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Timbre:
Definition according to American National Standards Institutde (ANSI): The combination of qualities of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds of the same pitch and volume.
Timbre is also known as tone quality or tone color. It is sometimes described as sound quality. The term quality in this context refers to how a sound comes across to a listener as the general character of the sound.
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments. More specifically, timbre enables the listener to identify the source of the sound ( the particular musical instrument making the sound) and according to some musical type such as brass or string instruments. For example, timbre is what people use to distinguish a trumpet from a saxophone if both instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and loudness. No amount of equalization will make the two instruments sound the same.
Pitch:
In music, pitch is the perception of the fundamental frequency of a note. Pitch is something perceived by the human ear, as opposed to frequency, the physical measurement of vibration. Pitch of a sound is determined by the frequency of vibration of the sound waves reaching the ear: the greater the frequency, the higher the pitch.
Pitch can be rank ordered on a scale from low to high and loudness can be arranged on a scale from soft to loud. We generally correlate pitch with fundamental frequency and loudness with intensity.
Timbre is different than pitch and loudness and cannot be reduced to one-dimensional scale. It cannot be related with any one physical dimension of a sound. We cannot say high timbre or low timbre. This makes the definition of timbre very vague.
Timbre and equalization are different by definition and no amount of equalization will have any effect on timbre. Equalization simply increases or decreases the level of certain frequencies. After equalization you can still distinguish between the speakers.
Remember, timbre is an aberration in loudspeakers. The only timbre that should be present is the timbre of the instruments being reproduced.
I can, and do use totally different speakers, but they all match because they don't have timbre.
I was in this guys studio in Minneapolis Friday.
Greg Reierson is in the front rank of mastering engineers.
I brought commercial CD,s and some of my own masters transferred to CD.
Those PMC XMB1s sounded just like what I'm used to. From memory I could have just as easily been here in Benedict. They did not have timbre.
The cost of those speakers new was $27,000. So speakers without timbre do not come cheap, but they are out there.
I was quite surprised that he wanted one of my productions for demo.
It was a recording featuring the Chestnut Brass in the Chester Fritz Auditorium, on the UND campus from 1991.
