What does "organic" mean? Genuine question. "Airy" to me means boosted treble, but I'm not sure about "organic".
Hi richard12511,
If if helps at all, I can try to explain what "organic" means to me as a description, given that is one of the main qualities I look for in a system.
What I mean by "organic" is that unamplified acoustic sounds like voices, sax, guitar, cello etc have more of the sound of the real thing, that is the sonic signature, the timbre, of materials they are made of, rather than sounding like an electronic alternative.
So take the human voice - it has a wet, damped, resonant quality - it's organic - we know the sound of human flesh/vocal cords, chest resonating in real voices. In contrast, a really bad sound system - take a bad P.A. system in the subway - can reproduce enough so that we can understand what a speaker is saying, and enough characteristics to recognize it was a person speaking through the system, but it is an artificial version of a voice - distorted, sharpened, tinny and ringing with a metallic signature rather than flesh etc. That's the exaggerated version, but I find similar analogs even when I listen to various hi-fi systems. The worst veer towards the artificial tone of the subway PA system, but even ostensibly better ones leave human voices sounding to me like disembodied electronic versions of voice - say a combinatino of sibilance that is sharper and harder, like you'd get pinging metal, than any human produces, a less coherent voice where it feels like I can hear the parts of the voice put together by the drivers, a voice that sounds hollow and lacking the density and resonance of a real flesh-and-blood voice coming from a throat and chest. Even with a really naturally recorded vocal track when I close my eyes most sound systems depart from the organic signature of the real thing to sound very artificial.
But sometimes I hear qualities that DO come closer to the characteristics of organic sound sources, more believably flesh-and-blood vocalists for instance appearing between the speaker. And that all goes for things like the woody resonance of a cello sounding woody (organic) and not some abstract flubby bass quality, the sound of the reed vibrating in a sax, even the metallic ring of a trumpet sounding like the metal of a trumpet, rather than a course digital sample.
So that's generally what I think of as "organic sound" from a hi-fi system vs "artificial."
(And the thing is, in a practical sense, it remains fairly subjective. Given the compromises in sound reproduction, very little will sound truly accurate to the real thing, so it's a pick-and-choose which aspects you care about most scenario).
