And thus speakers wander further and further from what is recorded, providing a target that those who produce music feel the need to chase.
If I want a recording of amplified pop music of whatever sub-genre to sound "live," I need to add 1.) a high base level of crowd noise, 2.) cheering, and 3.) impossibly loud echo and acoustic mud from what is usually an acoustically nightmarish performance venue overburdened by too much amplification. I like live recordings when those issues are controlled, but those are not the reference recordings most of the time.
If I want a recording to sound like what the musicians and composers intended, then please don't add "excitement". Record it in a good space (if it's acoustic) that does what musicians want a room to do while maintaining clarity. I do want to sometimes play it quite loud, and so want speakers capable of remaining linear at high listening levels. But I do not need them to provide enhancement. When they try to define excitement for me beyond what's on the recording, only then do they become the enemy.
But really I think that excitement is the natural result when speakers don't compress dynamic peaks at the desired listening level. A speaker might have that fault even with a good spinorama, assuming the spin is done at lower-than-desired listening levels.
I think when talented professionals talk about "accurate" speakers for mixing, what they want are speakers that don't muddy the detail of the music with a lot of out-of-control resonances. Guess what? That's exactly what I want in my (domestic) listening space for playback. I'm talking about pros creating recordings of acoustic music for listeners who have live performance (of acoustic music) as their baseline listening experience. Mainly: Classical, and to some extent, jazz and bluegrass. Not rock, and not (or at least no longer) country, not metal, not pop, and not hip-hop.
But most mixing professionals feeding pop culture suffer from what those in the printing and visual layout business used to call (Apple) MacIntosh Death--the availability of 400 fonts that tempts the untalented to use as many as possible instead of providing a simple, coherent design. Look, this DAW gives me 657 different flavors of room reverberation! More! More! More! And this recording sounds too quiet because the music has quiet bits. Let's raise the average by reducing the peaks! Compress! Compress! Compress! These B&W monitors the studio bought because they are British and fancy are too hot at 2 KHz, so let's EQ the heck out of it to add excitement! More Bass! More high treble! So, what is the supposed accuracy of so-called studio monitors being used to accomplish?
Recordings that squash dynamics with compression are going to sound bad no matter what magic the playback system attempts to perform to restore dynamic contrasts. (Which, by the way, is a classic example of the circle of confusion at work.) Same with recordings that lack spectral neutrality, which is more rare an which is what tone controls are for. I think a lot of the popularity of horn-loaded compression drivers over the years, and maybe even some electrostatic designs, has been to add the illusion of dynamic punch where the recording has squashed it.
If the music isn't sufficiently exciting all by itself, then a sound system trying to make it so isn't going to work, it seems to me.
The real enemy is the music industry that refuses to promote neutral, dynamic recordings so that the music can provide the excitement. I think of rock recordings from the early 70's--particularly what is now called prog rock where the complexity of the composition was something the musicians were aiming at--that were recorded fairly dry back in the day, without a lot of the processing that would now be done (perhaps only with the compression resulting from mastering on oxide tape). They sound so good compared to recent stuff. And people whose baseline listening expectations are dominated by available recordings lead the industry to double down on the processing. This popularity feedback loop sits on top of the industry business objective to promote pop stars that are more than merely musically talented--they must also be visually appealing for video presentation. The Buggles had it right.
Back to topic: I think the primary objective of most high-end speaker designs is to create a high-design, high-value (read: high-price) product that tells owners and their guests that their sound system is really cool. For that objective, the visual presentation is more important than the aural presentation, which has to be merely competent (and not always even that). These wacky visual designs always have a truthy technical explanation, but really most people who have real live music as their habitual reference can't detect any real improvement over plainly designed speakers that measure well and can produce high listening levels without compression.
Rick "in rant mode today" Denney
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