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Conductor of your system - "YOU"
I really meant to share with fellow AE hi-fi comrades of my recent hi-fi enlightenment, however, the ultimate arrival of Zanden Model Wilson last week finally prompted me to write my thoughts as both its designer & myself, in my opinion, share the same aspiration on how the BEST hi-fi playback system should perform – enjoy the read …
People who know me well are often perplexed why I spend so much time fine tuning my system & room acoustics almost everyday, this is because I have a burning passion of reaching closer to hi-fi nirvana ( I don’t say this lightly and therefore please do not read this statement lightly). Without sounding too blunt but the truth really does, in my opinion, all the systems I have listened to, in the past and present, sound NOWHERE near to the unamplified sound I hear at concert halls. I have been a frequent classical concert goer since 2000 listening to orchestral symphonies works, violin and piano concertos. I am particularly familiar with the different tonality of the Strad, I have heard many distinguished violinists playing this famed wooden instrument - Accardo, H. Hahn, S. Chang, A. Dumay, M. Vengerov, S. Mintz, , B. Schmid, though some played the Guarneri like L. Josefowicz & V. Eschkenazy, some I’m not sure i.e F. Bodi. To get to the point I want to make, I seldom listen to recordings by the most famous violinist Heifitz because the recording of his Strad sounded worse to me until I attended a concert 2 months ago where Akiko Sawanai performed Mozart violin concerto no. 5 (Turkish), she was playing the ‘Dolphin’ that Heifitz used to own and now belongs to a famous Japanese foundation. To my surprise, the tonality of this violin was the BEST I have ever heard (albeit not her playing), even my wife concurred. Without finding why I find Heifitz recording unattractive to me, afterwards, I spent everyday playing his Mozart violin concerto no. 4 (RCA label) and tweaked my system in order to get the violin sound on the LP sounding nearer to what I had heard. Many weeks had passed and after several more concerts, I suddenly realized one needs to achieve a natural and balance sound from his/her system. In order to put things into perspective and without sounding too abstract, I began applying the Chinese 5 natural elements in hi-fi playback, they are : Metal, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth.
Before you start bursting into laughter, I have been a student studying these 5 traditional elements and how they affect our daily life for some time now and life is about having a proper balance of these 5 elements, too much or too little/or lack of them, your body’s health will be affected. In hi-fi terminology, I would use metal as the sound we hear played through musical instruments made of metal – horn, oboe, trumpet, triangle, cymbals etc and wood – violin, cello, double bass, percussion. Trying to make your system reproduce the sound of metal and wood sounding natural is a 'life-long' endeavour. For example, if you visit an audiophile’s home whose preference is jazz, you can be almost certain it will not sound good when reproducing classical music and vice versa. When I still owned the big Avalons, Sarajan of 6moons came over and could hear my system was tuned to elevate the wood over the metal elements. Once you can play both jazz and classical music well, this means your system has achieved a fine balance of the metal & wood elements – the sound of the saxophone has a rich tonal body and cymbals should sound crisp as well as having shimmering highs without sounding thin, wooden instrument like violin & cello have distinct wooden tone and with rich harmonics plus decays.
I use Water element to express “the flow of music”, as all music we hear should sound rhythmic, it should have continuity, ambience, and harmonics, all these ingredients will make the listener feel fully engaged with the music. Having said that, a system which has a good element of Water but with an unbalance in metal & wood may sound coloured (like a very famous U.K. amp manufacturer who claimed their amps were the most musical in the 70s’ but really sounding coloured even up to these days and closer to our community, the famed high efficiency speakers, if you can’t hear the colouration or put it politely, their strong tonal signature, then you need to go to a music hospital (concert hall) to check it out.
Once your system has the wood, metal & water elements, it should sound very musical without any listening fatigue, however, an experienced audiophile will not be totally bowed out by its overall performance because some other crucial elements are still missing which preclude the listener from getting fully connected to the music he/she is listening to.
Up to now, I just can not comprehend how anyone who is familiar with the true sound of classical concert can be happy using a flea-powered amp to play music through their so-called high efficiency speakers because music is ‘dynamic’, it contains both the important & subtle micro as well as macro dynamics. Fire is the element to represent musical dynamics, these dynamics really make the sound from our system sounding ‘alive’ and ‘real’, if you rob your system of these dynamic contrasts, then your playback system, irrespective of how expensive it is, will not convince your brain that you’re listening to real music, most anemic sounding system will put the listener to go into a nice nap with their pleasant and sweet sound.
