[jp11801]

Ok so we have this fun play room dedicated to high end audio but without context opinions and impressions can be of little value particularly in the high end arena. This is the segment where manufacture viewpoint on sonic priorities takes on more weight than at the lower end, IMHO.

Many of us have an idea of what High End should sound like. Here is an excerpt from a vendor site Audio Revelations that does a good job of explaining priorities and sonic signatures of tables they carry.

" Some tables sound very smooth, relaxed and warm while others are very lively, transparent and accurate. You can picture it this way: A 'family sedan' takes out the roughness in the road for a smooth and easy drive but doesn’t give you a feel for the road nor much in the way of ‘hi-performance’. Sports cars have terrific agility and relay the road conditions instantly but can be hard over rough road. Further, like other components, tables vary from not-so-great to excellent production value (parts quality, engineering design)."

So at the end of it all are you a white knuckled thrill ride listener or a comfy plush leather interior luxury or somewhere in the middle. One persons ideal amp is another bright and sterile and conversely one persons awesome mids is another slow and bloomy amp. Most of us are in the middle somwhere but I beleive most have a preference for one area or the other in general.

For me I like a transparent sound with great extension top to bottom that is revealing but I also like to listen for long periods. I need leading edge definanition and rythmic grip. This preference is a blessing and a curse (as are most) in that when the recording decent to excellent life is good but given a poor recording I'd rather listen out of my iphone with my iems. I really dislike treble hash that can be present in many components that embody the sound I like so it can be a challenge. I am the opposite of the lush comfy listener that likes bloomy mids and is willing to trade extension and to a degree transparency at the top and bottom end for it.

There is no absolute right or wrong just right and wrong for you given your sonic preference. So what say you what is the sonic signature you crave and have either achieved or are seeking to achieve.

 

[selfdivider]

Great topic, jp. My priorities are transparency & dynamism but not at the expense of musical coherence and human touch. In the end, I just want the system to disappear, ideally, leaving only the imprint of music. Of course this is an illusion, but some systems are better than others at doing this.

Having said this, though, I'd like to say that I don't like to pinpoint & nitpick on "audiophile" qualities. I think it's a bit more intuitive than that, at least for me. I know it when I believe in the music I hear. And some systems, I definitely believe in what I'm hearing, even if all the transient response & treble sparkle or whatever aren't up to audiophile standards. I don't care a crap about flawless measured performance & low noise floor if I am not moved. I'm not saying these two are mutually exclusive. But however it happens, I BETTER be moved by my music, plain & simple. I've heard so many mega-buck components that fail to bring the music alive, it's not even funny, dude. (Hey, there's a great thread about this very topic, right?)

So in the end, all that flawless performance in terms of audiophile standards, i.e. low hash, sparkly transients, etc. is just an effect without that musical honesty. Which is why the only barometer we can trust is our own preference in listening.

 

[Asr]

My sonic priorities, in as best order I can put them in:
1. Speed
2. Clarity overall
3. Tonality
4. Soundstage
5. Blackness to background
6. -
7. Drive/punch

Everything else is an afterthought to me.

Though in apparent contrast to my priorities, when I listen to a system, my goal is a total sound quality that hasn't been enhanced anywhere in the frequency range, even in the treble. Yes, I do like treble, but only because so much equipment in the audio industry seems to roll it off - it seems like the dominant goal of most vendors in the audio industry is to tame the treble, not refine it, and that's a goal I absolutely dislike from the industry. Music should be euphonic, yes, but it should also be crystal clear - if it's not, I believe there's something wrong with either your ears or your equipment. I'm a musician and I know what live music sounds like. It can be raw, hard, sizzling, and harsh. It's not necessarily about smoothing over the edges. Sure, there's a romanticism to lots of genres, but that effect comes from the instruments and the performers. I fully believe the equipment behind the transducers should neither enhance or take away this quality.

The only additive sonic quality I want is at the transducer level. That's why I have more than one headphone.

