Basically, I love “do-it-all” equipment. Like, good for work and for fun too.
T50RPs are often used in studio environment, can sound thin and analytical-ish, but oh gods dat planar bass with Shure 840 pads.
HD58X are neutral-ish, everything sounds thick and full, but I’ll use these in my (home) studio too, I’ll just be careful about the bass bump (but look at that “perfection” from like 1khz to 20+khz).
T5Vs are Adam’s “inexpensive” speakers, but Zeos said their place was in a home theater, because they do good depth and imaging. Great. Perfection for me: I’ll use these for work and for fun.
All these are neutral, or neutral-ish. Naturally (…ish) reproducing what it sounded like in the studio, or good (ish) for studio and for music and youtube videos and whatever. None are dull and boring to listen to. Definitely not. (well, I don’t know about T5Vs yet, we’ll see).
All this is also “mid-fi”, and probably dull and boring compared to a fuckton of 500$+ headphones and speakers. But I’m not there yet.
Also, producers are not going for neutral, and it’s another reason why I prefer flat, neutral, natural sound reproducing equipment: I.e.: If you buy speakers with 10dB bass boost “because you like bass” and you listen to hip hop or stuff produced by Andy Sneap, be prepared to hear bloated bass or worse (distortion). If you like treble and buy grados, prepare to bleed from the ears if you want listen to trumpets at loud volume, etc.
In short: Unless something, somewhere, has gone very, very wrong, nothing is unbearable with flat, neutral headphones or speakers. Hence my preferences for neutral/naturalness.
I guess I don’t agree.
People have varying tolerances to high frequencies in particular, there are headphone/track combinations, that while I might enjoy, cause listening fatigue.
I had my hearing measured recently, and somewhat surprisingly apparently my hearing’s frequency response is well above average for my age, and maybe that’s the issue.
My perfect headphones are open and airy, fast, don’t produce excessive bass and have a continuous sounding frequency response.
The T50RP’s you mention I find are OK on the first point and fantastic on the second, but to my ears on too many tracks I listen to there is a hole in the bass response just above about 50Hz, I would describe them as sounding like a pair of speakers with a badly tuned crossover. So I would describe them as either having inflated bass or some sort of none linearity in the Bass frequencies.
I’m not saying that is how they measure, it’s how they sound to me.
Can you elaborate a bit on what it is you don’t agree about what you quoted from LeDechaine? He’s saying neutral shouldn’t get anyone into FR trouble. Sounds as though you’re saying neutral would cause treble listening fatigue?
I’m saying on some recordings it can.
I find this on a number of older CD masters. FWIW it’s not something I ever experienced with Vinyl or SACD recordings.
It’s one of the reasons I have so many valves in my speaker setup.
When I first got into Hifi and used Vinyl predominantly a lot of my system choices, a lot of people would have found “bright”. I relocated to the US in the early 90’s and my Vinyl collection was not relocated with me, when I got back into it I found significant listening fatigue using CD’s and similarly bright equipment.
In fact it wasn’t really until SACD came around that I really got back into HiFI and listening for pleasure in a big way.
Older cd masters could be pretty bad, as many engineers were just starting to figure out how to master for it and it was a fairly newer format, so sometimes the vinyl pressing sounded great and the cd sounded harsh, tinny, and bright.
Yes this is certainly a part of the issue, In a lot of cases all they did for early CD masters was go back to the Master tape mix, and digitize it.
I’ve discussed mastering for formats before.
Now imagine listening to these SACDs with Beyerdynamics and you understand why I prefer neutral FR. Even at medium volume it would be atrocious for me probably.
Seem to be a lull in the conversation, so I’m going to jump back quite a few posts:
A few months back it occurred to me to listen to some pop vocal recordings, including Elvis Presley, on Spotify to see how that worked with my latest EQ tweak. Sure enough when I listened with EQ enabled Elvis sounded just like Elvis should. When I switched EQ off he sounded half-way to being a different person. By extension, the right EQ or headphone tuning might turn Elvis Presley into Elvis Costello, lol.
But then I was struck by a thought. How did I know what Elvis (Presley) should sound like in the first place? His singing voice is very distinctive, but I’ve certainly never heard him in person. Mainly heard recordings on AM radio in the 1950s and early '60s. Plus maybe I caught an appearance or two on monaural TV. Back then I would have heard a sound with very little bass and very little treble and probably a roller coaster of peaks and valleys in between. But of course my brain knew how to make the translation from AM radio reproduction to live back then , and did so seamlessly. It’s the same way my brain knows how to make the transition from an outdoor reverb-free acoustic to my front hall acoustic seamlessly every time I enter or leave the house.
It’s often not that particular reproduction chain which measures most closely like the live sound that will best get the job done. It’s that reproduction chain that a particular listener’s brain knows exactly how to decode that will result in subjective accuracy for that listener.
That’s an A-ha moment for me plus a possible answer to what I initially perceived as a paradox in M0N’s quote above.
Yeah, it’s hard to figure out what something should sound unless you have heard it in person. If you can’t figure out how elvis sounds perhaps you should listen to the song on as many systems as you can and then piece together what you think the commonalities are
Well, I’m suggesting that doing that consciously would actually be my last-resort expedient. Since your brain/subconscious is already superb at decoding what distortions a given environment or sound system introduces, it will use that to transform the input signal from a known sound source, like AM radio, into a good approximation of the original audio.
But if you’re listening to a reproduction system with which you don’t have that kind of experience, your brain won’t know what to do. So what you hear will be coloured by the reproduction system. If you can listen to the same track or whatever on a system your brain has already decoded, what you hear should now be much more accurate to the original recording.
I think that jives with the latest psychoacoustic dogma – have I got it wrong?
Na, that’s probably pretty accurate but I’m no phd psychologist. I think the material that I can test the best with is the stuff that I have heard being recorded and mastered myself. I can make really accurate comparisons doing that but I don’t typically listen to my own work when its done lol, I would rather listen to music and not think about work
Huh, obviously, for flat/neutral headphones and speakers, there’s also live recordings. Yes, sometimes they’re also mixed and mastered. But, live streams, youtube videos of guitarists showing how their amps/guitars/pedals sound, etc… Animal sounds, car sounds, just… Real life sounds.
There’s an entire universe of non-mixed, non-mastered stuff benefiting from flat/neutral/natural sounding headphones/speakers.
Perhaps.
I honestly don’t listen to a lot of live recordings anymore.
Venues are rarely well mic’d, and I’d usually much rather listen to studio recordings.
I used to enjoy live concerts, but even then I didn’t really buy live recordings.
I’ve never been interested in listening to You tube videos for music, I’ll listen to a guitarist to appreciate their ability, but I don’t need Hi Fidelity for that.
If I didn’t already own more $$ of Guitars and Amps than is rational at any level I guess I might be interested in listening to “sounds”, but for me playing music has always been about tactility, I spent hours at weekends in Music stores playing everything I could find before I bought anything when that was my obsession.
FWIW I’m not saying wanting neutrality is a bad thing, it’s just not at least to me a goal in it’s own right.
