Musicality vs Transparency & Detail

How have you been able to achieve excellent detail retrieval without getting an etched fatigue inducing sound.

I found the solution was to go to pro studio speakers. Consumers designs are all designed to impress the listener in one extreme way or another - they are mostly looking for that "differentiating" factor to sizzle up the sound and stand out from the crowd or give good reason to buy this years model over last years model (different sound).

Audio engineers listen to music nearly all day, 8 hours a day five days per week. Audio engineers require detail and transparency in order to make precise adjustments. Audio engineers are often deeply familiar with the sounds of real instruments and musicality. Audio engineers want their productions to translate to other systems and therefore seek accuracy with the lowest amount of coloration possible from monitor systems. It is a "no brainer" that the most popular speakers used in pro audio mix and mastering studios are all of what you describe; musical, transparent, detailed and without being at all fatiguing to the ears. This not to say that studio speakers don't differ in sound from eachother - they do, however, consumer speakers are much more of an eclectic, eccentric, anachronistic mixed bag, as they cater to a such a broad market where being different is often more important than achieveing accuracy.

Are pro studio speakers right for everyone; probably not ....because they lack coloration or sizzle and certainly won't improve a bad recording, worse they will reveal a bad recording all to obviously.

Well said, Rushton. Salvatore's description explains that detail retrieval is musical, and I completely agree with this concept. A system needs proper transparency and detail retrieval to get to the music. Live music is seldom rolled off, plodding and lacking in detail. In fact it is just the opposite.

What happens many times with components that aren't up to the task is that the presentation becomes bright and glaring. That is what causes fatigue.

My experience of Shindo gear is that it is as "detailed" as the source it is fed.
It redefined "transparency" for me.
But somehow puts one off the track of such intellectual disection of the music and instead sucks you into the groove,funk,flow of whatever you are listening to.
I never feel like I am missing any details when I listen to my Shindo,and this from someone who's system used to be based on valhalla cables and the DCS stack.

I agree with Rushton. One way to put it is that true transparancy, and thusly true detail, has nothing to do with exagerated sense of detail via brightness or edginess, which are distortions. Noise that rides the signal, as opposed to noise floor, can result in a brighter, edgier, superficially more detailed sound but is actually masking true detail. Listen for a lack of harsh edge coupled with a sense of more information and naturalness, being sure to use reference recordings that you can trust to be naturally and well recorded. If you build your system around this you will have a magically revealing system that is very satisfying.

Bear in mind that bad recordings will sound bad, but you won't be adding insult to injury. You can, if you want, prioritize components that are smoothed over as opposed to simply lacking in harshness, and end up with a system that is forgiving of bad recordings, at the expense of low level detail that fleshes out the palpable you-are-there/they-are-here effect.

Assessing each component can be tricky though, since a better down stream component can reveal upstream coodies. It can be done though.

Bear in mind that bad recordings will sound bad, but you won't be adding insult to injury.

I'm reminded of the story about a well known reviewer who vastly preferred a given set of cables because they made one well-treasured recording sound wonderful. Unfortunately, that well-treasured recording was really a sonic disaster with sharp, edgy sonics. The cables smoothed over all the edginess, added a mid-bass boost, rolled off the top end, and made that one record very listenable. For this reviewer, there was no question but that this cable was far superior to another cable on hand that had made some outstandingly well-recorded orchestral LPs sound wonderful in the reviewer's same system just hours earlier, but allowed the "well-treasured" LP to sound like it's true self.
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