In order to reproduce the ‘flesh & blood’ of music, you need the Earth element, this to me is the vital bass element. Remember hi-fi amplifiers made in the sixties and seventies had the tone control i.e. treble & bass equaliser, if you turn up the treble or turn down the bass, the sound will become thin and unreal. It is the bass frequency that controls the body/tonality of the music, be it a human voice or a musical instrument. Too much bass, the overall sound is coloured and ill-defined, too little, sound will be lean and unreal. A system with a fine balance of bass will have a natural rich tonal colour and proper impact as bass is the only frequency your body can feel.
To put the abovementioned 5 basic elements in hi-fi playback, once you have a well matched system (I believe every customer of AE has this), the most important task is for the proud owner of his system to reproduce the sound well but in reality, this is really the most difficult thing to do as a lack of knowing what true unamplified music should sound together with lack of awareness of how one’s room acoustics can do to the sound (those who have uncovered tiled floor, large windows in the front or back of your listening position) will instantly cause total imbalance in the overall sound of one’s system.
The owner of the hi-fi system needs to be the ‘conductor’, like the conductor of an orchestra, irrespective of how good his individual player is, his major task is to ensure every musician of his orchestra perform as a team and when the certain musical moment comes, individual musician can perform the solo part to show off his/her talent i.e the solo violin playing performed by the 1st concertmaster on Scheherade. In order to achieve a fine balance of the 5 elements, repeated trial & error in our speaker placement is vital, it should take at least 5-6 months for an experienced listener to find the right spot for his new set of speakers and whenever a change in the hi-fi chain is made, he really needs to move his speakers a little bit (Marvel bro, I am v. glad you have finally moved your speakers and finding this effort rewarding, although this is a baby step, it is in the right direction). If our room has problem with sound acoustics, then this problem must be arduously tackled, otherwise, you will NEVER achieve the sound which has a fine balance of the 5 major elements in your system.
After tweaking my system and room to achieve a reasonably fine balance of the 5 elements, I meant to invite PT to come to ear-witness the sound of my system, however, this did not happen until he came to my place last week to deliver the new Zanden custom-made amps, however, he did get to hear the sound of the system briefly before I switched it off and heard a clear improvement compared to his last visit (when Ralp of Cessaro met the good folks from Audiotechnique magazine). The sound of the new amps instantly touched PT and myself deeply and although without taking any credit away from these superb amps, the room and components of my system really created a synergistic sound which give the listener a wonderful illusion he is listening to something really unique, something he has never experienced before and totally captivating by the realness of the overall sound.
Dear hi-fi comrades, if you understand what I have said, I am really happy and excited for you as you know you have a lot of work to do to make your system sing like music. My experience is when I first listened to Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra played in 2000 and when the baton was later passed to the world famous Edo de Waart, the orchestra has really transformed from a group of mediocre musicians to sometimes a world class orchestra – the 1st time when I had this impression was last year when they performed Dvorak’s No. 9 From the New World , the playing was comparable to
Concertgebouw conducted by Colin Davis and Vienna Philharmonic by Kirill Kondrashin.
I urge you to go to classical concerts to hear and REMEMBER what real unamplified music sounds like (I’m going to hear Midori perform Brahm’s violin concerto tomorrow) , the subtle details from different instruments and the frightening dynamic head room (reaching over 110 db at crecendo) of a 100+ musician orchestra will complete startle and then conquer you. Afterwards, play the recording of that piece of music (even by different orchestra), you can appreciate how much gap lies between the sound of your treasured system and the live event. Then, experiment with speaker placement and then room acoustics to achieve a finer balance of the 5 elements in your room, I am confident, 3 months down the road when you invite fellow audiophiles to hear your system, they will complement how much better the system now sounds compared to their last visit.
Conduct your system with passion and it’ll reward you with something you’d never thought possible – let true music unleash from your system.
Mr Z.
People who know me well are often perplexed why I spend so much time fine tuning my system & room acoustics almost everyday, this is because I have a burning passion of reaching closer to hi-fi nirvana ( I don’t say this lightly and therefore please do not read this statement lightly). Without sounding too blunt but the truth really does, in my opinion, all the systems I have listened to, in the past and present, sound NOWHERE near to the unamplified sound I hear at concert halls. I have been a frequent classical concert goer since 2000 listening to orchestral symphonies works, violin and piano concertos. I am particularly familiar with the different tonality of the Strad, I have heard many distinguished violinists playing this famed wooden instrument - Accardo, H. Hahn, S. Chang, A. Dumay, M. Vengerov, S. Mintz, , B. Schmid, though some played the Guarneri like L. Josefowicz & V. Eschkenazy, some I’m not sure i.e F. Bodi. To get to the point I want to make, I seldom listen to recordings by the most famous violinist Heifitz because the recording of his Strad sounded worse to me until I attended a concert 2 months ago where Akiko Sawanai performed Mozart violin concerto no. 5 (Turkish), she was playing the ‘Dolphin’ that Heifitz used to own and now belongs to a famous Japanese foundation. To my surprise, the tonality of this violin was the BEST I have ever heard (albeit not her playing), even my wife concurred. Without finding why I find Heifitz recording unattractive to me, afterwards, I spent everyday playing his Mozart violin concerto no. 4 (RCA label) and tweaked my system in order to get the violin sound on the LP sounding nearer to what I had heard. Many weeks had passed and after several more concerts, I suddenly realized one needs to achieve a natural and balance sound from his/her system. In order to put things into perspective and without sounding too abstract, I began applying the Chinese 5 natural elements in hi-fi playback, they are : Metal, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth.
