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The focus and air lie

There always have been some kind of fashion in the way a system sounds and since a few years it seems that more and more people are looking for details, air and pinpoint focus / soundstaging.
There's a lot of components, accessories and speakers designed to fill full that demand... Halcro, dCS, Esoteric, Nordost, BW, GamuT are some examples.

This sound does NOT exist in real life, when you're at a concert the sound is full not airy, the soundstage exist of course but it's definitely not as focused as many of the systems you can hear in the hifi shops, it just fill the room.

To get that focus and air hifi components cheats, it's all in the meds and high meds, a bit less meds, a bit more high meds and you get the details, the air, the focus BUT you loose timbral accuracy, fullness.
It's evident for someone accustomed to unamplified concert that a lot of systems are lean and far from sounding real.

Those systems are also very picky about recordings : good recordings will be ok but everything else will be more difficult...
That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality.

So why does this happened ?

Did audiophiles stopped to listen unamplified music and lost contact with the real thing ?

Is it easier for shops to sell components that sounds so "detailled and impressive" during their 30mins or 1 hour demo ?
ndeslions
sineburst
2 posts
 
I attend over 50 acoustic concerts a year and I hear harpsichord and piano played in my house. I agree there is something wrong with the audio ecology. I rarely "image" when listening to speakers and when I do it is flat - that is, the emphasis on left-right illusion reduces the height illusion.

OTOH I have heard remarkable timbral accuracy from reproduction and I think it does correlate to "air" in systems like Gamut, Thiel, Earthworks and Lipinsky - tweeters with "ultrasonic" capability, but no metal resonance. Further, when I am impressed with reproduction a lot of my peers consider it "harsh".

To me there are few recordings with accurate spatiality and timbre. Most of what I listen to is either European boutique classical labels (BIS, AliaVox, Harmonia Mundi, etc.), audiophile like Chesky, Mapleshade and Jon Marks or select jazz producers like Carl Jefferson and Manfred Eicher. The recording quality comes through on mediocre systems - my living room for example is set up with plastic cabinet B&W DM305 and B&K AV2500, a chip based "contractor" amp!

Recording technique - I prefer near-coincident pair - seems to matter more to suspension of dis-belief than listening to, for example, a Rudy van Gelder production on my Ayre AX-7 driving Tag-McLaren Calliopes.
mapman's avatar
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mapman
15,679 posts
 
So what is the alternative?
cdc
1,412 posts
 
Mrtennis, then why have an expensive stereo? You have made a good case for not having one.
mapman's avatar
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mapman
15,679 posts
 
"On second thoughts I guess I must add that I probably listen very differently from most people. I listen to recordings and concentrate on a particular individual instrument and then play it again listening to another"

Shadorne, I tend to focus more on different individual or group played lines or elements in the music when I listen also.

Some of these may be more prominent in the mix or buried way back in the mix somewhere.

I suspect a lot of people do this.

One big goal that drives my system design is to be able to do this as often as possible without limitation with as many different recordings (both good and bad) as possible.

Sometimes I'll just listen for specific parameters of the overall sound as well, more so when I suspect that some specific aspect of the detail I am focused in on does not sound right for some reason.
stringreen's avatar
stringreen
5,112 posts
 
I go to lots of concerts both classical, rock, popular, etc. In all types of concerts except for classical, the sound is amplified, and comes at the audience from many directions, and therefore that magic that we call air is not available except for an electronic echo that is ubiquitous in almost all of these venues. In classical musical concerts, however, it is possible to achieve that magical sound that we say is "air" if we find the seat(s) that can maintain the proper phase of the performance. That means that you should choose a seat in the 1st row of the balcony, with no ceiling or second balcony above yours. You will find these seats to be absolute magic and will give you a memorable performance in sound quality. You will notice that you are in perfect alignment with the recording microphones of the orchestra.
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