Timbre!

All Things Music
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Yes, I am happy you like it! I was uncomfortable introducing that album in the same conversation as Keith Jarrett, they are of such different musical content/intention. But what I love about Frahm is how texture and tonality come into play even when the music is more “simplistic” for lack of a better word. He goes well beyond much of the vanilla solo piano mood music out there, not naming names.

In the words of an Ani DeFranco song “every time I blink, I have a tiny dream”. With Solo, every moment between notes struck is filled with a sonic landscape of interest in and of itself.

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No idea technically. Intuitively I think it must have to do with reflections, maybe that a room full of reflections being directed out of a single doorway fits them together somehow? Maybe that the piano has some very long wave lengths in the bass that need to travel a bit?

When I was a flute head joint maker and flutist, I would often add to my impressions the sounds of a new head joint as heard from outside the room. There was a correlation between that quality and ultimately how they would project in a large hall. I would not presume to know why.

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I don’t think George Winston’s “December” falls into that category. But it does show an album that I thought was very well recorded in it’s time. And which is not recorded as well as the Jarrett.

But still recorded well enough to get timbre discussion, the second cut, “Rest Your Head” is haunting.

Now I find I’m listening to more solo piano music.

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This reminded me of another aspect of the discussion – sorry for the delayed response, and moderators, please move the post if it belongs elsewhere.

For some recordings, things like solo piano, small-ensemble jazz, and chamber music, there is the possibility of imagining the piece being played in your room, like the above. For others, like full symphony orchestras, it’s more difficult. So what, in theory, are we trying to do with our recording and playback chains: bring the performance home, or transport the listener to the performance? A lot of people are dealing with that question: recording, mixing, and mastering engineers, equipment designers, and us of course as we decide what to purchase and (for speaker-based systems) which room, where to place the stuff in the room, and our listening position. With all those decisions and more, it’s really pretty amazing that we’re able to get any of either kind of illusion at all, ever.

My guess: being in the same room with a piano being played is a visceral experience, even if it’s a spinet. The lower registers especially are felt as well as heard. (This brings up another aspect of timbre – we “hear” conductively through our bodies as well as by vibration of the tympanic membrane.). When we move out of the room, that aspect is greatly reduced (you don’t feel the instrument nearly as much) so the difference between the system and the instrument is reduced, and the illusion is thereby improved.

Again, that’s just my guess. Would like to hear other theories on that as well.

And @pennstac , I hope your wife is healing well and quickly.

Thanks to all for the discussion.

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I was going to avoid this discussion, it’s a very difficult topic to nail down.
I think you have to remove the recording/mastering part of it if your trying to evaluate playback equipment. It clearly is critical, but you have to select the best source material you can.
My utterly random thoughts on this.
Recently I’ve been considering the whole WHY do people describe things differently, and like different pieces of equipment, and my latest untested theory is around the fact that the characteristics of the sound that we listen for is a learned thing.
And I think this applies to timbre as well, the definition is clear, it’s all the fiddly micro stuff that makes an instrument sound like an instrument, but I think we have learned what characteristics of a sound are important to carrying that illusion, and what I perceive as important characteristics are not necessarily what the next person thinks are.
I’ve said many times (and I know I’m in the minority, and not judging anyone who loves the headphone) I find the ZMF Aeolus offensively bland with terrible timbre, the way instruments attack is conveyed , the texture of the note and the ability to capture what is sometimes a definitive harshness is a large part of what I’m listening for whether it be a piano, violin, saxaphone, or a distorted guitar, and I find the Aeolus just glosses over everything trying to present it in a pleasant relaxed way.
When I listen to Orchestral pieces I want to hear/feel the motion of the air in the room, and good recording will do this on a good chain. It’s harder to convey an orchestra on headphones, but I have a few binaural recordings I think are stellar in this regard



The question becomes why I value those aspects of reproduction, and I suspect it’s as much about my initial exposure to Hifi equipment. as it is my exposure to the real thing. I once spent an hour agonizing over whether to purchase a $3000 classical guitar or an $8000 dollar one over the sound of the G-String.
But the fact of the matter is I’ve heard all of these instruments MANY more times on recordings than in real life, and I suspect the first decade I spent with Hifi of lusting after Linn, Naim stacks, probably trained me to listen for what they did well, and while that might not be the sound I aspire to now, I suspect it has forever colored what I will look for in reproduction.
I think the way we listen is experiential, which is why it’s so hard to convey to people with different experiences.

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Another guitarist! Yay! I wasn’t going to join this discussion either, but now I feel safe to add some comments. By the way, these are amazing recordings. I love them.

So I’m a professional classical guitarist, and a few months ago I had the good fortune to be able to listen to a recording of myself and my singer through a pair of Verite Open’s from a recording session earlier that day in a church. It was uncanny, like I was transported back to that space again.

