quality
Sound quality refers to the quality of sound, and many people confuse it with "timbre". What is the quality of sound? When you're talking about a pair of shoes of good quality. You must be referring to the fit, the comfort, the wearability, not that it is beautiful and fashionable. Similarly, when you are saying that the sound quality of a piece of audio equipment is good or bad, you are not saying how its level is and how well positioned it is, but specifically referring to whether the equipment is "resistant to listening"! It's like being resistant to wearing or not fitting, and not fitting the foot.
A piece of equipment with good sound quality, it is comfortable and pleasant. You don't have to explore why it sounds comfortable and appealing, that's the business of experts, you just have to judge it with your ears. Some equipment is fierce and powerful, extremely fast, and has strong analytical power, but it is not durable to listen, which may be a problem with sound quality. A good audio equipment, its sound quality should be like a good voice, let people not get tired.
Maybe it's abstract to say that. You can cite another actual list to illustrate. When you mention cloth, you say: The quality of this piece of material is very good. When you're eating a steak, you'll say: The meat of this steak is very good. When you praise a child, you say: The child is very qualified. So, when you listen to a piece of audio equipment or an instrument, you also say: it sounds beautiful. From the above examples, you can clearly understand that "quality" is innate nature. The noble, good and beautiful sound quality means that the nature of this equipment is very good, and it makes people sound very comfortable. I can say that sound quality is the most important part of audio equipment, so I put it first.
timbre
Timbre refers to the color of the sound. In English, TONE QUALITY and TIMBRE or TONE COLOR are not the same thing at a glance. However, in Chinese, sound quality and timbre are often mixed and misused. We often hear that this violin is really cold, this violin is really warm, etc., which refers to the timbre of the violin. Sound, like light, is colored, but it is not seen with the eye, but heard with the ear. In general, the warmer the sound, the softer the sound; the colder the sound, the harder the sound. Too soft or too hard is certainly not very good. Sometimes, the timbre can also be described by words such as "noble" and "beautiful", basically it is also one of nature. However, just like cloth, cloth refers to its material, and cloth color refers to its color, and there are still obvious boundaries between them. In the audio equipment review, the timbre is like a color, referring to its unique color. Some of the equipment has a yellowish tone, some white, some cold, and even a little melancholy blue.
In short, audio equipment is like an instrument, almost inseparable from the fact that the more expensive the timbre, the more beautiful it is. A two-million-dollar violin may have a golden yellow tone, while a five-thousand-dollar violin may have a faded painting. Although everyone has different views, "beauty" still has a "consensus" that everyone recognizes, you can't say that a person with a nose is the "embodiment of beauty"; you can't say that a cold blue tone of the device is beauty. This is our consensus on the beauty of sound.
High, medium and low volume and control
This is easy to understand, but it is also easy to misunderstand the text. How to say it? Everyone will say: the high notes of this horn are too strong, and the bass is too little. This is the volume-sensing distribution of the high, medium, and low frequency bands. The problem is that if the bandwidth from 20Hz to 20KHz is divided into only three segments, it will inevitably produce "inaccurate" confusion. Where exactly do your basses refer to? How low? In order to make the description more accurate, it is necessary to subdivide the bandwidth of 20Hz-20kHz. According to the American TAS and Stereophile division is very simple, they subdivide each high, medium and low segment into three subdivided segments, that is, it becomes a "lower intermediate frequency, intermediate frequency, higher intermediate frequency" division. This division, like the law of twelve averages, is quite regular. However, when used in Chinese, there are some small translation problems, such as "lower intermediate frequency" We call "low frequency" or "low frequency"? What about higher low frequencies? "High and low frequency"? For Chinese, this division of foreigners may not work. Therefore, long ago, I referred to the frequency width of the instrument and the orchestra's name for the sound, and divided the frequency of 20Hz-20KHz into seven segments: very low frequency, low frequency, medium frequency, medium frequency, medium frequency, high frequency, and extreme high frequency. The nouns of these seven paragraphs conform to the customary titles of general Chinese, and are easy to remember and will not be confused.
