Is my preferred genre incompatible with hifi speakers?

[Chris A]

I would be curious about that sort of analysis on some of the stuff I like but don't want to derail the thread.

Name it...

 

[Chris A]

The track is definitely clipping, but not by 3 dB when looking at the FLAC file (44.1kHz/16bit) provided by Tidal, where it is clipping 1 dB in the left channel and 0.9 dB in the right channel

Difference in analysis, clearly. I don't see the algorithms used by Tidal to compute the numbers shown. Do you have a link to them? I believe I know what Audacity Clix Fix/Normalize (or Amplfy) is doing.

Both are estimates--in the absence of the original incoming track (the mix-down track).

Chris

 

[Defi]

Name it...

Suddenly my avatar feels like wearing a band shirt to the artist’s show

 

[goat76]

Difference in analysis, clearly. I don't see the algorithms used by Tidal to compute the numbers shown. Do you have a link to them? I believe I know what Audacity Clix Fix/Normalize (or Amplfy) is doing.

Both are estimates--in the absence of the original incoming track (the mix-down track).

Chris

The file was ripped from Tidal, and the analysis was done with iZotope RX9.

I have done many comparisons between tracks ripped from Tidal and the same track ripped from my original CDs, and the ripped files from Tidal are always identical to the ones from the CD, granted that they were from the same mastered version. I have also made null tests with the result of total silence, so the programs I use for this gives 100% reliable results.

 

[goat76]

Suddenly my avatar feels like wearing a band shirt to the artist’s show

I like this a lot, it has some elements that reminds me of noise rock, which is my usual prefered genre of music.

 

[Defi]

I like this a lot, it has some elements that reminds me of noise rock, which is my usual prefered genre of music.

This is one of their most cacophonous tracks hence the selection, but there is this ugly beauty hiding behind it all the time to me

 

[Chris A]

Here is the waveform view from the AAC file on YouTube:

Not much interesting to talk about there...

Well, Audacity Clip FIx/Amplify said that I needed -3.7 dB of amplification after declipping (which is a noisy process, of course). Here is the resulting spectrogram after declipping:

and the waveform view after declipping:

Here is the EQ that I used to smooth out the spectrum:

and the resulting spectrogram view after that EQ curve is applied:

Here is the cumulative "plot spectrum" view after EQ:

Here is the waveform view after EQ:

I can actually listen to it on my setup now...although I have to say that it's not a lot different than about half if it being a noise waveform.

Chris

 

[Defi]

That is... a red block. I'm gonna upload the track into Reaper and see what it shows.

yup.

Curious to try it out with the EQ though. I've been trying to decipher some of the guitar in this song.

 

[whereisbrian]

I'm also a fan of metal, noise rock, hardcore punk, and many other styles.

The first thing, as mentioned above, is to choose albums and files with the least compression possible.

The second is to try to optimize the acoustics of the listening room.

The third is to absolutely keep the speakers away from the back wall and side walls, if possible, to allow them to breathe.

And avoid making hasty judgments after listening.

I don't think one speaker is better suited to a particular type of music.
When I read (subjective) reviews of my current speakers, they were theoretically recommended for small jazz ensembles with vocals.

 

[dfuller]

I mean, to be clear.

The are surprisingly few actually good sounding metal records. Not so much dynamic range but the tonal balances are just all kinds of cooked - very bright, very presence heavy, lacking any meaningful low end or low mids.

 

[Multicore]

I'm afraid so. You'll be better off with lo-fi speakers.

Imagine if that were the case and you needed to figure out which lo-fi speakers to buy, what kind of poor performance would be optimal for your music?

 

[Defi]

I mean, to be clear.

The are surprisingly few actually good sounding metal records. Not so much dynamic range but the tonal balances are just all kinds of cooked - very bright, very presence heavy, lacking any meaningful low end or low mids.

I believe it is because the composition far too often relies on guitars... the plurality being especially problematic. You get 2 guitars whose presence is necessary to make the song identifiable, the bass is often reduced to just following one guitar part, and then to fill in the rest with noise it's just the guitars distortion taking up so much of the 2kHz-6kHz signal (don't quote me on those numbers). That's a losing battle to start, but it doesn't help that the average metalhead is a stimulus addict and so they crank everything to 11 and then the drums needs to be triggered as basically clicks to cut through and... well, ya. But in most facets of metal dynamic range is certainly not the goal. There are still bands who do this and sound fun, but there are way more than just sound obnoxious to me.

