[tansand]

Reverbs also, with better detail you hear the sound of reverbs much more clearly. It's nice.

 

[E1DA]

huh, that is the first thing what people refer when compare vinyl vs CD, especially earlier ones, when producers wanted to implement all hopes regarding new format(CD) dynamic range, and did reduce compression for that. Finally, all consumers noticed the difference LP vs CD, however, it was rather a bit different mastering than CD over LP domination. I like to listen to Diana Krall with some compression in my car or with open-back planars too. Need to lift up only one point at the Compressor GUI, see attached, to get vinyl like compression(note: not all LP vs CD are different).

 

[Tsukuyomi]

To me, "detail" means that when im listening to my music, im able to picture in my head more accurately where instruments are. To be able to imagine and construct a 3D environment around me in my head of all the instruments/singer(s) location and what they're doing.

more detail would make it easier for me to picture it, less detail would make it harder for me to picture it making it seem like its coming to me from all sides at the same time with no specific point of origin.

Sound stage and detail are not the same. lets not get confused here.

 

[bigshot]

You're describing sound location. That is one aspect that divides the good from the bad in speaker systems. It's not nearly as applicable to headphones.

 

[danadam]

Regarding knob twiddling

 

[Tsukuyomi]

You're describing sound location. That is one aspect that divides the good from the bad in speaker systems. It's not nearly as applicable to headphones.

Perhaps that what i meant then, sorry my understanding is a little bit amateur, but im still learning.
Do you find yourself ever trying to listen closer for things more than just music?
I can't remember the track, but i did have a Bjork album where if you listened closely enough you could hear her clothing brushing up against maybe the mic or sheet music stand or something in the studio booth. I really enjoyed that moment. There was also a track on Yo-Yo Ma's album where you could hear on certain songs his inhale breath while he was playing cello. such a fantastic feeling when you hear things like this in a song. I know its the masters job to remove these "artefacts" and give a cleaner experience but for me, they're bonuses and make a track really sound natural.

 

[bigshot]

You'd love Glenn Gould's squeaky piano bench!

To me, a good mix is a proper balance of sound... small sounds are small, big sounds are big. Nothing crowds out anything else. There's space for everything to read clearly. I don't want to hear exaggerated x-ray detail or have all the detail polished off to smoothness. I just want a clear and organized sound mix. Those sorts of things are aesthetic judgements made by the artists and engineers who make the album. Audio equipment can certainly present music poorly, but equipment doesn't reveal detail... it can only obscure it.

 

[Davesrose]

You'd love Glenn Gould's squeaky piano bench!

I was going to bring up Glenn Gould! In recordings, you don't just hear a squeaky piano bench, but all his muttering and humming while tickling the ivories.

I have some classical guitar training, so I can appreciate the type of detail that is having a mic be closer to that instrument to pick out the rasping of finger positioning and re-adjusting in seat. How much detail that is a perfect balance is always going to be subjective. For some genres, I like less detail and more sense of air. I also like to adjust to suit my preference at a given moment: finding I'm doing that more now with my surround speaker system with new receiver (which has a phone app that lets me adjust EQ on the fly).

 

[gregorio]

[1] gregorio, well know your precise&slow style of reply,
[2] let me ask you one more question right now. What's your opinion about the statement of Bruno Putzeys regarding that the flat THD+N vs freq plot is the factor(one of) of sound neutrality?

1. That's because so many of the evils (false marketing, etc.) in the audiophile world are due to fast and imprecise statements/replies!
2. I would need to see the exact statement and it's context, can you provide a link to the article/s please. On the face of it, THD+N shouldn't be a factor, it should be inaudible.

