Hardest genre to reproduce accurately

I truly believe it all depends on your speakers and slightly at the recording. I use Klipsch HII's which when using a well pressed album reproduces classical, jazz, and acoustic accurately. Rock is good, anything with distortion not so well. Welcome back 2010 thread, we missed ya!
 
I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but in my opinion, the answer is classical, and particularly classical piano.

I feel like you'd have to spend loads of dough to even have reproduced classical piano approach "real". Don't get me wrong, Mozart sounds great in my system, but not in a genuine way, as does rock.

Agreed, piano. Hard, fast strike. Metallic main body with decay. Wood resonance. So easy to blur, so easy to lose something. Live recordings are so much better. Studio piano does not have the dynamics. It would seem the nuances are lost the moment the mixer pushes a slider.
 
Definitely depends on the recording side too, I agree. With voices, the mic and recording technique is at least as much the culprit as the speakers. Probably with piano too I suspect (but I don't have that much experience at hearing pianos in concert, nor on recordings)
 
Stereophile has a mic sampler and a pretty decent piano track on one of their test CDs, also includes an acoustic polarity test track.
 
You build your system to the type of music you like. By far the least favorite type of music to show off equipment is thrasher metal. Ever heard a high end system try it? I have. It just does not sound good because the stuff is pretty much horribly produced. But when you go to high end audio stores or to shows you'll get lots of Diana Krall. Ever heard thrasher metal on ribbons or electrostatics? they are okay at low volumes. Crank it up. Horns? Crank that metal up. Talk about a bright top end. About the only good speakers I've heard handle it are the big boy conventional speakers---Dunlavy scvi.

So I think that genre of music is the toughest to sound good loud & cranked up. Most systems are going to have major distortion problems at medium volumes. It'll show problems upstream and downstream and there's not much you can please because it was also poorly recorded. Just try sitting there picking out the tons of problems as to why it doesn't sound good. Brutal. But who does that? A lot easier dealing with accoustic music with zero dynamics.
 
Most rock/pop recordings are not difficult to reproduce. They generally don't have a lot of dynamic range nor do they have much in the way of extreme lows or highs. What's difficult is hiding their awful sound. A good system doesn't cause that distortion it just lets you hear what's on the recording.

If a given recording doesn't sound good when played loud on a good system it's almost always the result of a poor recording. You're just hearing what's there. A lesser system is probably masking those nasties. I'd rather have a revealing system. But then, my music of choice is mostly classical and jazz. Those two types tend to be well recorded.
 
Large scale pipe organs/works. Many amps flatten the sound out on high demand passages, cheap digital strips the detail and sonorous nature of the instrument, and a majority of speakers cringe at reproducing such energy. Mids break up, bass is sloppy and uncontrolled, and the upper registers become shriekingly awful. Atworst, the whole presentation collapses into place, rendering the experience as an awful one.
 
I find Balinese Gamelan music very hard to reproduce.

Usually I like thundering this out of my system 8am every sunday morning, my neighbours really love it too.

Some of the nicer clattering aspects (sounding similar to all the pots falling out of an overloaded kitchen cupboard upon opening it) sound good - with the upper-mid registers resonating nicely at bone-jarring frequencies.

But some of the lower-end clanging of metal djembe drums are very hard to reproduce naturally.

NO-FEE-6-NCH-Gamelan-Presentation-735x400.jpg
 
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To me, no question. The human voice. I consider it the most complex of musical instruments.

Others may disagree.
 
You build your system to the type of music you like. By far the least favorite type of music to show off equipment is thrasher metal. Ever heard a high end system try it? I have. It just does not sound good because the stuff is pretty much horribly produced. But when you go to high end audio stores or to shows you'll get lots of Diana Krall. Ever heard thrasher metal on ribbons or electrostatics? they are okay at low volumes. Crank it up. Horns? Crank that metal up. Talk about a bright top end. About the only good speakers I've heard handle it are the big boy conventional speakers---Dunlavy scvi.

So I think that genre of music is the toughest to sound good loud & cranked up. Most systems are going to have major distortion problems at medium volumes. It'll show problems upstream and downstream and there's not much you can please because it was also poorly recorded. Just try sitting there picking out the tons of problems as to why it doesn't sound good. Brutal. But who does that? A lot easier dealing with accoustic music with zero dynamics.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

I always 'voice' out my systems to favor the midrange at the expense of the top and bottom if necessary, and focus on tonal nuance, to get that crucial middle just right. Because I love vocals. And it's where most of the music lives to me.

And because nothing lights my musical fire like a top female voice can (Some male vocals too. Still enjoy my early mono Sinatra). And that's why I have a menu of primarily female artists selections to dial in any system.

Sadly, Nancy Wilson, who we just lost, was one of those voices.
 
I played quite a few of the 14 Nancy Wilson LP's I have yesterday. Give Jacintha a listen. She has a superb voice and all her recordings are reference quality.
 
I agree with piano. Covering just more than 7 octaves, with a ton of acoustic power, complex timbre, and wide dynamics, I've never heard a convincing piano reproduced, whether that means you-are-there or it-is-here. The piano, live, has a commanding presence and an expansive sound that can make the hairs on the back of the neck rise. I've read that there are some systems way beyond my pay-grade that come close.

My system sounds reasonably pleasant playing back solo piano recordings, and gets a lot of things right, but no one will be looking up to see whether there is a piano in the room. Very hard nut to crack.
 
I agree that orchestra and piano are tough to get right because of their range, and human voice because it's so familiar. But instruments with sharp transients like brass and percussion are also tough to make realistic, although for different reasons. Those are where efficient speakers like horns shine. Less efficient speakers convert too much of the power of those transients into heat, blunting the impact.
 
I agree that orchestra and piano are tough to get right because of their range, and human voice because it's so familiar. But instruments with sharp transients like brass and percussion are also tough to make realistic, although for different reasons. Those are where efficient speakers like horns shine. Less efficient speakers convert too much of the power of those transients into heat, blunting the impact.
The trouble with exponential horns is that they aren't natural on acoustic strings and voice, tho' great for brass and percussion.
 
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