 

[sigbergaudio]

I mean, to be clear.

The are surprisingly few actually good sounding metal records. Not so much dynamic range but the tonal balances are just all kinds of cooked - very bright, very presence heavy, lacking any meaningful low end or low mids.

There's a depressing amount of not so good recordings, but there are also quite a few good ones, and you benefit from good speakers even if you're into rock and metal.

I started a thread on this a while back:

Do you need high end speakers for rock and heavy metal?

I wrote an article with this title, obviously to promote our active speaker systems, so I am putting this in the Desperate dealers forum. :) The article can be found here: https://www.sigbergaudio.com/blogs/news/do-you-need-high-end-loudspeakers-for-rock-and-heavy-metal But is there perhaps a...

www.audiosciencereview.com

And there was also a different thread where good metal tracks were discussed, that I wasn't able to find at the moment, but in relation to that I started a playlist with tracks with decent quality:

EDIT: Found the other thread too;

Metal with good sound - is there any?

I like both metal music and good sound/recording. Unfortunately they do not seem to go hand in hand and this is a challenge especially when it comes to headphones. What bands you have you find to sound good? Small part I have already find: Metallica - good in general Tool - good Ghost - good...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[Zenheiser]

One of the truisms about converting from lossless (e.g., WAV) to lossy (e.g., AAC as found on YouTube) is that the amplitude spectra must not change if the lossy version is to sound anything like the lossless version (at least at frequencies below ~10-12 kHz).

What the ripped AAC file from YouTube that I used showed will also show up on your WAV files. You can check this by using something like Audacity on the particular music track being discussed and look at the resulting plot spectrum view--the "purple mountain" view...as my wife likes to call them .

Chris

Thanks! I think I understand it somewhat now, but definitely have to read a bit more about it!

 

[TLEDDY]

Hello all,

I hope my question is not regarded as too off, but...I will just give it a try.

Due to being a consultant and therefore travelling a lot, I did not own loudspeakers for the last ~13 years. I am a huge fan of very, very technical metal (Archspire, Psycroptic, etc.) and listened to that kind of music with my beloved headphone companion Beyerdynamic DT1350.

(sorry already if this is just noise for you, but I just love it).

I chose this pair of headphones back in the days as it was pretty much the only headphone in the shop that allowed me to not only enjoy a song itself, but to easily follow any instrument in the mix separately and, most importantly, effortlessly. I want to only focus on the drums? No problem. I want to listen to the bass only? Easy. Vocals only? Swap between them? Enjoy just the attack of the snare, identify the string gauge on the guitar (just kidding) - what I want to say is: that`s the way I like to enjoy music on my headphones: absolute precision, still easy listening. Btw: I only listened to flac- or WAV-files.

Now my personal circumstances have changed and I wanted to invest in a nice hifi setup for my home. I did a lot of research on this forum regarding amps and speakers which might fit my requirements and sound preferences and then went to the local expert shop to have a listening session in their test chamb.., uh, tastefully, obviously geometrically perfect and elegant listening room. They had various speakers from Elac (Vela Something), Fischer&Fischer, Quadral and KEF in various price ranges and presented them to me with some random classical music, Blues, Jazz, Orchestra etc. Although all of the speakers sounded different, but all exceptionally great, I quickly noticed, that I really somehow disliked low frequencies. For some of the smaller speakers, the shop owner recommended the addition of a subwoofer, but the moment he turned it on to present the difference and smiled to me as if he wanted to suggest that the music was now more even enjoyable, to me everything suddenly really sounded meh and was just...a mess and no pleasure anymore. Like a layer of discomfort. A distraction. It added volume, but reduced the overall precision. It is hard to explain, but I really, really did not like the sound, independent of the price tag of the equipment he switched on and off.

Now to the actual problem: as I know my musical taste is not really mainstream or mass compatible, it took a while for me to hesitantly ask if I could play some of my own music. No problem, he said. But there was a problem: all songs sounded shite. At first I could not really understand what it was, as all speakers were somehow great before, but then I realized, that I was lacking the ability to effortlessly(!) follow each instrument. The song itself was there, yes, but a good amount of the separation was gone. I could no longer follow each instrument with ease, but had to focus very intensely, making listening a physical excercise, not a pleasure. I had my DT 1350s with me, listend to the same song again to make sure I wasnt having a bad day, but: absolutely different experience.

So I left the shop (without speakers, of course).

