[GREQ]

I wish people would list their actual location because I'm nosey.

 

[finalstan]

I wish people would list their actual location because I'm nosey.

Ha, location is one thing, NATIONALITY is another

 

[IEMusic]

Ha, location is one thing, NATIONALITY is another

True, but that would actually be nosey. Everyone is of course welcome to share that information, but pretty much only physical location is relevant. I find myself wondering about this piece of information more than almost anything else when trying to give recommendations.

 

[ADUHF]

What are transients? I get the concept, but still find it difficult to define, and often difficult to assess well.

A new term to me as well. However, I believe they are lower volume notes and other musical details which can sometimes get lost in the crevices and distortion of cheaper-sounding headphones, speakers and amps.

You will know them when you hear them... And then you don't on another pair of headphones.

This is probably another example of word-shortening jargon btw. So "transients" is probably just short-hand for transient details, like "technicals" is short-hand for technical details.

 

[GREQ]

I always thought that transient response was the headphones ability to go from the state of not making sound, to making sound and back to not making sound as quickly as possible.
Often measured as 'impulse response', generally headphones with faster ability to make those transitions exhibit higher fidelity and separation.... generally. But whether a fast headphone sounds good or not... that's almost entirely subjective... stunning transients have often come from quite bass-light headphones in my experience.

Ha, location is one thing, NATIONALITY is another

Both are changeable

 

[ADUHF]

I always thought that transient response was the headphones ability to go from the state of not making sound, to making sound and back to not making sound as quickly as possible.
Often measured as 'impulse response', generally headphones with faster ability to make those transitions exhibit higher fidelity and separation.... generally. But whether a fast headphone sounds good or not... that's almost entirely subjective... stunning transients have often come from quite bass-light headphones in my experience.

You could be right, GREQ. I don't really know.

Maybe what I was describing above was microdetails, or somethin else?

Fwiw, here's how the Head-Fi Glossary describes transients (which sounds more like your definition)...

Transient - The leading edge of a percussive sound. Good transient response makes the sound as a whole more live and realistic.

 

[IEMusic]

A lot of times, I find it a relief to read oppositional view points. When an IEM is universally praised or universally criticized, it often starts to feel unnatural if everyone has the same viewpoint, and just agrees with each other. Like everyone is being influenced by each other. So, when someone contributes a well thought out and explained oppositional viewpoint, it is a relief. The exception is someone who is simply a thread crapper trying to anger everyone else w/o any explanation of their opinion. An opposing viewpoint almost legitimizes the product, b/c we all hear things differently, and have different tastes.

 

[GREQ]

A lot of times, I find it a relief to read oppositional view points. When an IEM is universally praised or universally criticized, it often starts to feel unnatural if everyone has the same viewpoint, and just agrees with each other. Like everyone is being influenced by each other. So, when someone contributes a well thought out and explained oppositional viewpoint, it is a relief. The exception is someone who is simply a thread crapper trying to anger everyone else w/o any explanation of their opinion. An opposing viewpoint almost legitimizes the product, b/c we all hear things differently, and have different tastes.

I disagree.

 

[Whazzzup]

I disagree.

i beg to differ

 

[arch023]

I've been trying to listen to older songs, before 2010s, and i find that most recordings are boring or far away. sometimes the vocals get really dry. especially with my qdc. i've been trying to diversify my genre but i keep getting back to square one. does anybody else have the same experience as me?

 

[IEMusic]

With the rate that ChiFi is moving, does someone need to create an “IEMGang“ company, like watchgang.com?

 

[Redcarmoose]

I always thought that transient response was the headphones ability to go from the state of not making sound, to making sound and back to not making sound as quickly as possible.
Often measured as 'impulse response', generally headphones with faster ability to make those transitions exhibit higher fidelity and separation.... generally. But whether a fast headphone sounds good or not... that's almost entirely subjective... stunning transients have often come from quite bass-light headphones in my experience.


Both are changeable

It’s the start of the musical sound. Which is very fascinating as we get so much just from the attack. Roland made a synth called the D-50 which was a single unit that copied what people were doing in the studio. People would put a small sample of an instrument at the very start of the note and the remainder of the note could come from a regular synthesized sound. It’s this crucial attack that we gather so much identification while listening. So instead of a sampler keyboard you had a small PCM attack wave placed at the partial second time-frame of the start of the note.

It also turns out we judge timbre (along with differentiations in over-tones) which is distinguishing tone from one instrument to another, based on the very attack. So somehow it’s this very first transient response which now becomes so important for stuff sounding real-life. Obviously it’s also used when describing fast abrupt instruments like cymbals and the character of the beginning of a drum sound. But if you were to study most any musical thing other than ambient synth washes the attacks hold a bounty of information. Even instruments which you wouldn’t think would have a personality to their attack do like regular rock bass notes.

The transient response is able to get detail at the special first character of the note, thus improving making timbre more real.

