While you say you are new to the hobby, your post shows you have thought things through pretty awesomely.
Just a few thoughts:
... When thinking about what exactly makes something sound “good”, I’ve made some interesting and counterintuitive discoveries during my own personal listening sessions over the last year or so. Some of these are obvious but others seem counterintuitive or even go against mainstream opinion. I’d like to share these observations and theories and hopefully get feedback.
...
- Mood seems to be one of the biggest factors in determining “good sound.” For me personally, I’d even say it could be the biggest.
Agreed 100%. Without being in the mood, without being relaxed and looking forward to a good music listening session, one is not overly inclined to fully appreciate the music... or the equipment that provides the sound quality to truly enjoy it.
-... Good sound seems to depend heavily on the absence of noticeable, distracting imperfections like resonances, crackles, distortions, etc.
Amen.
... Good sound seems to require bass that isn’t too soft or too loud and is even/smooth. Booming bass seems just as bad or even worse than a total lack of bass.
Preach on brother!
I loathe lazy bass. It may be OK for movie FX to get cheap thrills, but it *destroys* musicality.
... High volumes seem to be a requirement, unfortunately. For me personally, 70-90 DB.
I am glad you attach a number to what you label "high". I'd agree certain volumes are necessary to assess sound quality, but too loud is even worse than too muted. You won't discern sound quality with either, but with "too loud" you can easily damage your hearing permanently, and thus you wouldn't be a good judge of sound quality at any level anymore...
... Scale? Not sure what to call this exactly, but it isn’t exactly volume, but more of the feeling of being enveloped by the sound.
Not sure what "enveloped" means - the term is mostly used with surround sound. My personal preference is to have the presentation in front of me, since that is how things are really experienced (very few people sit in the middle of a jazz orchestra or jazz ensemble, and even then I am not sure that's the best place to perceive the *performance*, it's just best to hear yourself and stay in close synch with those around you). *But* I want it to have width and depth.
- There seems to be a limited window of listening time before the ears seem to start to become desensitized. Turning up the volume gradually can counter this a bit but this just seems to lead to fatigue. So for me I can only get about 1 hour of listening at maximum sound quality.
An hour at 90dB may be something your otolaryngologist may warn you against :-D That would explain the loss of sensation... One thing I notice is that, if I start playing last night's music session in the morning, I am like "Whoa, too loud!". Our hearing recovers from any regular day's audio stress (not just music, just sounds in general) overnight. Even just after a typical day going about our lives, our hearing hardens some. I have always been very sensitive too noises: I need to wear ear plus at night because even two mice doing it behind a drywall are likely to wake me up. :-D
- I keep hearing that bass frequencies can’t be localized. Heck, movie theaters are designed around this. But I swear I can hear the location of the subwoofers which are rolled off at 80hz. It’s not as noticeable as higher frequencies, but it’s easy to hear. Stereo bass seems to sound better to me. Am I fooling myself?
That is exactly why setting up a subwoofer for music listening is much trickier than most people realize. You have to work on the positioning before the bass location becomes seamless.
- Room acoustics seem to be absolutely massive. Perhaps even more important than the speaker. Even moving furniture around slightly can change the sound significantly. Rugs are huge.
Absolutely true. The room itself is probably >30% of the audio equation. Speakers and subs interact with rooms. So they have to either be a magical match for the room, or room correction needs to be applied. With all the talk about THD and SNT measurements... we forget DSP-based room correction is often *the* most important innovation in audio in 30 years or so.
- Source material/recording/mixing is obviously huge. High quality speakers don’t seem to help low-quality audio sound any better at all. If anything, bad audio seems to sound even worse through good speakers.
Yup.
- I have trouble hearing or fully understanding this concept of “imaging.” I keep reading about it and I know lots of people value it. But I don’t really understand what amazing imaging would sound like in a stereo system. Pinpointing the location of an instrument doesn’t seem to make sense to me unless you’re talking about surround sound with lots of channels. ...
Imaging, staging... whatever you call it... it's nice to experience, and mandatory for some types of music IMO. However with most music and recordings it is pretty irrelevant because there really isn't a reference and often is just used as a gimmick... "Oh look how the guitar track keeps panning from left to right - that is *stereo*, baby!"...
I love classical though, and with that staging is *essential* for a great music appreciation session. Classical orchestras are arranged in a standard way for 95% of music, and in a concert hall that's how you hear it - so losing that in a recording is very bad. I for one can never ever enjoy mono recordings of classical music. With any other music genre, there's absolutely no reference for staging. And with the vast majority of recordings these days, there was never a stage involved anyhow. Musician X played their track in Tokyo, musician Y in NYC... and it's the sound engineer that completely artificially mixes stuff in a horizontal plane some.