Resolution vs. Musicality

[Cellcbern]

I appreciate you clarifying and expanding your thoughts on this topic. The sharing of these thoughts would have been beneficial to me in the opening post. The thread makes more sense to me now. Thank you.

I still think that the ability of a component or system to present the timbre of instruments accurately and distinctly is a matter of resolution and not musicality.

Sounds like you would like to define "resolution" to include musicality, which would be different from the historical definition. Here's why that doesn't work. Whatever you might want to add to the category "resolution", it still centers on the extent to which the detail available in the medium is mined and accurately reproduced. With a great recording more resolution (i.e., retrieving more of the available information) might result in more musicality (realistic timbres, emotional content, etc.). However with a less than great recording, even of a great performance, more resolution can result in less musicality and listening pleasure because more of the "warts" are being highlighted. I have experienced this in my own system. For a decade I owned Merlin VSM speakers, the resolution of which was frequently compared to electrostatics. The speakers were called "ruthlessly revealing" by several reviewers, and I found this to be true. With a well recorded sacd for example they were revelatory. I heard detail and nuance in familiar recordings I had never heard before along with outstanding musicality. However when I played anything that wasn't superbly recorded the superior resolution was a curse. Much of my collection became unlistenable. My Ars Aures F1 monitors by contrast were much more forgiving. They didn't retrieve all of the detail that the Merlins did but because of their voicing were more musical and enjoyable over a much broader range of recordings. In this case the less resolving component was more musical, something I've experienced many times over the 40+ years I've been an audiophile.

 

[bonzo75]

The Ars aures floor standers are quite musical for a very low price and do well near corners. Art audio designer has them in the UK they sound nice with his amps especially 300b

 

[bonzo75]

New Yorker on resolution

 

[Cellcbern]

The Ars aures floor standers are quite musical for a very low price and do well near corners. Art audio designer has them in the UK they sound nice with his amps especially 300b

Unfortunately Ars Aures pulled out of the US market.

 

[PeterA]

Sounds like you would like to define "resolution" to include musicality, which would be different from the historical definition. Here's why that doesn't work. Whatever you might want to add to the category "resolution", it still centers on the extent to which the detail available in the medium is mined and accurately reproduced. With a great recording more resolution (i.e., retrieving more of the available information) might result in more musicality (realistic timbres, emotional content, etc.). However with a less than great recording, even of a great performance, more resolution can result in less musicality and listening pleasure because more of the "warts" are being highlighted. I have experienced this in my own system. For a decade I owned Merlin VSM speakers, the resolution of which was frequently compared to electrostatics. The speakers were called "ruthlessly revealing" by several reviewers, and I found this to be true. With a well recorded sacd for example they were revelatory. I heard detail and nuance in familiar recordings I had never heard before along with outstanding musicality. However when I played anything that wasn't superbly recorded the superior resolution was a curse. Much of my collection became unlistenable. My Ars Aures F1 monitors by contrast were much more forgiving. They didn't retrieve all of the detail that the Merlins did but because of their voicing were more musical and enjoyable over a much broader range of recordings. In this case the less resolving component was more musical, something I've experienced many times over the 40+ years I've been an audiophile.

Thank you for this explanation. I still think that if a component or a system can not present the timbre of various instruments accurately and distinctly, the component or system is neither resolving or musical. It it can, then it can be both resolving and musical. I appreciate your distinction, I just never thought of it that way. I do not really use the term "musical" when describing what I hear from a system. I know others do. Perhaps that is why I have not thought much about the term.

 

[thedudeabides]

Actually my 'argument' is the advocation of describing sound using straightforward accounts of what we hear rather than using vague terms over which we cannot agree. The business about the piccolo was an example; one needn't hear the symphony to resolution' has no ostensive definition, it is not a thing, At best it is an act or a state. I won't adopt a sonic syntax that talks about 'capturing resolution' as if it were a raccoon and the microphone a trap. This is the problem with these sorts of words. Better to describe what you hear.

Thank you for a concise, accurate statement regarding the fallability and pitfalls of subjective threads like this. These type of threads never make any sense to me given the ambiguity and personal perspective of the meaning of certain words such as resolution and musicality. Through my eyes and with all due respect, it is like a dog chasing its tail.

But on the other hand, forum members seem to enjoy these types of discussions so who am I to say.

