Originally posted by DLF
I remember watching one of the Royal Society lectures they used to show on BBC2 over the summer. They had an experiment where they recorded the same note on a violin and a piano. When played back you could easily differentiate the two instruments. They then edited the recordings to remove the leading edge or 'attack'. When played back the two recordings sounded identical. The leading edge, although a small part of the waveform, is obviously rather important.
David
Spot on; or, as our German friends would say, Genau.
Caution: Boring member coming in :rds2:
What DLF said is quite true. Let's skip electronic instruments. Let's concentrate on acoustic ones. And let's take as an example the flute. The body of the flute sound is very pure and almost tuning fork like. However, it definitely doesn't sound that way. There are many factors involved here, but one of them is that the initial sound - the 'leading edge', is actually not pure at all: the air hitting the edge causes turbulence and that turbulence has a definite effect in the body of the sound.
This also happens with speech. If you make a talking machine composed of consonants and vowels and just string them together (can= k+e+~), you get an unintelligible cackle. To be intelligible, the consonant bit must intermesh with the vowel bit giving it a quite different aural effect (psychological, not physical).
Returning to instruments most studies were achieved with organ pipes. Now, an organ pipe is essentially a flute, but you may voice it quite differently: even if you don't change harmonic content, the difference between the attack transients (the initial 'chif' determines, to a very large effect, the sound you listen; that is, the body of the note, after the transient is acoustically affected by the attack.
But all this, I think, is not in dispute. What Tones wants to know is if there are differences in reproduction capability here.
Now, for once, I disagree with you Tones: there definitely are such differences. Incidentally, that is why I chose the Lavardin. Take the Moon amplifier, or the Chord, the YBA, for instance. When listening to a very chiffy organ, the sound is a mess: none of the amplifiers I listened to had the resolution to actually recreate all the initial jangle of inharmonic sounds. With the Lavardin, which is very transparent, they become much clearer - and hence, the sound colour is much more true to life.
If anything, I'd say that is the most important single factor distinguishing amplifiers: the ability to resolve very complex transients.
But the Lavardin is quite different from all the other amplifiers I heard, and that is why I bought it. Most electronic equipments have a messy transient attack. The valve ones much less so. I don't know the technical reasons, but this seems to be a constant fact.
Well. I didn't solve the problem, but I hope I added to the confusion.