High End Audio Terminology — Transparency and Imaging

I have spent 20+ years in the High End Audio Arena and have a few things to say :-)

Transparency and Imaging. Heard these terms often? These two attributes combined are what defines and sets apart high-end audio from HiFi or normal mass market audio systems. Unfortunately, they are not well understood or amply demonstrated, leaving a ‘grey’ area in the high-end Audio world, causing a reasonable amount of audio babble and not enough clarity.

This article seeks to convincingly explain and simplify the concept, hopefully putting you on a path to identifying and realizing these two aspects of the High-End audio system.

Imaging is relatively easy to understand, transparency a little more complex. To me, these 2 aspects combined, form the raison d’etre of the high-end audio world.

Understanding Transparency:

Most audiophiles when asked about transparency reply that it is the attribute where the audio components (player, amp, speakers, cables) that are reproducing music do not add any of their own colour / signature / distortion to the sound. The components just let the music through, as recorded, without lending any character to it. That’s fair and accurate to some extent, but incomplete because it doesn’t give you a complete picture how how this definition translates into a hearing experience. To truly understand transparency, we need to understand what lies at the heart of the meaning of the word ‘transparency’ itself and quantify the concept in audible terms — In other words… When I hear music, how do I know that the system playing it is ‘transparent’?

Those who know me will always be used to my use of analogies, so let’s define transparency with a simple visual analogy.

You have perfect 20/20 vision. You need to enter a chemical laboratory but have to wear a set of protective glasses to prevent damage to your eyes. So, what would quantify a great pair of these laboratory glasses?

1. Glasses should be so well designed (light, ergonomic and suited to your face) that you feel you are not wearing a physical product at all. You don’t feel any weight around your ears nor feel the frame obstructing the bridge of your nose and you can wear them for the longest time without feeling fatigued.

2. The glasses are wide and large and do not obstruct your field of vision, so when you look side-to-side or up and down, you get a clear, unobstructed view of the scene in front of you, not hampered by the frame or the extent of the size of the glasses. You are able to visualize the scene in front of you in its entirety, without obstruction.

3. And… The lens is so crystal clear and distortion free that when you look through them, it feels that you are not looking through a lens at all. You can just see the scene in front of you, in all its detailed visual glory. The lens, apart from being the clearest, most undistorted piece of glass, is also free from dirt, dust and stains.

In other words, you now know that you are wearing a pair of glasses but the vision around you is still so undistorted and clear and dynamically entire — just as you would see it with our own eyes — that it feels that you are not wearing a set of glasses at all.

This is transparency…

I have sometimes caught myself checking to see if a sliding door really exists by squinting at all angles, just to make sure I’m not walking into the glass door, because it feels so clear and transparent that I am unable to see the glass at all.

So, when you wear glasses and you know and realize that now, your vision is through a set of lenses, you have lost that ultimate transparency that makes the world around you so clear.

Coming back to the audio system now. Let me quantify and correlate the 3 visual transparency points above to the audio world.

1. Just as a really comfortable set of glasses, the audio system must prevent any listening fatigue. You can listen to the music for long sessions, the end to end of an album and all you feel is that you are listening to the music, not a music system — there is a sense of comfort and a non-fatiguing nature that allows you to just listen and keep listening.

2. Just like the glasses that allow complete unobstructed vision in all directions (up, down, left and right) with seemingly no limits, except your vision itself, and without ever making the frame of the glasses obvious, the audio system must be dynamically unfettered as well. When the music goes loud, the system responds easily, just providing the loudness that you require. There is seemingly no physical limitation to the dynamics and the loudness of the music that you are hearing.

3. And … the system is so free from any audible distortion and extraneous electronic and electrical character that the audio components seem to disappear from the room and you are left with a wall-to-wall air curtain of sound. Even as you observe and see the speakers and electronics physically in the room, you do not feel that the sound is coming from them.

Transparency is the ability of the music to be free of the music system and ultimately just hang around in the space between the speakers. In other words, even though you are physically seeing the hardware and know it’s there, you never feel that the hardware is making the music.

Transparency can also be considered as the audio hardware’s ability to completely disappear and leave you with just the music. And as you look at the audio equipment in front of you, you will still have this unbelievable feeling that the music is not being generated by these components.

So, how do you recognize or cultivate the ability to recognize audio transparency.

