The Pain of Neutral Sound

[Macca]

My joining this forum was prompted by my coming across this thread, it having a great resonance with my own path.
Please, any posters here, compare and discuss.

Have to say I was not sure what this thread was about. SQ is not satisfactory and the fact that the speakers are 'studio monitors' is to blame? Perhaps you could explain more as to why this has resonance with you?

[walpurgis]

Perhaps you could explain more as to why this has resonance with you?

Dennis has been an AMT user. I think that may have something to do with it.

[Macca]

Dennis has been an AMT user. I think that may have something to do with it.

I thought AMT drivers were meant to be really good? Is this not just a case of putting some very good, very revealing speakers in front of a less than optimal upstream combination and hearing the issues it has being unmasked? Or am I missing something?

[Pharos]

In essence you will see from my introduction that I have had many of the bits of equipment at different times listed in the whole thread, and had hope that we could compare experiences of each.

The Heil is very revealing, but the original ESS mid/woofers were under BL'd and lacked speed and mid range, and with an under-damped bass. The Rogers was much better.
However the Heil has remained pretty well unchanged for 40 or so years, which is a shame because it has so much going for it,
hence my purchase of the ADAMs.

Opinions on the AVI and ATC preamps would also be useful to me.

[Yomanze]

I hear you, it's why in the end I stopped using Amphion Argon speakers, which incidentally did bridge the gap between studio and home. For me the ruthless transparency highlights a key problem with a lot of recordings with regard to vocal sibilance and extreme top end distortion. Am happy to take a bit off the top, bit of warmth, and gain a fuller more organic sound. I noticed the Argon2s were less explicit (transparent) at the top end, the Argon3 were better in every way, the tweeter too good for many recordings, a part of me preferred the balance of the Argon2. Yes, get Massive Attack - Mezzanine on and the benefits would be clear, but in the real world music production quality is wildly variable.

[Pharos]

Those point are really addressed by the question;

Do I want an absolutely transparent and revealing system which reveals everything, and may 'sabotage the art' in so doing, or do I want one of sufficient resolution to hear all the artists intentions, but not one revealing the gnat on the microphone farting?

To me that differentiates the 'Monitor' from the 'Hi-Fi' speaker, and if I have the former I am distracted form the ethos of the music, and am a techno-obsessive, and if I have the latter, I am not hearing the highly resolved reality.

I suppose this points to whether or not we are in a position of producing the art, or receiving it.

The enjoyment of music is largely after all a projection of ourselves; we assign, ascribe, and attribute, to what we hear, rather than it being an objective conveyance of information.

[Pharos]

I have also just remembered that as my system has improved in revealing, much music becomes so easily understandable in terms of events, that it may even be laughable.

Just such occurred a few years ago to me with a 'Stones track; it was bare and amateur.

[RothwellAudio]

I don't get any of this thread at all. The idea that studio monitors are a different beast from domestic speakers and designed to do a different job is in my opinion completely wrong and is a fairly recent idea - a product of the marketing departments of manufacturers whose target market is the the home recording/ small studio fraternity. To my mind there is only one type of speaker and that type ranges from poor at one end of the spectrum to very good at the other. There isn't one type for "listening to music" and another for "analysing the recording". Up until the late 1990s it was common for studios and domestic consumers to use the same speakers. LS3/5As, Spendors, Tannoys etc. could all be found in studios and in hi-fi shops. The Yamaha NS10s are classic example of the re-writing of history. They were never designed to be studio monitors, they were just designed to be speakers, and because there was a large market for hi-fi at the time they were sold as domestic hi-fi speakers. Now the hi-fi market is much smaller and the home studio market is much bigger and NS10s and their lookalikes are targeted at home studio owners and sold as monitors to people who believe that makes them different from other speakers. I don't believe it.

Of course, I could be wrong

BTW, I thinks NS10s sound horrible, and that isn't because they're accurate/neutral/analytical - it's because they're just horrible.

[walpurgis]

BTW, I thinks NS10s sound horrible, and that isn't because they're accurate/neutral/analytical - it's because they're just horrible.

Ah. The truth comes out at last. I agree.

[walpurgis]

I have a very revealing system. But there's no nastiness there. It's not ruthless and forward sounding, just very lucid, open and clear. To my ears, there a tendency for nice sounding Hi-Fi's to be using Class A amplification, but that's not exclusively so. As always, getting a sound you like is a question of careful 'mix and match' of components. And, going for a one make system is no guarantee of getting you the best sound.