Falls Audio Forum
General Category => Improving your system => Topic started by: paulAdmin on November 07, 2016, 07:49:43 PM
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One of the characteristics of music that is seldom mentioned is its tactile qualities.
Music generates from an interaction, drums are obviously struck in varied ways, chords plucked or moved with a bow, or various wind instruments moved with air in varied volumes and timing. If we can hear these instruments live without amplification and in a location that has good acoustics, there are some tactile chrematistics we can notice. One is the characteristics of the material the instrument is made off, wood or metal such as brass, or the skin of a drum, or the rim of a drum. The tactical nature of the music goes beyond getting a sense of the material of an instrument. The tactile nature of music conveys the aspects of the interaction needed to make it. So you may get more idea that there is player creating those drum beats not just hear the effect of drum beats. In a way, the tactile qualities put the musician within the music.
In a worse case, with the absence of tactical information, the music can, to use an analogy, sound like it was computer generated. Why is tactile reproduction is important? It is important because it is conveying an essential part of the playing of music, music is essentially tactile. Loosing tactile qualities is to loose part of the reality of the music.
Reproducing tactile information appears to be a major challenge for hi-fi reproduction. A system can perform well regarding resolution and dynamics yet still convey little if any tactile information. There are a couple of characteristics that may help reproduction of tactile information. These are speed, and timbral rightness. A system with poor timing would be out of time against the interaction of player and instruments, also one that cant faithfully capture the sonic qualities of difference instruments is likely to struggle as well as its making up pseudo representation of what the instrument is producing. It is true that all hi-fi reproduction is a pseudo representation, there can are great differences when this done well and poorly.
It is quite possible that some designers don’t consider or think about the reproduction of tactile qualities of music. Even systems with many good qualities may convey little to no tactile information. It is my observation that a speaker of low acoustic efficiency can struggle more in this dimension which isn’t solved by adding high power amplification.
All speakers are a trade off, those with the highest quality factors can achieve good performance in multiple dimensions. An example is a full range driver how far it can still maintain performance; treble is particularly hard for a cone driver to maintain control at the highest fs. Its easier if the driver was smaller as its better coupled to an acoustic wavelength of those frequencies. Multiple cones can help yet keeping some control gets increasingly hard at the highest fs, the control needs to be subtle, yet the driver is still working hard reproducing the other frequencies.
One of the key design criteria for hi-fi has been flat measurement. Older designs, such as those of the 60s, and earlier could be dismissed as inferior. As in everything else, there is no free lunch. The gains of flat response did come to a cost as those who have compared old and new design may have experienced. Compare a modern all-digital radio playback with the Old HMV I heard in the Radio Museum in London. The gap on vocal reproduction is enormous; voices are wet and warm and solidly real sounding on the HMV. :o :o On digital, they are thin, washed out and dry they sound forced and fake by comparison. >:( >:( >:( >:(
When I got back into hi-fi after many years layoff due to other priorities, I swallowed uncritically technological advancement leading to better designs and better reproduction. Yet I learnt in some cases there was some progress than in others there wasn’t.
One of the key tests for truly excellent reproduction is the ability of the system to sound like real music when a decent recording is played. This kind of reproduction is far more engaging and a system you can listen for as long as you want to without getting fatigued is a real asset.