Decoding Audiophile Terms: ADSR

ADSR

Attack: The time it takes for a sound to increase to its maximum amplitude.

Decay: The sound immediately begins to decrease to the sustain level.

Sustain: The sound remains at this level until released.

Release: The sound decreases back to zero amplitude.

ADSR is embodied by efficiency and compression affected, with its roots firmly entrenched in the concept that the transient response will be clean and unencumbered. The cold and unforgiving reality is that this is the closest term to real audio performance in audiophile speak. While the masses faintly murmur in doubt and openly express buyers remorse against the tide of weak and half hearted engineering measures of mass produced gruel, this term has existed and been recycled since its conception in synthesizer development by Robert Moog in 1965 and later seen in print in 1972. You did read that correctly, this term was developed to express the function and sound produced by synth keys. This would mean, by logic alone, that the music production world understood the implications of audible decay and release, or what is referred to today in subwoofer circles as “overhang” and “bass decay” since the 1970's and within the context of actually making what we are listening to.

Compressive effects are the source of bass overhang, and loss of detail. Unfortunate for, well, everyone, there are only two ways to deal with this problem.

1. Buy enough units to limit cone displacement to the point where you no longer hear those problems. The problem with this is your audio room will end up changing as many time as you breach your personal threshold for underperformance and disappointment. So as to how many units you would end up with and how many iterations of subwoofer configuration you would end up with... I don't think you would even know the answer to that question.

2. Buy a subwoofer system that guarantees displacement with inaudible compression and distortion effects. The issue is that this approach automatically throws you into the "luxury" (more accurately, high performance) audio market and the options in brand names are, from my last count, only one.

We owe a lot to the concept of ADSR and it is fundamentally this line of thinking that forms LDLC and guarantees displacement.