I don't want to feel like the music is being pushed at me (or pulled back either) unless I'm intentionally adding that quality at the transducer level. If I want to imagine in my mind's eye standing up in the soundstage and walking around in it, I want the preceding equipment to allow me to do that. Or if I want to imagine sitting back and letting it come at me, I want it to do that too.

Speed, with control, but determined power behind it. The force of say Superman that can stop on a dime. I want to feel the bass but I also want to hear the snap, spark, and thrash of treble-inducted moments. Music to me is nothing without that.

My system has been primed for my sonic preference.

 

[ast]

1. neutral (natural, uncolored)
2. transparent with great details
3. balanced ( no overly thumpy bass, ear piercing highs )
4. well controlled, deep bass with good texture.


...

 

[panda]

if using cars as an analogy, i prefer a luxury sports sedan such as an audi s8. meaning i lean on the smoother side of things with the option of performance when necessary or wanted. as far as bass vs treble preference, i'm in the lively hi-hats camp however i'm more a fan of mid-range biased gear than the other two ends.

i like gear that imparts a nice signature to the sound without getting in the way of the flow of music. i believe that high resolution with low distortion can still be achieved while being colored. not necessarily vivid but 'contoured' a bit to my liking.

we can dissect aspects of sound reproduction all we like; but in the end, for me it comes down to one thing, does the system groove? it's as simple as having the right swagger or not. no matter how many great qualities certain gear might have, if it doesn't work cohesively or gets me focused on the music that is playing through it, it's a failure in my books. or at the other side of things, even if a certain piece of gear has more than a few flaws, if it gets the flow right, it becomes attention worthy...

 

[progo]

Detailed, musical, involving, balanced. Smoothness is good, but I lust after details, really.

 

[Cool_Torpedo]

For some time I had sonic priorities like neutrality, balance, resolution, transparency and all that, but after more time learning how this thing of audio works for me, I feel that everything falls into two concepts:
- Coherence: Everything falls in place, nothing drives your attention to sonic features, and music is just that, an art form with much more contents and "load" than its sonic components.

- Consistency: The system performs accordingly to the music and recording quality demands. Good music sounds interesting, challenging and involving despite a bad recording quality -this can be easily assessed by listening some old mono recordings- and bad music is exposed as such with no mercy, no matters how good and "audiophile quality" the recording is.

My problem now is having discovered that colored systems can have those two qualities, the same as not very resolving ones, and also that outstandingly balanced, neutral and resolving systems don't have those qualities at all.

Still learning

Rgrds

 

[Dr. T]

Speed: excellent transients make me go wow on well recorded pieces.

Resolution: even on complex passages I want to be able to hear instruments distinctly.

Bass control: I like tight, controlled bass. A bloomy low end ruins it for me.

Soundstage: I guage this by a sense of what kind of room I am in (in the recording) and where the intruments are in relationship to me.

Finally, an overall balance of sound where no particular frequency range or instrument is prominent over the others.

 

[tkam]

For headphones I only have two real priorities, tonality and musicality/naturalness or whatever you want to call. I'd put soundstage at the bottom of my list since no headphone does it correctly anyways. That's what my speaker rig is for after all.

 

[jp11801]

after reading there are two areas I would ad and they are correct tone and sense of space. Sense of space is different from soundstage with pinpoint accuracy like speakers. It is more of the sound that surrounds the sound, the room effect on Blue Note RVG LPs for example.

 

[jinp6301]

I try to get the overall system to give me depth, correct tonality, coherence across the entire range and musicality. Most of these can be obtained if you use the correct set of transducers as ASR said.

 

[catscratch]

Nice, it's good to see this topic back. I tried it once, but that was before we had the high-end forum. You can imagine the replies I mostly got.

For me, a system has to disappear and leave the music behind. That can be done in several ways, however.

