"Natural" Sound

[PeterA]

Nice OP, Ron. We all have our subjective interpretation of what the term "natural" means. I agree with whoever said that it is what you hear when you listen to live acoustic music. The language of audiophiles can get quite confusing. The interesting thing is that ordinary people can hear an audiophile system and instinctively know whether or not it sounds natural.

I have a neighbor who plays guitar and piano. If I walk by his house and his windows are open, I can tell with certainty if he is playing one of his instruments or his stereo. I liked the comment made about how a voice or hand claps sound in a room. That simple test can tell us a lot about whether or not a system will have the potential to sound natural in that room.

Sure, the term is loose and may mean slightly different things to different audiophiles, but don't we all think we know what a guitar, violin and piano sound like? If it is unamplified, it is natural. It can vary depending on the particular instrument, who is playing it, the temperature, the humidity and the space in which we hear it. By contrast, we have no idea what Jimi Hendrix's guitar sounds like. He even said that he plays amps, not guitars. Great sound, but hardly natural.

"Natural" describes what each of us thinks of when we have an acoustic memory of a guitar, a singer, a violin or some other instrument. It varies a bit, but each of us does have a very good idea of what a particular instrument sounds like and if a system gets close to that sound that we remember, or know instinctively, then that system sounds natural to us.

Sadly, I have not heard many systems that sound natural to me, but I believe Steve's description of David's system and the impact that it made on the way he now thinks about audio. And I respect David's use of the term as one of the ultimate descriptors of a quality system.

Accurate does mean something different, but in the right circumstances, accurate and natural can meet and that is when one realizes that an excellent system is playing a great recording, and there is nothing better than that in this hobby.

 

[amirm]

Sure, the term is loose and may mean slightly different things to different audiophiles, but don't we all think we know what a guitar, violin and piano sound like?

We do but once it becomes a recording, you have no idea what a truthful version sounds like. EQ, microphone choice, where it was played, etc. are all embedded in the track. All of us know that if it were guitar, it is still a guitar, as it would if we played it on a clock radio. But natural as in what the real instrument sounded like prior to recording? No way. It is not possible.

 

[Steve Williams]

Natural......let's just say that once you hear it you'll know exactly what I mean. To all you word parsers who are finding it difficult to wrap your objective minds around the term, I say make the trip to Cedar City and then let's talk. Until then all of you can think what you think but believe me it will smack you in the face when you hear it because you'll understand when you hear it. It sounds as real as it gets. I'll just leave it as that. This takes no measurements other than those that God gave you, to wit, your ears, something that many here don't use all the time

 

[ddk]

"Natural" means exactly that, nothing more and nothing less. It isn't subjective or a matter of personal preference! if you know how musical instruments sound, the way music is played, the nuance and balance of a live performance then you can objectively judge if a system is "Natural" sounding or not. Micro's excerpt from the AS article gets close to explaining the term, totally different from personal preference which is subjective, "Natural" is purely objective. You'll know it when you experience such a system and contrary to popular belief with almost any average recording which hasn't been "audiophiled!"and across different musical genre. Sure better recording sound better but average ones still remain "Natural" and highly enjoyable. Of course getting there is another story...

david

 

[bonzo75]

This, re horns, I haven't heard the Siemens but Silbatone bring a different pair of vintage WE horns every year to the Munich HiEnd,they are a very enjoyable listen, huge scale, designed of course for auditoria , but extremely coloured by modern standards.
Keith.

Wow, a really good post from you, finally. However the vintage horns that the Cheung (the Hyundai owner) brings along are real WE horns, with GIP drivers. The smaller horns are the Silbatone ones. yes they are natural, which is why the WE mono is on my top list of long term speaker even though it can't be properly transitioned to below 75hz. Till 75hz, it makes you stop listening to other hifi.

 

[bonzo75]

It is easy to examine audiophile terms to see if they have value. If we subjected 10 audiophiles to the same system that was say is "natural," would the majority of them describe it the same? I would say no.

That is because the majority of audiophiles have minimal, or almost none live classical concert experience.
Tough to say what is exactly natural as there is a range but easy to say what is not natural.

