In my limited experience of owning various speakers throughout the years, I somewhat agree with this. All speakers have their own house sound and are coloured. Speakers which do refinement and detail well will sound great with acoustic music. Rock, techno or electronic music from the likes of Jean Michel Jarre etc. usually don’t sound good on these speakers. I don’t know why but this is my experience.
There are speakers that do everything well, but they sound different playing delicate acoustic music. The refinement or perhaps delivery of the presentation is different/lacking in comparison to polite or delicate sounding speakers. “Rock speakers” mostly have a brutish and forward sound apart from tight and impactful bass, and they will not sound refined and delicate. The speakers can be tuned to have the best of both worlds, or all worlds, playing all types of genres reasonably well. Nevertheless, they will still sound different in comparison to speakers which only sound great with specific music genres.
Indeed and there is a good reason why that is incidental to the speaker itself.
I used to always be of the opinion that a speaker that excels at one genre but not as much in another is simply a bad speaker. It’s how I was trained many years ago in hifi retail.
Now all things being equal, that viewpoint holds true. But things aren’t equal. The problem is born in the mixing room. When anything is mixed, there is some guesswork as to the type of playback equipment used. Teenypop, mixed for headphones and iPhone docks most likely. A lot of jazz mixed for audiophiles with a certain type of gear. Rock music is often mixed with an intend of low end gear or certain types of speaker responses in mind.
We talk about a hifi being neutral and not colouring the music but “neutral” is an unknown value that changes. I think you certainly can get a system and speakers that sound “really good” with all genres of music. But they are almost certainly going to “excel” at other genres that happen to align with the mastering intent.
The best you can really manage when building a system or picking speakers, when you have a wide range of musical tastes, is find a speaker that doesn’t actually sound bad at any genre you care about.
Very good point about mastering. What we need is a tool to remaster music to taste! To some extent of course tone controls can assist - perhaps it is time for an audiophile DSP box including presets for different music styles…
What would we call such a device? Where we could see how the output is equalized? A “graphic equalizer” ?
Truth be told, I can’t imagine using vinyl without tone controls. Was contemplating a Stageline for my spare HC on the Naim rig but after bumping up against a few discs that are simply unlistenable without a fairly heavy hand on the tone controls, I think I’ll confine vinyl to the non Naim system I have.
I can set several up on my active crossover if I want, though it would take a lot of time to decide what sounds right, though I can’t select without going to it and turning off power amps before changing. OK for a listening session, and unless a long session I rarely change musical styles during a session, so possible…. But in practice I don’t find problems by style of music, more it’s just individual albums, so would be unworkable.
Can you switch Roon simply and at will without upsetting other things? (Not that I’m thinking of getting Roon, just interested.)
Yes, you can create multiple profiles that contain the DSP element of your choice.
I have a profile called “small speakers” with a steep bass roll-off to combat albums where the mixing engineer has decided to boost the bass to stupid levels! I’ve only ever come across one album like this and it makes it much more listenable.
