Phil Leigh wrote: > Pat - are you saying that "great" and "accurate" are mutually exclusive?
Well, maybe not mutually exclusive, but they are very much different dimensions. In more obvious terms, recording engineers care a lot about accuracy, They need to know what is in the sound. Audiophiles typically want two different things: 1) great sound 2) sounds like real life (The Absolute Sound uses "unamplified instruments in real space" as their goal). Many Audiophiles love tube amps, which any second year Engineering student can show you how they are nowhere near accurate. > Mind you - I can think of lots of great speakers but no accurate ones > :0). True, but accurate in the recording studio world is well understood. Maybe not accurate in some proper philosophical truth sense, but well known and recognized. Accurate systems tend to have some negative characteristics, "fatigue" is one often heard comment. "brittle high end" is a less nice way of describing the same thing. Now, the most 'popular' pro-studio speaker in the world was the Yamaha NS-10. They were in 99% of all the studios in the world and all the engineers knew how to work with them. No one thought that the NS-10 was good for music, rather they were 'typical' of what a consumer would have. Thus if your song sounded 'good' on a NS-10, it could be trusted to sound at least good on whatever system your customers might have. > No speaker yet made is totally accurate in terms of both in-room > frequency and time response - perhaps this will always be true. Anyway, > we'd never know, because the entire chain would have to be "accurate" > too... I was leaving out the room issues. Someone a while back posted about SoundOnSound magazine, One part of that magazine that I really like is their monthly "studio fix" section. They go into someone's studio that has problems, and try to fix it. In all cases, they do most of the work on the room's acoustics. Only rarely do they recommend that someone replace gear. > I'm not sure our ears would know accurate anyway. However, our brains > know good (sometimes). Its all about having fun listening to music. If it ain't fun, find a new hobby. -- Pat Farrell PRC recording studio http://www.pfarrell.com/PRC _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
