FrankHarveyHiFi said:
JMacMan said:
With respect, your point is probably meaningful in the context of your work life, where you are mixing and matching products to create sound 'flavours' to hopefully please a punter who listens to Hifi.
As I say, by all means continue with your flavoured mixing and matching approach to HiFi if you wish to listen to different sonic flavours of pink noise/electronic music/rock pop etc.
For serious classical music, and classical musicians though, it's just not good enough. End of.
JMac
You don't need to tell me, you need to tell the thousands of music listeners out there that they're wrong in choosing something they like the sound of and want to listen to.
Your chosen equipment - however accurate - is still going to differ to the PMC's, ATC's, M&K's, B&W's, KEF's (and all the other numerous speaker manufacturers out there that are used for mastering) that the artist/mixer has used to mix/master his/her music on, so how close do you think you're really getting?
Firstly, I'm not wishing to make a point that comes across in any way as an denigrating comment against you personally, in any way whatsoever - as that would be patently unfair, unwarranted, and well, just not nice.. However, I do feel that the current system building methodology found predominately throughout the industry of mixing and matching of kit with passive speakers, is a throw back to the 1950's DIY era, and with modern technology and production methods, arguably an outdated concept of system building in the 21st century.
PMC's, ATC's Miller & Kriesel, B&W's, KEF's etc, are all what one could call 'serious' speakers - they'll be the top models, and all designed at giving the most faithful and accurate reproduction possible, by highly qualified, tertiary trained, professionals.
If you use a speaker that is also designed with that goal in mind in the home, or a pair of high quality headphones, you will likely get as close to the orginal performance as the limits of technology currently allow.
Speaking personally, one of those limits for classical music is 2 channel stereo arrays - I listen to a lot of M/C SACD as I find it gets me much closer to that real life 'being there' experience of the concert hall with classical music.
The other is the mix and match approach - I believe active speaker systems to be a vast improvment upon the current system buidling paradigm, where the closest approach to the original sound is the goal - the whole system is in the hands of a highly trained team of engineers - atypically a sound designer, acoustic engineer, and DSP engineer, along with electrical and production engineers. The whole system can be tuned to give the maximum performance, coupled with the utmost of fiddle free setup and reliability, coupled with an engineering effort by experts where the closest approach to the orginal sound is the design goal. As against which, you have an highly qualified amp designer who has to build for anything from a simple to a ridiculous load (8 to 3 ohms impedance for eg) and a speaker designer who has no idea what sort of amplifier his speakers may be teamed with.
One is then in the hand of well meaning enthusiasts, but otherwise amateurs, at a retail level trying to balance out bright speakers, with a warmish amp, and so on.
As I say, it made sense in the 1950's, but not in the 21st century, apart from providing more profit with accessories such as cables etc (active is a much more 'closed' system obviously) and arguable choice for the consumer. Hehe, I just so want to take my Merc to a dealership, and enquire if I could improve the peformance by fitting a Toyota engine in it perhaps - or maybe a Honda or BMW engine - after all, BMW & Honda make some of the best engines going, which you'd know if you're a petrol head. This is the equivalent we're looking at with current HiFi building methodologies, and as I say, it's a method that belongs with the baby boomers of the 1950's who created it, and with whom it will probably, and IMHO hopefully, die out.
JB