Thats not quite right always. A particularly noticable time when dynamic range can be exceptional but still have the “wall of sound” effect is with iems. Even with very very good ones you can still get a very dense stage with lazer sharp seperatipn and imaging. It seems to me that what is trying to be described here is the opposite of an airy presentation. Think kind of like the opposite of arya
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Must be why I hate IEMs. All joking aside, I think of a wall of sound as 2 dimensional with no depth and the signature squished together. Though wall of sound leaves room for interpretation, my bass guitar instructor always referred to it as such…having too much density. The Phil Spector Wall of Sound is much different of course.
I’d personally argue it isn’t depth, because imo if you take a headphone like a large driver hifiman, I think those offer a more wall of sound type experience while still having good depth imo
I’d agree that there is a good wall of sound and bad. The good being like the Hifiman is a good example. The verticality on the HEX was one of it’s best features imo.
I guess in my experience, I’ve heard the term Wall of Sound used more in a derogatory way then in a complimentary way.
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That is fair
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Would you say that a good wall of sound has good depth, layering, imaging, spatial accuracy, and detail in things like echo acoustics and speed/decay?
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Yes. Absalutely i would personaly. Imo, the difference between “good wall of sound” and “holographic” is exclusively air within the seperation. Also, tbh (to fall back on the “organic” discussion earlier) I find a certain amount of “good wall” (or lack of air) is benefiting to getting a more organic presentation with several genrens of music (especialy rock or concert style live music)
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Yes i would 100% there is good wall of sound.
I think @Draaly is hitting close to home. There seems to be a lack of air. Things can still be deep, wide, separate, and placed well. There is just something felt between it all.
Anyone here play DnD? It’s like the gelatinous cube Gelatinous Cube - Monsters - D&D Beyond . It hit thick and you feel the pressure when youre trapped inside.
Its also probably why i am not an iem guy, the pressure from them irritate my inner ear.
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Never played DnD, but have always wanted to. Never had friends that did though, so we always played Risk instead, lol.
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Yes for sure
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I’m down for an audiophile dnd group so long as someone else DMs and yall are ok listening to the audible clipping of my blu snowball 
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My friend is deep into it and wanted to DM, so we got a group together and it is extremely fun. I would say do it with a group of friends as “pick up groups” tend to fizzle. I honestly cant wait for each session every week. We are currently making our way through a blown out demon forge, its basically chernobyl with demonic centaurs.
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The way I view questions about “realism,” is that it’s not a singular quality, but rather a blanket description of how closely an audio reproduction resembles a live music performance.
Put another way, a perfect television would be indistinguishable from a window into another world. Likewise, perfect headphones would be like wearing earmuffs that let you listen to the place where the music is happening.
There are a lot of factors that can make audio playback differ from live audio. Frequency response / colored tunings are maybe one of the most obvious, since things will sound tonally different on a colored chain vs real life. But beyond that, subtleties in timbre and dynamics can be very hard to reproduce convincingly. There’s a sort of “uncanny valley” where you know you’re listening to a recording and not music happening in the room with you.
Susvara impressed me immediately with timbre and dynamics; the first track I played on mine was the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, because I was daring them to live up to the hype. Well, the cymbal crashes in that tracks produced the same kind of instantaneous loudness that is usually only present when there are real pieces of metal crashing together in your vicinity.
If you have an even frequency response, but flattened dynamics, music can sound lifeless. I wonder sometimes if that’s what people dislike when the term “analytical” gets thrown around. In any case, realism and naturalness, to me, are things that not even the very best equipment does perfectly, but when you experience exceptionally well-focused (and believably sized) imaging on summit level 2 channel, it really can be almost creepily suggestive of people and instruments in the room with you.
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Maybe someone can help here. I was trying to explain “grip” to someone specifically when discussing amplifiers and was struggling a lot to put it well. They just kinda kept going “that sounds like dynamics” and thats not what I was going for at all but I couldnt figure out how to put it.
Somewhat relates to control, and when I think of control I think of basically how well the amplifier can control the driver, if something lacks control it might sound a bit loose and rounded, if something has too much control can lead to something sounding dull and lifeless that somewhat prevents some information getting through somehow. Previously I have defined it as how well can something produce impact and dynamics while remaining taught and nuanced
I guess for me grip would be control + tonal weight and body, so basically how well can it control the driver while also pushing around a lot of weight and density properly if that makes sense
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Thats basically how I tried to explain it and he just went “that sounds like not overshooting dynamics” and all I could really do was go "yah, but its not just a big dynamics things. It matters for all driver control. TBH it was kinda frustrating because he wasnt arguing at all (genuinely trying to understand what I was trying to explain) and I just couldnt get the wording.
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Just to add on to that, maybe you could also attribute it to bass definition. Like if you don’t have good grip then you won’t hear much definition in the bass. And in musical terms, you could also say it’s like when the amp holds on to the bass fundamental long enough for the harmonics to get through if that makes sense. That’s another way to describe it I think.
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Bloom: can this be defined a bit more?
I always took it as a measure of a sounds attack and speed. Where a slower, softer attack is usually described as bloomy. And the bloomy sensation kind of being like slowly turning up the volume on a note then slowly turning it down as the note should go away.
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It’s somewhat related to control, transient response, and also speed, generally I think of bloom as a pleasant roundness and richness that focuses on being a bit sweeter and smoother, but is a bit more soft and sluggish. Not really sure exactly it depends how it’s used, but I think the way you describe is how people would use it
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Doing research and trying to figure out if the 300B bloom everyone talks about is what i think they mean by bloom.