Leafed through the HiFi+ at Barnes & Noble last night. I thought later about how my trade magazine reading has reached a different stage… yet again.

Many years ago… many, many years ago… I read them to find out what things sounded like. You know, how the last paragraph or two has all the meat and I would just read that, and then maybe scan the rest of the article if I was bored. I only read the equipment reviews – the music reviews never made sense to me (how are they supposed to know what kind of music I like?) although some background on the artists can be interesting – at least in pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia days.

Then I would just read the reviews of the ultra high-end equipment.

Then I would just read the reviews of the ultra high-end. written by the reviewers who frequently reviewed [aka knew something, anything about] the high-end.

Then I would read these particular reviews of the ultra high-end to see how much they agreed with what I had heard

Then I would read these particular reviews of the ultra high-end to see if and how subtly they pointed out the flaws in the piece of equipment

Then I would read these particular reviews of the ultra high-end to see if they had any clue about what was the important things that the piece of equipment did right and the important things that it did wrong.

Then I pretty much stopped reading reviews

Now, when I see a review, I think “cool, somebody is getting some positive press”. I mean, you know it is going to be positive, right? No reason to read the review. When I saw that the Edge G6 amp got reviewed in HiFi+, I thought “Good for Steven and the Edge factory, they got some positive press”. When I see the new Evolution Acoustics monitor speakers highlighted on the first page of the HiFi+ CES Show Report, I think “Good for Jonathan Tinn”. No reason to read the actual comments or reviews – they really do not matter. It is not like they are going to try and accurately place the sound of the piece under review in the context of its peers, the available associated amp [if speaker] and speaker [if amp] and with respect to the other components in its product line.

I am not sure what the next step is in my consumption of trade magazines.

But it probably ain’t gonna be pretty 🙂

[Where we try to use the formalism of the previous post to shine some light on the turnkey solutions for magical drug-like system design]

Looking at Mtotal from the last post, the total mutation (some might say mutilation) of a signal from a music source by a system of components can be divided up into several parts:

Mtotal = Mdistracting + Mrequired + Mmagic

Similar to Jim from Encinitas’ observation that [paraphrasing] a system has to sound real enough to satisfy and occupy our minds so that the magic of the music can reach our hearts… the equation above says that for the total mutated sound of a system, Mtotal, to be magical, we have to minimize the mutations that are distracting [like brightness] and those that filter out the good stuff [i.e. remove microdynamics and subtle information] because, optimally, we really want Mtotal = Mmagic, where Mmagic is the set of all allowable mutations to the sound that do not affect its magic.

I am not sure this approach reveals any more information about how we can design a turnkey magical system at a given price point. Distractions that are significant might be a slightly shallow soundstage for one person and a lack of macrodynamics for another. Mmagic might be just plain whatever is on the media for some [most] people whereas others want a slightly exaggerated harmonic richness perhaps[?].

Perhaps what we really want is to do, with only a slight nod to the formalism here, is to create a spreadsheet-like approach where everyone fills in their preferences and wham bamm we get a lit of components [speakers, cables, amps, etc] that are best suited to our tastes at various price points.

For example, I might fill in (on a scale 1 to 10, 1 is most important):

Mdistracting [Do NOT want]
tonally incorrect 1
dull sounding 2 (a little dull sounding is OK)
bright sounding 1 (a little bright is 3)

Mrequired [Do very much want for it to sound reasonably real]
micro-dynamics 1
separation 2
good tone 3
rhythm 6

Mmagic [Do very much want for magic]
micro-dynamics 1
separation 2
good tone 2
rhythm 6

This means that it is very important for me that micro-dynamics, separation and tonality get through the signal chain from the source media to the speakers to my ears, and it is also very important that in so doing the signal is not made very dull, bright or tonally incorrect.

I wonder if it is just me, but the things I kind of require for something to sound reasonably real can, when one or more of these same things are rendered EXTREMELY well, often become magical for me.

In the previous post “What Absolute Sound?”, when trying to describe various issues with systems with more and the minimum number of components in the signal chain, the idea of describing a system as a chain of Filters and Mutations came up.

Since a Filter is just another Mutation, one can describe a system of ‘n’ components as a sequence of mutations M on the signal coming from the source media:

Mtotal = M1 * M2 * … * Mn

Where M1 is the mutation caused by component #1, M2 by component #2, etc. A component can be an amp, cable, speaker, the room… everything that affects the sound of the system. A typical mutation might be one that removes some dynamics, it might exaggerate note attacks in the midrange, it might shift the harmonics a little bit in the upper frequencies, etc. or it might do all of these things.

For example: if M1, a cable, is lean and only lets through 90% of the bass and M4, a preamp, is also lean and only lets through 70% of the bass, and all other components are bass neutral, then the system lets through 0.90 * 0.70 = 63% of the bass.

A “balanced” system is one where all frequencies are mutated the more or less same way.

A “pseudo balanced” system is one where various frequencies that are mutated significantly by one component are ‘almost’ counterbalanced by a mutation in another. I.E. if one mutation is bright, exaggerating the attack of treble frequencies, then another would have to be rolled off on top, or in some other way unexaggerating the attack in the treble somehow so that, overall, the frequencies in the treble end up being mutated the same way as the frequencies in the midrange and bass..

An “optimal system” is one where the mutations M are very small and have no significant effect [in practice, there is always a slight filtering of the signal as it winds itself through cables and connectors and various cir5cuities. Also a slight leanness or bass emphasis might be present and detectable. All else being more or less mutation free or sufficiently nuanced as to defy easy detection].