High Performance Audio - The End?


Steve Guttenberg recently posted on his audiophiliac channel what might be an iconoclastic video.

Steve attempts to crystallise the somewhat nebulous feeling that climbing the ladder to the high-end might be a counter productive endeavour. 

This will be seen in many high- end quarters as heretical talk, possibly even blasphemous.
Steve might even risk bring excommunicated. However, there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

Steve's point, and it's one I've seen mentioned many times previously at shows and demos, is that better more revealing systems will often only serve to make most recordings sound worse. 

There is no doubt that this does happen, but the exact point will depend upon the listeners preference. Let's say for example that it might happen a lot earlier for fans of punk, rap, techno and pop.

Does this call into question almost everything we are trying to ultimately attain?

Could this be audio's equivalent of Martin Luther's 1517 posting of The Ninety-Five theses at Wittenberg?

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Can your Audio System be too Transparent?

Steve Guttenberg 19.08.20

https://youtu.be/6-V5Z6vHEbA

cd318
deep_333,

By "By now, we know..." I meant that by now some of us have read your posts and relized that you do have very vivid imagination. We almost got worried it is sliding into illusion, delusion, and hallucination territory.

The Pioneer speakers I mentioned were, in fact, two different models. One was https://www.stereophile.com/content/pioneer-sp-bs41-lr-loudspeaker which I had not heard by the time I quoted this review to a friend of mine. He went on to buy a model up (floorstanding) with inscription A. Jones on the back, too. It was to be a guarantee of performance. My friend is not the one to change equipment often, closer to barely ever, but within a month those speakers ended up tucked behind some door never to be connected again. They are still there. Out of curiosity, I bought this speaker from Stereophile review. We thought that bigger model might have simply been inferior to standmount so it was cheap enough to compare for fun. They were donated to my mechanic’s garage, sitting high up under the ceiling. Admittedly, we did not try those speakers with tens of thousands of dollars equipment, but that is probably not what a designer would have expected when designing them. In any case, I do not doubt that Andrew Jones is a good speaker designer and I did hear two pairs of TADs (standmount and floorstander, I do not know model designation) that sounded wonderful. I believe he designed them, too but may be wrong. It is just that his venture into very low price speakers was overwhelmingly underachieving even for that price. Somewhat older and similarly priced Infinity speakers were a few galaxies above them. That Stereophile review is to a degree exactly 180 degrees away from reality 
@glupson, ah yes, the infamous "we"... the disgruntled glupson Jekyl and a glupson Hyde, the pair that keeps coming back...

 Alrighty then! Have a great time with your infinity speakers (galaxies above). My condolences on the stereophile review that fooled ya and made you flush 80 dollars down the drain! Thanks for sharing this great tidbit of information. I wish you both great luck on your future endeavors...
deep_333,

You, kind of, asked, I answered.

I paid more than $80 for those speakers and did not flush them down anything. They went high up.

I wish you best luck in picking your speakers next time. May I suggest Debrox?

Still fantasizing about my speakers' designer?
I thought this thread was about whether having a more revealing system is a bad goal. Personally I think that is the ramblings of someone desperate to sound relevant.

Take a b-grade band, genre unimportant. Playing in a great acoustic space will not make them sound worse they will sound better.

Resolution is far more likely to reveal interesting nuance. A bad system will make everything sound bad. A great system can make even some pretty awful stuff sound okay.
@dutchtreat,

"Visited a friend recently, who has a grand piano in her music room. Listened for about an hour, noticed what makes it sound real. Timbre at all frequencies, all notes. Percussiveness. Sustain, damping pedal effects, different sound played pianissimo to forte."


Time and time again piano crops up when evaluating the authenticity of any playback system, as does listening to live unamplified music.

You're fortunate in that you have access to a wide range of live sound. 


"My guitar, recorded with the same mic, sounds like my guitar, sans alteration. My wife's speaking voice, ditto."


Again, live sound. Again, great reference points. On the occasion I've heard a live sound recording played back through speakers I'm always impressed by its immediacy and dynamics. It's the kind of thing that I've rarely heard in any commercial recordings.

I'm not sure why modern loudspeakers no longer have felt surrounding the drivers the way they did with the tweeter for example on the LS3/5 for example.

It sounds like you're getting great results with well recorded music but I hope you don't mind if I ask  how your system is with some of the more standard pop /rock recordings in your collection?