Before you start bursting into laughter, I have been a student studying these 5 traditional elements and how they affect our daily life for some time now and life is about having a proper balance of these 5 elements, too much or too little/or lack of them, your body’s health will be affected. In hi-fi terminology, I would use metal as the sound we hear played through musical instruments made of metal – horn, oboe, trumpet, triangle, cymbals etc and wood – violin, cello, double bass, percussion. Trying to make your system reproduce the sound of metal and wood sounding natural is a 'life-long' endeavour. For example, if you visit an audiophile’s home whose preference is jazz, you can be almost certain it will not sound good when reproducing classical music and vice versa. When I still owned the big Avalons, Sarajan of 6moons came over and could hear my system was tuned to elevate the wood over the metal elements. Once you can play both jazz and classical music well, this means your system has achieved a fine balance of the metal & wood elements – the sound of the saxophone has a rich tonal body and cymbals should sound crisp as well as having shimmering highs without sounding thin, wooden instrument like violin & cello have distinct wooden tone and with rich harmonics plus decays.
I use Water element to express “the flow of music”, as all music we hear should sound rhythmic, it should have continuity, ambience, and harmonics, all these ingredients will make the listener feel fully engaged with the music. Having said that, a system which has a good element of Water but with an unbalance in metal & wood may sound coloured (like a very famous U.K. amp manufacturer who claimed their amps were the most musical in the 70s’ but really sounding coloured even up to these days and closer to our community, the famed high efficiency speakers, if you can’t hear the colouration or put it politely, their strong tonal signature, then you need to go to a music hospital (concert hall) to check it out.
Once your system has the wood, metal & water elements, it should sound very musical without any listening fatigue, however, an experienced audiophile will not be totally bowed out by its overall performance because some other crucial elements are still missing which preclude the listener from getting fully connected to the music he/she is listening to.
Up to now, I just can not comprehend how anyone who is familiar with the true sound of classical concert can be happy using a flea-powered amp to play music through their so-called high efficiency speakers because music is ‘dynamic’, it contains both the important & subtle micro as well as macro dynamics. Fire is the element to represent musical dynamics, these dynamics really make the sound from our system sounding ‘alive’ and ‘real’, if you rob your system of these dynamic contrasts, then your playback system, irrespective of how expensive it is, will not convince your brain that you’re listening to real music, most anemic sounding system will put the listener to go into a nice nap with their pleasant and sweet sound.
In order to reproduce the ‘flesh & blood’ of music, you need the Earth element, this to me is the vital bass element. Remember hi-fi amplifiers made in the sixties and seventies had the tone control i.e. treble & bass equaliser, if you turn up the treble or turn down the bass, the sound will become thin and unreal. It is the bass frequency that controls the body/tonality of the music, be it a human voice or a musical instrument. Too much bass, the overall sound is coloured and ill-defined, too little, sound will be lean and unreal. A system with a fine balance of bass will have a natural rich tonal colour and proper impact as bass is the only frequency your body can feel.
To put the abovementioned 5 basic elements in hi-fi playback, once you have a well matched system (I believe every customer of AE has this), the most important task is for the proud owner of his system to reproduce the sound well but in reality, this is really the most difficult thing to do as a lack of knowing what true unamplified music should sound together with lack of awareness of how one’s room acoustics can do to the sound (those who have uncovered tiled floor, large windows in the front or back of your listening position) will instantly cause total imbalance in the overall sound of one’s system.
