July 2025

Mixed Senses And Audio Vocabulary
The law of diminishing returns.
Editorial By J. Martins

  Writing about Music is like Dancing about Architecture, someone once said. I did use the sentence a few times, particularly in the years when I was the editor of a music publication and we had to convey in words how a performance or recording made us feel. At the time, I really had to master that art—after all, you want to do justice to artists and their music, and you need to keep readers engaged and wanting to buy the record.

When I'm in a position to judge how things sound and I have to write about it, I am fully conscious that I am describing purely subjective impressions that are frequently ephemeral and subject to shift under different conditions, or at another time.

Is Writing about Audio Like Painting about Philosophy?

Yes, the process of picking words to describe emotions and general sensory perception is a bit like philosophy. It can be systematic, reflect critical thinking, and employ logical analysis, conceptual clarification, and argumentation.

Robert Harley (of Absolute Sound fame) uses words such as tone color, and liquidity, to describe sounds, and I get it. To see a speaker described as "sounded big, majestic, and hugely dynamic" (also Robert Harley) doesn't seem out of place to me, and while used to describe purely subjective impressions of a system, they are words that speakers' designers would pick.

It is a different problem when I read "This amp sounds better than any other I've heard," or "this cable has a textured midrange," because sensorial perception is in that case circuitous. Much like an acoustic engineer is one that sounds hollow when we hit it, an amp or cable only "sounds" if we drop it or whip it. If "the treble is smoother" it must be the tweeter in the speaker. How an amp drives that speaker is certainly relevant and affects sound...

A listening test of an audio signal chain is a process challenged by a great number of variables, while the art of defining subjective impressions is even more complex and intricate. Yet, when it comes to audio electronics, we are constantly forced to exercise that art form. "The sound was too bright," someone was saying about one of the rooms at AXPONA. It was probably the room, but anyone attending the show will find this a natural thing to say, because we all agree on intent.

For decades now, research on the language used to describe sensory perception in the context of listening tests or auditory perception research has been an abundant field. Sometimes, that research produces actual reference material and inspires standardization efforts for classification. A recommended such effort is the ITU-R BS.2399-0 1 report "Methods for selecting and describing attributes and terms, in the preparation of subjective tests"—which contains The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Audio Wheel for reproduced sound.

Also fascinating are the recent studies comparing that classification in other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, revealing a different set of language-specific patterns with numerous implications. Think about that, the next time you do a demo of your amplifier at an audio show in China.

This is all the more relevant since we are now struggling to find excitement when measuring today's amplifier stages. Objective reviews are increasingly a futile effort to work around the limits of even our best audio measurement tools. And even when we get the measurements, we struggle to find words to describe them, as Stuart Yaniger recently wrote in an audioXpress review: "The measurements were, frankly, boring. How so? I was so often just looking at the baseline noise and distortion of the audio analyzer."

Many of our colleagues from consumer audio publications struggle between showing objective characterizations that are meaningless to their readerships, while trying to convey in words the subjectivity of their experience. Even harder in high-end audio, when writing about improvements in sound quality from audio amplifiers that cost more than a car or a house. One needs to admire their Herculean efforts, even when not agreeing with Robert Harley's notion that astronomical price tags result in "accelerating returns" or substantial improvements and significant benefits. Yes, I do agree that the listening experience and emotional engagement cannot be replaced by technical measurements alone, but I have a very different view about the law of diminishing returns in audio product development.

J. Martins
Editor-in-Chief

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