Regarding knob twiddling

Everyone should watch that video, it's pretty much how all recordings of all popular genres are put together. It puts paid to many of the audiophile claims of "real" and "it's like being there (at the live recording)" because it's not real and it's not like being at the live recording! There are some important omissions in the video though:

1. Beat Detective came out in 2000 and was a revelation, it bought some new features to the table but it's main benefit is that it could do in minutes what had previously taken hours or days. Slicing up a performance note by note and "quantising" them to the grid had been available/possible nearly a decade earlier but each slice and each crossfade had to be created individually.
2. Quantizing one or more parts is a musical decision, as is the amount of quantization applied. With a decent drummer (for example) and a decent take, maybe only 20% quantization would be used instead of 100%. Applying 100% quantization will usually end-up sounding mechanical and therefore it's only done if the artists/producer want it to sound mechanical.
3. The inverse is also possible (and quite commonly used). Let's say we have a particularly good drummer (for example) who does a particularly good take, it's got a great groove/feel but is not metronomically precise. Instead of quantizing the drums to the grid and ruining that groove, we can do the inverse and quantize the grid to the drums. (This "groove template extraction" was one of the new features Beat Detective brought to the table).
4. I'm sure some producers did this because they were lazy but generally that wasn't the reason. Ultimately, it was the unavoidable consequence of consumers' actions/decisions. The late '90's saw the rise of digital file exchange (and piracy) and the early 2000's saw a shift from album sales to single track downloads at a fraction of the cost (or no cost at all). As record label profits fell, the budgets they gave to producers to make albums had to be slashed. There was no longer the budget to stick a band in an expensive world class studio for 6 months, experimenting and doing takes/overdubs until it was near perfect. So, we end up with just a few takes which are then "sliced and diced" together, the studio time reduced from say 6 months to 6 weeks and much of that in a relatively cheap editing suite rather than a world class studio! Hence why so many of the world class recording studios have closed down.
5. The idea of slicing/dicing per note is not new or restricted to the DAW age. The famous "Doctor Who" theme tune (1963) was entirely created this way, each note recorded on a separate piece of tape, then all spliced together. This wasn't practical for pop/rock bands but doing numerous takes/overdubs and having numerous edits (by the bar or so, rather than the note) certainly was and the proof came in the mid/late 1960's with one of the best selling bands of all time (The Monkees), none of whom were good musicians (or in some cases, musicians at all)!

[1] I can't remember the track, but i did have a Bjork album where if you listened closely enough you could hear her clothing brushing up against maybe the mic or sheet music stand or something in the studio booth. I really enjoyed that moment. There was also a track on Yo-Yo Ma's album where you could hear on certain songs his inhale breath while he was playing cello. such a fantastic feeling when you hear things like this in a song.
[2] I know its the masters job to remove these "artefacts" and give a cleaner experience but for me, they're bonuses and make a track really sound natural.

1. Some people "really enjoy" it, others find it a distraction from the music and of course, in a live, acoustic performance the audience would never hear those "details".
2. It's not the mastering engineers' job to remove such noises, it's the job of the editing/mix engineer, although it might sometimes be done by the mastering engineer simply because their highly accurate, reference system might reveal very low level noises that were missed in the recording/mixing studio. Commonly though, many noises cannot be removed without damaging the music/wanted signal, so either another "take" would be done or the decision taken to use the take with the unintended noise, if for example the take was particularly good in other (musical) regards or if the unintended noise can't be avoided.

G

 

[E1DA]

gregorio, it is a quite old story about Mr. Putzeys, for sure it happened on diyaudio.com 2003-2004 when he tried to establish there "Switching Power Amplifiers and Power D/A conversion" forum. And finally we got that forum, OMG, it was 15 years ago...

 

[SilverEars]

The other day I trying out some Grados. They have a reputation having peaks in their response or not all that tonally balanced.

There was one Grado I thought sounded quite detailed, and sounded good tonally in general out of the bunch. It was the SR325e.

Soon after I looked for a graph for headphone to understand why I found the sound so detailed, and all I ran into was a bump in the 2k. Hmmmm. I wish I can get an accurate measurment of this headphone.

The details are in the upper-mids.

I find the best sounding headphones are ones that does the upper-mids well relative to the bands around it. Mids are the most important IMO.

 

[SilverEars]

I notice that HD600 has a bit of a detail lift compared to HD650 which seems to have a blacker background, and I think it's due to the presence region. Looking at SR325e response you see the lift at 2-3k or so, and similarly the HD600 (although somewhat different). HD650 doesn't have that much of a lift in that region. I found SR325e have that transparent response like the details are poping out, and to me it's seems like the result of the 2-3k, the presence region. So, this is why I think details are in the upper-mids.

