Silky and soft highs: product of coloration?

A great system (not only the amp) can deliver highs with delicacy and richness with well recorded performances. The system is only as good as it's weakest link, so if your sources suck then no amp or preamp can rescue the signal.

Lack of glare, congestion and harshness are hallmarks of a fine system. Put a marginal speaker cable into an otherwise excellent system and you'll hear the glare and congestion.

If you hear delicate details, like fingers on strings, vocal overtones, natural sibilants and no harshness or glare, then you've got a high performance system. If the details are absent or rolled off, then you've got a system that trying to euphonically compensate by softening the highs artificially.

Listen for details and delicacy. Can you hear a bass note's fundemental separately from it's overtones. Can you hear "air" around the bass strings and the woody sound of the bass's body. With nylon-string guitar can you hear the ends of the fingers on the strings and can you tell if the player is using a lot of nail or a little?

Dave

Dave

Dgarretson, This live performance was out in open. I agree with you generally regarding Typical High school band's playing capabilities. This High School band was somewhat special and hence invited to play at many places in So Cal, including Disneyland. Sure their playing can't be compared with Virtuoso artists. In any case, live is live. You can't beat that.

Nethepill, That's reassuring & refreshing. Something is certainly wrong should an audio system make euphonic the treble sound of breaking glass or fingernails on a chalk board or a five year old playing violin.

This thread got me thinking about (HP's?) recent Part 1 review of the Scaena line-array speakers in TAS. Now I've heard these speakers under show conditions together with the Memory Player. Among their very impressive qualities is a silky, mellifluous, utterly grainless treble, set against a jet-black background, apparently achieved without sacrificing detail and attack. Yet the treble of this speaker seemed to take the brunt of HP's skepticism as being "possibly" unrealistic (his reservations about fully committing himself on this point perhaps intended as a cliff-hanger to be resolved in P2.) I'm still wondering myself whether treble like this, while appealing, is entirely realistic. But my general sense is that more typically, very expensive end-high systems err further on the side of stridency and aggression. When modifying equipment I've found that bleeding-edge improvements to power circuits in both SS and tube devices almost always results in a smoother treble, shedding grain that I wasn't aware of until it was gone. Not really a matter of flavors & tastes, and as Chris says, very expensive to achieve commercially.

I play with professional orchestras occasionally as a sub and I'll say that MOST instruments sound edgy up close. Classical instruments are meant to be heard from the middle of the orchesta section of the auditorium, not 10-feet away. From the listeners' perspectives they'll generally sound "silky" and smooth.

OTOH, very few studio recordings sound natural. Trumpeters use the proximity effect of the mics to make their solos sound warmer, engineers add reverb and select mics with euphonic sounds for each instrument. I often record myself on trumpet to hear what's actually going on in front of the horn. Without proximity effect, reverb or EQ, it's very "raw". I love that sound, but it's not what you get in most recordings.

Dave

Once more, although instruments can sound bright and harsh at close range, they have in real life "body" and "bloom", that is what you can only hear when music is reproduced using the best (and unfortunately also most expensive) electronics.

Chris