Musical Speakers - If you like that sort of thing.

Not everyone has the same goals in any hobby including music and audio. Neutrality and accuracy may be consider good things in general but not everybody values these most. So what? That's fine in my eyes. Variety is what makes the world go round. I could have 5 totally different sounding speakers in my system and enjoy each, though all cannot be equally accurate or neutral.

Personally, if I'm investing all my eggs in one basket however, neutrality and accuracy are generally attributes of systems that are keepers. Its a given for me also that the music will sound good. "Musical" means whatever somebody wants it to mean. it cannot be determined via objective measurements alone. Usually, in the end, all it means is that the music sounds good to them.

Jax,

The people on this site are, for the most part, audio hobbyists. Audio hobbyists often (though not necessarily always) want to hear what is on the recording - for better or for worse. For many 'goners, that is precisely the point of this hobby. If a record is poorly recorded, they want to hear that when they play it.

OTOH, a less dogmatic music lover may want to optimize for best sound across his/her particular music collection - regardless of the accuracy of the reproduction. The problem recordings that I own are almost uniformly troubled in the same way - tipped up and bright. Therefore, I do like certain speakers that tend to ameliorate that problem - even at the expense of marginally degrading the sound of my better sounding records. Actually I roate thru more than one pair of speakers - largely for this very reason.

I don't know that one is better than than the other, but I think that the "accuracy" camp prevails here. Two different pursuits - two different goals. Truth vs. beauty, perhaps?

Marty

Marty, well said. I totally agree. However, I think that most audio hobbyist are balancing both interests. They are pursuing ulitimate accuracy, but they are also pursuing musical enjoyment. I mean if you've got zero interest in musical enjoyment and it's all about accuracy, you might as well be listening to test tones or something like that. And yes, I know that some people do. I've been to audio shows and wondered why we were listening to south american wood mouse mating calls. But for most people, I would guess that a big part of the goal of getting accuracy is because increased accuracy results in increased musical enjoyment. If that's not a big part of their goal now, it surely was when they started in the hobby.

This is true for me. I got into this hobby because I love music and a high quality system delivered better music. So for me, having the most musical system is the ultimate goal. No other goal really makes sense to me.