If it sounds good, it is good

Specs are important, but they can't tell you what only your ears can hear.

Photo Credit: Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash

The audio world is full of buzzwords, specs, and branded features. Each year, the list gets longer, and companies compete with each other to see which one can offer the longest list.

You can see this play out on Amazon’s product pages. Even a budget-priced set of wireless earbuds can have an extensive list of specs.

Since so few of us have the chance to actually try these products, there’s a strong tendency to adopt a checklist approach to buying.

Hi-res audio certification? Check.

Support for advanced Bluetooth codecs? Check.

Spatial audio mode with head tracking? Check.

This tendency is even stronger in the hi-fi and audiophile communities, where obsessing over the composition of a cable, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of an amplifier, or the clock jitter timing of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), can take on a religious zeal.

There’s nothing wrong with ensuring that a product delivers on a certain set of technical expectations. But before you realize it, the checklist has become a stand-in for what matters most: Does it sound good?

As a tech journalist and product reviewer, I’m more aware of this trap than most folks. It’s a professional hazard. The more you learn about how the sausage is made, the more you feel compelled to focus on the ingredients.

This week, as I began researching an upcoming series of articles on Dolby Atmos, I learned that even the people who create the music we adore wrestle with this issue.

It came up during my interview with Guy Fletcher, who, in addition to being an accomplished musician, composer, and audio engineer, is also the person who created the Dolby Atmos mix of Dire Straits’ famous album, Brothers In Arms.

I assumed that, given his facility with the technology of music making, he would be fanatical about achieving a specs-based perfection in his work.

But not only did Guy teach himself how to play by ear — remarkably, he never learned to read music — but he also relies on that hearing-first approach to guide his production process.

“I would much rather trust my ears than trust a scope or a reading or a measurement,” he told me during our chat. It’s not that Guy ignores technical elements. “Measurements are valid and we need measurements to align rooms and do everything that we need to set up a studio control room.” But he’s not ruled by them.

“The bottom line to me has always been, if it sounds good, then it is good.”

It’s a motto that he inherited from his late father, Ted Fletcher, the pioneering audio designer behind the Alice range of mixers and the JoeMeek range of preamps and compressors.

That struck a chord with me. If it’s true that we, as buyers of audio gear, can be lulled into thinking of a spec sheet as a substitute for what we would hear if we could actually try the product, then it’s also true that an audio engineer, staring at a scope instead of trusting what they’re hearing, is making the same trade. The Fletchers had every excuse to let the readout make the decision for them. They didn’t.

Specs matter, as do features, design, materials, etc., because they signify a product’s potential. But they’re not a guarantee of how a set of headphones or a full home theater will sound.

As you’ll see over the next few weeks as I dive into Dolby Atmos, it can be a rabbit hole of technical considerations. Multiple channels, lossy and lossless compression, discrete versus virtualized speakers, binaural rendering … it’s a long list.

I’m not going to shy away from that list — it’s essential to understanding how Atmos works. But the goal isn’t to arm you with a checklist.

The goal is to explain how these specs and features combine to deliver the sound you hear, and why, even when everything looks right on paper, what matters most is: if it sounds good, then it is good.

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