[zeplin]

posted by: Dusty Chalk...
Quote:

Don't make me whip out my speech about the evils of EQ. Is it phase-correct EQ? If not, then it might be introducing more colouration (of a different variety) than it's correcting.

While that may be true, don't you think it ultimately matters what the sound is like when it comes out of the headphone and into your hairy ear...that outwieghing the fact that an EQ might get in the way of the signal path? Excuse me if I'm not expressing myself clearly...I know a good deal about audio, but next to nothing compared to some of you folks. I guess what I'm trying to say is, for example, I have a SlimX with a Cosmic...when I bought my new AT W1000's the other day, I noticed that it was a tad bright on the top end (specifically having trouble with that ssssss sound). To fix that, I just lowered the treble boost (the filter on the Cosmic and corner frequency a bit (on the SlimX), and now they sound simply wonderful (and I also do this when I run my headphones out of my Arcam A75 integrated amp as well). On top of all that, the W1000's treble has tamed down a lot since I've been burning them in practically every night all night. I got a chance to borrow a friends Lynn cd player (which I used with both my Cosmic and Arcam A75) the other day and I compared its sound to the SlimX's and found that the SlimX is slightly better because I can fool around with that treble (and if the SlimX didn't have this feature, they would have been about even) boost a little more, which therefore makes the W1000's sound more to my liking, therefore making me more satisfied. If the EQ has affected the sound in a negative way, then it is only on a microscopic level that is sure not to call to my attention...and believe me, I pay great attention to detail as far as having the treble, mids, and bass exactly where I want them to be. I hope you understand my point and can offer any opinions that I might not be aware of...because I am still learning a great deal every day

 

[Rizumu]

Quote:

Originally posted by ooheadsoo The first time I ever heard a nice sound system and heard these little details that I never heard before with the artists scuffing around, breathing, coughing, I was majorly annoyed, just like you are now. Now, I have come around on this 180 degrees. It's those details that take you to the performance, front row seat. When you play piano, you are always moving and your sleeves will flap and rustle and brush against your body. In a way, it's part of the music you're creating. Those details take you to the performance, rather than some disembodied synthesizer producing the music.

The first time I plugged in my HD580's and heard these details I thought it was amazingly cool

It just makes the experience that much more real and personalized; you feel like you're actually attending a performance...

 

[Nik]

Sound IS color!

I think that speaking about headphones and hi-end equipment in general, we could to divide in two categories: hi technologies object and musical instrument. In the first list we have very good things that give us the most equilibrated sound reproduction respecting all the information recorded in the CD. The second list (very few exemplar) are MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, that really PLAY music, exactly like a fine musical instrument. If you intend this extreme hi quality as colored sound, I’m totally for this! The R10 (IMO) is one of these rare musical instrument. I desire the contribute of the equipment in reproducing music, (why not?), but this contribute must be absolutely “musical”! Or better MUSIC! Do not exist object in hi-fi reproduction that do not gives nothing to the sound: impossible! But even my ears “give” something to the sound… So the conclusion is: “remake” the recording producing MUSIC and build the “new” musical event giving to you all the (even if different) emotions you had in the live performance. This is my opinion.

So, sound IS naturally colored, but color of the music.

Nicola

 

[Tomcat]

Quote:

Originally posted by Hirsch Rather than distracting, I find the greater detail to enhance rather than distract. It makes things more real to me. So, IMO your initial conditions aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible to both enjoy music and have maximal detail.

Hirsch,

I don't think so. If a system produces detail for the detail's sake, if it has "maximal detail", I believe it to be anything but accurate. In a concert, I perceive instrumental sounds and orchestras as having a certain degree of cohesion, I am able to hear the music as a whole. In reality, music isn't atomized and perceived in distinct and seperate parts offering themselves to a listening approach that analyzes and quantifies sonic details. In reality, music is a continuum that exists in time, there are harmonic relationships and rythmic cohesion. There is a musical flow to be perceived, that's mostly missing from our systems if we are able to perceive detail. Perceiving detail means perceiving an event that is artificially isolated. Detail is grain and distortion, it's not music.