From 20Hz-40Hz this octave I call very low frequency. There are very few instruments in this band, and probably only instruments such as double bass, bass bass, Tuba, organ, piano and so on can reach such a low range. Since this very low frequency is not the most beautiful range for an instrument, composers rarely write notes that low. Unless pop music is deliberately arranged with electronic synthesizers, very low frequencies are of little use to audio fans. Some people mistakenly believe that although the base tone of an instrument is not so low, the harmonic can be as low as the base tone. In fact, this is not true, because the base tone of the instrument is the lowest tone of the tone, and the tone will only be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, five times... Wait to climb up high, without a sound of going down. It's like you're tightening a string, and the full-length vibration frequency of the string is the fundamental tone, one-half, one-third, one-fourth, one-fifth... A vibration of equal chord length is a harmonic. The sum of the base and overtones is the timbre of the instrument. In other words, the violin and flute will behave differently even if the base (pitch) is the same.
Low frequency
This frequency from 40Hz to 80Hz is called low frequency. What instruments are there in this band? Drums, double bass, cello, bass bass, bass, bass, bass telescopic horn, bass clarinet, Tuba, French horn, etc. This frequency band is the great contributor to the thick low frequency foundation. Usually, the average person mistakes this band for a very low frequency because it sounds very low. If the sense of volume in this frequency band is too small, the feeling of abundance and surging must not be; and it will lead to the prominence of medium and high frequencies and high frequencies, so that the sound loses its sense of balance and is not durable.
Medium to low frequencies
From between 80Hz-160Hz, I call it the low to mid frequency. This band is the most headache for Taiwanese audio fans, because it is the culprit that causes the ears to explode. Why is this band particularly prone to spikes? This is related to the length, width, and height of the small room. In order to remove this annoying peak, most people go to great lengths to absorb this frequency band so that their ears do not explode. Unfortunately, when your ears don't sound like a bang, the lower low frequency and the upper middle frequency may have been sunken with the absorption of the middle and low frequencies, making the sound thinner and lack of richness. It's even more unfortunate that most people are right to think this is just because the peak has disappeared. This is one of the reasons why many people's homes are not rich enough. Instruments in this band include those just mentioned in the low band. Oh, and timpani and bass should be added.
intermediate frequency
Frequencies spanning between three octaves (320Hz, 640Hz, 1280Hz) from 160Hz to 1280Hz are called intermediate frequencies. This band includes almost all instruments and vocals, so it is the most important band. The biggest misunderstanding of the instrument's vocal range by readers also occurs here. For example, most of the violin's range is in this frequency band, but the average person mistakenly thinks it is very high; don't think that the soprano range is very high, in general, her highest range is only in the upper limit of the midrange.
From the description above, you must also understand how important this midrange is in terms of sound. As long as this frequency is concave, the performance of the voice immediately becomes thinner. Sometimes, this thinness can easily be interpreted as a "false condensation." I believe there are a lot of audio fans who are in a mid-range depression without knowing it. The importance of this frequency band can also be.
Analysis power
This term is the most tolerant and understandable, and people who have played with cameras know the difference between the resolution of the lens; people who watch TV also know that their TV can parse a piece of black hair without any confusion is a manifestation of good resolution. Good audio equipment, even the most subtle, complex things can be clearly expressed, this is the analytic power.
In fact, the details and the level of shadows are clear, which is also the result of analytical force, just as the sense of space can also be combined into the sound field. But analytical power does not represent all the detail regeneration and layering. For example, the sense of hierarchy from the next row of rows is not all caused by the analytical force; moreover, if the sense of hierarchy is really incorporated into the analytical force, it is impossible to clearly explain the nouns of the individual terms. Therefore, I will say it as separately as possible here, and the reader only needs to know that the "Twenty Points of Sound" have an inseparable relationship with each other.
In general, if the subtle changes (at low levels) can be clearly expressed, then the analytical power of this device is of course very good. Since there is an analytic force at a low level, is there any resolution force at a high level? Of course! In the extreme explosion, everything can be analyzed very clearly, that is, the high-level analytic force.