The first is to have a system that's so flawless that it never jars you out of the sonic illusion. Everything is represented exactly the way it should be, and you can't simply put a finger on any particular aspect of the sound that is wrong. In the absense of this, the music starts to come through and take center stage. The O2 can do this brilliantly with some music. Note that a system this perfect is by definition not analytical, since an analytical sound is a coloration stemming from desaturated tone color and insufficient dynamic range, and is therefore a flaw. A flawless system is by definition musical if it's playing good music.

The second is to have a system to vivid and engaging that you don't really care about the flaws of the system. This is a rig based around drive, impact, harmonic richness, and dynamic range. It only works with music that's very driving to begin with, but in this case it can simply grab you and not let go until the CD/track/whatever is over. A lot of good, driving dynamics can do this - i.e. balanced HD650, RS1, etc.

Of course, we also have many systems that are somewhere in between. Highly accurate, but not entirely accurate, though their inaccuracies add to their presentation rather than detracting from it. The HE90 is the best example; it's entirely too euphonic to be completely accurate but its colorations are some of the most pleasant I've ever heard. The K340 is another example still.

I tend to prefer the last type of system - accurate enough to not interfere with the sonic illusion, but also subtly euphonic to inject some life into records that are less than perfect. While most of my collection is quite good in terms of production, I still don't want a system that will intrinsically limit me to enjoyment of mostly flawless records, and I want something that is accurate enough to present pristine records cleanly, but also euphonic enough to give subpar records a push in the right direction.

In more detail, my particular sound signature would involve:

- neutral-ish tonal balance, with perhaps a slight tilt to the warm side
- deep, tight bass that's linear without any midbass/upper bass emphasis
- slight emphasis on the lower mids to give a warmer tone to the midrange
- slight emphasis on upper treble, not lower treble, to give an illusion of greater air
- slightly forward presentation that brings the sonic foreground into focus, combined with a wide soundstage to cast the background far beyond the head
- a liquid, organic, "wet" quality to the sound that lenghthens trailing edges slightly, but at the same time without compromising leading edges like the HD650 often does
- relaxed presentation of detail, where detail is all there but doesn't interfere with the sonic picture (which, if the rest of the rules have been followed, is probably going to be the case)
- speed! the system has to be able to keep track of every single instrument no matter how dense and hectic things get... which rules out most dynamics, unfortunately
- naturally, dynamic range, impact, microdetail, texture, etc, but I don't even need to mention that, since who actually doesn't want dynamic range?

Hmmm, does it sound like I'm describing the HE90, or does it sound like I'm describing the HE90?

Note that I still haven't found this in a system I can actually afford. Maybe a well-diven O2 or EH1.2b, if the latter is actually finished to a reliable standard.

 

[ast]

Quote:

Originally Posted by catscratch /img/forum/go_quote.gif ...... In more detail, my particular sound signature would involve: - neutral-ish tonal balance, with perhaps a slight tilt to the warm side - deep, tight bass that's linear without any midbass/upper bass emphasis - slight emphasis on the lower mids to give a warmer tone to the midrange - slight emphasis on upper treble, not lower treble, to give an illusion of greater air - slightly forward presentation that brings the sonic foreground into focus, combined with a wide soundstage to cast the background far beyond the head - a liquid, organic, "wet" quality to the sound that lenghthens trailing edges slightly, but at the same time without compromising leading edges like the HD650 often does - relaxed presentation of detail, where detail is all there but doesn't interfere with the sonic picture (which, if the rest of the rules have been followed, is probably going to be the case) - speed! the system has to be able to keep track of every single instrument no matter how dense and hectic things get... which rules out most dynamics, unfortunately - naturally, dynamic range, impact, microdetail, texture, etc, but I don't even need to mention that, since who actually doesn't want dynamic range? Hmmm, does it sound like I'm describing the HE90.........

Amen!!!

 

[Cool_Torpedo]

Nobody else finds quite informative that this whole thread just got 12 replies and less than 200 reads?

Rgrds