 

[microstrip]

Thank you for a concise, accurate statement regarding the fallability and pitfalls of subjective threads like this. These type of threads never make any sense to me given the ambiguity and personal perspective of the meaning of certain words such as resolution and musicality. Through my eyes and with all due respect, it is like a dog chasing its tail.

But on the other hand, forum members seem to enjoy these types of discussions so who am I to say.

Curiously resolution and musicality have precise meaning if we share the same objectives in sound reproduction. Surely if people discussing disagree on the fundamentals they will be chasing their tails forever. It is is why I always try to include them in discussions.

In the first issues of TAS Harry Pearson clearly explained his objectives and perspectives and developed a language to describe them and his evolution to readers. Surely this language does not have success in communities having different objectives.

Resolution and musicality have been used with success by tens of reviewers, that often use examples of recordings to support its understanding.

My usual system includes the ARC REF40 preamplifier and the VTL Siegfired II. For the last few days I have been listening to the conrad johnson GAT2 preamplifier - ART amplifier. Just in a couple of words I would say that both are musically satisfying , but the ARC/VTL has higher resolution. I hope people get an idea of what I mean...

BTW, I understand that musicologists can be confused by the use of the word "resolution" with a different meaning of their more frequent use of "resolution" in musical texts - I adapt myself when reading "Gramophone". But in audio we have been using it in the instrumental meaning.

 

[PeterA]

I sure am glad I did not name my system thread “Musical Sound“.

I could have written sentences like this: “I was listening to music on my new audio system today. After spending weeks to fine-tune the set up, it sounded musical and I was musically satisfied.

 

[thedudeabides]

Curiously resolution and musicality have precise meaning if we share the same objectives in sound reproduction. Surely if people discussing disagree on the fundamentals they will be chasing their tails forever. It is is why I always try to include them in discussions.

We can respectfully agree to disagree. Or maybe we do agree.

So many of these type threads lack a clear sense of context to focus the discussion. I personally will always choose musicality over resolution any day of the week. I have had my share of resolving systems over the years and I have found I turn it off because of listening fatigue and lack of emotional involvement.

And I no longer have the energy or desire to make any changes. I am very happy and fortunate to have what I have.

 

[Gregadd]

I guess I am kind of late to this discussion. I do not see musicality and resolution as mutually exclusive. Musicality is my ultimate goal
Resolution is a detail that contributes to musicality.
Probably if resolution is competing with musicality it is because you have gone too far in the pursuit in the pursuit of resolution. Imagine you are holding a magnifying glass.At first it is distorted. Then you move it and it comes into focus. Continue to move it and it goes out of focus.
The image can be to large or to small. It can hyper focus on certain parts. It can be blurry or have an unnatural hyper detail. All this eventually detracts from the reality of the image.

In my opinion and experience of course.

 

[Blackmorec]

In instruments, resolution basically is a product of two performance characteristics, detection sensitivity and noise, that work together hand-in-hand. The problem generally is that when sensitivity is increased, so is noise….for example, if you increase the gain on a photomultiplier or an electron multiplier, you increase it’s sensitivity, but you also increase its noise. If you turn up the gain on an amp, you get more signal, but you also get more noise, so the solution is fundamentally simple…..find a way to increase the signal without increasing noise and the best way to do that is to increase the output signal while decreasing the input and intrinsic noise levels.

Hi-fi is no different….to increase resolution we must increase sensitivity while decreasing noise.
If all you do is increase sensitivity without dropping noise your system will start to sound less musical, because the noise is masking some of the additional detail and that hidden detail is simply heard as additional noise.

Bottom line, if you want to increase your system’s resolution to provide greater detail AND musicality, find creative ways to decrease the system’s intrinsic noise. The very best way I have found to do that is to address external and internally generated emi, resonance inducing vibration, DC power supply noise, AC noise, cable screening and transmission quality, jitter and clock accuracy, network traffic and cpu and switch noise and the areas most prone to these effects are of course the network supplying the data stream and/or the entire analog chain.

Make the necessary improvements and you will increase both detail resolution and musicality.

 

[Gregadd]

You can of course lower the noise floor thereby increasing s/n.