In my opinion, resolution and transparency are very much different from the idea of detail. Greater resolution will aid in recreating qualities like musical cohesion and musical flow. If you connect the dots in order to get a proper line, the details disappear. I believe the more obvious and high-lighted detail we hear, the more damage to the integrity of the musical signal has been done. And the more annoying our systems will sound in the long run.

And as far as coloration is concerned: obviously, there are far more important things for a satisfying an involving recreation of the musical event, for recreating the musical emotion (hello, Nik!)than a flat frequency response. Does anyone remember the sound of the first generation CDPs in the early eighties? Ruler-flat frequency response and utterly unmusical. Harsh, brittle, and annoying as hell. Modern-day CDPs still have the same ruler-flat frequency response, but they sound a lot better, don't they? I believe tonal flatness is a lot less important for musicality than transient behavior, dynamic range, low-level resolution and phase linearity, just to name a few.

Colored or not, whatever sounds more musical to my ears is more accurate in the only area that counts: reproducing the musical event and its emotion.

 

[Hirsch]

Quote:

Originally posted by Tomcat Perceiving detail means perceiving an event that is artificially isolated. Detail is grain and distortion, it's not music.

Here is where we differ. Detail simply means that the system is passing along more information. If we listen for it , we can hear not just the note of the violin, but the texture of the way the violinist is bowing. We may be able to hear small volume sounds and high volume sounds simultaneously, rather than an indistinguishable blur. The key is that it has to be done coherently. To many "detail" amps do so by artificially enhancing detail (a hot high-end for example). The music becomes out of balance, the sound isn't coherent, and becomes unsatisfying. The only way to get greater detail is a faster amp, that increases detail at all frequency ranges, and integrates those frequency ranges in a more coherent manner than a lesser amp (which is why I don't believe in equalization as a corrector for detail, as it can only deal with part of the frequency range at a time. Tonal balance maybe, detail no.) When that happens, what you're listening to sounds more like music. The choice to listen to detail lies with the listener, as in a real musical event. It's a supporting character, not the event itself. Sound in real-life carries a lot of information. Why not recorded sound as well? Too much information is only bad if it is emphasized over coherence.

 

[Beagle]

Quote:

Originally posted by ServinginEcuador The less coloration you get from your cans, the better your sound will be to the original.................but those who own the Sony R10s say that they blow everything else away since they add so little coloration of their own to the music

But they (and other phones) are designed to make the listener think that they are not colored which is itself a coloration. If you sit in front of an instrument and hear a trumpet note or sax or clarinet note, it's uncoloured. When you listen to a recording of a musical instrument which went into a colored microphone, colored wiring, colored recording equipment and mastering equipment, then played back on a colored stereo system through colored wired up to colored headphone drivers and into your ear, it cannot ever be the same. So everything is colored. Let's move on.

 

[JaZZ]

Quote:

Originally posted by Nik ...sound IS naturally coloured, but colour of the music.

No doubt, that's true. The clou is: the color should originate exclusively from the recording, not from the reproduction equipment – in the ideal case. A microphone, a CD player, an amp as well as a headphone or a loudspeaker are no musical instruments which are intended to produce resonances and reflections to sound colorful and musical. They are meant not to «sound» at all. Housings of loudspeakers better are as stiff and resonance-free as possible (e.g. by consisting of concrete or marble), and speaker membranes should only develop controlled partial vibrations, if at all, to minimize colorations.

Quote:

Originally posted by Beagle But they (and other phones) are designed to make the listener think that they are not colored which is itself a coloration. If you sit in front of an instrument and hear a trumpet note or sax or clarinet note, it's uncoloured. When you listen to a recording of a musical instrument which went into a colored microphone, colored wiring, colored recording equipment and mastering equipment, then played back on a colored stereo system through colored wired up to colored headphone drivers and into your ear, it cannot ever be the same. So everything is colored. Let's move on.

Although this is true in principle, the coloration produced from high-quality components in the recording studio as well as with home equipments is of a kind which isn't too obvious to the ears. It's never ever in the range of a musical instrument – compared to such it can even be called inexistent, with the exception of loudspeakers and headphones, thus mechanical sound transducers. The art of creating a «neutral» sound reproduction thus consists of minimizing irreparable sound degradations/colorations in source devices, cables and amps and finally sound transducers as well as a certain degree of synergetic matching.

