Hot or not, soft on the highs, why oh why?

Just a general observation of mine over many,many years. It seems to me a lot of folks call things "hot" on the high end when in reality the sound is fairly accurate IMO. I've heard way too many muffled, pillow in front of speakers systems and recordings that folks seem to blissfully enjoy.

Seems to me a lot of people do not want accurate high end reproduction as it in reality can get a bit hot, even shrill. With jam sessions over the years in my house I've heard cymbals, tambourines, trumpets, brass wind chimes, triangle, bells, even a massive gong in my main room as well as multiple female vocals live, so I know what they sound like in my listening area. They have a high end that can bite a bit, but I love that, it's alive, has air, top end.

Playing many typical music releases I all too often find the high end is a joke, cymbals way too soft, the edge of breath on a female vocalist is all but gone, the tail edge of reverb is missing, brass chimes sound like a pillow is in front of them.

I end up using my own recordings as reference as I know how they sounded in the room. I also know my own hearing, I have it tested every year at work.

Is it just me, or is the bulk of humanity taking the easy listening way out and accepting a soft high end as natural/normal?

 

I don't think most accept a softer sound as natural but maybe less fatiguing over longer listening sessions.
Lets not confuse the accurate harmonic bite that live instruments produce with the shill, sterile and over cooked upper frequencies that a poorly designed audio system may produce.
A well designed audio playback system will accurately produce great detail and give a good overall tonal balance without an overbearing clinical edge, thats something speaker manufactures have been working toward for many years, ( amazing detail without unnatural brightness ).
In the end it's a matter of personal preference, just as many audiophiles/music lovers will choose the less fatiguing and softer sound of tubes, some will prefer a bright crispy presentation.

 

On a related note, my main speakers are Mackie active 824's. They are very accurate and not soft sounding by any means. I really love the sound. I don't get to hear much live music much these days. The last live sound I heard was the Return To Forever reunion tour concert at Ruth Eckert Hall in Clearwater Fl. a few years ago. Great band, venue, and sound. But I noticed how less 'hot or bright' the sound was. It sounded great, but more mellow and blended than reproduced hi fi. The reproduced brightness and pinpoint accuracy wasn't there in the live sound, kind of a different experience than a hi fi sound. I began to think that hi fi, especially played on a good system is a sound experience unto itself, different from live sound.

 

Depends on how you define "accurate high end reproduction". Do you want your system to make recordings sound real, or do you want it to accurately reproduce what's on the actual recording? Personally, I'd much rather have a system that accurately reproduces what's on the recording and leave it up to the engineers to make it sound lifelike. An inaccurate system that makes the recording sound more lifelike than it actually is drives me up the wall.

 

I once went to a so called 'exclusive high end' Hi Fi shop with a friend who was on the look out for a new system. .. They offered equipment for sale that reached into the many tens of thousands. You know the type of shop ...solid security grilles on the doorway...'only by appointment - visits '.....Valves .... 'the old school thinking of super high speaker efficiency to compensate for the low powered rated Valve amps touted for sale..... everything there -costing mega-earth prices for what it all was .....all demostration vinyl (and a few CDs for the alleged 'heretic's) available for THAT alleged perfect musical auditioning experience were all quickly recognised, as nothing more than chosen sonic - show off discs, where artistry takes a backseat.
At one stage I almost burst out laughing. The seller was raving at the 'quality of the experience' he had musically set up.
All I was hearing was some female jazz singer trying to intimately sit in my lap on my knees, and croon husky words in my ears (in just one of many of the examples presented ). Talk about unwanted aural musical 'rape'. It was nothing more than a manifestation of what was once taken as 'truthful realism' which is AKA from the bad old days - cheap jacked up presence in the upper bass and midrange and spiked highs of a sound system.
Something very easily achievable by the 50's and early 60's by home builders when Hi Fi was much more expensive/ against wage earnings , to the general public.
No wonder that 'Hi Fi shop' and countless other examples - like it, that spread sonic bulldust to make a sale.... folded.
Sorry about the cynicism but many a Hi Fi shop owner has trained me so, over many countless decades, watching their con - behaviour.

 

Hot hi end normally means cheap tweeters and poorly implemented crossovers
Boomy bass is also evident in these devices.
Accurate is very neutral

 

Getting treble right is hard to do. Easier to soften it up then to make it real. Particularly with CD sources.

 

Yes to the above. You want those peak moments as they are on the recording without editorializing them. How a system renders these moments is very important, however, every recording is very different.

 

His hearing is starting to go and the Mackies, the live stuff in his house.... are pushing through it. He has not heard a really nice vinyl system. I am him but with a nice vinyl system. I was doing some drops into hi res digital, then I converted into redbook and "where did the high end and the first reflections go?" got me just like him.

