The sound of cymbals..........

Graham, valid question, as I feel you will get a dozen or so different answers, although a simple one is only required, a musical system, is complete, in that it draws you into the emotion and involvement of the preformance, whilst keeping the Realness of the event, be it Studio produced or Live stage/ concert hall, all the things like timbre/slam/dynamic's/stage/image/timing and groove, are 'Melded together' forming a musical bond, that is just there, it may not be the most pin point accurate or ultimate openness, or even mega groove, but it does connect, giving the Music, and that is it, in the world according to garp, we can discuss, propose theroy/counter theroy until mana turns to dust, but regardless of cost/equipment and/or placing, as soon as you hear those first notes, you KNOW weather a system either has it not. WM

 

I think that if anything, HiFi makes Cymbals, even on crappy systems sound a lot better then they do in real life.

Now at least a good handful of you must have been in a room with a drummer. I myself am a guitarist and have played with a few drummers over the past few years and the Cymbals are the most horrible noises created when your in the same room or on a stage. I dont know anything that creates such a deafaning, unbearable din such as a drummer hitting cymbals...

Now if hifi reproduced THAT sound it would not be listenable at all! Even live recordings take away the loud crash that makes any other musician shout to drummers to SHUT UP when trying to tune their instrument.

Thank god for HIFI making cymbals listenable!

 

Sorry.....logic error....does not compute

I don't actually agree that a cymbal sounds horrible, although I agree good reproduction doesn't really aid easy and or background listening.

I guess having asked the question, I need to answer it myself. I think the thing I'm most sensitive to is hi-fi's sins of comission above sins of omission, i.e. I'd prefer for it not to introduce obvious distortion than to fail to capture the genuine leading edge. And I really don't want to be reminded with every note that it's coming from a magnet and a bit of paper, rather than a bit of wood and dead cat. Shoving a load of tizz around strings, cymbals, piccolos etc does more to destroy the enjoyment of music for me than any loss of dynamics/attack. Of course I want both.

So my priorities that contribute to musical enjoyment in descending order are:
1) Lack of tizz around highish-frequency notes
2) Vanishing speakers
3) Dynamics
4=) Clarity
4=) Spatial layout
6) "Timing"
So for me the sound of a cymbal addresses 1 and 4, so is a fairly good test - although a violin section is a tougher test for me, as a) I'm more familiar with its sound and b) it is a far more dominant sound in the music I mainly listen to.

But IMO the real life in music comes from the performance - a great performance on a crappy system will give me more enjoyment than a crap performance on the best system in the world - and this is where I do get sensitive to timing and subtle dynamics. There is of course a spectrum here - some will much prefer stunning performances recorded in the 1920s over good ones from nowadays, even though the sound is rubbish, and others will only be happy with the top quality recordings from Reference Recordings or Chesky or... - but I'm somewhere in the middle, give me a very good performance from the last 30 years and I'm happy.

This is veering more to the "ambinence" thread, but I made and interesting observation last night: I've been waxing lyrical about how fantastic this new amp is, but after being at a concert of Haydn played on period instruments last night, I came home and played something similar...and it was soooo far off - mainly in the clarity and cleanness of the instrumental sound, but there was still a little tizz around the strings.

I'm not sure whether the attributes of a system that plays classical superbly well will also be equally good at playing jazz, rock or dance/techno - I can't see any reason why not - but I'm pretty sure than the compromises required to meet a budget will result in a different system lower down the food chain.

 

GrahamN.......wish I'd said that.

Could not agree more !!

 

yaaay another guitarist!

please post lots more.



Chris

 

Pah !! .. you guitarists and your oversensitive ears !!

I have to say.. as a drummer.. (part-time recreational only!).. I couldn't dissagree more... It is true that a lot of drummers only seem to think that cymbals should be hit as hard as possible under all circumstances.. but the sign of a good drummer is less to do with timing than it is to do with dynamics... Until I took some lessons from some professional drummers.. I always believed that the differering levels of the various bits of the kit like you hear on recorded music were all obtained by the engineer in the mixing stage. I now know that with good drummers at least that is most definitely NOT the case.. I've heard many a pro.. giving a workshop and they sound exactly like a recorded and mixed drum kit does on an album. I've no idea what particular brand and model of cymbals the drummers you played with used.. but I would say that combine cheap cymbals with an inexperienced/average(ish) drummer and the usual result is one hell of a racket in the cymbal dept. However... I have to stress that cymbals only sound like a "deafening unbearable din" when they're..

a) too cheap and nasty to do anything but go loud, (cheap being a relative term as good cymbals are damn expensive).
b) being played by a mediocre drummer..(even rock drummers play the top end of the kit with dynamics.. at least good ones do).
c) combination of a) and b)

However, having said that .. there are some cymbal sounds that you hear on recordings that are only possible due to the eq'ing of the recording engineer.

GTM