Coloration-free is not the same as colorless! That's the wrong thinking – like in the initial posting: «...these phones are so neutral and bass lacking that i find them totally boring to listen to.» Lack of bass has nothing to do with neutrality, like others have already stated. And «neutral» has nothing to do with analytical and boring, as little as a live concert is boring or a purely intellectual pleasure. If all micro-information is adequately transported from the musical instruments via microphones and recording/pressing processes, home electronics and finally headphones/speakers, with as little degradation and additional coloration as possible, it will have a similar fascination as the live concert – subject to all the principal limitations speakers and headphones suffer from.

JaZZ

 

[richard]

TheAbsoluteSound.com (TAS) explores music and the reproduction of music in the home. We believe that the sound of music, unamplified, occurring in a real space is a philosophic absolute against which we may judge the performance of devices designed to reproduce music. Our goal is to provide the resources consumers need to judge how a component's sound either honors or departs from the music's truth, and to make sound purchasing decisions that maximize their experience of reproduced sound.

--Mission statement of The Absolute Sound magazine.

 

[Orpheus]

dusty:

"You're really on an EQ kick recently, aren't you? Don't make me whip out my speech about the evils of EQ. Is it phase-correct EQ? If not, then it might be introducing more colouration (of a different variety) than it's correcting."

i'm not arguing pro/cons of eq. all i was saying was that in order to get a truly flat or neutral response, you would have to add EQ. otherwise such a headphone does not exist. which is a fact.

 

[JaZZ]

There is not one flat frequency response with headphones, but an immeasurable number of them, depending firstly on individual anatomics (and their interaction with the headphones) and secondly on the position of the virtual sound source (frontal/lateral...). An equalizer capable of equalizing all this doesn't exist. You can just as well renounce it.

BTW, a flat frequency response is synonym to a flat phase response, be it with or without equalizing. (The phase shift in an EQ provides the exact compensation of the phase shift of the concerning unevenness.)

 

[Nik]

Posted by Jazz:

No doubt, that's true. The clou is: the color should originate exclusively from the recording, not from the reproduction equipment – in the ideal case. A microphone, a CD player, an amp as well as a headphone or a loudspeaker are no musical instruments which are intended to produce resonances and reflections to sound colorful and musical. They are meant not to «sound» at all. Housings of loudspeakers better are as stiff and resonance-free as possible (e.g. by consisting of concrete or marble), and speaker membranes should only develop controlled partial vibrations, if at all, to minimize colorations.

Dear Jazz,

The problem is: when you are recording do you not use any technical instrument? (microphones, speakers, recorder, cables, effects… exactly as the CD player or headphones that you will use when you are listening? So, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to be totally free by any mechanic and electric instrument. So if you have better reproducers instrument than recordings instruments, probably you can to be more near to the beautifulness of the MUSIC. When I heard for the first time my CD player with the R10 headphone I had the impression of “bypassing the recording” for a direct contact with the music… (I said IMPRESSION).

Nicola

 

[JaZZ]

Nik...

...there may indeed some information be lost or degraded during the recording process, and to a certain degree it may be possible to compensate for that. But how can you be sure that the quality of your equipment, with the R10 in first place, isn't in fact more the result of a lesser signal degradation than of a compensating coloration? That's what I tend to think. It's not only coloration that comes from electronic (recording) equipment, but also a whitening of colors, just the same as cameras and films aren't completely true but accentuate some colors or tone down others, increase or decrease (color) contrasts... It seems very unlikely that your «slide projector» (your R10 equipment) manages to compensate for all imaginable recording colorations.

 

[Tomcat]

Quote:

Originally posted by Hirsch Detail simply means that the system is passing along more information. [...] The key is that it has to be done coherently. To many "detail" amps do so by artificially enhancing detail (a hot high-end for example). The music becomes out of balance, the sound isn't coherent, and becomes unsatisfying.

Hirsch,

Yes, I absolutely agree (with the second part). But what is the consequence of your statement: More detail doesn't simply and always mean more accurate sonic information, does it?

