Fidelity vs. Musicality...........Is there a tug of War?

@bpoletti 

"Define what is "musicality" and what is "fidelity."  

Be very specific and use objective terms, not subjective terms.  "

This is an audiophile forum, not law school.

@noske20

If you can't define it, then you have no clue what you're talking about.

Perhaps we can find a way to kill off all acts, concepts, and aspects of individualism within the scope of humanity and all these disagreement thingies will finally go away.

To put all these overly animated meat objects a nice neat simple (and quiet) box.

I demand the right to stay outside of that box, of course, and do my own thing. But the box awaits you, all you problem children. Commoditization is your future.

It would make my life a lot easier if you would just get in the dang box and stay there.

Anything added is distortion. Piano, for instance, has overtones stretched over harmonics.

… best we agree to disagree on that one. Technically you are correct of course, however in music reproduction I prefer an amp that adds 5% 2nd order harmonics over one which adds 0.01% 5th order harmonics. The vast majority of posters here will make the same choice in a listening test.


I’m looking at distortion in the context of how we experience music vs. what a scope will show.

@cleeds


No no no, fidelity is my spouse being faithful to me, not me to her! Jeez dude. 😂🤣

Seriously though, I have no problem with the accepted definition of fidelity; it’s more a case of how that definition is applied in audio. I don’t consider high fidelity in audio as the ability of an amplifier to reproduce a sine wave accurately on a scope. Rather i see high fidelity of an amplifier to reproduce music in a way that I find it to be natural and accurate. 

The two are not the same, and most often some amplifiers will do the one well, the other not much.