After reading countless posts on this forum since I joined in April 2010, I have formed several opinions about where we are at in this hobby. If you read and believe much of the dogma put forth here, you would come to the conclusion that we are all wandering around in the desert trying to find our way (and maybe we are). Here are some examples that I’m grossly oversimplifying:
1. Everything we ever needed to know about audio measurements has been known for 50 years.
2. Measurements and DBT will lead you to sonic nirvana.
3. Measurements can’t tell you how something will sound and DBT is not to be trusted
4. None of us can ever know if our systems are accurate to the source recording because we weren’t there when it was recorded and mixed.
5. No two recording engineers mix music the same way so we will never have a de facto standard to use when setting up our gear to reproduce as accurately as possible how the music was made.
6. You can’t truly know if you are improving your system and making it more faithful to the source recording because of #4 and #5.
7. You can’t tell if one component is better than another, only which you prefer.
Now, here are some “real truths:”
1. No two pairs of speakers sound the same.
2. No two stereo systems sound the same.
3. No two rooms sound the same.
4. Because of one, two, and three above, we all hear something different from the same recordings when we play music on our systems.
So now I submit, are we all hearing our own slice of the “truth” or have we all picked out components that merely sound as good as we can make them given our disparate budgets and rooms? And if everyone is right, can anyone be wrong? I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
For example, if you chose a speaker for whatever reason that has no appreciable response below 40 Hz but yet measures very flat over the entire FR it does cover, some people would argue that you have distorted the input signal. Some people’s definition of distortion is very narrow. If the output doesn’t equal the input, then you have distortion. So if I presented the speaker with information in the bottom octave (20Hz-40Hz) at the speaker terminals from the amplifier and the speaker can’t play it back, we can argue that the speaker is not faithful to the source through its omission. And I hope that most of us would agree that acts of omission are better than acts of commission. But the fact remains information was left off of the table. Now getting back to my point here; one can argue that your speaker with no output below 40Hz is still providing you a large slice of the truth because everything else you are hearing from it has been deemed to be very accurate based on its measurements and numerous reviewers agreeing on its intrinsic wonderfulness. In conclusion for this example, we can argue that you have a large part of the truth, but you don’t have the whole truth. You can argue that you don’t care about that portion of the truth which is why you chose not to purchase it, but it doesn’t change the fact that you left some truth on the table when you assembled your system.
We have to assume that if we set up a system with wide-band competently designed components in a treated room that we are reproducing the recordings as faithfully as technology allows us to. And having said that, because no two rooms sound the same and no two pairs of speakers sound the same, and no two systems sound the same, the recordings will all sound different when heard over different systems. How do we account for those differences and can we say which is more faithful to the source that we really know nothing about anyway? We don’t know how recordings were made, mixed, and mastered. Everybody can’t be right, and conversely everybody can’t be wrong. Maybe at some point this hobby is like religion, you have to have some faith.
At the end of the day, I think what is important is that you are happy with the choices you have made and that you think you have put yourself on the right path. When you make upgrades to your system and you hear information that maybe you didn’t even know was there before or it clearly sounds better, I think that represents a clue that you are heading in the right direction.
1. Everything we ever needed to know about audio measurements has been known for 50 years.
2. Measurements and DBT will lead you to sonic nirvana.
3. Measurements can’t tell you how something will sound and DBT is not to be trusted
4. None of us can ever know if our systems are accurate to the source recording because we weren’t there when it was recorded and mixed.
5. No two recording engineers mix music the same way so we will never have a de facto standard to use when setting up our gear to reproduce as accurately as possible how the music was made.
6. You can’t truly know if you are improving your system and making it more faithful to the source recording because of #4 and #5.
7. You can’t tell if one component is better than another, only which you prefer.
Now, here are some “real truths:”
1. No two pairs of speakers sound the same.
2. No two stereo systems sound the same.
3. No two rooms sound the same.
4. Because of one, two, and three above, we all hear something different from the same recordings when we play music on our systems.
So now I submit, are we all hearing our own slice of the “truth” or have we all picked out components that merely sound as good as we can make them given our disparate budgets and rooms? And if everyone is right, can anyone be wrong? I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
For example, if you chose a speaker for whatever reason that has no appreciable response below 40 Hz but yet measures very flat over the entire FR it does cover, some people would argue that you have distorted the input signal. Some people’s definition of distortion is very narrow. If the output doesn’t equal the input, then you have distortion. So if I presented the speaker with information in the bottom octave (20Hz-40Hz) at the speaker terminals from the amplifier and the speaker can’t play it back, we can argue that the speaker is not faithful to the source through its omission. And I hope that most of us would agree that acts of omission are better than acts of commission. But the fact remains information was left off of the table. Now getting back to my point here; one can argue that your speaker with no output below 40Hz is still providing you a large slice of the truth because everything else you are hearing from it has been deemed to be very accurate based on its measurements and numerous reviewers agreeing on its intrinsic wonderfulness. In conclusion for this example, we can argue that you have a large part of the truth, but you don’t have the whole truth. You can argue that you don’t care about that portion of the truth which is why you chose not to purchase it, but it doesn’t change the fact that you left some truth on the table when you assembled your system.
We have to assume that if we set up a system with wide-band competently designed components in a treated room that we are reproducing the recordings as faithfully as technology allows us to. And having said that, because no two rooms sound the same and no two pairs of speakers sound the same, and no two systems sound the same, the recordings will all sound different when heard over different systems. How do we account for those differences and can we say which is more faithful to the source that we really know nothing about anyway? We don’t know how recordings were made, mixed, and mastered. Everybody can’t be right, and conversely everybody can’t be wrong. Maybe at some point this hobby is like religion, you have to have some faith.
At the end of the day, I think what is important is that you are happy with the choices you have made and that you think you have put yourself on the right path. When you make upgrades to your system and you hear information that maybe you didn’t even know was there before or it clearly sounds better, I think that represents a clue that you are heading in the right direction.