 

[LL21]

In instruments, resolution basically is a product of two performance characteristics, detection sensitivity and noise, that work together hand-in-hand. The problem generally is that when sensitivity is increased, so is noise….for example, if you increase the gain on a photomultiplier or an electron multiplier, you increase it’s sensitivity, but you also increase its noise. If you turn up the gain on an amp, you get more signal, but you also get more noise, so the solution is fundamentally simple…..find a way to increase the signal without increasing noise and the best way to do that is to increase the output signal while decreasing the input and intrinsic noise levels.

Hi-fi is no different….to increase resolution we must increase sensitivity while decreasing noise.
If all you do is increase sensitivity without dropping noise your system will start to sound less musical, because the noise is masking some of the additional detail and that hidden detail is simply heard as additional noise.

Bottom line, if you want to increase your system’s resolution to provide greater detail AND musicality, find creative ways to decrease the system’s intrinsic noise. The very best way I have found to do that is to address external and internally generated emi, resonance inducing vibration, DC power supply noise, AC noise, cable screening and transmission quality, jitter and clock accuracy, network traffic and cpu and switch noise and the areas most prone to these effects are of course the network supplying the data stream and/or the entire analog chain.

Make the necessary improvements and you will increase both detail resolution and musicality.

I am no expert when it comes to these things, certainly not a technical person. But what I can say is that I have sought out isolation, emi/rfi shielding, power supply-related stuff and also signal/chassis grounding. And my experience has been all of these have indeed allowed previously obscured/hidden detail to come forward...and not forward as in someone 'artificially sharpened leading edges'...but where it certainly seemed like by removing noise, it suddenly left perfectly natural detail and music uncovered...the key being natural music uncovered.

So I really like this post because it sums up well my own observations and experiences.

 

[Cellcbern]

I am no expert when it comes to these things, certainly not a technical person. But what I can say is that I have sought out isolation, emi/rfi shielding, power supply-related stuff and also signal/chassis grounding. And my experience has been all of these have indeed allowed previously obscured/hidden detail to come forward...and not forward as in someone 'artificially sharpened leading edges'...but where it certainly seemed like by removing noise, it suddenly left perfectly natural detail and music uncovered...the key being natural music uncovered.

So I really like this post because it sums up well my own observations and experiences.

Removing noise always lifts a veil to reveal what was being obscured or distorted. However what is revealed will not necessarily be "perfectly natural detail and music". It still depends on the quality and voicing of the components and the synergy of the system.

 

[Blackmorec]

Removing noise always lifts a veil to reveal what was being obscured or distorted. However what is revealed will not necessarily be "perfectly natural detail and music". It still depends on the quality and voicing of the components and the synergy of the system.

Listening to the actual recorded detail instead of noise will always sound better and more natural regardless of the quality and voicing of the components. Even a very poorly matched and quite harsh sounding system will sound better when you remove noise and unmask detail, simply because the noise and masked detail that you hear as added distortion sounds really ugly on such a system; far worse than it does on a high quality, well matched hi-fi. The reason for that is that the noise is in addition to the system mismatching. Noise and distortion will never make a poor system sound better, so by the same token, their removal won’t make it sound worse.
What you finally hear may not be ‘perfectly natural detail and music’ due to the system‘s limitations but it will still be an improvement over the untreated system’s sound

 

[Cellcbern]

Listening to the actual recorded detail instead of noise will always sound better and more natural regardless of the quality and voicing of the components. Even a very poorly matched and quite harsh sounding system will sound better when you remove noise and unmask detail, simply because the noise and masked detail that you hear as added distortion sounds really ugly on such a system; far worse than it does on a high quality, well matched hi-fi. The reason for that is that the noise is in addition to the system mismatching. Noise and distortion will never make a poor system sound better, so by the same token, their removal won’t make it sound worse.
What you finally hear may not be ‘perfectly natural detail and music’ due to the system‘s limitations but it will still be an improvement over the untreated system’s sound

Didn't say it wouldn't be better - said it wouldn't be "perfectly natural detail and music". It hasn't happened to me but I have known several audiophiles over the years who were convinced that the reduction of noise via various accessories and tweaks made undelying weakneses in their systems (e.g., bright treble, recessed midrange, clinical sound, etc.) more apparent.

