Originally Posted by
Tony G
A lot of interesting thoughts here.
The proposed categorisations, which I see as aspects of emphasis in system selection, can certainly be illustrated from my own experience.
Most notably, when upgrading my speakers nearly 2 years ago.
I was fortunate to be able to audition 1 of the potential contenders in my own system for some time with a view to purchase.
The other contender was an unheard, import only proposition, roughly price equivalent.
Not perhaps a complete unknown as I owned a lower model in the range at the time and a higher model using the same driver was exceptionally well reviewed by a tntaudio writer with whom I share an affinity of tastes in reproduction.
The speakers in question had received very good press and for more than a week I was very taken with them, they mated well with my amplifier, made everything sound great, tremendous sense of scale, not quite as dominating of my living space as the ones I eventually bought.
They definitely covered the first two aspects and were not remiss in the fourth.
Until I stopped being in the first flush of love and heard what they were missing, then followed a week of tinkering to see if the problem was elsewhere, I set up a switchbox to switch between them and my then current speakers to check what I was hearing and finally decided that what I was noticing was the compromises that had been made in the design to achieve their design goals.
I still find it a mystery why a speaker with a nominal sensitivity very similar to what I am using now should not reproduce the micro detail I hear now.
Be that as it may, I reluctantly returned them to the dealer with recompense for his trouble in delivering and picking them up again, feeling that it was only proper to do so and also that it was a cheap letoff.
Those speakers have now gone to a home where they are loved, but they were not for me, much as the effortless sense of scale was intoxicating.
I then went through the import thing and after nearly 2 years am constantly delighted with what I hear, yes they are ruthlessly revealing, yes they do not do the bottom octave and I may add bass augmentation at some time but at present, for most of what I listen to and the comfort of my neighbours, they are more than adequate.
Quality of bass, for me, exceeds quantity for most music. They have also proved an excellent system tuning tool.
Enough illustrative digression.
I would propose, and it is covered in various ways earlier in this thread, rather two categories, the first resolution and the second re-presentation.
The first being the ability of the system to retrieve the recorded information and the second its ability to faithfully re present (as in present again) that information.
I expect this is similar to what Marco is referring to as accuracy and feel it most closely resembles category the third, though it embraces the other 3.
I do not set out to find problems with the re-presentation of my system, but should some particular distortion intrude upon the music, then I will embark on tinkering and tweaking to ascertain its source and if possible resolution.
Whilst improved fidelity has often revealed recordings to be less than might be desired, the balance of improved sounding recordings is very favourable and the improvement made by some changes been much greater than expected.
An example here would be the improvement to the performance of the DL-103 after changing from a cheap SUT to an active headamp, another, a particular distortion in vocals on a couple of recordings eliminated after using Mr Yips protractor and painstakingly realigning my cartridge.
The results of the above 2 examples, improved information retrieval for the latter and harm minimisation in the former, resulting in more accurate re presentation, instead of a screech of massed violins there are individual violins, instead of one singer there is a backing singer and some studio reverb.
If the information is retrieved with accuracy in the time domain and re presented with phase coherence then I think tunefulness and all else will/can be re presented given a minimum damage amplification chain and suitable output transducers.
I think that is enough of an essay.