Velocity sense and transient reaction
In fact, the sense of speed is the result of the transient reaction, and it is also the specific performance of the equipment's rise time and rotation rate. Foreigners usually describe this as a transient reaction rather than a sense of speed. However, Taiwan's customary term is a sense of speed. For the elderly, the sense of speed is easier to understand than the transient reaction. Basically, these two terms refer to the speed of the reaction of the equipment. I don't think I need to explain it here.
Strength and weakness contrast and dynamic comparison
The contrast between strength and weakness can also be said to be the dynamic contrast of foreigners, that is, the contrast between loud and quiet. Generally speaking, the contrast between strength and weakness can also be divided into the contrast between the strength and weakness of "strong contrast" and the strong and weak contrast of "very little contrast". We often say that the dynamic of classical music is very large, which means that the contrast between its maximum and minimum sounds is great; and although rock music is loud, the undulations of its size are not large, so we say that although it is loud, the dynamic contrast is not large.
What is a dynamic contrast with minimal contrast? That is, the subtle contrast between strength and weakness is very close. This subtle contrast between strength and weakness is like the ripples of water, looking at it from a distance as if it does not move, and only when you look closely can you know that it has been subtle fluctuations. The contrast between strength and weakness should be as simple as this: the great contrast between strength and weakness is the waves that lapped at the rocky shore; the small contrast between strength and weakness is the fluctuation of the lake under the breeze.
The size ratio of the instrument to the vocals
In the end, how big is the line and shape of the instrument? In the end, the human voice should be like a chain? Or do you want to be plump with meat? This problem has been plaguing audio fans. Idealists believe that it should be reduced to the size of the actual orchestra and put into the listening room at home. In fact, this is not possible. Let me give you the simplest example. When the piano and violin are playing a sonata, the shape of the piano does not know how many times more than the violin (and the volume is the same). If the volume of the violin is not increased when recording, the violin is often obscured by the piano (this is often the case with live concerts). Therefore, when recording, the sound recordist will deliberately balance the volume of the violin. Speaking of the concerto performance of the whole orchestra and violin, if it is completely proportional, then the violin should be too small to be small, not as clear and powerful as we hear on the CD. Therefore, the correct "instrument to vocal size ratio" is not blindly reduced according to the rules, but according to the reasonable music to make the size ratio. This is true of musical instruments, and it is also true of vocals.
In fact, the most noteworthy aspect of the size ratio of the instrument to the vocals is not the problem of proportional reduction or not, but the misunderstanding caused by the distortion of the frequency response curve. For example, if your room has a serious peak around 100Hz, the timpani drum will be particularly loud and powerful, and the same is true for cello and double bass. This is the really wrong proportion. Therefore, when commenting on the "ratio of the size of the instrument to the vocals", special attention should be paid to the effects of the distortion of the frequency response curve.
The texture and air of musical instruments and vocals
The term "texture" is quite abstract, and we often say that the wood texture of this furniture is very good, the texture of this leather sofa is very good, or the texture of this marble is very good. From this example, we can understand that the so-called "texture" Kyo refers to the "nature of the material" of the object. However, we are not talking about the texture of the sound quality here, but the texture of the instrument playing and percussion touching the moment of action. So when we say, "The violin has a good texture," we mean, "It's recorded like a violin." When we say, "The texture of cymbal strikes is good," it means, "It strikes like it's real." Conversely, when we think that "the violin is not textured enough", we say "it doesn't look like the real thing". From this, we can clearly understand that the so-called texture also refers to the "fax degree". When the laser turntable was first introduced, everyone felt that the sound of the violin was not like, that is, its rubbing texture was not like.
When we listen to the clarinet, we say that its sense of shape is really good, which is also a kind of "facsimile degree". In short, texture and body sense are synonymous with "fax or not". As for the "sense of air", what is it? When we describe a playing and tapping keyboard instrument, we use "so-and-so instrument has a good texture." However, when we describe wind instruments, we usually do not use the word "texture", but use "air feeling", that is, the feeling of blowing air. To put it more clearly, "air sensation" refers to the sensation of sound waves vibrating, while texture is mostly the sensation of the moment after "contact". Of course, in addition to the texture of the strings when playing, the string group also has the "air feeling" generated in the air of the strings.
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![Why should the piano be tuned?[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)