Musicality vs Transparency & Detail

Interesting questions you pose, Montepilot. For me, I've always enjoyed detail and resolution, but too often that has come at the expense of musical naturalness. It seems relatively easy to design for more apparent detail but harder to maintain overall correct rendering of harmonic overtones -- the key in my experience to musically natural sound reproduction. I'd far rather trade-off some amount of detail and some level of transparency for greater accuracy of timbre and harmonic overtones. In the 80s, this was for me always the classic trade-off between Audio Research and conrad-johnson gear: c-j always made music for me, even without the ultimate in detail and resolution.

Today, many designers are achieving a much better synthesis of musical naturalness and resolution. Among the equipment I'm fond of, Jim White's work with his Jupiter series Callisto and Io preamp and phono stage comes immediately to mind, as does Ralph Karsten's work with his Atma-Sphere MA-1 and MA-2 OTL amps. I don't think you can go too far in the search for transparency and detail retrieval, but I do think it's easy to go astray and lose the music.

One final thought: don't confuse Salvatore's priority on "low level retrieval" with "high detail." Salvatore is very careful to clarify that he's looking for is the ability to retrieve the very quietest musically relevant information and not have that low volume information masked by system noise. In his March 2007 blog update, he clarifies this a bit with a discussion of "noise floor" and "sound floor".
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How have you been able to achieve excellent detail retrieval without getting an etched fatigue inducing sound.

I found the solution was to go to pro studio speakers. Consumers designs are all designed to impress the listener in one extreme way or another - they are mostly looking for that "differentiating" factor to sizzle up the sound and stand out from the crowd or give good reason to buy this years model over last years model (different sound).

Audio engineers listen to music nearly all day, 8 hours a day five days per week. Audio engineers require detail and transparency in order to make precise adjustments. Audio engineers are often deeply familiar with the sounds of real instruments and musicality. Audio engineers want their productions to translate to other systems and therefore seek accuracy with the lowest amount of coloration possible from monitor systems. It is a "no brainer" that the most popular speakers used in pro audio mix and mastering studios are all of what you describe; musical, transparent, detailed and without being at all fatiguing to the ears. This not to say that studio speakers don't differ in sound from eachother - they do, however, consumer speakers are much more of an eclectic, eccentric, anachronistic mixed bag, as they cater to a such a broad market where being different is often more important than achieveing accuracy.

Are pro studio speakers right for everyone; probably not ....because they lack coloration or sizzle and certainly won't improve a bad recording, worse they will reveal a bad recording all to obviously.

Well said, Rushton. Salvatore's description explains that detail retrieval is musical, and I completely agree with this concept. A system needs proper transparency and detail retrieval to get to the music. Live music is seldom rolled off, plodding and lacking in detail. In fact it is just the opposite.

What happens many times with components that aren't up to the task is that the presentation becomes bright and glaring. That is what causes fatigue.

My experience of Shindo gear is that it is as "detailed" as the source it is fed.
It redefined "transparency" for me.
But somehow puts one off the track of such intellectual disection of the music and instead sucks you into the groove,funk,flow of whatever you are listening to.
I never feel like I am missing any details when I listen to my Shindo,and this from someone who's system used to be based on valhalla cables and the DCS stack.