Plankton is an SBAF invented term I believe.
It’s supposed to capture the ability capture the subtleties of a recording, I’ve always considered it a combination of microdynamics, blackness and overall timbre, but it like a lot of the more esoteric terms gets used to cover a lot of things.
It’s common on SBAF to separate it from microdynamics, so YMMV…
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I’ve actually never heard the term ‘illumination’ to describe sound…
Do you remember where you heard it?
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As an example, if previously on a track that is well known to me, deep in the background there is a “ticking” that I always thought was drumstick tapping a wood block. Now with a different piece of gear it’s like a light was turned on and what I "see” is that it’s the snap of fingers. I would describe the piece of gear as being better at illumination because things in the background are now better illuminated and more recognizable?
I’m just wondering though if there is a distinction between that and Detail Retrieval. I suppose it’s a matter of judgment but, I started thinking that since the example is background being more apparent that maybe detail retrieval is more in general - not taking stage and depth into consideration.
I’m probably over thinking it and it seems rather esoteric now that I put it out there.
That sounds like detail retrieval and microdynamics.
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Thanks, I will have to go back and read the definitions again with more focus on micro/macro dynamics and detail. What I’m defining as detail is obviously not correct.
@M0N Mostly for you as I hear this terminology in your descriptions a bit, “organic” and “natural”. How do you explain these and how do they (if they) overlap with making something realistic.
@everyone else… In your experience and opinion, can things be realistic if its colored one way or another? Lacks or has too much detail? Or is anything other than astringently analytical?
Generally I’d say those terms are just kinda as they are, something organic or natural sounds like it has life, fleshed out, feels like it has soul basically.
I would differentiate organic from realistic though. This might be a strange one but I personally think you need something to sound organic to be realistic, but you can have something sound organic without being realistic. When I say realistic it basically means does it sound like it would irl, and that’s a combination of everything. Organic tends to carry combined traits like tonality, tonal density, and presentation mainly (sometimes timbre). Where I would say to achieve realism you need that + time domain like dynamics, spatial recreation, speed and separation, transients, etc. So you can have something sound organic, but it might not sound realistic. But I can’t say I’ve ever heard something sound realistic without also sounding organic.
This is from an overall perspective though, if I would use realistic in isolation then it’s self explanatory, if I were to say like presentation is realistic, it’s just as you would think it means
How I would use the term, no from an overall perspective, but some aspects could be considered realistic even if it isn’t overall realistic. Perhaps dynamics could be realistic but tonality isn’t, or timbre is realistic but spatial recreation isn’t. Realism to me is the absolute hardest thing for a system to achieve, and personally I’d say the mass majority fail at that overall. But that’s ok, something doesn’t have to be overall realistic to be good imo (and could carry some traits that are realistic, but not all aspects)
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Define color
This is one of my pet peeves, the fact that “Neutral” is assumed to be dry and lifeless.
There are lots of Amp/DAC combos that have measurable flat FR that don’t sound like that.
So why do we choose the nasty lifeless THX sound as Neutral and everything else as colored?
I mean there obviously colored amps, most SET amps will have discernable levels of 2nd Harmonic distortion, though even then it’s likely close to the limits of what’s considered audible in a normal room, you’d struggle to find many DAC’s that don’t measure flat.
If you measure a system end to end the only significant impact on the FR is going to be the transducer, which is why it’s a terrible metric to base quality on.
Realism IME has little to do with FR though, I think we’re far more sensitive to timbre, microdetail, phase and time domain effects when it comes to perceiving things are real.
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For sure, to me I define coloration as anything that deviates from real life, and that can mean any aspect of sound, so really isn’t fr mainly at all most of the time. And it’s also why I haven’t heard anything that sounds “uncolored” as well, because that just flat out doesn’t exist, or at least I haven’t heard it yet lol. If that had actually been achieved, the audio scene would be very very different from how it is now
You kinda have to judge coloration based on the final chain, you ideally want to combine colorations in your chain to get the desired result (this is more in listening than in measurements though)
Agree for sure
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For me colored is a general broad summary of the sound if a certain part of the spectrum was decently emphasized. Ie: the bass on the Radiance. Neutral to me also isnt boring (and tbh i never heard a thx) but just that nothing is exceedingly emphasized. This admittedly may be flawed a little as different source material can skew anything and a other factors ,like speed, contribute to what i consider “coloration”, but for the sake of not having better vocabulary i think that is a decent idea of what I am thinking.
