History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

It has, but in a different w.r.t comparing different sound systems with the same recording. Let me try to explain. You might know some of the following, sorry if it's a re-explanation.

In a proper concert hall, sound is expected to be homogenous, so you should be able listen to the orchestra equally well, with the same sound balance (or mix) regardless of the place you sit. Similarly, recordings are done from suspended or positioned (and ideally tuned) mics, so you can capture the orchestra as someone sitting in the audience. At least this is how our performances were recorded.

The mastering is then done to match the recorded sound to the hall's sound, and balance any imperfections or clean the orchestra's inner talk between pieces (yes, we communicate a lot :D ).

When you listen an orchestra live, you will have a lossless blueprint of the piece in your mind (track by track if you can separate the instruments). If you can get a recording of the same performance, you can compare it with the live performance. That's absolutely correct.

But if you listen to a recording of a different orchestra playing the same piece, the arrangement and instrumentation will be same (you may have 8 violins instead of 12 but, violins won't be changed by violas most of the time). So, the atmosphere of the piece will be the same. Assuming the recording is done by competent folks, the spectrum would be the same (~20Hz -> ~20Khz roughly).

After some point, even if you're listening to a different orchestra, you can start to point to the things that should be there. It's very hard to describe, but every instrument has a base sound and details on top of it (you can tell they're all trumpets, but different brands or models. Similarly you can tell they're double basses but they're different in some ways). That base sound starts to erode too when you have a lossy compression, and in turn it affects the sound of the piece, regardless of the finer details (which are mostly affected by resins, bows, styles, etc.).

It's a "these two instruments shouldn't interact like this in this piece. Something is missing!" kind of feeling. This missing part is either something at the high or low end, almost an harmonic. It's not noticeable unless you're looking for it, but it's there.

That difference can be clearly heard by re-encoding a FLAC as a high bitrate MP3 and taking their differences. It's a hiss-like sound by contains a lot of the said harmonics and you can almost listen to the piece just by listening to it. Someone did that and published the differences, but it was some years ago. I'm not sure I can replicate or find the article. That article took differences of the exact same recording but, it can be applied by your brain to different recordings after some time.

Hope I've succeeded to clarify it somewhat. It's something very hard to describe by words. Please ask more questions if you want to. :) I'd be happy to try more.

>My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap

That’s around ¾ the amount of music I carry on my iPhone :-)

The “Speaker Rankings” tab here is useful: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe...

Otherwise, let me know your price range and size constraints, and I’ll refer you to the best engineered (with subjective impressions that back it up) speaker you can get. Note that generally to get good bass response you need larger speakers due to the laws of physics, but more exotic construction can push these boundaries, albeit at the expense of greater cost and electrical power demands.

If you want to know what is objectively far better (and subjectively according to most, as the science predicts), look to the Revel F328Be, Genelec 8351B + Genelec W371A, Kii Three + BXT, Dutch and Dutch 8C. These are very expensive, but even in the worst case they are half the price of the B&W Nautilus and perform far better according to what the state-of-the-art science tells us. And subjectively, this is easily confirmed.

In my comments, I assume that the recording and mastering is done indeed properly. If you can't carry the orchestra's sound to the playback medium, everything is already moot to begin with.

The thing I'm looking is musical dynamics rather than details itself, but it's equally lost with poor recording and mastering as you say, since they're also captured by the microphones. The thing I'm trying to explain was they are not "finer details" like "oh! I hear the bow of that player", but a bigger feeling that the orchestra creates by playing together, and that effect is independent from individual instruments, most of the time.

It's a somewhat difficult concept to put into words and explain. It's more about feeling the music and decoding the brain, and I think it needs some experience. Being unable to translate this into words makes me sad, because it carries music to another dimension IMHO.

This trope that ‘the best audio product for you is a highly subjective personal choice’ directly contradicts decades of well-established science, and is a long-standing myth that plagues this industry — and not coincidentally, serves to sell a ton of over-expensive garbage to under-educated (by design, via marketing bunk) consumers.

If you read ASR’s materials on headphone science and the HD800S review in particular, it will become entirely clear why it sounds the way it does, and what you need to do to EQ it to fix its tonal character issues out of the box.

I own the HD800S and if it wasn’t for the scientifically derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound.

I should add though that headphones are definitely more subjective than speakers. This is because we are shoving a speaker 1 inch from our ears and hoping it will sound like the music is in the room around us instead of actually shoved right up against our ear — and the way this sounds actually does differ from person to person due to different ear canal geometry!

This limitation is not the case for speakers, though! The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people), whereas for headphones this number is not as high (though I don’t know that number off the top of my head).

And you know what’s great about ASR? They explain all this! All you need to do is read their resources and understand what the science does and does not help with.