 

Soft on the highs guy here. I hate hot high end. Just can't stand it. It makes my ears bleed and my head explode. Detailed sound with a wide soundstage and sparkling highs is very nice, but hard to achieve. Since many cds sound hot per se I won't add more hotness, but prefer to soften the sound a little bit.

 

One of the thing I love about my 300B Set amp is that it does these sounds very well and with a lot of detail. On my 45 rpm vinyl reissue of "Julie is Her Name" you can really hear her breath- both when she inhales and delivers a lyric. On well recorded jazz albums the cymbals really shine- you can hear the stick hit the cymbal- you can literally hear the wood of the stick. To me, it is right on the edge of harsh. The only time it corsses the line is if you get a saxophopne squeak or somthing like that and it's supposed to sound that way. I love the way it delivers the treble range, some may not.

 

Uh, wrong on all points.
I don't have any Mackies, I've had a good vinyl system for over 40 years now, my hearing is checked every year, it is not bad.

 

THIS is what I'm talking about. Thank you.

 

300b SE amps are polite aural exciters and compressors. Dsitortion management.

Sorry about the Mackie thing. Where did I get that from? I dunno.

 

Were these live jam sessions in your house amplified or acoustical performances?

 

acoustical.

 

I've actually studied this quite a bit and it isn't really the high frequencies that are "hot"- it is the upper midrange frequencies, the ones that our ears are most sensitive too. The killer frequency is 3000Hz. It's no coincidence that the tone that most smoke alarms produce is 3000Hz. And yes, the bulk of humanity would like this frequency reduced (significantly) while listening to reproduced music as well as a reduced "shelf" of frequencies from 2000Hz to 4000Hz.
Personally I like accurate reproduction but the problem is even a slight up tilt or peak in the ear sensitive frequencies, e.g. 1 or 2 db. higher than the rest, is highly noticeable and usually objectionable. Unfortunately these frequencies are easily reflected and amplified in the room environment so this is often what you get and it is truly not doing justice to your audio investment.
In other words, achieving a flat response with loudspeakers in a room usually requires some form of countermeasure and while flat "hot" is acceptable, situational boosted "hot" is not.

 

I like your thinking on this.

 

I want accuracy, and if accuracy also means lifelike then it jolly well better sound lifelike.

 

Well you're preaching to the choir as far as I'm concerned! I despise everything around 3000Hz. Apart from a smoke alarm I can't think of any instrument or part of a voice whose desirable tones lie in this range. A cymbal you say? Nope, actually - the hiss of a cymbal isn't there.

3000Hz functions especially well when it's pushed to disguise poor masterings - all of a sudden you're hearing brightness and you're supposed to mistake it for high fidelity...as little as half a dB is enough to do it.

 

As well , adding to previous helpful comments by others here : in that 2000 to 3000 khz region, it is the most difficult area for a speaker manufacturer to attempt cross-over to other speakers in any designed system.

 

It's as if everybody hears things differently...

 

There is remarkable little energy in music above 5k
The mid band is where we are most acute, that is why crossover design must improve and hi order steep crossovers
must be implemented to reduce breakup in tweeters and woofers, the cause of audio distortion in LS.
DSP offers this implementation, that and better driver design will producer cleaner and more accurate devices.

 

I hear what you are saying and I truly wonder why speaker makers use the crossover strategies that they do. For example in my car the front doors have an active 3-way setup, a 7" midbass driver (Hybrid Audio Technologies), a 3" wideband driver (Hybrid Audio) and a 1-1/4" dome tweeter (Morel). Having full control of the crossover and slope for each driver, through trial and error and lots of research I arrived at an 800Hz crossover 24db slope between midbass and widebander and a 6000Hz 12db crossover between widebander and tweeter.
The widebander can really play between 400Hz and 10,000Hz (although with some beaming above 7Khz) but the point is it has a very wide sweet spot and you can get this driver to play the heart of the material without getting anywhere near its breakup frequencies. Same with the tweeter, it can play above 6Khz all day long and not break a sweat. I'm telling you guys it sounds so sweet and amazing.
Contrast that to my home 3-ways that cross the 3-1/2" midrange to the tweeter at 2000Hz! Why on earth are they asking a 1" titanium dome tweeter to play from 2Khz and up?
It sounds very nice but I know that if I re-did the crossover frequencies it would sound so much better.
Probably something to do with soundstage width but it is definitely a trade-off I would like to experiment with.

 

Nothing wrong with top end, but many speaker manufacturers don't know what they are doing so the tweeter ends up louder than the other drivers. Some try to pad it with x-over parts, but that screws things up even more. If the tweeter draws attention to itself, it's a bad design.