 

[IEMusic]

It’s the start of the musical sound. Which is very fascinating as we get so much just from the attack. Roland made a synth called the D-50 which was a single unit that copied what people were doing in the studio. People would put a small sample of an instrument at the very start of the note and the remainder of the note could come from a regular synthesized sound. It’s this crucial attack that we gather so much identification while listening. So instead of a sampler keyboard you had a small PCM attack wave placed at the partial second time-frame of the start of the note.

It also turns out we judge timbre (along with differentiations in over-tones) which is distinguishing tone from one instrument to another, based on the very attack. So somehow it’s this very first transient response which now becomes so important for stuff sounding real-life. Obviously it’s also used when describing fast abrupt instruments like cymbals and the character of the beginning of a drum sound. But if you were to study most any musical thing other than ambient synth washes the attacks hold a bounty of information. Even instruments which you wouldn’t think would have a personality to their attack do like regular rock bass notes.

The transient response is able to get detail at the special first character of the note, thus improving making timbre more real.

Great response! Thanks for putting it into words so well.

 

[IEMusic]

I though I’d move this interesting conversation to this thread.

It is true all BA sets have generally worse timbre than pure DD sets. They generally also sound less natural in the bass to me, such as having less bass decay/movement of air, and sometimes worse subbass extension than DD. Even the most expensive all BA IEM I've heard (QDC Anole VX) has not as good timbre as some cheaper DD sets.

Though at the budget/midfi segment, the multi BAs may generally have better bass speed and generally better technicalities and isolation than pure DD sets (which are generally vented). Different strokes for different folks.

Hybrids supposedly address these issues by combining the best of both worlds eg DD bass with mids/treble handled by multi BA drivers, but sometimes there are crossover or coherency issues especially for budget hybrids.

I'm just going to stand on my soapbox for a minute here. I enjoy reading your comments, @baskingshark, so I don't mean to be disagreeable toward you specifically.

The idea that BAs have worse timbre than DDs has reached the level of dogma, as far as I can tell. I'm not as experienced with gear as the frequent posters here, but based on my own experience, I don't buy it. BAs and DDs both tend to have problems with tonal accuracy. They just have different problems, and apparently, more people prefer the compromises of DDs. My favorite set now is the TRN BA5. The now-classic example of good timbre is the BL-03. I like that one, too, and it used to be my favorite in my stable. But its defects gradually wore me out, and to me, that has a lot to do with their tonal accuracy. As a classical music listener, if I'm listening to a string quartet and the cello sounds bloated and dominating, that's not tonally accurate. If I'm listening to a string bass soli passage in a symphony and I can barely make out the individual pitches because low frequency reproduction is too slow, that's not tonally accurate. If I can't hear resonances from the performance space, that's not tonally accurate. If response is too slow for me to hear the friction of a bow as it's drawn across a string, that's not tonally accurate. For issues like these, I think my BA5 is significantly better than my BL-03. The BL-03 makes some lovely sounds, but they aren't always realistic sounds. When I read about DD timbre being better, the meaning I get is that someone prefers the distortions of a DD set over the distortions of a BA set, just like someone might prefer tubes to solid state.

My first Chi-Fi IEM was a KZ ZS10 Pro, and I thought it's tonal accuracy was really bad, so I am not trying to over-generalize here. I guess that's part of my point. This is just my opinion and you might be right to generalize, but I think we should hesitate before repeating this particular generalization. I think another point worth making is that there is not a clear distinction between tonal accuracy and technical proficiency. A deficiency in one can be interpreted as a deficiency in the other in a lot of cases, I would imagine.

On a side note, I resist using the word "timbre," which as far as I can tell BGGAR popularized, because I'm a former musician and timbre is something I understand as relating to an individual instrument or musician. Saying a speaker or IEM has a good timbre isn't as crazy as saying an IEM has good pitch, but it's almost as strange to me. Can you say what an orchestra's timbre is like? No, because an orchestra has infinite colors at its disposal. So it makes even less sense to say an IEM has a timbre. An IEM reproduces the timbre of an instrument, perhaps, but it doesn't have timbre like a trumpet or a violin. I realize people use it as a shorthand and this is a pedantic point, but an IEM should reproduce tonal colors/quality accurately. It can't have a timbre. Maybe this just reflects a bias because I've been using the word "timbre" in a different way my whole life, so feel free to correct me.

OK, I feel better! Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

Water should have no flavor, but most of us don’t find this to be true. Speakers, drivers, anything used to reproduce sound should have no timbre of their own, and be fully transparent. but there is no such thing. They all add their own colorations, or “timbre“. They themselves are “instruments”.

The quotations are doing a lot of work to expand the definition. Coloration is a better word to me than timbre. Is a television an instrument, but an instrument for visual information? Maybe, but only insofar as any tool can be called an instrument, and I'm talking about music.

Instruments, more akin to a scientific than a musical one, because a musical one requires to be physically modified even on a temporary basis. It's true that iems for example have no timbre.

Uh. BGGAR did not popularize "Timbre"... it's been around even before youtube even started (understatement). In fact, I even corrected Chris/BGGAR/HAWAI regarding the textbook definition of Timbre. I did him a favor, out of respect.