Its pretty easy actually. Ask your guitarist friend to pick up his guitar and sit in front of you and play a few chords and sing along with the words of a song. No music system, no complex hardware, just the guitar and the voice. This is the most transparent you will hear your audio. Nothing but the guitar and the voice, the pluck of the strings, the harmonics of the decay and the character of the room interacting with the sound waves. Or the next time you are at the local fair and you hear the army band making music as they march along — hear the character of the horns and the unfettered dynamic of the bass drum. Nothing in between, just the music — and you are hearing transparency in all its glory.

As you observe these sounds, you will recognize this character of transparency when you hear them through a high-end audio system.

Understanding Imaging:

Imaging, thankfully, is a simpler concept to understand.

Let’s go back to that laboratory once again, remove our glasses and look around. For kicks, we’ll make it a Quantum Chemical Lab. You are seeing 4 white walls, a ceiling and a floor, a rectangular room of a defined height, width and depth. In the center of the room there is a large laboratory table with a wash basin towards one side. On the table is a whole bunch of pipettes, burettes, test tubes and various Bunsen burners. Standing behind the desk and directing the action is a certain animated Quantum Alchemist furiously pouring chemicals from a test tube into a crucible over the Bunsen flame. There is a large picture of Schrodinger on the wall directly to the right of the table.

Hah, you don’t have to remember the details.

Suffice to know that what you are observing is a dynamic and 3-dimensional representation of your visual world. Each and every object has a defined place in this space-time construct — each item has 3 dimensions to it and is positioned accurately in a 3-dimensional world. Your visual wave function of this scene will never collapse — it remains vivid, 3-dimensional and dynamic.

Now back to our audio world. imaging is exactly the audible version of the visual above. When you listen to the music you must be able to hear every instrument, sound and voice from a predefined and definite and accurate point / space from the wall-to-wall curtain of transparent sound that we described in the Transparency section.

So, consider that you are sitting in front and center of a pair of stereo speakers (you are at one corner of a symmetrical triangle).

You should hear every audible note in the music occupying a particular point in space, defining the original spatial character of the performance. The singer’s voice should come and hang from the center of the two speakers, directly in front of you, at around the same height of his / her mouth. The pianist should be somewhere off center to the left (let’s say) and the sound of the piano should be at waist height. Similarly, the sound of the double bass maybe somewhere to the right of and behind the lead singer and the drummer will be positioned at the center back.

If you can hear the instruments at all these predetermined positions, center, left and right including the layers of depth, you have an audible image of the original performance and this beautiful audio phenomenon is called Imaging.

Why don’t you hear Transparency and Imaging often or at all?

It’s a true limitation, even failure of high end audio demonstrations when most people who walk into a high end audio showroom are unable to hear these 2 capabilities of an audio system.

Why is it so hard to achieve?

Transparency and Imaging go hand-in-hand. To achieve one, you must have the other.

For both, the first and most important aspect is the quality of design and engineering of the audio components.

Sidebar: I must say this alluding against the price of the product. I always maintain that you can achieve high end without exorbitant pricing.

In fact, many high-end products, unfortunately, incorporate cost without adding value.

This is why more expensive systems do not necessarily mean better audible quality. (I intend to write a whole separate piece on this in some time, with some examples of blatantly expensive products in the audio world that are more superfluity than substance, more claimed extravagance than engineering).

But back to Transparency and Imaging

Let’s assume, you are in a high-end showroom and most likely, the quality of the products is not the issue. Why no Transparency and Imaging then? Simply because both these are concepts are very intrinsic to the psycho-acoustics of human hearing and knowledge of room acoustics; concepts unfortunately not well understood by most high-end audio professionals. Achieving transparency and imaging is also very troublesome and requires minute and infinitesimal adjustments in room acoustics and speaker and listener positioning, to achieve. Something that the audio guys are not ready or willing to do. It is so much easier to demonstrate a music track, expound the equipment, show off the numerous What HiFi Stars instated to these products and speak off the terminology of high end with no requirement of understanding or meaning. Can’t really blame them; if the burden of choice is on the customer and the customer is not aware or unsure, why take the trouble to go through the hassle, eh?

But here’s the other side of the story. As a customer, you must insist on questioning the veracity and extent of those terms. Tell them that you are unable to hear the great musical stories that are being extolled by the audio system and make them aware that they have work to do beyond talking like HiFi bots.

And begin your simple listening journey by observing the natural world of sounds around you.

The next article will be about achieving Transparency and Imaging in your listening space, understanding the limitations and avoiding common mistakes

— Stand by.