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit a huge professional audio shop in the next big town with my brother, who was looking for guitar equipment. They had a listening room with loudspeakers and I could connect my phone to them.

Huge surprise for me: every speaker in this room was better than anything I listened to before in the hifi shop. And not by a small amount. By lightyears. I spent almost 60 minutes in there, swapping back and forth from pair to pair, enjoying my music in a way I did not think it was possible with speakers at all. I could hear the same details as with my headphones and was able to follow the individual components of each song absolutely effortless. The best part was: even when I was 2-3 meters away from the speakers, running around, and definitely not in a perfect listening position, the experience was still way better than with any of the $$$$$$-equipment at the hifi shop. I am not talking about a slight difference, but another world.

I narrowed my preference down to:

Neumann KH 120A
Genelec 8040
Adam Audio A7V (not as clean as the aforementioned, but overall...a bit more fun)

I tried some electronic music afterwards and even that sounded better than any of the huge tower speakers in the hifi shop.

So I am actually asking myself three questions now:

1. Did I "ruin" my listening preferences with my headphones over the last 13 years and/or
2. Is the music I am listening to generally "incompatible" with hifi equipment?
3. Is there any drawback in using one of the aforementioned speakers in my living room?

Also perhaps someone here can shed a bit of light into my experience and why it is the way it is?

My tag line, “De gustubus non est disputandum!” most certainly applies here.

My only thought is to buy accurate, full range speakers and use modern electronics to tailor the sound to your tastes.

Good luck!!

Tillman

 

[dfuller]

I believe it is because the composition far too often relies on guitars... the plurality being especially problematic. You get 2 guitars whose presence is necessary to make the song identifiable, the bass is often reduced to just following one guitar part, and then to fill in the rest with noise it's just the guitars distortion taking up so much of the 2kHz-6kHz signal (don't quote me on those numbers). That's a losing battle to start, but it doesn't help that the average metalhead is a stimulus addict and so they crank everything to 11 and then the drums needs to be triggered as basically clicks to cut through and... well, ya. But in most facets of metal dynamic range is certainly not the goal. There are still bands who do this and sound fun, but there are way more than just sound obnoxious to me.

It's not that, modern guitar sounds tend to be presence heavy to a fault because it lends "clarity", and for some reason the bass is also super thin and plinky too (and often just under mixed) and the drums have to be bright and presence heavy to be audible.

Tech death is notorious for this problem but a lot of modern metal records sound like this. I attribute it to poor listening environments during production and low budgets.

 

[Chris A]

There's a depressing amount of not so good recordings, but there are also quite a few good ones, and you benefit from good speakers even if you're into rock and metal.

This is one area that I agree with wholeheartedly.

One of the things that I discovered over the years in helping others dial-in their fully horn-loaded loudspeakers (i.e., a remote dial-in process via owner swapping his emailed REW files and receiving back updated DSP configuration files from me) is that I was accidentally made aware that many people play their systems much louder than you otherwise might guess...a LOT louder.

I found this out via an innocuous mistake in a starting (blank) DSP configuration file I used that had set the limiters in each channel to their most sensitive level instead of least sensitive level. I found that these guys were playing their setups extremely loudly--like 105-110 dB continuous ("C" scale)...at the listener's position. Yikes!

The images that I have of most "hard rock" enthusiasts is not at all like the "audiophile" community, where if you go to a audiofest somewhere, they think a loud setting is anything above 83 dB. BIG differences from what I saw with the hard rock enthusiasts I dealt with.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So if you are a hard rock enthusiast and only play your music at very low relative levels (relative to live concert volumes approaching 110 dB at the audience positions) then using small direct-radiating pro monitors is probably a viable solution--if you never get any louder than ~83 dB at the listener's position.

However, if you are the type of person that cranks it up from time to time to near concert loudness levels--you need to be mindful of the modulation distortion and transient thermal distortion of crossovers and driver voice coils that you quickly run into with this genre of music (i.e., very high loudness and unchanging dynamics--like the two tracks that I analyzed above). This is where you tend to read complaints about "opaqueness" and "clamping down" effects (thermal effects) when playing hard rock with its very thick harmonic content and nearly constant loudness levels vs. time. (Classical pipe organ music can also fall into this regime.)

There is only one real solution for this: higher efficiency loudspeakers that do not exhibit audible modulation distortion at sustained concert loudness levels.

I can hear deeply into all my music tracks for soundstage and depth due to the vanishingly small levels of modulation distortion that high efficiency loudspeakers exhibit. This is the real difference between direct radiating and well implemented horn-loaded loudspeakers (full-range horn loaded).