The owner of the hi-fi system needs to be the ‘conductor’, like the conductor of an orchestra, irrespective of how good his individual player is, his major task is to ensure every musician of his orchestra perform as a team and when the certain musical moment comes, individual musician can perform the solo part to show off his/her talent i.e the solo violin playing performed by the 1st concertmaster on Scheherade. In order to achieve a fine balance of the 5 elements, repeated trial & error in our speaker placement is vital, it should take at least 5-6 months for an experienced listener to find the right spot for his new set of speakers and whenever a change in the hi-fi chain is made, he really needs to move his speakers a little bit (Marvel bro, I am v. glad you have finally moved your speakers and finding this effort rewarding, although this is a baby step, it is in the right direction). If our room has problem with sound acoustics, then this problem must be arduously tackled, otherwise, you will NEVER achieve the sound which has a fine balance of the 5 major elements in your system.
After tweaking my system and room to achieve a reasonably fine balance of the 5 elements, I meant to invite PT to come to ear-witness the sound of my system, however, this did not happen until he came to my place last week to deliver the new Zanden custom-made amps, however, he did get to hear the sound of the system briefly before I switched it off and heard a clear improvement compared to his last visit (when Ralp of Cessaro met the good folks from Audiotechnique magazine). The sound of the new amps instantly touched PT and myself deeply and although without taking any credit away from these superb amps, the room and components of my system really created a synergistic sound which give the listener a wonderful illusion he is listening to something really unique, something he has never experienced before and totally captivating by the realness of the overall sound.
Dear hi-fi comrades, if you understand what I have said, I am really happy and excited for you as you know you have a lot of work to do to make your system sing like music. My experience is when I first listened to Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra played in 2000 and when the baton was later passed to the world famous Edo de Waart, the orchestra has really transformed from a group of mediocre musicians to sometimes a world class orchestra – the 1st time when I had this impression was last year when they performed Dvorak’s No. 9 From the New World , the playing was comparable to
Concertgebouw conducted by Colin Davis and Vienna Philharmonic by Kirill Kondrashin.
I urge you to go to classical concerts to hear and REMEMBER what real unamplified music sounds like (I’m going to hear Midori perform Brahm’s violin concerto tomorrow) , the subtle details from different instruments and the frightening dynamic head room (reaching over 110 db at crecendo) of a 100+ musician orchestra will complete startle and then conquer you. Afterwards, play the recording of that piece of music (even by different orchestra), you can appreciate how much gap lies between the sound of your treasured system and the live event. Then, experiment with speaker placement and then room acoustics to achieve a finer balance of the 5 elements in your room, I am confident, 3 months down the road when you invite fellow audiophiles to hear your system, they will complement how much better the system now sounds compared to their last visit.
Conduct your system with passion and it’ll reward you with something you’d never thought possible – let true music unleash from your system.
Mr Z.
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Comments
Thank you for your sharing. This is really an interesting one that has provided a lot of insight of the subject to me.
Amongst others, I also feel HKPO's substantial improvement under the leadership of Edo de Waart's. He makes Mozart played by HKPO much more enjoyable to me.
I shall also hear Midori's tomorrow. It is not the concert but the rehersal session in the morning - it is free :=)
The very thoughful articles of yours make me enivous of your having the "time" to do what you like to to. My time on the airplane may be more on the ground.
The funniest part of the article is "Marvel bro, I am v. glad you have finally moved your speakers and finding this effort rewarding, although this is a baby step, it is in the right direction."
Marvel's baby step really inspires me, it sounds a big move in comparison to me. I am just a lazy bastard without taking the step of an ant. It seems like I will always be the bad guy pointing fingers here and there unless I fire the hell out of the board.
Thanks for the writeup.
Your writeup inspires me tremendously. I adjusted the Thales tonearm with the Hyper Emminent from 11:00pm to 1:30am last evening. Then, today, I re-adjusted it again from 5pm to 7:30pm. The goal is to ensure the "tracking force" of the cartridge to be the SAME on either the outer circle, inner circle or middle of the record. It is very difficult. I called Micha three times when I almost wanted to give up. I understand the Thales arm much much more.
The reward is immense. Once again, the Tidal phono is crazy. If you don't work hard on the very force, the Tidal reflects mediocrity. If you work hard, it changes completely from night to day. Like Voy said, we need TIME!
I'm glad you see yourself as a conductor of your system. You're on the right track... at least to me. This will make sound tuning a blissful joy and all the more meaningful.
Years ago, I had this same idea (and even the exact term conductor) having a long discussion in another forum with PT and Marvel but failed to convince them.
My humble 2 cents is that no matter how close, what we tune should remain a replicate to unamplified performances. The smaller the scale of music, the more likely to get closer. It would be impossible to put a sea into a mug, without a little help from...... our own imagination.
Anyway, you're now painting not photographing. The fun and the art out of something highly scientific. May your passion in this audio game keep burning, Mr Z.
Reading what you've been striving for your own audio nirvana has tremendous impact on me, who's reluctantly retired from this hobby due to poverty.
Regards
Santamomo