I also tend to agree that FR and also resolution are not the main contributor to realism. And that realism may be the white rabbit that we keep chasing. It’s a little like photorealism in visual art. There are so many drawings and paintings that are photo realistic. Replicating details and lines and shapes so closely yet its never the real thing. And sometimes the more interpreted and non realistic pieces are what we enjoy the most.
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Can I get an explanation of time domain? Seems like it encompasses a few things but I’d like a clearer understanding of it.
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To add to that, do you guys clump together terms like neutral, balanced, and flat? To me they’re all different terms, but I do hear it occasionally from reviews where they portray it as being the same thing.
neutral - as close to real life as possible
balanced - no part of the frequency emphasizes or takes over the other
flat - boring and lifeless
IMO and speaking directly to fr and detail retrieval… fr has to be neutral or something close to it for me to perceive it as realistic. Detail retrieval is a little more nuanced in that it has to be detailed enough to avoid things like muddiness but done so with a certain amount of refinement to avoid things like being overly analytical. There’s a spectrum of realism in detail retrieval and yes it is a white rabbit lol.
IMO all of these terms can be used to describe different attributes of the sound but if we’re speaking about fr I think they are different. Neutral is, like you say, something that sounds realistic and where nothing is exaggerated or missing. Balanced doesn’t mean neutral because, just as an example, a headphone that has a W shaped sound signature can be balanced but not neutral. I guess flat and neutral could be used to describe the same things but I usually see it used to describe bass and more directly bass extension.
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A term I use and a phenomena I feel like should be far more talked about is “stage dynamics”. Aka, how well is the stage used. Are there any dead spots? Does stage size change with track? How well is the stage utilized in general? This can kind of be covered when discussing staging in general but u find is often just ignored and can be a true stand out of certain gear (mest and P6P are two pieces that I think handle stage dynamics astonishingly well)
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I am looking for a term to describe what I best currently only explain as density.
It would be a term that explains how packed and thick the music wall is hitting you.
IE:
Some chains present a thick wall of sound, it feels like everything, even the silence and empty space, is felt. Like jumping in a pool of jello.
Other chains seem to keep the silence and empty space completely unpressurized. Pieces seem to effortless present themselves and only parts with something to offer can be seen. This would be those “dancing” water fountains. Its just empty space until something delicately spurts up.
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Hmmmm. When I think of density I think of tonal density, but when you describe it I almost think of separation + background + presentation, but more really background blackness.
Something with good background blackness will give that better sense emptiness and absence of sound, where something with poor sense of blackness would lead to you being able to hear something when you shouldn’t be able to, basically feel something that shouldn’t be there.
For separation that would be how well things separate from each other, and how organically they can do so, so something with poor separation might have things closer to each other and less space between things (if the recording isn’t like that that is), so with bad separation I can also see that perceived denseness as things don’t have space to move away from each other
Presentation would come down to how things are given to you, and how the product shifts where things are shown
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I think what your describing, I would term as a part of staging, and blackness.
I agree with M0N what I consider density is more about how tonality Is presented, thicker or thinner sounding.
Though I can see how one could be interpreted as bleeding into the other, but it’s possible to have a setup with great tonal density that also has good separation, and where the contrast with the blackness can still be stark.
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Yes, it’s not really blackness in the sense of the silence is filled with a high noise floor. But more like… not sure how to best describe it. Ever see in movies of NYC or Tokyo where it shows crowded streets that the protagonist needs to push through? It feels like that crowd is the music coming to you.
Not something I would say is negative but a preference. I do guess the best way of describing it may be as a correlation of a few staging and presentation aspects.
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It’s hard to interpret what other people are trying to describe.
I like visual metaphors to describe stage, separation is a good one, I like the term focus, as distinct from that, to describe how much space a sound fills and how that representation decays into the surrounding space. Is a sound a thin line in the space or does it bleed into the gaps between. A sound that’s too focused in a stage can sound unnatural.
I think much of what we are describing with stage are time domain effects, but there is a tendency to try and map language towards tonality because that’s what we associate with audio.
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To me, it almost sounded like you were explaining Dynamic Range, as the wall of sound is something I always correlate to heavy compression.
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