AUDIO DEFINITIONS

For those of you who are brand-spanking new to “High-End” Personal Audio (headphones) and Two-Channel Audio (speakers), please find several definition provided via analogy to help smooth the road, so to speak, for your discovery of the new and rather incredible world. 

Why incredible? Because if you happen to be a lover of music, then via the High-End, whether your choice be headphones or speakers, you will get to know you music—CDs, albums, downloads, streaming caches—these friends, in some cases decades old, in a new, exciting, inspiring, and, dare I say, more intimate and more fulfilling ways. Through “High-End” audio they will reveal themselves to you like never before. But first some definitions to begin the demystification of the “High-End.”

Transparency

Imagine for a moment that you are standing on the other side of the window, looking in at all the, smiling, giggling, crying newborn babies. What if that window was opaque, dirty, not see-through. Then it would, of course, lack transparency and you would not be able to see any of the babies. Of course, parents would complain that they can't see their kids and the hospital would send out cleaning teams to deal with the non transparent window.

As the first team finishes its cleaning, the parents are now able to make out the babies but only barely. The transparency has improved, but it's still not great. However, as successive cleaning teams take turns at the window (the union only allows each team an hour at a time on cleaning the window, breaks you know) greater and greater transparency is noted, until, at some point, it is as if there is no window at all. Now before the parents as seen through the very transparent window are their beautiful babies.

While there are very few, if any audio products these days that are so opaque, non-transparent, that the music can barely be heard, there are quite a few that would offer less than the ideal transparency of the window not be there at all. Part of our reviews will provide the reader with an idea of just how see through—transparent—the components that we review will render the music. 

Detail

Another term often used in audio speak is detail, which is often stated as the “resolution of fine detail.” For instance, and using the same analogy, if the window that looks on to the babies is so clean—transparent—as to be seemingly not there, but despite this the babies are all really fuzzy looking and kind of all look the same, then there would be very poor “resolution of detail.” Film  and/or photograph are easy parallels here.  

There are those audio components that can resolve detail, well, okay, which can make one's music or the various things happening across a song more difficult to hear or even understand, kind of like the fuzzy babies. And there are those components that can resolve detail brilliantly, so that all or nearly all that was intended to be heard on a given song, movement, track, etc. is very clear down to the micro-details—the vanishingly quiet sounds of birds outside a recording studio, a musician’s breathing, the movement of a piano’s foot pedals, pages turning, a muffled cough from deep in the audience, etc. Such resolution of detail would give very distinct form to the various babies, allowing them all which to be clearly identify. 

Transient Speed

Have you ever been startled when listening to music by a musical note that all of a sudden jumps out from nowhere all lickety-split like? Well, that is transient speed and while some components handle these instances quite well, other components might handle them in the way, relatively speaking, similar to how molasses travels down a mildly, inclined plane, not well. So when we talk about lickety-split or light-speed or tachyon-speed transients were talking about components that are exceptional at rendering the “startle factor” when called for and this is a very good thing. 

Separation, Layering, and Positioning

Well, going back to the baby analogy, separation, layering, and positioning speak to the separation of the various cribs from one another, how there are rows or layers of cribs from the front of the room to the back of the room, and how they are firmly positioned and not moving about as if on wheels. In this selfsame way, when I or one of the writers at AudioKeyReviews write about separation, layering, and positioning we are letting the reader know how well a given component is handling these attributes in a recording. Are the musicians all mushed up together, in a straight line across the stage playing their instruments, and are they moving about randomly, including the guy on the drum kit, as if on skates? If this is so and not intentional, then the system that you’re listing to is doing a poor job of playing back the music. However, if separation, layering, and positioning are being well portrayed by one’s components, and is able to lay things out like the babies in the cribs, then you will, via your system, move ever closer to an accurate portrayal of a live recording or the recording “space” as dialed-in via the recording engineers. 

COHERNCY

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DYNAMICS

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NOISE FLOOR

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NEUTRAL ZONE

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DYNAMIC HEADROOM

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