Hi, this is Jörn again,
even if it does not sound very romantic and many clients would prefer to hear a nice marketing story like oh yes, we had a couple of hundreds listening sessions with a bunch of famous grey haired musicians, but for us there is no such thing. We do not sit in our listening room while making serious faces and debating about it if the violin sounds like a Stradivari or like a Guarneri after we changed this or that detail
We leave that to those who like to tell and/or read such thing since such a process brings me back to one simple thing: everybody can build drivers into a cabinet, tells a story about it and try to sell it. Since always something will come out of the box and one can describe it as sound then and talking about it how much one likes this sound. Print it, or let it print and find clients who like exactly your philosophy/story/sound and you are in speaker business. What do you think is more difficult: being able to work with difficult measurement equipment (which is more expensive then a nice car) and the willing to invest in to it and knowing exactly what one is doing or taking the short cut and just describing the sound of a product, judging it by hearing and telling a story about it ;-)? Even without ever touching a microphone one could design a likeable speaker and could check it with live music, concert visits etc. and would get maybe even a pretty decent result, and it is nothing wrong with doing it like that.
But we believe it needs much more to offer a product which is working like a messenger, since we want to design a postman who delivers the mail without changing the content of the message nor forgetting parts nor adding parts because it would be more enjoyable to read the message then. We also do not like to sit in a closed closet in the first row of an orchestra because it sounds better in there to prefer a coloured/filtered way to listen to what is happen in front of one.
And therefore our best friends here at TIDAL are microphones and measurement systems. But even then one can not make a general conclusion out of this procedure, since many manufacturers claim measuring over hearing and most clients heard that before and disagree with the result. The difference and the core of it is how good and what they measure. And what they believe is relevant to the sound and how they deal with it or finding a solution for it. Of course we know as well there are things one can hear more easily then it is easily to measure in the dynamic process of converting current and voltage from the amps into sonic for the ears by the speaker, and also take care about it. But this is a very small amount and just the little cherry on top of the cream. At least for us.
Using technology and judging it with technology is something we do to avoid to colour our speakers with our very own preferences. Everybody has a preference if it comes to hifi. And to mix it with this is right and this is wrong makes no sense per se. As an example: there was reviewer coming to our room this year at the CES and wrote the Sunray sounded bass shy after listening to his tracks. He claimed to have a neutral position to judge this. Well, we gave it a friendly grin and can live perfectly with a.) such attitude and b.) the statement he did.
Why is that? Simple answer: the guys reference speaker is a speaker with a big bass boost, where a Sunray simply does not add bass where no bass is. Used to his recording of course he heard it bass shy he heard it maybe the first time as it really is. We treated even the room with very effective bass absorbers to have no big bass peaks even if it would be more popular then a reproduction closer to neutral. And since the TIDAL Sunray is like all speakers from us designed to do the opposite of absolute sound we took it as a big compliment.
I leave it up to everybody to consider if a TIDAL could be one of the more neutral speaker out there. A chameleon-like ability to follow every change in equipment is always a first little sign for neutrality of a speaker if one does not have or care about measurements. Because in the end of the day all manufacturer should build products for the ears, and not for the microphone! And if it has to be a TIDAL, then one better just trust us why we work that way.
You as clients can enjoy the fun part to do something we dont do - to get praise from music lovers in the end of the day: judging and discovering the speakers in an emotional way, to play with them, to feed and spice them them in many different ways with many different amps, cables and sources until YOU feel they do sound like the best to in your ears.
And a neutral speaker will always allow that. Just think about it :-).
Many nice hours in front of your systems,
Jörn Janczak
TIDAL Audio GmbH, Germany