Basically, semantics aside, DD &BA reproduce the bass frequencies differently, which I believe, may cause a technological difference in decay and weight (aural pressure tbp). Now listening to classical with the blons is not the best way to pass judgment/ general assessment on DDs and their timbral capacity. Just to put it out there.

Okay. Well, using your lingo, based on what most people are used to, via listening to dynamic speakers/moving coil transducers predominantly, the colorations of DDs tend to sound more natural to them than do the colorations of BAs.

A TV is not an instrument if you’re reserving that definition solely for sound/music. But it does produce it’s own nuances, hence different display technologies.

I personally do consider a sound transducer an instrument. Again, ideally, it wouldn’t be, and would provide 100% faithful reproduction of the recorded sound, but such a device does not exist. Every transducer produces it’s own complex harmonics that often allows one to decipher the differences between them, even if they are producing the same fundamental frequency tone.....timbre. That’s why so many types of transducers exist.

No quotation marks.

Edit: I do agree that the term “timbre” is very often misused. Maybe we should come up with a better term. I don’t really like using the term coloration for some reason. And yes, an IEM as a whole doesn’t have a timbre. Sorry for the tangent, and the quotations.

It's not that I'm reserving the term for music or sound a priori, it's that an "instrument" in the context of music is a musical instrument, and a speaker is not a musical instrument to me. But to you it may be and that's fair.

Again, I think the better word might be distortion or coloration rather than timbre, but it's fair if that's the shorthand you prefer. As the other commenter said, "timbre" predates YouTube, along with IEMs/speakers/whatever. It's not like I don't know what people mean by it. As I said, it's a pedantic point, and I'm influenced by my background. But find whatever definition of timbre you like that's external to the hi-fi community and it probably won't explain it in terms of speakers.

Anyway, we are each entitled to our views and I appreciate yours.

Whenever I read comments re' timbre on Head-Fi I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly in some cases) that the term is being used to describe how well (or poorly) the ear/headphone under discussion preserves, or reproduces the timbre of the instrument being listened to.

I admit I have struggled to understand some folks comments re' timbre, especially where no specific instrument or voice is mentioned, and having read the above comments I now wonder if many are using timbre to mean something I have failed to understand all along.

To me, it seems perfectly understandable to use the word while writing about reproduction equipment, as long as it's used to refer to how well the qualities of an instrument or voice present in a recording is reproduced. Any other meaning would require an explanation of that specific use of the word for me to be able to (easily) parse the comment without confusion.

Has timbre been adopted here in audiophilia to express something specific and different to the usual dictionary definition? (I.e. The specific qualities of an instrument/voice which render it different/unique to other examples of a similar origin, e.g. two acoustic guitars playing the same note, but sounding distinct from one-another).
Serious question, it would explain my occasional difficulty.
It would be strangely appropriate if I discovered an interpretation new to me in the "Discovery thread".

 

[IEMusic]

Whenever I read comments re' timbre on Head-Fi I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly in some cases) that the term is being used to describe how well (or poorly) the ear/headphone under discussion preserves, or reproduces the timbre of the instrument being listened to.

I admit I have struggled to understand some folks comments re' timbre, especially where no specific instrument or voice is mentioned, and having read the above comments I now wonder if many are using timbre to mean something I have failed to understand all along.

To me, it seems perfectly understandable to use the word while writing about reproduction equipment, as long as it's used to refer to how well the qualities of an instrument or voice present in a recording is reproduced. Any other meaning would require an explanation of that specific use of the word for me to be able to (easily) parse the comment without confusion.

Has timbre been adopted here in audiophilia to express something specific and different to the usual dictionary definition? (I.e. The specific qualities of an instrument/voice which render it different/unique to other examples of a similar origin, e.g. two acoustic guitars playing the same note, but sounding distinct from one-another).
Serious question, it would explain my occasional difficulty.
It would be strangely appropriate if I discovered an interpretation new to me in the "Discovery thread".

Timbre (“tambər“, it really annoys me when reviewers pronounce it “timber”), strictly speaking, refers to individual instruments. My position is that since sound transducers (DDs, BAs, Electrets, Planars, etc) are themselves colored, and not perfect at reproducing sound exactly as recorded, they have their own sound. Because they have their own individual sound signature, they in effect have their own timbre. It’s ultimately up to the majority to determine if this is a legitimate way to use that word. In such an instance, the word could be “used to describe how well (or poorly) the ear/headphone under discussion preserves, or reproduces the timbre of the instrument being listened to“. This is the way that I have been using the term, perhaps incorrectly?

This is how i interpret it when people use it but i think if i ever were to describe something using timbre no one would understand that i mean it to be how that specific instrument sounds. You can have 25 different tunings on a drumset and talk about timbre but a piccolo snare is going to sound different than a deep snare and all the different snare sizes. Same goes with toms. So, using BGGAR if he is talking about Jon Bonham's kick its going to have a different timbre than *Insert your favorite drummer*

Obviously this goes for many instruments that arent supposed to be in key (e.g. bass, guitar).

When using the term timbre to refer to the sound of a particular instrument in the music one is listening to (JB’s bass drum), that is the proper way the term should be used.