 

[microstrip]

It is easy to examine audiophile terms to see if they have value. If we subjected 10 audiophiles to the same system that was say is "natural," would the majority of them describe it the same? I would say no. It is not a quantitative term. The same word when used in some supplement you take has a very specific meaning, meaning it is not man-made. But here, it loses its specificity and just conveys some emotion the person had. It is not a descriptor of system performance.

Compare that to, "the bass was boomy." We may not be able to understand how boomy but we immediately get a specific sense of what the person is saying about the system. Or "the highs were very bright." We get that too. Even terms like "more air around instruments" can be quantitative and far more than "natural."

When I read your review of Steve's system, the only walk away point for me was that you had a great experience there. Please don't hit me , but I didn't get any other specific impression of what was heard. The main thing I noted there were specific things like what album you had used to listen there. That was specific and actionable. If we want our assessments to be transportable beyond something fun to read, we need to think in those specific terms.

BTW, kudos to you for the self examination and creating this thread. Can't reward you enough point for doing this.

Amir,

You just picked a methodology to invalidate audiophile terms that is not related to the purpose high-end needs and uses them. These terms are used to communicate values that are beyond your description of sound quality. Surely, not as accurately as your preferred nomenclature, but more successful than it. High-end people - designers, manufacturers, reviewers and consumers - manage to communicate using it, as shown by the products and great systems they assemble and great experiences they share.

Just picking an amateur member isolated short sentences about a system as an example of your opinion is misleading. We have been reading hundreds of posts about Steve system and this is just some additional information that complements our understanding and enjoyment of Steve's system.

BTW, I would enjoy to read how you would express your opinion about David's and Steve's well known systems.

 

[Al M.]

That is because the majority of audiophiles have minimal, or almost none live classical concert experience.

Precisely.

 

[bonzo75]

'bring a different pair of vintage WE horns,' try and keep up Ked.
Keith.

Yes he is opening up a museum in Seoul of WE speakers.

 

[ddk]

This, re horns, I haven't heard the Siemens but Silbatone bring a different pair of vintage WE horns every year to the Munich HiEnd,they are a very enjoyable listen, huge scale, designed of course for auditoria , but extremely coloured by modern standards.
Keith.

Most of the coloration you hear with Silbatone systems comes from the ancillary equipment and not the WE horns. From what I've seen and heard modern standards in high end are pretty pathetic for the most part, just supplemented what you call old, i.e. slightly golden and dark for the sake of musicality with amusical coloration.

david

 

[amirm]

Amir,

You just picked a methodology to invalidate audiophile terms that is not related to the purpose high-end needs and uses them. These terms are used to communicate values that are beyond your description of sound quality. Surely, not as accurately as your preferred nomenclature, but more successful than it. High-end people - designers, manufacturers, reviewers and consumers - manage to communicate using it, as shown by the products and great systems they assemble and great experiences they share.

Just picking an amateur member isolated short sentences about a system as an example of your opinion is misleading. We have been reading hundreds of posts about Steve system and this is just some additional information that complements our understanding and enjoyment of Steve's system.

BTW, I would enjoy to read how you would express your opinion about David's and Steve's well known systems.

The methodology I picked was to take 10 audiophiles to listen to the system and see how many of them describe it as natural. Isn't that what you say these terms are good for? I routinely see people go to the same room at shows and come back with different impression of the same system in the same room.

Audiophiles accept these terms readily. I am not disputing that. Here Ron is asking us to self-examine if that is the right thing to do. Whether such conduct dabbles in hyperbole or it is descriptive to have meaning. I explained that the meaning it has is that the person has enjoyed the system as "natural" is a positive attribute in all of our minds. Beyond that, it simply does not convey anything specific. An example was given that it means the instruments sounded like real life and I explained how that is impossible. Do you have another specific definition you want to offer?

