John Atkinson discusses measurements

[fas42]

A combination of measurements and subjective impressions can be very informative - take the Zu speakers mentioned: I looked up the Stereophile reviews, and the measurements gave the key information, high sensitivity and easy to drive. Which correlated with what people heard: big, full of life sound - much closer to what's on the recording, rather than the squashing done by normal systems. The fact that the Zu speakers had 'problems' was quite irrelevant in the flesh - their ability to convey the essence of the musical event captured largely overrode any technical misdemeanours.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Really?  My experience with them is limited but I did hear them at an audio show.  While listening, I was trying to figure out how to tell the demonstrator that the sound of the recording was strikingly different from how I have heard it on my own and several other systems.  When the music stopped, however, another listener stepped up and what I had been thinking.  When challenged by the assertion that this is the way it should sound, he responded that he had worked at the sound board for those recording sessions.  Hmmm.

 

Well, my experiences with evolving systems to produce "convincing sound" is that the presentation of recordings, when one achieves this, in general is very different from that of conventional 'high end' rigs - "squashed", or compressed in a subjective sense, is the thought that comes to mind when I listen to normal standards of playback; what's missing is the vitality, the sense of life, the immersion in the sound that occurs with the "real thing" - competent or a very high standard of SQ restores that quality to what you experience - it's always "on the recording", but one needs to go, currently, to substantially extra effort to achieve that element in what you hear.

 

Reading between the lines, speakers like Zu's can, I repeat, can be a shortcut to getting there - the downside is that remaining anomalies can be strongly spotlighted if not every care is taken with the setting up. Which may have been the case when you were listening.

 

What was the recording, if I may ask ... ?