Overdrive, Amps and other observations.

olafgarten

I was talking to a friend who is a hifi nut (or audiophile if you prefer) about Guitar Amps, and he brought up the point that with amps in general Overdrive and Distortion are negative qualities and so with Guitar Amps we are looking for amps which are really bad at amplifying things. 

Even with Clean Tones,  we are looking for the amp to impart its own tone on the signal, rather than being transparent like a hifi. 

In a way we are looking for something which is the worst, but in the best way. 

On the other hand, my friend recently spent £500 on a cable to connect his turntable to his amp when he only spent £300 on the turntable itself, so this could be the ramblings of someone who is insane. 

Winny_Pooh

If you have ever plugged your guitar direct into your hifi or PA you will know why. Because electric guitars naturally sound like shit.

edbolivar

Totally different things.

A HiFi amp's job is to faithfully amplify the finished piece of music that has been produced and mastered, using a reliable source. The creative process has been completed, hopefully to the artists satisfaction. The HiFi's job is a very simple one (albeit often expensive to do right), and that is simply to not be noticed, to add no colour.

A guitar amp is very much part of the creative process, by design (now, not so much in the very early days) it has the potential for a variety of sounds that we can choose to deliver and express our music.
 
It is almost an instrument of itself, in that the same amp can sound good and bad depending on who is playing it.

The HiFi should sound the same, irrespective of who presses play...

Therefore, the means of measuring a good one is very different in both cases, as they have very different jobs and therefore design briefs

ICBM

Winny_Pooh said:

If you have ever plugged your guitar direct into your hifi or PA you will know why. Because electric guitars naturally sound like shit.

Not always - it depends on the guitar. I've discovered that I really like some semi-acoustics DI'd, for an 'electric-acoustic' sound that isn't as pingy and piezo-y as a standard electro. I agree it doesn't sound great with most solidbodies though.

Essentially an electric guitar amp is a sound producer, whereas a hi-fi amp is a sound reproducer. The electric guitar amp is part of the instrument.

A very good rule of thumb - not always true, but very often and a good starting point - is that although precisely the same physics applies to both, if something is better for hi-fi you should do the exact opposite for electric guitar, and vice versa.

Sassafras

Do you mean I've wasted a 150 quid on my Mad Professor Red directional cable even though it spins electrons in a guitar friendly way?

ThePrettyDamned

So what are studio monitors? 

Surely there is no need for a hi fi that does anything other than what studio monitors do -which is what music is mastered on, therefore is designed to sound good with. 

Or have I missed a piece of the puzzle? 

ICBM

Studio monitors are designed more to be 'revealing' rather than sounding 'nice' - which can make them fatiguing to listen to for long periods, compared to hi-fi speakers. Obviously this means that at least one type isn't perfectly accurately reproducing the input signal! But that's only ever a theoretically attainable goal anyway since all speakers are limited by physics to some extent or another, so in reality neither are and it's just a question of what characteristics you want to hear.

Dave_Mc

ICBM said:

Studio monitors are designed more to be 'revealing' rather than sounding 'nice' - which can make them fatiguing to listen to for long periods

Bit like the audiophiles themselves

guitarfishbay

Studio monitors don't have to be fatiguing to be good. Though that also depends on if the music is fatiguing..

ThePrettyDamned

guitarfishbay said:

Studio monitors don't have to be fatiguing to be good. Though that also depends on if the music is fatiguing..

Well why bother paying silly money for a hi fi if studio monitors would do? 

It seems hi fi is designed to sound nice - but surely that would depend on how the music was mixed. 

So why not mix on a high end hi fi? No one listens to music on studio monitors. 

richardhomer

ThePrettyDamned said:
Well why bother paying silly money for a hi fi if studio monitors would do? 

It seems hi fi is designed to sound nice - but surely that would depend on how the music was mixed. 

So why not mix on a high end hi fi? No one listens to music on studio monitors. 

Studio monitors tend to be optimised for listening at relatively close quarters - hi fi speakers aren't. Monitors are often designed to handle higher power/volume than domestic speakers.

The kind of powered monitors people use on home recording set ups are not comparable to high-end hi fI in terms of quality. At the top end, companies like Bower & Wilkens produce both monitors and hi fI speakers which sound exceptional in terms of clarity and tonal balance.

guitarfishbay

The sky is the limit. I've been in a room with £40k PMCs, my monitors may be nice for a home setup but there's still a whole other level of studio speaker just like there are really high end hifi speakers.

Then, there are these

http://hifilounge.co.uk/focal-grande-utopia-em-floorstanding-speakers

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

Well why bother paying silly money for a hi fi if studio monitors would do? 

It seems hi fi is designed to sound nice - but surely that would depend on how the music was mixed. 

So why not mix on a high end hi fi? No one listens to music on studio monitors. 

That's not what you want for monitoring - you want to hear every flaw rather than a 'nice' sound. If you mix on hi-fi speakers you're likely to produce a mix which sounds great on those, but might sound odd or bad on different hi-fi speakers or some other system, because there's something wrong that was hidden on the first speakers. Monitors are designed to be very clear so that doesn't happen - but it also means that you probably won't like them for listening for pleasure.

Analogy: we like playing guitar through valve amps, even clean, because they sound warm and have subtle natural compression which makes it easy to play. Solid-state amps tend to be 'harder'-sounding and aren't as compressed, so you need to be more careful how you play. Useful as a teaching amp, but most of us generally don't find them as nice.

Of course that means that hi-fi speakers aren't actually perfectly reproducing the input signal - monitors are probably closer - but when has anything in the hi-fi world needed to be actually true?

TTBZ

I use a pair of Mackie MR5 for my pc "Hi fi" speakers. I didn't see the point in going down the real hifi rabbit hole and they sound great for anything. So much nicer than normal pc speakers and they're useful for recording as well.

ecc83

This myth comes up in audio forums from time to time, that "high fidelity" speakers are somehow "hyped" to make music sound better. It is of course a contradiction in terms. "Hi fi means accurate reproduction, ideally nothing added or taken away. "Sweeten" the speakers and they can no longer deliver fidelity!

Probably the first truly hi fi speakers were the Quad electrostatics. They were such a revelation in their lack of colouration, and low distortion that they were quickly adopted by most major cutting houses for QC (they could not really be used as studio monitors since they could not deliver the 100dB+ SPLs of the huge speakers then in use such as the 15" Tannoy concentrics. )

Anyone who followed the QUALITY audio press in the 70, and beyond will remember such names as Castle, Rogers, Harbeth, Spendor, KEF and others whose aim was always to make ACCURATE loudspeakers . Rogers especially had the LS35/A which was designed as a mobile "truck" monitor but sold as essentially the same speaker for domestic use.

Monitors tiring? Some maybe, the NS10s are supposed to be a bit strident but I can listen to my Tannoy 5As for hours of Radio 3, rock and jazz and talk programmes.

The term "hi fi" has become devalued and is almost a bad word to describe indifferent "audio" and that is a shame.

Dave.