As to Steve's room, I have been to his old place but not new. I did however just come back from RMAF and post my subjective impression of a few rooms. I did not see any riots in streets over them.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Al. M,

I am sure you will appreciate the words of Anthony H. Cordesman in his TAS writings about the Quad 2905

" Go to any live concert of chamber music, listen to any other music emphasizing strings and woodwinds, listen carefully to massed strings, pay close attention to soprano voice, or simply listen to someone actually play a grand piano. Compare what you hear to far too many recordings played through some of today’s best and most accurate equipment.

If you can’t hear the same types of musical detail when you stand only 10 feet away from a live musician, and if you can’t the same balance of “highs” when you listen to live music, you should not hear them on recordings. Here, I may disagree with many of my colleagues who listen primarily to popular music. With classical music, the issue is not whether you can hear something new – or more “detail” – it is whether you can hear what is musically natural and musically relevant. A Strad should sound exactly like a Strad.3 A Soprano’s voice should not emphasize breathing sounds and harden. A Steinway or Bosendorfer should sound like a grand piano, and never have hints of sounding like slightly off tune upright. A loud flute should be a source of pleasure, not irritation, and so the upper register of the clarinet. Full text at http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/back-to-musical-realism-the-quad-system-part-1/


Many authors have tackled this subject, most of the time in reviews about components that are able to sound natural. And yes, if you google "natural sound" and good reviewers names, most of the time you will find examples in classical music.

IMHO it is a mistake to try to define precisely the meaning of some subjective terms in a short post, as they do not have an intrinsic exact meaning. There is no fast way to enter the "natural sound" culture - except perhaps experiencing it in a revelatory system, as it happened to Steve. You have to read a lot and built your own perception of the words, looking for some convergence with others. Some people can not stand this type of imprecise audiophile language and love denigrating it. It is their wright and IMHO the loss is theirs and ours - it will prevent them from participating in some of the best debates high-end can offer us.

Note microphone placements. The only mics that are close to 10 feet from the musicians are above whole sections. Is that where Mr. Cordesman gets his reference? Floating above the violins? Because that's where they are recorded and yes, they will capture more detail (and more accurate tonality) there than they would at the listening position, and more, in fact, than we will hear sitting out in the concert hall. There is a reason for this: microphones don't hear the way human ears do. Recording technology does not process a signal the way a human brain does. When the engineer moves the microphones closer to the musicians it's because he'll get a better recording there.

And I'm not sure I understand the "10 feet" thing at all. 10 feet from an instrument is representative of what live listening experience?

 

[Steve Williams]

as David suggests the "natural" sound is one wherein you sit and listen and for the lack of better terms there is just nothing to analyze as everything sounds right. There is no need to listen to a particular song to demo the system bass or another song to demonstrate sibilance or lack thereof. It is the sum total of what you are listening to. If you start analyzing what you are hearing and begin to break everything down into it's pieces and listen for those particular sounds IMHO you are talking HiFi and not natural. You'll know it when you hear it. I would suggest again that if anyone wants to know how natural sounds, make a trip to Cedar City as you will come away with a whole new perspective of your sound system. And there is no rioting in the streets

 

[Diapason]

"Natural" is the kind of word that means something among audiophile friends who have listened to and talked about lots of different systems and components together, but is much harder to gauge when dealing with strangers on the internet. Of course, just because it isn't well-defined that doesn't make it meaningless, but its usefulness as a concept diminishes quickly when used to describe an unknown piece of equipment in absolute terms. I listen to a lot of organ music. "Natural" in that repertoire is completely different to "natural" for a singer with an acoustic guitar recorded in a studio.

Unnatural is probably a far more useful word, because then you can specify why and try to tease out what that means. However, the recent trend here would seem to describe anything with valves as being unnatural by definition due to distortion, which leads us back to the whole question of why so many people's subjective sense of "natural" is improved by the addition of distortion, myself included. And round and round we go.

 

[853guy]

'Natural' means nothing as has already been stated it could mean anything , now if you say the system has a 4dB lift at 8kHz then everyone understands exactly what you are saying.
Keith.

C’mon, Keith.

“Natural” is what we as a species have been experiencing for roughly the last 42,000 years. That’s if the dating of a pair of flutes - one made from bird bone, the other from mammoth ivory - is anything close to accurate.

