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I got today an email with description of a playback sound that made me to think that the author linguisticly formed and nailed down one aspect of sound  that I very long looking myself and even practicing but never was able to put it into the words. I think he did it very nice and very thoughts provoking. Here are his words, reprinted without permission:

“The first thing that impressed me was the bass, or really the lack of bass, you don’t hear bass you don’t hear highs there is only midrange, … I was expecting to listen to a bunch of concepts like the air between the instruments or the midbass slam or the transparency of the highs, there is none, there is only seamless extended midrange, but lets call it plainly, there are only instruments playing, and a bunch of them! “

A single sentence but it very loaded and it encompass years and year of observation about sound. What the sentence introduces is very tangible characteristic of sound of a playback – the bandwidth of Midrange. I sound oxymoronic – how a Midrange might have a different bandwidth? What we call Midrange is defined but there is a lot of “buts”.

The key in the sentence above the describer “Seamless extended midrange” which implies that a playback must be of course full-range but the wider bandwidth is perceived as Midrange the better sound is. I mean if the system has extended bass and extended HF but they sound as Midrange then something in the system is done properly.  The irony is that live sound has no HF and no LF – it has ONLY Midrange but the bandwidth of this Midrange and the amount of information in this Midrange is enormous. The reproduced sound very frequently gets broken down to LF, Midrange and HF that is in a way a surrogate of sound reproduction. So, the rule is:

The wider Midrange bandwidth is without trained listener experience deficiency in upper and lower octaves the more pregnant reproduced Sound is.

I think I need to start to review from this perspective the performance of the orchestral conductors and musicants…

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