GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Audio vs. Musical pitch

Post Subject: Audio vs. sound vs. scalePosted by noviygera on: 5/1/2013

I've been thinking about this matter for a while but could not find a better excuse to formulate my theory then in this topic. My simple theory is that if we reduce our concept of "music" the more fundamental concept of "sound" as point of reference than we can easier visualize of what audio system should do. Lets say that we are trying to reproduce a "sound" true to it's original form with all the harmonics, timbre, tone, whatever you like to call it, then that reproduction must be consistent in the spectrum of sound coming out. It will not be accurate to the original, as any sound system will never reach the recreation of the live event or "original sound" but the sound system's coloration or sound signature should be consistent in it's entire range of reproduction. What will vary is the scale of the sound coming out but the signature will be consistent.

That is why I could never even theoretically understand how one can expect to reach the above goal when you have, for example, different types of drivers (plastic midrange, aluminum compression tweeters, paper woofers) all made on different principals of different materials, and to try and expect them to harmonically match. This would go back to Romy's example of a trumpet player having different trumpets for all notes. However, a better example to see why this is not possible would be to take the "sound" as a point of reference rather than a musical recording.

So if we record the sound of someone spitting, not even a live concert event, we can screw up the reproduction of that sound by inconsistently reproducing it though harmonically unmatched sources (or speaker drivers) and space (time alignment). The way I see to reduce this mismatch is to have harmonically matched speaker sources (drivers and enclosures) and by this I mean all of them being variation of one type of a driver and having them spatially matched. Example: drivers of same design, same material, only of different scale.

So by reducing the intended final reproduction result to the reproduction of only "the sound" we can better visualize what is required. Agree or disagree?

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