@PCMusic Thank you for this review!
What is really interesting to me is that it seems you independently discovered something that I and a few others have been speculating about for a while: that the perfect speaker “beam width” and/or degree of side wall reflections actually varies a lot depending on the type of music.
I have both medium beam and wide beam speakers, and I also love music from an extremely wide range of genres. Like you, I find that the narrower beam and more “dead” rooms (less sidewall reflections) often sound much better for rock, EDM, etc. (what I call the “amplified music” genres). On the opposite side of that, I find that recordings of orchestral, jazz, voice, etc performances (what I call “unamplified music”), sounds best on the wider beam speakers and in rooms that are less “dead” in order to sound most real to an actual live performance. Also like you observed, I find that a medium beam sound system will still sound quite good for these “unamplified” genres, more so than an ultra wide beam sound system will sound for “amplified” genres. But still, neither will sound
ideal for the other.
Whatever the acoustic reason, I think the causal reason is actually quite simple: amplified music is generally created and performed via amps/speakers and in venues where the sound is very energetically directional. If it’s performed this way, this is the way it’s meant to be heard — and everything about the music is created and tuned to sound best via this style of acoustic delivery.
Similarly, real instruments and voices do not have the same kind of directional beaming that you get from e.g. PA speakers or concert speaker arrays. Their directional properties are much more complex in theory, but in general tend to be more convincingly reproduced by wide beam speakers in somewhat more “live” rooms where there wall reflections aren’t overdamped.
I also agree that high dynamic range is not an intrinsic good, despite what many audiophiles say. Rather, if a song was meant to have low dynamic range via heavy compression, then that’s great as that’s the way the art form was expressed. But conversely if a song was meant to be performed with high dynamic range, then anything else is a compromise and a corruption of the artist’s original intent. Now sometimes this is indeed necessary, e.g. due to real world constraints of someone’s speaker system or even the need to tightly control volume so as not to disturb neighbors. But it doesn’t change the facts regarding what is the best way to consume the music as it was intended.
Only thing I disagree with is what you quoted presenting a postmodern intersectional social-political interpretation of dynamic range compression, which IMO is complete and utter nonsense:
The article in this link even use a socio-political approach to discuss DRC and I find the argument very compelling:
https://www.its-her-factory.com/201...tions-of-the-loudness-war-and-its-criticisms/
Dynamic compression and range isn’t just about music, or hearing, or audio engineering. The aesthetic and technical issues in the compression-vs-range debate are local manifestations of broader values, ideals, and norms … Dynamic range, or the ability to responsively attune oneself to variable conditions and express a spectrum of intensity is generally thought to be more “healthy” than full-throttle maximalization–this is why there are things like “digital detox” practices and rhetoric about “work/life balance” and so on. At the same time, range is only granted to those with specific kinds of intersecting privilege. Though the discourse of precarity might encourage us to understand it as an experience of deficit, perhaps it is better understood, at least for now, as an experience of maximal loudness, of always being all the way on, of never getting a rest, never having the luxury of expressing or experiencing a range of intensities.
If we want to philosophize about the parallels between a song's dynamic range presentation and sociopolitical commentary on the "intersectional privilege" of some people to rest versus others who have to work all the time, that’s fine and can be appropriate in the context of a particular piece of art
if and only if the artist was trying to convey that particular message.
But it is incredibly
pompous, pretentious, and presumptive for the quote's author to try to broadly paint
this particular sociopolitical message across an entire industry spanning a wide spectrum of artists whose perspectives and artistic expressions/messages are no doubt very
diverse and individually varied -- which makes it deeply wrong for the author to generalize their postmodernist sociopolitical interpretations of dynamic range compression across all who employ it, which as a tool/instrument is in reality merely one channel among many through which artists can
express whatever message they wish.
In fact, I would argue that this author's view of the role of dynamic range compression in the musical arts is
beyond merely
incorrect in most cases; it's a fundamentally misguided perspective through which to interpret anything in life; in general, trying to imbue meaning from patterns without commensurate “checks and balances” to ground the interpretations to reality, is a recipe for self-delusion because it permits virtually any and all interpretations to be “believed”. IMO