Musicality and Engineering

I play no instruments now, but I loved music from a very early age and was a pretty good classical pianist as a kid and I think that gave me an ear for what sounds good.

I certainly hear a lot of Hi-Fi that to me is just not right, regardless of how well respected it may be or how well reviewed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by StanleyB

As far as I am concerned, any designer who has a perception of how music should sound like should be taken outside tarred and feathered, and a board hung around his neck with the words "I know nothing".
A musical instrument sounds the way it does. Once an audio product designer starts to alter the tonality and other parameters of the instrument sound that the listener is otherwise expecting then the product is more than likely to fail to live up to expectation as far as serious listening by the knowledgeable audio aficionado is concerned. One of the few pieces of audio equipment that can be forgiven for its wide variation in tonality of the reproduction are speakers. But everything else that in an audio chain should be capable of given an accurate as possible reproduction of the originally recorded sound.

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Sorry for not coming through clearly enough.

Tonality is one of the most important aspects of accurate reproduction of music and that is not something which should be altered at the designer's wish.
But that is not what I was talking about by perception of music.

By perception I was meaning what is the designers view on accurate reproduction of music. We have often seen that the best measuring equipment is not necessarily the best sounding. So it boils down to what the designer thinks is the right sound..
For example, tubes not necessarily measure well because of the distortion, the very reason tubes sound good. The designer who prefers tubes over solid state does that because it fits his design philosophy.
Similarly for Kevlar/Paper/Metal cone, Burr-brown/Wolfson/ESS etc.
And another part is the emotions invoked by the music.. some prefer pipe and slippers sound, some prefer dynamic and foot tapping, some prefer neutral and hyper detailed.. they all may have same tonality but are results of different perceptions of music.. and will appeal to different groups of people.