Re: Question for the owner about Tower recommendation
Originally Posted by
JPW
I come from the guitar world, and I've listened to a lot of plain audio recordings, YouTube recordings, album recordings, and so-on comparing different guitar amplifiers and speaker cabinets. I've also heard and/or played many of those same amps/cabinets in person. A Peavey 5150 through Celestial V30's sounds like a Peavey 5150 through V30's, recorded or in person. Of course listening in person gives you the most complete picture, but a Marshall JCM 800 conveys more presence, mids, and brightness on a recording over the Peavey 5150 the same way it does in real life. The same goes for hi-fi speakers in my experience, but to a lesser extent. Recordings can definitely be a useful comparison tool.
I come from the speaker world, and have recently started into the guitar world, and while I think you're right that this works for guitar gear, good speakers are importantly different.
Fundamentally, the primary design goal of good speakers is more or less the same: flat and smooth frequency response both on- and off-axis (which implies neutrality). Most well-designed speakers are all essentially trying to do the same thing, and it's just a question of what got compromised along the way, that is, how well-executed they are. Differences between very good speakers are subtle, and this is not an accident; they are all basically shooting at the same target.
Example: I have a pair of Sierra-2s, and a pair of Philharmonic Mini Philharmonitors. These speakers come from two designers with not only similar design goals, but similar design approaches and even use similar parts. The S2s, mostly by virtue of better woofers and cabinets, have much deeper bass extension—that's easy to hear and you could spot that with a YouTube video for sure. But if you crossed over both speakers at, say, 70Hz, it would be a challenge (probably possible, but not easy) to tell them apart in an in-person blind test. These speakers are trying to do the same thing in pretty much the same way, and they are both well-executed. There's no way on earth you could separate them using a YouTube video.
Guitar amps/cabs are not like this, for one primary reason: they are explicitly trying to sound different. Marshall and Vox (just picked two at random; I'm a bass player—I know, eww—so for me it'd be, say, Ampeg and Darkglass) are, on purpose, shooting at different targets. While good speakers are explicitly trying to not color the sound, designers of (most) guitar gear are doing just the opposite: if they don't color the sound, that's a problem. So of course differences are easy to pick up, even on YouTube videos recorded with crappy mics—differences are the bread and butter of this world.
The other big issue is mono vs. stereo. You can tell essentially nothing about how well stereo speakers image from a single-mic recording, but pretty much all guitar rigs are mono anyway, so that's not a concern.
Luna Duo V2 LR, Titan Horizon V2, and Rythmik L22 & L12 in HT, Sierra-LXs in study, S-2EXs and Duo V2 C in bedroom, S-1 NrTs in dining room, S-1s at work, HTM-200s in kitchen. Brother owns CMT-340s and dad has a pair of CBM-170s.