contradictory communication

Another example, the Vandersteen 3a Sigs have been said to be warm. However, they are flat out to over 22kHZ.
Therefore, it has to be another parameter that one is hearing.

I truly doubt there are more than two or three people on this forum who can hear anything over 16kHZ so I'd wonder whether or not it's pancake flat over that frequency if that would make any difference at all. I wonder if most folk's definition of "warmth", when it comes to audio reproduction, has more to do with certain distortions, and the 'rounding off' of the reproduction of frequencies. I say this because "warmth" seems to always go hand in hand with tube audio, which is cinnominonomous, uh, sinnonomoose...damn...synomonous....cinnobonous (hey, I'm hungry)...where's that spell check....... with distortion.

Marco

if the definition of warm were changed to mean correctness of timbre, e.g., listening to an acoustic guitar, one hears the nylon character of the string and the wood body, there would be no need to use the word transparent or any other word.

i think the problem lies in the use of audio terms which are not terms used to describe music.

i personally prefer a description to an adjective.

one could say an absence of bass or lower midrange, using an instrument as a reference instead of lean.

sometimes when using 2 adjectives, the result is ambiguous.

as a reviewer, i try not to be aware of conotations of words so i do not confuse my readers.

anyone who is interested can go to audiophilia.com and read a review or a feature article. you will need to search the archives for feature articles and some of my reviews.

i welcome any comments that would be helpful to me in the future.

my name is roy harris. my email address is: rouyash04@yahoo.com .

thanks.

We tend to use analogies from the other senses to describe the sound of audio systems. They are imprecise, but are generally more meaningful and useful to me than other approaches I have seen, except for those few reviewers who are able to communicate the overall character of a component, for which they also invoke analogies: red wine vs. white wine, Carnegie Hall, yin and yang. These are the most useful for me. This is a personal thing, however. No one approach will work for everyone.

Let's see, was Mrtennis using green power bait or nightcrawlers?

MrTennis - Unfortunately, the term 'warm' to describe playback is inconsitent among audiophiles. To you, clearly it means "loss of detail in the treble region."

To BigTee, 'warm' means midrange body, and may be irrelevent to the upper register.

To me, it may mean something else.

I think a point of confusion is that you can have two different playbacks, both measuring ruler flat, and one can sound "warmer" than the other. This is because there are many other attributes of audio that play a role in what we hear other than the freq. response.

Take 2 speaker drivers, one made out of aluminum, the other paper, and the third plastic composite. They all measure ruler flat, but they will all have different sonic characters, perceived "warmth" being one of them.