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Detecting colorations

Posted by David Aiken (A) on July 11, 2005 at 15:31:46

In Reply to: I've found it exceedingly difficult to detect tonal colorations posted by Al Sekela on July 11, 2005 at 13:24:33:

I realised how hard some colorations are to detect after I swapped from a shelfless rack I had designed myself to a Grand Prix Audio Monaco base unit.

I thought I had been reasonably free of major colourations with my rack, and others who heard the system were quite impressed by my results with my rack. On swapping, however, I noticed 2 things on quite a few discs. First, there wasn't the same stress on some notes sung by singers - some of the notes sung by Jennifer Warnes' male duet partner on 'You Don't Know Me" from "The Well" were particularly strong examples - and the rhythmic sense of tracks demonstrating this characteristic often improved even more than the rhythmic sense elsewhere. After much thought I could only put it down to the old rack having a narrow band resonance that was excited by those frequencies, causing it to sound as if the singer was stressing or exaggerating that note but having no audible effect on neighbouring notes. The rhythmic change I put down to the stressed notes actually being off beat. Performers, whether singers or instrumentalists, use stress and volume on notes as one technique of marking the beat, or playing with it. Removing a resonance that didn't coincide with the performer's own stress allowed the beat to flow as it should. Listening to tracks where these effects had been occurring without my knowledge became quite a revelation with the Monaco.

Narrow band resonances won't show strongly as overall tonal colourations but they do really become noticeable on removal.

Interestingly, when I played classical guitar decades ago, I was told a story about one of Segovia's favourite guitars developing a particular one note resonance over time and eventually becoming unplayable in public as a result of the exaggeration of that one note.

David Aiken

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