I guess that is what's bothering me most about the idea of detail: through this term, music reproduction is reduced to information retrieval, and the listener is asked to quantify his experience. The quality of the music isn't considered any more - to be more specific: the quality of the music isn't felt any more. Perceiving an artist's expressive nuances is something that enriches our musical experience, certainly, and it's possible only through a system with high resolution or high transparency, but I refuse to think of those nuances of the interpretation, of phrasing and decay, as detail. Whenever we characterize something as detail, it has lost its meaning, it has become an interchangeable particle of sonic information. But the minutiae of the interpretation are inseparable from the musical experience, they serve an artistic purpose. If I am able to perceive something just as detail, then it has lost its musical purpose.

If we want to increase the musicality of our systems, listening for detail won't get as anywhere.

 

[markl]

Quote:

I don't think so. If a system produces detail for the detail's sake, if it has "maximal detail", I believe it to be anything but accurate.

I disagree. I reject the idea that there is such a thing as "over-hyped" or "manufactured" detail (there is such thing as over-emphasized treble, but to me, these are two COMPLETELY different things). I prefer the word "resolution" to detail for precisely this reason-- some people hear "this phone is more detailed than that phone", but read it to mean "this headphone is brighter than that headphone". When I talk about detail, I'm not talking about treble response, but the ability of the phone to reproduce musical information throughout the spectrum.

It's like switching between a 35mm negative and a medium-format negative. The medium format negative does not have "over-hyped" brights, it has greater resolution period, making the image crisper, clearer and more life-like, and revealing subtle information that 35mm simply can't. In comparison, the 35mm print will have clearer grain, will appear less sharp, the colors less robust, and less "life-like" than the higher resolution print made from the higher resolution medium format negative.

No headphone can add information to the signal, any more than a camera can add details to things that weren't there when the shutter clicked. No headphone can magically produce the sound of someone taking a breath, moving in their chair, or what not. Having higher resolution means the phone is more transparent not less, and is not getting in the way of the sound that was actually recorded *and that actually occured*. There is no way that the retrieval of this micro information can make the experience *less* real or convincing, IMO. On the contrary, blocking out that information is a coloration. But you can't know what you don't know, and it's not until you have a higher-resolution can that you can see your other less-sensitive cans were masking detail.

Also, just because you're hearing a chair squeak, doesn't mean the phone has gone out of it way to bring that tiny piece of information alone. The fact that you are hearing it is proof of how much more information the phone is retrieving *everywhere* in the recording.

For me, climbing up the audiophile ladder is all about retrieving more "detail", or rather increasing "resolution". Detail retrieval/resolution is the definition of better sound. Everything else that is positive about getting better and better equipment all boil down and accrue from obtaining increased resolution.
Quote:

But they (and other phones) are designed to make the listener think that they are not colored which is itself a coloration.

Now this statement is just absurd. Why go to all the trouble of creating a phone that magically "tricks" people into believing it's not colored instead of using that time/energy to make a headphone that is actually less colored?

The R10s *are* less colored than other phones. Too bad, you'll have to accept it.

Mark

 

[Beagle]

Quote:

Originally posted by markl Now this statement is just absurd. Why go to all the trouble of creating a phone that magically "tricks" people into believing it's not colored instead of using that time/energy to make a headphone that is actually less colored?

Because it's impossible, that's why. Headphones are all sonically 'shaped' whether you like it or not. All headphones are compromised. One will outshine another in one particular area but not in all. I try to accept this in order not to drive myself nuts for the rest of my life.

Many people will claim that their headphones are less colored than R10 or whatever because they prefer the sound of theirs. If they believe that their phones sound more like the real thing, then that's their most uncolored headphone, especailly if they paid a handsome amount of money for them. Nobody is going to say they bought a $5000 headphone and they suck, just like nobody is going to admit they have 3 inche.

How could you prove such a thing anyway? You can't measure coloration or lack of it. Something that measures flat can still be coloring the sound very badly.

You have a wire, earcups, pads, drivers (magnets, voice coil, diaphragm), housings, headband and they are stuck together and sold to consumers in order for them to listen to music and hopefully enjoy it. Choose the one you like and enjoy the music. Don't worry about if it's coloring the sound because it is.

Someday someone will market a $6000 dynamic headphone and some will listen to it and claim that they were transported to another planet, but in reality they will still be here on Earth, just travelling down a different road that inevitably leads to the same destination: nowhere.