Here's SR325e response



Here's HD600



HD650

 

[BassicScience]

I haven't read the entire thread, but my opinion is that greater detail is primarily the result of lower distortion, flatter frequency response, and lower noise floor. By FAR, the greatest distortions are introduced by transducers (speaker units) vs. modern electronics. This is not to remotely suggest that all amps, DACs, etc. essentially sound the same. However, your choice of transducer will generally have the biggest impact on the level of detail you experience (or prefer not to experience, as the case may be).

 

[Steve999]

I have an old pair of HD580s (the original of that design and the precursor to the HD600s) that I come back to from time to time. I say to myself, wow, those do sound nice! I’ve tried the HD650s and found I liked the HD580s better. Of course this is sighted, totally uncontrolled, totally biased opinion on my part.

In my subjective opinion I think to say that there is nothing above the HD650s in price that sounds better is pretty out there. In fact I think there is a lot out there that is much cheaper and just as good or better. There is some objective data I could use to back up my point of view pretty strongly but my point here is not to diss the HD650s. It would still be just measurements and with transducers we are talking differences in preference, differences in head and ear shape, etc. So if for one person the HD650s are the best out there I believe that entirely. But I think as a broad-brush opinion or given as advice to other people it’s not reasonable.

As far as detail goes, for my taste, the HD650s are definitely lacking in detail, in the bass end and in the mid-to-upper treble. They are old tech and roll off pretty quickly in the bass and they roll off too much for me in the upper-mid-to-treble zone. They are very good, they are excellent in the midrange, but in my view for nearly anyone there is probably better to be had.

You can have too much detail in areas of the spectrum—if that area is emphasized too much in the frequency response too much you will hear the stuff at those frequencies more (at a louder volume) at the expense of missing some “details” in other parts of spectrum. To me that’s kind of obvious.

Often I think an emphasis from, I’d ballpark, 4-10 kHz is subjectively perceived as more detail, as people commonly think of it. But with newer tech you will hear stuff in the bass that just wasn’t reproduced very well before. I mean it can be gross differences, like, I just did not hear that on the other headphones (or speakers). Better bass or treble than the HD650 gives you can come really cheaply, IMHO. The hard part is reproducing the upper bass and midrange as well as the HD650s.

 

[SilverEars]

I have an old pair of HD580s (the original of that design and the precursor to the HD600s) that I come back to from time to time. I say to myself, wow, those do sound nice! I’ve tried the HD650s and found I liked the HD580s better. Of course this is sighted, totally uncontrolled, totally biased opinion on my part.

In my subjective opinion I think to say that there is nothing above the HD650s in price that sounds better is pretty out there. In fact I think there is a lot out there that is much cheaper and just as good or better. There is some objective data I could use to back up my point of view pretty strongly but my point here is not to diss the HD650s. It would still be just measurements and with transducers we are talking differences in preference, differences in head and ear shape, etc. So if for one person the HD650s are the best out there I believe that entirely. But I think as a broad-brush opinion or given as advice to other people it’s not reasonable.

As far as detail goes, for my taste, the HD650s are definitely lacking in detail, in the bass end and in the mid-to-upper treble. They are old tech and roll off pretty quickly in the bass and they roll off too much for me in the upper-mid-to-treble zone. They are very good, they are excellent in the midrange, but in my view for nearly anyone there is probably better to be had.

You can have too much detail in areas of the spectrum—if that area is emphasized too much in the frequency response too much you will hear the stuff at those frequencies more (at a louder volume) at the expense of missing some “details” in other parts of spectrum. To me that’s kind of obvious.

Often I think an emphasis from, I’d ballpark, 4-10 kHz is subjectively perceived as more detail, as people commonly think of it. But with newer tech you will hear stuff in the bass that just wasn’t reproduced very well before. I mean it can be gross differences, like, I just did not hear that on the other headphones (or speakers). Better bass or treble than the HD650 gives you can come really cheaply, IMHO. The hard part is reproducing the midrange as well as the HD650s.

I really want to try the HD580, but Sennheiser stopped production long ago. I don't know how to get a hold one these days.

I imagine the sound of 580 to be between 600 and 650 because I do prefer 650 out of the two, but I wish in some respects it was like the 600.