Musicality and Engineering

I had once started a discussion with the same name in another forum, since this question has intrigued me from time to time.
Since this forum is a hub of aficionados of music, who are into the "art" of sound and not merely into the "science" of it, I would love to know your views on this topic. :)

It is our love for music which drives us into this audio hobby. We all love listening to music, and we love listening to it in a way that it can dig deep into us and evoke the sense of peace, happiness or for some the sense of raw emotion.. the same raw emotions that drive a musician to compose the music.

Last night listening to my system, immersed in the depths of the music being played, I am sometimes struck by the thought.. how does the designer of an audio equipment put so much life into something so inert. It is basically a pulse of electricity which ultimately is causing a diaphram to vibrate and produce sound waves. But the designer designs everything in such a manner that even this mundane thing is able to produce such beautiful musicality.
My system is very basic, and I have heard systems which are even more beautifully musical.

This made me think, what was it about the designers of these equipments which makes their creations such. Is it only excellence in engineering and design? Or is it that these people loved music more than anything, and their understanding of the science and engineering allowed them to create something which could produce something so musical.

If we look at some of the greatest designers in the field of audio - John Bowers of B&W, Raymond Cook of KEF, Tom Colangelo of Mark Levinson and Cello, Dan D'Agostino of Krell, Sir Nelson Pass, Jeff Rowland, William Johnson of Audio Research, Dave Wilson of Wilson Audio .. all of them were/are either musicians themselves, or real music afficianados. They had real love for music and the passion to get that music in their creations.. who tried to incorporate as much honesty, emotion and musicality in their creations as possible.

So, to be able to create musically engrossing audio equipment, especially speakers, do you think it is more important to be a musician/music connoisseur first, and then an engineer? Or is it engineering which has the upper hand?

P.S: If you got bored with the ramblings.. please allow your greatness to forgive this poor soul
:ner:

So, to summarise - do you have to love music to produce good sounding audio equipment?

Objectivists say no. As long as the technical spec is good enough, the reproduction of music will be accurate.

Subjectivists say yes. You have to 'voice' the kit to make it sound like music, pure engineering excellence is not enough.

I say that most kit doesn't play music properly. Maybe if the designers loved music more, it would.

Good question,

Musician friends don't seem to care too much about the equipment and can 'get' the music from a boom box (Bose anyone:eyebrows:) as well as from a good HiFi.

I am a guitar maker and so into the technicalities and nuances of the sound my instruments make and so care deeply that my HiFi makes the same sound as my guitars.

I get enormous pleasure from my three systems - and the wife's when listening to Judas Priest and the like - in spite of the fact that they are all at a different 'quality' and price level.

All the bits were chosen and swapped around until they made music.

So the answer is............don't have a clue.:scratch:

I am in my own camp ( which should not be confused with Mein Kampf).
All the new DAC chips with outputs that do not require a separate audio stage cannot be "voiced" by the product designer unless he/she adds an audio stage that isn't strictly required.

Some people are only interested in the specs and components used. Sound quality is unimportant to them from a design aspects. Most of them are gifted enough to know in advance how the equipment will sound like once you tell them what the parts are. I doubt I am ever going to reach that stage in my own ability, so as a designer I prefer to build one or more (expensive) prototypes first, listen to it/them, before selecting the final design.

But the problem with any equipment downstream in an audio chain is how things will pan out once you make a change upstream. A high current amp might make your speakers sound a lot more bassy. So do you swap the amp out for something that gives less bass, or do you flog the speakers on ebay and get something with less bass? And who is to blame for that situation? It is the amp designer who gets accused for voicing his amp, whilst in reality all that he did is built a beefier current delivery circuit.

What about a linear power supply versus a SMPS? Can we say that the designers have voiced their power supply, because it is very likely that the two items will give a different sound.

Last but not least the cable designer. Would it make a difference if the cable was twisted clockwise instead of anti clockwise? If it does, can we say the designer voiced his cable by wrapping it one way instead of the other?

