high fidelity aims at faithful reproduction of recorded music...
but most people do not know how the music
sounded like in the original copy..
they are not using the same monitor speakers
that the recording engineers used,
even the listening environment is different
not to mention the electronics are not the same...
so what happens is that every one has his own idea
as to how a piece of music on playback must sound like....
and this is where all the discussions emanate from,
some like his music trebly, some like more bass emphasis,
some like female voices, etc, etc, etcetera.....
and that is why this type of threads go around in circles....
and imho should be closed....
You don't have to know what it "sounded like", all you need to do is recognise the distortion introduced during playback because of the weaknesses of one's own system. Eliminate that, and you're closer to what the 'real' waveform is; what it sounded like to the mastering engineer will likely be very different, because of the distortion in his playback chain - it's unlikely one will be ever able to find the original recipe ... 😉
Anyway, I don't think I would like to hear what he heard, on the basis that most of the studio monitor sound I've come across leaves a lot to be desired, 😀.
I see one particular reason to keep the thread open, and that would be if posters from here on try to actually listen to each other, pick up on the points they make, show courtesy to other points of view, remain curious about different perspectives and basically start showing some generosity of spirit. What's killing this thread is the succession of dogmatic assertions made by some posters which seem to show little or no regard for the points of view of others.
Content and subject of threads is one thing, and this is contentious of course, but this doesn't have to be conducted as if we are living in a war zone.
I recall a manifesto by Peter Qvortrup from quite a few years a go where he postulated that the best amplifier would emphasise the differences inherent in different recordings, not make they all sound the same. This bypasses the "what was the original sound like?" question nicely, by running from the hypothesis that every recording session should have differences to the sound of other recording sessions.
The more varied an amplifier makes all your recordings sound, the better it is, in that it is not imposing some other flaw over the top of the recording that homogenises the sound.
Of course it may also make a good number of your recordings sound unlistenable, but I can see merit to the argument.
Is this good amp design? Is it inherently "tube sound"? and Is it an amplifier that you would actually want to listen to? all remain to be answered...
The more varied an amplifier makes all your recordings sound, the better it is, in that it is not imposing some other flaw over the top of the recording that homogenises the sound.
Of course it may also make a good number of your recordings sound unlistenable, but I can see merit to the argument.
Is this good amp design? Is it inherently "tube sound"? and Is it an amplifier that you would actually want to listen to? all remain to be answered...
Hello Drew, that's pretty close to my design goals, to eliminate whatever "homogenises" the sound. This led my after several decades of building amps to only using directly heated tubes in certain configurations including filament bias in all cases. To my ears it removed a veil. I take your point about all recording sessions being different. What I do when listening to different designs is to select the recordings that already sound to my ears closest to the acoustic original instruments I'm familiar with as a musician. I'm sure a lot of us do that. I'd personally distinguish between the sound of directly and indirectly heated tubes, but others wouldn't and the success of any tubes depends on the circuit.
AJT, since all that's now being offered is handwaving and platitudes, no actual data, analysis, or listening experiments, the thread is truly useless. What needed to be said was all done in the first couple dozen posts.
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