when discussing speakers and such I often run into quite a bit of terminology describing sonic qualities which I am not too familiar with. If somebody says that there is a -6 dB/octave falloff above 10 kHz or 3% THD below 100 Hz at 100 dB/SPL or irritating phase cancellation due to comb-filter effects I know exactly what they mean. But when somebody says for example that a speaker is "bright" - now what is that?

And what about "imaging", "sound stage" and the like?

Thanks for any clarifications!
/Magnus

Bad analogy.

To the original point, the English language is pretty poorly equipped to describe sonic phenomena, so it borrows terms. Hence "bright", "dark", "muddy", "soundstage", etc.

look I was not trying to say that sound perception by any means can be fully quantified just by a few technical parameters. I have played clarinet for years in both symfonic orchestras and jazz bands and yes, good music is nothing you read from a diagram, even if it is three dimensional. It is simply that I hear a lot of words that I do not know the correct meaning of (especially since my native language is Swedish and not English). If you, for example say that is sounds like sitting in a tin can I understand fully what you mean (looking at an FFT plot of this particular sound would probably tell me absolute nothing). But when somebody said "bright" or "good imaging" it was not obvious to me what that was referring to. Now that you have explained the terms I know better. Thanks for the clarification!

/Magnus

its annoying because 'bright' for one person ,may mean 'harsh ' for another.

I think that when people dont have freq response graphs,FFTs it becomes the only way to do it.

Theres no solid quantification.

'HIFI' magazines are bad for this..however they do test the DVD players to test signal - noise ratios-when its already very excessively good! haha.

Cheers

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