The cone material is only part of the chain. Just as important is the speaker acoustic environment. The most exotic speakers you can name can sound like “you know what” in a poor room.
''It seems you don’t believe the importance of transients when it comes to your brain identifying the instrument playing the tune.
Many years ago, as an exercise in note reading, I took a familiar song and wrote a backwards score of that song to be played into a tape recorder. Played backwards, the tune is totally unfamiliar and so I had to actually read the notes as I was playing the song, I couldn’t cheat and play by ear or memory.
Then I ran the tape backwards to check my playing and the song sounded right but the instrument I was playing (violin) sounded totally unlike a violin because the decays of the notes were now the attacks and the attacks of the notes were now the decays."
Yes that’s all very nice. Jimi Hendrix beat you to it. You mischaracterize my position:
“the information in the sound that identifies an instrument is not in the tone of the sound, but in the transitions from silence to tone and tone to silence, also known as the attack and decay of the sound.”
"That’s right! Nothing whatsoever to do with overtones! That’s why pipe organs (pick a stop) are indistinguishable from the human voice, or the harmonica. Nailed it! "
As for Strawberry Fields, the instrument is clearly a flute. You seem to be saying you can’t identify an instrument if you don’t hear the attack and decay. That’s bogus.
“dagosa July 19
The cone material is only part of the chain. Just as important is the speaker acoustic environment. The most exotic speakers you can name can sound like “you know what” in a poor room”
That is true. Actual musical instruments even sound like “you know what” in a poor room or concert hall.
Another 2¢ from me: Instruments DO have differences in their tone other than the attack and decay. Cheap stereo equipment tends to mask the different tonal colors of instruments to a good degree. I play and practice on some very large pipe organs (one of which is pictured in my little avatar at the beginning of my posts), I have a Hammond B-3 variant at home, and I can assure you all that a Hammond will absolutely NOT match the overtones of a pipe organ, especially a pipe organ with a fairly full stop combination drawn! The drawbar harmonics of a Hammond are not even tuned as true harmonics, they are just hard-wired to another equally tempered note.