Audio Intimacy
Subscribe to Ask Paul Ask a QuestionHigh end audio is all about connecting with the music. This video delves deeper into what we ight think of as audio intimacy.
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High end audio is all about connecting with the music. This video delves deeper into what we ight think of as audio intimacy.
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Is it possible to avoid emotional involvement when designing a product. I doubt. Even if a designer is forced by his management to design a product he dislikes he is emotionally involved! Assumed the designer is most proud of his product/baby he will have reached the highest level of emotional involvement (intimacy). But this will not allow him to neutrally judge/assess the result of his design efforts- cognitive bias! Thus where is the neutral arbiter? Is it possible to neutrally assess music which always will reveal emotions (positive or negative ones)?
Every engineer is somewhat emotionally involved with a product that they have designed or are designing. That’s natural. If I’ve worked on a product and it’s not released, or it’s released and doesn’t sell well then that’s disappointing. This doesn’t mean that engineers working on audio products always listen critically to what they’re designing. Consumer electronics corporations will be concerned with time to market, the specification sheet, cost of goods sold (COGS), ease of manufacture, unique selling points, matching competitors or identifying a gap in the market. Also, some engineers might be excellent at circuit design in terms of making a stable, reliable design with low parts cost, but have uneducated listening skills.
Having owned amplifiers and speakers that were incredibly emotionally involving, but regularly blew up, I’ve learned that intimacy has to be tempered by an equal passion for reliability. Maybe that means, as Paul implies, having someone around who makes sure the stuff works.
Another word is romantic. Does the system portray the music in a romantic way? Does the music bloom in layers both horizontally and three dimensionally? Does the music flow across the soundstage seamlessly when there are sounds meant to flow from the speaker to speaker? Is the sound linear, warm and sweet so listeners fatigue doesn’t set in? Does it startle you with realism? Is it otganic? And yes is it intimate?
organic* beat by the clock again.
Every DIY audio project amplifier or speaker sounds perfect.
To its builder.
Nobody’s baby is ugly. To its parents.
I think that depends on the person. I designed a 50 W Class AB power amplifier with low overall feedback, and that sounded really good, even though I say so myself. I messed about with multiple different phono stages without creating any that were really amazing. I designed and built speakers that each had some good points, but weren’t particularly good compared with commercial designs. However, the time spent experimenting with speakers did show me just how complicated it is to design a good speaker, so that was a valuable learning experience.
I had an interesting conversation with a designer at Kef, when they were a cutting edge UK company. He said that he could take a standard pair of production speakers and make ten modifications, each of which improved sound quality , but when he did an AB comparison with another another pair from production, the overall effect of his ten “improvements” was a loss of quality. It’s natural to think that every change is an improvement without blind testing.
Every DIY audio project sounds perfect.
To its builder.
Nobody’s baby is ugly. To its parents.