Surely the point is to accurately represent the musician's intention, tone and touch. Using guitarists as an example, and eschewing classical music for the nonce, there's no denying that the Mark Knopfler's tone is sweet when he plays, as is that, though to a lesser extent, of Richard Thompson and Eric Clapton. Slash, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, however, generally have a lot harder, more attacking tone. In other words, the aim is neutrality throughout, and not to allow the electronics to get in the way of the intention.
It's the same with other genres, too. Taking classical, a solo violin when played by Hilary Hahn or ÿJuliet Fischer is accurate but colder in tone than when Janine Jansen plays the same piece, and that's what you should hear. Similarly with piano, where some players have a lighter tough than others. Again, it's the work of the hifi to enable the listener to hear the difference without putting a slant on it.
The problem is that lower end systems add a lot more than higher end ones, whether it be forwardness, which sounds detailed but at the cost of sweeter voicing, or warmth, which is taken to mean warm and woolly. Also, there's a group of listeners who love slam and lots of hard-hitting bass, because it sounds so exciting if not necessarily realistic.ÿ
There's also the misconception of 'clinical', 'ruthless' sound. That's fine, if you want to listen to music dissected to its component parts, but that's really not what groups, quartets, orchestras really want. You listen to the whole, and the solo component when the artist deems appropriate. This doesn't means, for example, that you shouldn't be able ÿto follow the bass lines in a Yes recording, for example, but that you should also be able to listen to it in context and together with the other instruments. ÿ
All of which means any system should sound truthful, and high-end systems doubly so. The problem is that to do so not only costs a lot of money, ÿbut also that individuals hear differently, so what is truthful to someone is grating to another. Another difficulty is that amplified music can sound vastly different from one exponent to another - it's fair to say the intention of Motorhead, for example, is different from that of Pink Floyd, so they adjust their electronics accordingly. Designers certainly bear this in mind, but it is hard especially for speaker designers to come up with compromises that cover all genres effectively. An example is Sonus Faber, whose speakers are designed primarily for classical music, and which means, though by no means warm, their voicing is less successful with Nirvana. It's by no means bad, by the way, and all the detail is there, but it's not thrown at you in the way which KC intended, because grating was a part of his intention. On the other hand, they do classics, jazz and rock in a way few other speakers can.
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