There is a reason to strongly consider very high efficiency loudspeakers if playing heavy rock music at concert levels.

Chris

 

[Zenheiser]

I had two looong listening sessions (unfortunately not in the same room) with somewhat surprising results.:

	Radiant Clarity 4.2	Radiant Clarity 6.2	Neumann KH 120 II	Genelec 8040	Adam A7V	Elac Vela 403.2
Stage width	+++++(+)	+++++(+)	++	+++	++++	+++++
Separation (i.e. how easy is it for me to follow each instrument)	++++	++++	+++++(+)	+++++	+++++	++++
Bass low end	+++	+++++	++++	+++++	+++++	+++++
Attack/Punch/Precision	+++++	+++++	+++++(+)	+++++	+++++	++++
Perceived Neutrality	++++	+++++	+++++	++++	+++	++++
"Holographicness"	+++++(+)	+++++	++	++	+++	++++
Fun	+++	++++	+++++	++++	+++++	++++(+)
Overall Impression	++++	++++	+++++	+++++	+++++	++++(+)
Pros	Stereo imaging is unbelievable. Sound is holographic	Stereo imaging is unbelievable. Sound is holographic, impression is more balanced/rounded than the 4.2	Not sure how to describe it better, but: everything is just where it should be.	Very similar to the KH 120, provides a bit more low end	Much wider stage/better stereo imaging than Neumann/Genelec Razorsharp	Very...round? I really enjoyed how well the lows and highs blend into each other. Electronic music was the best on the Elacs. The Radiant are much harsher in this regard
Cons	High frequencies are a bit to present for my taste, compared to the bass. I can somehow perceive the small size of the speaker.	This is truly an amazing speaker. In terms of providing the ability to follow each voice/instrument, the professional monitors are still a bit better.	...no real stage, but I am not really sure I need one at all.	Listening to metal (not electronic music) the Neumann sounds a bit more neutral, the Genelec a bit more dull	Definitely NOT Neutral	Not neutral
Verdict	Great, but: nope. Sound is too small, especially considering the price tag. If you want an acoustic holodec, this thing is magical.	This is an impressive piece of technology. The stage is just wow. It is very, very well balanced - however: as the biggest joy in listening to music is the ability to switch in my head between instruments, vocals etc. to follow them note by note, the pro monitors are doing this still somewhat better - at 50-70% of the 6.2s price tag...	Short listed	Short listed	Short listed	This is the most "hifi-esque" speaker of them all, but it does a lot of things very, very well. Although the Radiants are much more holographic and more precise, I did prefer the Elacs in a/b. Looking at the list above, I am not sure why, as the 6.2s have the better ratings, but the Elac was...nicer? Short listed.

 

[Waxx]

I don't listen a lot of metal, but sometimes i do, and mostly the more heavy black metal kind. They sound best on neutral speaker with a lot of headroom i think. Even if they don't have big dynamics, the complexity of the sound spectrum demands a lot of your speakers and not pushing the drivers is key in that.

I like big JBL type (compression driver in horn with big woofer) for that the most. The Econowave (a popular budget diy version of that type of speaker) got a big part of it's popularity from that, it plays heavy rock without any compression or distortion because of the big headroom these speaker have at normal or even loud hifi level. Modern small bookshelf type speakers are not capable to play that music like it should.

Most of my metal-loving friends user older big speakers to be honest, with old JBL monitors (the blue ones) as utopian speaker for many. Many even use pa spakers actually, not hifi speakers.

 

[Wolf11Man]

You are really going great length to find your speaker. I think some of your observations are room related. Using all those speakers in the same room should shift some results, but not show extreme differences. Monitors usually have options to change some "edges" to correct for this. Problems like a little reduced bass or a sharp tweeter. Anyway, using these options now would extremely inflate your list.
The remarks about the ADAM surprise me a little, maybe some switch was not in the neutral position, also, at first the air motion tweeters is perceived as sharp, because of it's exceptional resolution. Which can be corrected with a flick of a switch.
Another thing, monitors offer electronic in room correction options, with can reduce unwanted peaks, but conserve their positive characteristics.
On the other side, the effect producing sounding of the HIFI speakers will prevail, even when an added room correction may fix parts of their problems too. It is simple to color a neutral sound, but more diffilcult to uncolor a colored one.
Do you know what amplifier was used with the HIFI speakers?