 

[LL21]

Didn't say it wouldn't be better - said it wouldn't be "perfectly natural detail and music". It hasn't happened to me but I have known several audiophiles over the years who were convinced that the reduction of noise via various accessories and tweaks made undelying weakneses in their systems (e.g., bright treble, recessed midrange, clinical sound, etc.) more apparent.

Good point. Absolutely agree...if your base underlying system is fatally flawed, all that is going to happen is you are going to hear the flaws plain as day.

I suppose I tell myself I really like the original Zanden 4-box digital a lot...its all about music and purity of note with Yamada San. So I suppose I feel in my particular case that I wish to ensure the spirit behind that original sound is allowed to make its way all the way through the system and ultimately be properly amplified through the speakers and into the room.

And in removing grunge, I do so far feel like its voice is truly natural detail and music.

 

[microstrip]

I would say that it all depends on what we are calling noise and what kind of noise we are addressing. If you look at the current subjectively SOTA preamplifier you will find that most of them have poor noise specifications. When we pick a DAC with tubes we are adding noise. And I am sure that their designers know how to design ultra silent gear.

Most tweaks do not remove noise, on the contrary they add it. If we isolate a component sometimes we are not just preventing noise from coming to it, we are just impeding it from escape from equipment.

Stereo is filled with compromises and illusions. IMHO one of the illusions is thinking we can understand other audiophile systems and attitudes.

 

[LL21]

I would say that it all depends on what we are calling noise and what kind of noise we are addressing. If you look at the current subjectively SOTA preamplifier you will find that most of them have poor noise specifications. When we pick a DAC with tubes we are adding noise. And I am sure that their designers know how to design ultra silent gear.

Most tweaks do not remove noise, on the contrary they add it. If we isolate a component sometimes we are not just preventing noise from coming to it, we are just impeding it from escape from equipment.

Stereo is filled with compromises and illusions. IMHO one of the illusions is thinking we can understand other audiophile systems and attitudes.

I suppose when I say removing noise, the way I think about that is if I can hear details that heretofore had been hidden beneath the surface...whispers in the background of movie soundtracks, or can hear more clearly the actual words during complex choral music...or realize that there was actually a 2nd set of strings way behind playing a complementary tune...then I take that as the system noise going down to allow that to come forward.

Again, not being a techie, I do not truly know HOW I can hear words more clearly or hear instruments that were not there before...but again, if I get that, and the newfound discoveries are natural in tonality, etc...I am happy.

 

[Blackmorec]

I would say that it all depends on what we are calling noise and what kind of noise we are addressing. If you look at the current subjectively SOTA preamplifier you will find that most of them have poor noise specifications. When we pick a DAC with tubes we are adding noise. And I am sure that their designers know how to design ultra silent gear.

Most tweaks do not remove noise, on the contrary they add it. If we isolate a component sometimes we are not just preventing noise from coming to it, we are just impeding it from escape from equipment.

Stereo is filled with compromises and illusions. IMHO one of the illusions is thinking we can understand other audiophile systems and attitudes.

Hi microstrip,
If you’re saying that a lot of tweaks don't always work optimally i would completely agree. The secret is to understand what problem you are trying to solve and the way a particular device addresses it. Let‘s take an amplifier and vibration control as an example. The amplifier is fed 120v or 230V AC which it must convert to DC. To do that requires a transformer and a rectifier. Both these devices vibrate. At the same time the amp must sit on a support which itself picks up vibration from the room floor. So if you only add a tweak to isolate the amp from room floor vibrations you trap the internal vibrations inside the amp’s chassis. If on the other hand you were to add a tweak to ground those internal vibrations into the support structure then you provide a pathway for ground borne vibration to enter the amp. What is actually needed is a way to isolate the amp from vibration in 1 direction, while providing a pathway to ground vibration in the other direction. So if you use wooden blocks to ground the amp it‘ll probably sound worse, ditto something like sorbothane footers for isolation. But if you use a footer specifically designed to isolate in 1 direction and convert vibration to heat or work in the other, you’ll hear improved sound. Does that mean that wooden blocks are useless? if the amp happened to be sitting on a rack shelf that was itself isolated and provided a means to convert vibration, like the Symposium shelf for example then a wooden block or similar would be exactly the required tweak. Horses for courses as the old expression goes.
I find your assertion that tweaks add noise interesting. Which particular tweaks are you thinking about here? Are they genuinely adding noise, or only when they are misapplied as in the above examples?