David Chesky on "ringing"

The World is a Bell, and it wants to RING!

Walk up to a piano, strike a single key, and listen closely. What you hear is not just a note — it’s a sympathetic vibration, a resonance that arises because the string naturally wants to vibrate at its fundamental frequency. The same happens with a guitar, a drum, a wine glass, or even a sheet of metal. Everything in our physical world has a resonant frequency, a natural mode of vibration, a note it wants to sing. The universe is, quite literally, a concert of ringing.

Audio reproduction is no different.

Your loudspeaker box is the most obvious example — a large resonant cavity with panels that flex and radiate sound in unintended ways. But it's not just the box. Your amplifier chassis, your cables, your digital-to-analog converter (DAC), even the circuit boards and power transformers — everything vibrates, and thus everything rings.

This became viscerally apparent to me recently in the studio while comparing linear-phase equalizers to minimum-phase EQs. Set to identical filter shapes, the sonic difference was striking. Linear-phase filters preserve phase relationships across the spectrum but introduce pre-ringing artifacts — a kind of temporal smear that occurs before the transient. Minimum-phase filters, by contrast, do all their damage after the transient, creating post-ringing that, while technically less "accurate," can feel more musically natural to the ear.

The ear can hear this ringing — not as an overt tone, but as a kind of blur, a clouding of the leading edge of a note, an inability to localize or feel immediacy. And this is just from a software filter. Now imagine the cumulative effect of every physical object in the playback chain doing its own version of ringing, from capacitors to cables, from enclosures to air gaps.

This may also explain why people still love vinyl. LP playback is, from a technical standpoint, riddled with flaws — mechanical noise, surface wear, channel crosstalk, limited dynamic range. And yet, it's emotionally engaging. Why?

Because analog never stops ringing. The cartridge, the stylus, the cantilever, the headshell, and the tonearm are all mechanical resonators that don't just start and stop. They sing along with the music. They fill in the gaps — not with data, but with sympathetic overtones and a kind of musical sugar that pleases the brain. There's a reason maple syrup and salt taste good together in the morning: we crave harmonic density. LPs, in a sense, continue the sound beyond the note — a sonic metaphor for warmth, continuity, and presence.

So what is accurate?

That’s the philosophical core of this discussion. You can measure a flat frequency response, perfect impulse behavior, or total harmonic distortion below 0.0001%. But no measurement can capture the cumulative psychoacoustic impact of all the materials, mechanics, and algorithms in your playback chain. The ringing, the resonance, the interactions — they are systemic and emergent, not linear or isolated.

The signal is not the music. The music is what happens after the signal passes through your chain of resonating objects and arrives in your emotionally perceptive brain.

So the question is not merely what is accurate, but rather:
What is beautiful? What is meaningful? What moves you?
Because in the end, the world is a bell — and it wants to ring.

- David Chesky