Music as a socio-cultural phenomenon predates Edison’s first attempt at playing back prerecorded sound by several dozen millennia, while the ability to playback sound in a commercially-available format has only been with us for less than 150 years.

From an evolutionary point-of-view, we have been singing, drumming, and blowing hollow objects for way, way longer than we have been sitting in front of inanimate objects playing back ghosts. So it’s difficult for me to conceive that we don’t know what “natural” is or should be.

If memory serves me correctly, I recall you’ve posted before how a system “knows” what it’s playing. No system does, of course. It does not possess sentiency. But we do. We’ve been making music for a very, very long time, so as a species, we’re already neuro-biologically wired and predisposed to identify what music is as distinct from, say, someone quoting Shakespeare or an explosion in a cutlery factory (cue Einstürzende Neubauten jokes).

So we are always the arbiters of what “natural” is, because there is no other thing on earth that has the capacity to make a distinction between music and non-music. And defining it is not difficult. That is, if one is open to move beyond rigid objectively-defined and adhered-to dogma as to what constitutes the listening experience, and allow that without the subjective human experience, music has no meaning, and “natural” has no value.

 

[Steve Williams]

Thanks Brendon

I always appreciate reading your posts.

 

[Steve Williams]

I have never posted that a system 'knows' what it is playing ,quite the opposite.
In terms of audio reproduction, 'natural' means absolutely nothing, no more than sterile, clinical, steely,warm , etc etc.
If you'd want to describe the sound of your room, post a screenshot of the FR from your listening position .
Keith.

You just can't wrap your mind around the concept can you Keith

 

[Steve Williams]

So Keith as a point of clarification you are suggesting that a rooms FR will tell you if the sound is natural or not

 

[amirm]

The FR of your room will tell me far,far more about the sound in your room that the descriptor, 'natural' yes.
Keith.

And nothing is a better teaching tool about what "natural" means than to sit there with an EQ, adjust it and hear the difference. Unless that is done, it is not surprising that no value is put on what the curve shows.

 

[PeterA]

We do but once it becomes a recording, you have no idea what a truthful version sounds like. EQ, microphone choice, where it was played, etc. are all embedded in the track. All of us know that if it were guitar, it is still a guitar, as it would if we played it on a clock radio. But natural as in what the real instrument sounded like prior to recording? No way. It is not possible.

Amir, we do know what a violin sounds like and what a truthful version sounds like. I think you are trying to make a different point, but I am not talking about the system reproducing exactly what the recording session sounded like. If we were not there, we can not know that. This point has been discussed many times before. The thread is about a term being used to describe how real an instrument sounds through a system.

Or am I missing your point? Are you saying that you don't know what a real (violin) sounded like prior to the recording? If not, just go to a hear a live string quartet or Beethoven's Violin Concerto played by a great orchestra. Even a local high school recital will work. That will tell you what a violin sounds like. Not that particular violin, played by that particular musician in that location on that day for some recording session, but it will be close enough to give some idea of the natural sound of a violin. And if a system gets close to that natural sound of an actual violin, and I've heard it in only a few systems, then those systems have a sound which I would describe as "natural". They may also be accurately playing a natural recording, but that is a different discussion, perhaps better located in the science forum, because that is more of an objective analysis of how accurate a system is at transposing the data on the recording into sound waves.

This is a term being used to describe if a listener finds the sound convincing. It is really about the effect the system has on the listener. I think Ron and David and Steve are talking about impressions, a general sense of approximating the sound of actual instruments. They are not talking about recognizing or identifying that a guitar is a guitar on a clock radio. They are talking about a stereo not sounding artificial, mechanical or like some man made device turning a file into music.

When I hear a natural sounding system, and when people I know say that a system sounds natural, I am, and they are, saying that they are able to suspend their disbelief to some meaningful level and they are less aware or perhaps even completely unaware of the system in front of them. They have lost themselves to the music because it sounds natural to them.

All of those threads about the alphabet soup of digital connections and specifications are the antithesis of threads like this which are about beauty and a listener's emotional connection to the music. That can not be easily measured or broken down into specifications or data points about amounts of distortion or perfect copies of files.