Tinny, as a sound attribute.

"Tinny" is one of those useless words audiophiles like to use, but it doesn't mean anything. Proven by your having to ask what it means. The same goes for "musical" (my favorite nonsense word), and "fast bass," and "bloom," and PRaT, ad nauseum.

--Ethan

Tinny could be used accurately though.  Being of certain age, I've actually played with the tin can and string telephone, I think that tinny means low resolution, low sound level, and slightly echoing. That is hard to hear, what you hear is not clear and reverbrates.

Sadly, this really doesn't apply to anything resembling audiophile gear, so it is sort of useless.

Quote:

Originally Posted by EthanWiner 

"Tinny" is one of those useless words audiophiles like to use, but it doesn't mean anything.

I don't agree.  I've heard very few audiophiles use the word, I think it's useful, and I think it means something.  It has been used since the dawn of domestic audio reproduction, and it means "the kind of sound that results if equipment is manufactured shoddily using the cheapest available materials."  In other words, if accepted wisdom was that "good" sound came from an acoustic tone arm made of fine steel, and a heavy papier-mache horn, then "tinny" sound came from a tone arm and a horn pressed and folded from thin sheet metal.  Analytically, that implied restricted frequency range and severe resonances.  Conceptually, it's of limited relevance today, but I think it's usefully descriptive.

My understanding of the term tinny is a "tilting up" of the upper midrange and treble with a lack of bass frequency. The resulting sound seems to lack body and weight giving the impression of a thin or metallic sound. 

Tinny isn't an audiophile term - it's the term that someone who is not really interested in hi-fi is most likely to use to describe terrible sounding audio. Tinny generally refers to the material of the transducer having an obviously audible (I mean really obvious, not audiophile obvious) effect on the sound produced, producing severe distortion and thus a "metallic" or "plasticy" sound.It is normally accompanied by a sharp rolloff of both the high and low frequencies.

To experience the wonders of this for yourself, may I recommend a pair of Gummy Earbuds - will put you back for about 5 dollars.

Quote:

Originally Posted by InnerSpace 
Analytically, that implied restricted frequency range and severe resonances.

This is exactly my point. Better wording would be "midrangey" or "telephone like" etc. And I do agree that "tinny" is not the worst offender. The other nonsense terms I listed above are sillier. Why use vague words when we already have much more precise ways of describing sound quality? The other day in another forum someone insisted that audio from his receiver's analog output sounds "more engaging" than the same audio from the receiver's HDMI output. To me, "engaging" is a mental state (seriously), having nothing to do with defining or explaining audio fidelity.

--Ethan

Quote:

Originally Posted by EthanWiner 

This is exactly my point. Better wording would be "midrangey" or "telephone like" etc. And I do agree that "tinny" is not the worst offender. The other nonsense terms I listed above are sillier. Why use vague words when we already have much more precise ways of describing sound quality? The other day in another forum someone insisted that audio from his receiver's analog output sounds "more engaging" than the same audio from the receiver's HDMI output. To me, "engaging" is a mental state (seriously), having nothing to do with defining or explaining audio fidelity.

 

--Ethan

This is (imo) because people are  writing about their emotional responses to their equipment and/or music, but using language that pretends to be saying more than "I like this better than that." There's also an effort to sound like a member of the group, so that even the newest audiophile grabs at words like plasticky, musical, engaging, etc because he reads it on the forums and thinks this is the way to talk about these things. Then this meaningless language becomes part of the landscape and expected, so that efforts like Lunatique's to rationalize the expression of what we're hearing falls down the rabbit hole.

I relate tinny to having a compressed response range (roll off on both lows and highs) without a full sound throughout (I feel that an adequate bass reproduction goes a long way in giving the sound depth and body)-- making the timbre of the upper mids-treble stand out and be extremely metallic sounding. 

I think it can legitimately be used as a word to describe sound, it just needs to have a universally supported definition.

In reality you could just call tinny as a fancy word for thin-- which is pretty much what I described in my definition above.  Tinny itself is apparently well known enough to get its own definition on my mac's little dictionary wiki:

tinny |ˈtinē|adjective ( -nier , -niest )having a displeasingly thin, metallic sound :tinny music played in the background.

I thought tinny , meant thin harsh sound.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TMRaven 

I relate tinny to having a compressed response range (roll off on both lows and highs) without a full sound throughout (I feel that an adequate bass reproduction goes a long way in giving the sound depth and body)-- making the timbre of the upper mids-treble stand out and be extremely metallic sounding. 

 

I think it can legitimately be used as a word to describe sound, it just needs to have a universally supported definition.

 

In reality you could just call tinny as a fancy word for thin-- which is pretty much what I described in my definition above.  Tinny itself is apparently well known enough to get its own definition on my mac's little dictionary wiki:

 

tinny |ˈtinē|adjective ( -nier , -niest )having a displeasingly thin, metallic sound :tinny music played in the background.

I think that dictionary definition is pretty much it.  Thin, metallic sounding.  That's what I think of when I hear "tinny."  Thin and metallic seem to have a pretty obvious meaning, at least to me.