I think everyone on this thread is absolutely correct in their comments. What’s interesting is to see my tendency to talk about timbre as if it’s a catch all for “realism.” I think this thread has helped me realize it’s really only meant to describe the balance of attack and the accompanying overtones associated with a particular class of instrument, type of instrument, or particular instrument. What I’ve realized is that timbre alone isn’t enough to recreate a convincing sense of that ever-illusive quality of “being there.”

The Arya does a fantastic job with bass timbre in my mind, for example, but it never sounds convincingly like a “bass.” Why is that? It’s because it doesn’t deliver the physical sense of impact a bass can actually give, not like a biocellulose driver can anyway, or a floor standing subwoofer. So despite it having good timbre, it has poor impact, and therefore relatively poor “realism.”

Another example is the Auteur, hailed for its amazing timbre, which it does have. But it often fails at that “real” quality, mostly due to lack of detail. I love my Auteur Classic, but it is not a highly resolving headphone, not to the level of an HD 800S anyway, or ZMF’s own Verite or Atrium. This lack of clarity actually gets in the way for me. I can make out that a classical guitar sounds like a classical guitar, in that the balance of fundamental to overtone is spot on, as is the physicality of the sound (which in my mind is not itself “timbre”), and I can pick out one guitarist’s tone from another, but the slight loss in clarity just doesn’t convince me it’s like the real thing. It’s also slightly too warm for a real-live classical guitar, which gets into tonal balance, and so it’s interesting that tonal balance can also be a separate thing from timbre in my experience. Paradoxically, the Arya’s tonal balance for classical guitar is so far off that it ceases sounding like that instrument, actually getting in the way of timbre. It’s more like a thin representation of itself, perhaps because of the overemphasis on the higher overtones occurring as a note is plucked, with tons of string “noises” (nails, squeaks, etc), but less string fundamental “tones.” So tonal balance can relate to timbre, but can also be unrelated.

Don’t know how helpful this is, but it’s what came out of trying to figure out what timbre is for myself as a result of this thread, as it relates both to my guitar playing and to headphones. So far, the Verite Open has been the only headphone really capable of recreating the exact sound of my guitar, which includes timbre, impact, tonal balance, and detail. But it does badly with vocal timbre for me at the same time. Why is this? Maybe there are too many variables to sort through to get a convincing answer for that.

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Interesting. A few years ago, back when some headphones went on community tours here, I was sent an Audeze LCD-2 closed-back to review. It was (to me) such an unlikeable headphone that I made a total hash of the review after months of procrastinating. One of the low-lights of that listening experience was listening to a recording of classical guitar (I think it was Sor Studies) in a stone church in Spain.

The closed-back headphone clearly created a tiny clamshell sized space with a ghost aura of the church sized space around it. Absolutely unlistenable. It sounded as it was supposed to on my better headphones at the time, an old set of STAX SR-5n, and the Sennheiser HD-6xx, Hifiman HE-560, and the Grado SR1e, all open-backs.

Now I guess it wasn’t “Timbre” per se that was the problem, but the artificiality of the space created by the closed backs. All of the other headphones did a very respectable job of reproducing not only the properly-recorded guitar, but the very live performance space.

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You’re not the first to suggest reluctance writing on this thread! I for one am glad you did, and everyone who did. I’d like to think a difficult to nail down topic would stimulate good conversation.

I think early on here or somewhere else I mentioned a “sum of all parts” and the human mind having a unique way of perceiving a lot of different things as a whole. Your comments (and others) to me fit into that. An instruments character is indeed determined as much by its attack as its resonance and decay.

An oversimplified concept would be the difference between an electric piano and an acoustic piano. An electric piano, or a keyboard playing sampled keyboard sound, no matter how well recorded, is not going to interact with other struck notes in the same way as multiple open strings on a soundboard will. This is why an electric keyboard sound, when it is overtly trying to sound like a piano (vs. a cool new synth sound) can sound “fake” compared to a real piano. This is a failure to reproduce the timbre in a realistic way because the complexity of simultaneous sounds is limited by the samples. IMO. It is in this sense that I use the word timbre. Possibly I’m using the word in a narrow sense, or maybe too broadly.

The question we seem to be driving at is if different transducers would produce timbre differently, even if all other things could be equal and their frequency responses perfectly matched.

Since we’ve all been autobiographical already, I’ll go there again. When I worked for a flute maker in Boston, I was playing flutes made from solid silver, solid 10-18 karat gold, and interstitial platinum alloys of 98% pure platinum. The instruments we were making were state of the art, even with the head joints, the basic dimensions cut by CNC to incredible accuracy. Over the years I picked up a very predictable, repeatable, sense of the timbre characteristics of each metal. In the real world, not all things can be kept perfectly equal, but over years of listening, I feel sure the materials each had a unique timbre. Even if their frequency responses were on paper similar.