To me, it is not about the music or the parts. I am more interested in the layout. From personal experience, the same bunch of components placed in a different position on a PCB can have a dramatic effect on the sound. That flies in the face of anything that the objectivists and subjectivists claim. It also allows me to seek out the best sounding part for a particular layout, instead of the most expensive parts to maximize my sales potential. That's one reason why I hate that Crystal champagne with gold leaves in it. I can't taste the gold, but I would feel it in my wallet if I had to pay for the stuff.

Which is why I started by declaring that I am in my own camp :).

As someone who designs and makes some modest pieces of kit, I'd say that it is a balance between technical understanding and application of certain standards (both in design and construction) but also it is about voicing kit. In particular, loudspeakers can be designed on paper but to get them sounding right does take a lot of care. You have to listen over an extended period, and change one thing at a time (ie wadding, surface damping, crossover values) until what started life as a technical exercise also becomes the result of a subjective exercise. This is usually done in conjunction with measurement though as the end result is in achieving a flat in-room response but since all rooms are different, you never really arrive at the final destination and subjective tuning tends to win out.

Cables are different and personally, I would not agree that they can or should be voiced, as their principle function is to pass a signal, in as unaltered a state as is possible, to the next piece of kit down the chain. There is a "however" however! It depends on just what you are connecting because a cable is just part of an overall circuit and that circuit may require certain LCR parameters that only the cable can provide in fine tuning, so you can to a certain extent, customise depending on circumstances. For example, a phono lead may be required to have an overall capacitance of 100pF between deck and phono stage as any increase could act in circuit to form a low pass filter and act to roll off treble performance.

Can/should a DAC ve "voiced"...don't know as I am not a DAC designer but I suspect that a DAC needs to work independently of subjective bias as there is, whether we like to think of it this way or not, a strict and very precise mathematical relationship between input/output defined by the physics needed to recreate an accurate analogue signal.

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Originally Posted by apollo

So, to be able to create musically engrossing audio equipment, especially speakers, do you think it is more important to be a musician/music connoisseur first, and then an engineer? Or is it engineering which has the upper hand?

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I don't think it's so important to be a musician rather than an engineer. To me, the main requirements are to be inquisitive and, above all, open-minded. That way, when practice and theory diverge, you're more likely to believe your ears and your heart rather than established thinking when things sound either better or worse than theory predicts.

Thanks all for some interesting points.

@Jerry: You and I are somewhat on the same page here.. I guess :) Subjective/Objective debate in audio is as eternal as the debate between good and evil (order of appearance completely coincidental, I swear !!)
For me, specs are important, but only to a degree. Ultimately the equipment has to sound good.

@Gordon: You raise a nice point. So can I interpret from your post.. in general, the ones who create the music (musicians, composers) are less interested in the correct re-creation of the music, than the persons who provide the means of creating/re-creating the music (instrument makers/designers and audio equipment designers) ?

@Stan: When you say layout on the PCB, isn't that a part of the design process itself? I mean circuit and layout design, component selection, laying re-laying and re-routing are all part of design/build.. right?
Please don't think I am trying to second guess you.. just trying to understand.

But I agree.. which components will sound musical will very much depend on what it was paired with, who is listening to it, and what is the listener's interpretation of musicality.
Which is why I have a feeling, that since the designer of the equipment has his own perceptions of how music should sound like, knowing/understanding the design philosophy of the original designer, is an important factor when selecting an equipment, especially for analog equipment like preamp, amp and speakers. Of course, I may be wrong..

@Paul and Shane: Thanks for your input :)

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Originally Posted by apollo

@Gordon: You raise a nice point. So can I interpret from your post.. in general, the ones who create the music (musicians, composers) are less interested in the correct re-creation of the music, than the persons who provide the means of creating/re-creating the music (instrument makers/designers and audio equipment designers) ?

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Probably:)

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Originally Posted by apollo

Which is why I have a feeling, that since the designer of the equipment has his own perceptions of how music should sound like, knowing/understanding the design philosophy of the original designer, is an important factor when selecting an equipment, especially for analog equipment like preamp, amp and speakers. Of course, I may be wrong..

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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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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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:exactly:

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.