Comments on Profile Post by E_Schaaf

If you think a mastering engineer doesn't prioritize dynamic contrast and full bodied textures, you're not a lover of music, you're a treble fetishist.

Pondering to the tune of increasingly bright, gutless and bass light headphones at CanJam. Nothing punches or hits. Everything is airy and ephemeral 'look at me' and not 'enjoy the music'. Soft and diffusive AF. Even headphones that have beefed bass are limp. Maybe just bad electronics? Without ZMF or Focal here, there's a stark lack of punch, focus, and engaging mids...

Audio languages are (still) difficult.. I'm trying to distinguish details from dynamics personally btw. I love simple definitions. So sticking to details meaning the distinction between different freq (either in fundamentals or some of harmonics) while dynamics meaning contrasts between different amplitudes.

Just my personal vocab but impact is a separate entity from detail. Latter is more being able to hear the nuances of a room or, yep, spit in a vocal track while the former is more a tactile thing related to speed and perceived mass.

Technically speaking you're right, everything is a detail/information even the soundstage and timbre.

But commonly speaking I would confined it to just the texture, but that's me. A lot of others use it to describe the treble extension, clarity, the shape of the transient (square/round) or even the microdynamics...

That's why I try to avoid to use that word because a lot of people use it to describe a lot of very different things. Now I try to use more specific terms like texture.

@E_Schaaf about the limp dick bass it's because it's the era of super thin plastic diaphragms *the vomiting emoji*.

Photo analogy: loudness is saturation; dynamic range is dynamic range (macro-dynamics and micro-dynamics being high contrast areas vs gradients on a leaf); headstage is FoV and fstop; timbre is colour accuracy; detail is what's left behind after noise reduction, whether erring on side of grain or overly-smoothened smartphone shot.

@E_Schaaf You're describing the bane of my existence. Presumably due to space limitations many achieve greater performance by sacrificing design traits that enable this

Focal/ZMF/Fostex using larger/more air permeable pads or removing semiopen cups the result is similar. Hoping one day a multidriver dynamic or Ortho can achieve full/tactile/slamming sound without sacrificing air/imaging/separation/staging

Not to mention most still using TPE without a proper surround, and weak magnets. Cheap bastids.

Every time I've tried a headphone that has high magnetic force I've liked it. Tactile, and slammin'.

This is preliminary but so far the LCD-X '21 is proving to be the first reasonable compromise I've heard, but bass ain't slamming as hard as I'd want, and not sure it can render much plankton.

@Lyander Nicely put, I land about the same on definitions.

Lyander knows I'm a slam-head :) Not talking bass emphasise at all. I'm not happy unless my eyes are bulging out of my head with each thump on impact alone!

Re. detail for me the real thing is earned by resolution and speed, maybe microdynamics too.

For me 'detail' is shorthand for how well _all_ the micro stuff is rendered - but mainly the small variations in both amplitude (so microdynamics) and pitch. Impact/punch/hit/slam are to me more about amplitude so they're macrodynamics...

...whereas soft vs hard (and fast vs slow) belong under transients - or for the former pair, texture, along with smooth vs granular, with texture meaning to convey general character and transients referring to specific notes or instruments. But I'm willing to be corrected & educated :)

Comfort v Clarity, or as I like to think of it as Good vs impressive. If people are impressed by it within seconds it will sell. Will it be enjoyable later on? Doubt it, you only have to grab attention and be treated like the best in class. or this case can jam to be talked about.

@BenjaminBore if you're open to it, I'll have some loaners eventually that may interest you... Seems we have at least one shared sonic interest

You're getting me a little excited there @E_Schaaf :) If I have the bandwidth when the time comes I would be more than happy to.

To clarify and elaborate on the detail thing. Though resolution defines the fidelity and textural rendering of an individual sound if it isn't married with good separation so that each of those sounds are distinct and speed so that fast sounds do not smear then that detail will be lost. Like pixel density, colour accuracy, and HZ of an LCD. 1/2

Microdynamics could be said to be detail in another category, like the contrast ratio of an LCD. Focals being equivalent to an OLED.

Plankton 'perhaps' its ultimate, or at least it's most difficult to render, form where all those factors have to come into play together. 2/2

I'm not very good at this kind of language, but, back in the day when my ears were more capable of "critical listening," one of my test recordings was an orchestral percussion crescendo from a Mahler symphony (1 or 2: I forget). How much is it a single noise, how much can the individual instruments be made out? That example, for me, would be *detail.* Or *resolution*