Perhaps this is why I am open to the idea that the material of the transducer itself might contribute to timbre, or get out of the way of timbre, more one than another. Is the Atrium sound solely a consequence of bio-cellulose or tuning, or both? I find myself wondering if timbre reproduction is at all a product of “tuning” a headphone, an accident, or a slave to the materials.

And I do not know the answer even if I have an opinion.

But it is fun to discuss it!

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Totally! And thanks for the encouragement. This is a tricky word to pin down for sure.

I can’t magine building an instrument, with all that involves, but along the lines of material, guitar string material plays a huge role in the sound. I spent so much time selecting just the right strings for my particular guitar, made with just the right tension, material, and thickness, to get the sound I want. I ultimately settled on a bass set of strings from one maker, and a set of trebles from another. Material was indeed a factor, but so was the interplay between the material, the thickness of the string, tension, and the wood of my own guitar, the bracing of the top plate, everything together. And yet, give me a carbon string, and I will almost always hate its sound on my guitar, in the same way that I will almost always think planar diaphragms portray guitars and voices in an artificial way (I say almost always after hearing stuff like the Susvara, LCD-5 and Caldera). So yes, I think the material is important, but only also with how it interacts with other associated factors.

And you’re absolutely right, I had forgotten how important sustain and decay is the the timbre of a sound! And how a very quick decay on some headphones will also encroach on the associated timbre we have with that instrument, if we’re used to it having a longer decay. And vice versa.

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It’s interesting to hear differing opinions, I think one of the the Susvara’s strengths is timbre, it’s hard to point to something it doesn’t do well for me, with the caveat that the amp and DAC have a huge impact on what you get.

Classical guitars are just so hard to evaluate on though, so much of it is about how it was recorded.
I really only play at classical guitar (haven’t played seriously in years), but it’s funny to hear you discussing string selection, to me so much of it is in the way the guitar body resonates with the unwound strings in particular, some combinations can come across very “flat” sounding .

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Am I old? Plastic strings? Carbon strings? I was a kid and my Mom and her teachers played, not me. But I recall discussion of “gut” vs “nylon”. And what metal was used to wind the bass strings.

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Well nylon is plastic.
I’ve never tried a carbon string, but maybe I should.

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Yes same! What I meant is that the Susvara, LCD-5 and Caldera are all standouts for me in planar timbre. All three are incredibly accurate to my ears.

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If indeed there is a generalization to be made regarding planars, I think within planars there may a hierarchy that suggests outliers. Early in my journeys I bought an inexpensive Drop Hifiman headphone which initially I was impressed with, but then I realized it made pianos sound like synthesizers. However, I agree 100% with you regarding Susvara. My few months as a Sus owner (well amplified) were very enjoyable and I never noticed timbre of any instrument as unnatural. Amazing headphones. So there are obviously qualitative differences when it comes to a “species” of transducer. And it isn’t price dependent, in my experience. The more modest RAD-0 produced timbre just as well as the Susvara IMO, just not all the other things.

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I’ve watched my brother in law fret about this endlessly. He’s settle on gut A and E strings on his old violin, which in its original form would never even have known metal strings anyway. Even those, when he records solo Bach, he tensions them down to A430 because the violin likes less tension. The great recordings of the old masters, besides being recorded differently, were all using gut strings. The drawback is that they are constantly losing pitch, but IMO they make violins sound more human. Now everyone just wants power. Let’s not even get into bows!

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I do not hear unnatural timbre from my Rosson RAD-0. Rarely from my Hifiman HE-560 v2. Frequently :phone: from my Audio Technica AT-2 Orthodynamic from about 1975 or so.
 
 
 
:phone: or it would be so if I used them frequently

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Hey fellow timbre geeks,

I should probably share this over in What’s Playing? but this is a recoding I recently ran into which captures all of the insane complexity of piano timbre, texture, attack, power, dynamics. Everything. Not sure what many folks will think of Henry Cowell, he was a very important influence on a lot of ultra-modernists in the 20th century music scene. This piece displays the tone cluster technique he advanced. He was also one of the first to compose for “prepared piano”. I like some of his music because it is tonal and still has a “home base” and not removed from all harmonic association.

Anyway, this performance is insane. The hard rock of classical piano. It is arguably his most famous piece but I’ve not heard it performed with such virtuosity and a great recording.

First 3 tracks, Henry Cowell, Three Irish Legends

Have a nice weekend.

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Very powerful. Listened last night on iPhone ROON and Audeze LCDi3 with cipher cable.

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Ohhh yeah, this is pretty amazing. Didn’t know a piano could be recorded in such an open, spacious, immersive way. Through the Aeolus it’s quite an experience!

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Absolutely the case with classical guitars these days too. Less human sounding at the expense of more volume and power. Carbon strings are an example of this. So are double-top guitars, where two very thin pieces of wood are sandwiched around a thin honeycomb material to produce a huge sound. Huge, but not very human. I played a double top previously owned by David Russell once, and to my astonishment, I sounded exactly like him! Those guitars have very little regard for the subtleties of the individual player.

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