In a demo, play well-recorded music that you love and know well, especially songs that'd get you dancing and your head nodding. If you can hear well into the track and you respond to the sound, then it's a winner. Conversely, certain speakers give a clean, undistorted sound yet be uninvolving and boring in comparison. |
Are you able to hear and listen to the 3-d micro- dynamic envelope of each piano note like if each note was a real 3-d object living in space in the middle of your room with his own color and physionomy? are you able to "see" this note? If yes, your audio system/room is acoustically musical... If not, sorry for you .... Musical for a musician and for an acoustician is a quality related to the non amplified natural "timbre" experience of a piano a guitar or a voice etc... Non amplified, because the electronic background noise of the electronical gear process must not hide or veil the musical instrument own resonant body subtle information .... The micro dynamical subtle cues of the natural musical instrument are also the micro dynamical cues you wanted to keep emerging from your room ...These same well known "cues" about human voice or piano, their presence or their absence, will guide you through the fine tuning process of your room acoustic treatment and control... And you need a room acoustically controlled to reach for each "bunch of frequencies and harmonics" , and which will create for them , a space where 3-d perception of sound volume impression is possible.... Accuracy of gear engineering is not enough for that... Acoustic science do the end job.... The timbre particular resonance of an object inform us about the specific quality of this object....Read this 2 times.... 😁 And ponder on it .... We cannot reduce "timbre" to frequency accuracy.... Timbre is a "lived" perceptive experience in some environment like your room, not only an equation... Mathematical accuracy of tone is not enough to describe musical experience....The specific resonant body information of a specific musical instrument and human body must be conveyed by the speakers through a room which is controlled and modified to accomodate them SPECIFICALLY and make this possible... . «A system is musical if you see music with your ears and if you listen with your eyes»-Anonymus Acoustician Wait a minute! are you saying that a deaf person can see music through his body ?- Groucho Marx 🤓 Ask Beethoven or Helen Keller....- Harpo Marx |
I haven’t read through all the posts but from my experience . . . Musical systems are experienced through the heart where there’s some emotional connection and truth evident from all recordings. You know it’s working when the clock goes out the window. Typically, guilt is present when even trying to describe the system’s performance. Analytical systems on the other hand are all about the gear and the Demo. Purely experienced as a head trip (and/or horror film for emotion). It’s typically all about the genius who built the monster where only certain selections of music demoed at specific levels correlate into a tune. Not all recordings can be played on these systems and typically only “Audiophile” recordings which have their interpretations baked in will make sense. While some systems are built as an analytical tool for evaluating, most consumers opt for musical enjoyment. |
In order to have a musical stereo system, focus on these three criteria: Effortless dynamics. Presence. Timbral purity. I learned this from Jim Smith a long time ago. https://www.getbettersound.com/ |
