ucla88 said:
I have to strongly disagree with Lynn's disagreeing with this. But I think it is semantics. I don't think ucla88 is making any implicit assumption about what FR is. With due respect, Lynn is inferring that FR means only amplitude. In Lynn's example he says "here is the impulse that was used to calculate the FR", but Lynn presented only the FR amplitude when both amplitude and phase are obtained from the impulse. I don't see to many discussions today where the term frequency response is used to refer to only the amplitude response. Talking about FR amplitude without phase is meaningless. There I agree. When Lynn says "traditional techniques" he is showing his history (I’d say age, but I’m older.
) ucla88's statement obviously refers to FR data which includes amplitude and phase and which is easily obtained using MSL or other FFt based measurement methods. Maybe the better way to state it is that once you have the impulse you have the dominant linear characteristics of the system. From it you can generate FR (amplitude and phase), CSD, burst response, or whatever you like. But all these are just different means of processing the impulse response. I think the biggest problem of looking at CSD plots is that you have to know what they should look like before you can make any real conclusion about how good or bad they are. Sure they will show you the obvious driver break up. And you probably can’t decipher that from the impulse, but it is pretty obvious form looking at just the FR amplitude. If a system has flat response then you need to look at the phase too. I think everyone is pretty aware of that today. A CSD might help interpret what a distorted impulse or what the phase response form a flat system means, but it’s just a different way of looking at the same data. Like looking at phase and group delay. Just as GD is a different way of interpreting phase, so is the CSD of a system with nominally flat response. Of course, looking at something in different ways is always a good thing, but before a conclusion can be made as to what is good or bad it is necessary to know what defines good. So what does a CSD plot for a perfect LR4 crossover look like? Here are a series of CSD plots for different crossovers I made a few years bad. http://www.geocities.com/kreskovs/Stored-energy.htmlJohn's comment is correct. I really should have been more specific. I do mean FR and phase as John pointed out. I'm not making any minimum phase assumptions.
And I agree with John-you have to know what the csd should look like, and know what windowing system system you are using, and what your reflection free interval is. All of these significantly affect how your CSD ends up looking.
In another vein, from a psychoacoustic standpoint, the link between what a CSD looks like, and what a loudspeaker sounds like is often not clear. Folks make all sorts of assumptions on audibility of a particular peak based on how far it extends in time when it's not exactly clear how meaningful it is. (And whether or not it's artifactually created!)
CSD's are a nifty technique to pseudoscientifically validate misattribution. You know, "there's something I don't like about the sound. Oh, would you look at that ridge in the CSD. That's it. I need a unit with less energy storage."
Note I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong, just that it's way too easy to look at a CSD and infer things.
mark
And I agree with John-you have to know what the csd should look like, and know what windowing system system you are using, and what your reflection free interval is. All of these significantly affect how your CSD ends up looking.
In another vein, from a psychoacoustic standpoint, the link between what a CSD looks like, and what a loudspeaker sounds like is often not clear. Folks make all sorts of assumptions on audibility of a particular peak based on how far it extends in time when it's not exactly clear how meaningful it is. (And whether or not it's artifactually created!)
CSD's are a nifty technique to pseudoscientifically validate misattribution. You know, "there's something I don't like about the sound. Oh, would you look at that ridge in the CSD. That's it. I need a unit with less energy storage."
Note I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong, just that it's way too easy to look at a CSD and infer things.
mark
LineSource said:
The TD10M we offer now can easily cover the range from 80-1500hz. It is quite flat to over 2000hz or so. It is an overhung design though with the standard Lambda motor as we discussed. About 6mm Xmax based on the Bl curve. 93.7dB 1W. The underhung design is great for linearity but not for any kind of efficiency. The Dipole10 has about 12mm Xmax with a very flat BL curve in that range of 10mm. As with any underhung design though, efficiency suffers. I'm thinking these are in the 88-89dB range. Trying to get any kind of high Xmax out of an underhung is not practical. In the case of the Dipole drivers we have a 1.5" tall gap with .5" tall coil. You're using only 1/3 of the flux in the gap at any given point. To increase efficiency gets quite expensive. You need much more flux, which a large ring of neo could provide. The problem then is that the back plate will be the first to saturate then becoming the limiting point, requiring more thickness of the steel. Then the pole would be next to saturate. The only way to fix that is to go with a larger diameter coil and pole. That gets exponentially more expensive.
Neo is great, the problem is that it is expensive to use also. Not that the material itself is expensive, but magnetizing it. To do the size neo we'd need for these drivers would require an investment of well over $100,000 for the magnetizer. The other option is to build motors, ship them freight to IMI to have them magnetized, and then shipped back. Especially with the price of fuel now, this gets quite expensive. Then there is also the risk of damaging motors in transit.
As far as the BL > 17, I'd need some frame of reference. BL is of course proportional to Re. Our 2.5" coil driver for the new AV series has a BL^2/Re of just over 140. Bl is over 20 with an Re of around 3ohm.
We sampled quite a few cone materials. Exotic materials to just paper cones with other things impregnated in them. So far we haven't found anything that has performed as well as the cones we are using with the coating we apply. I do have one material that I have my heart set on for the future. Just a matter of making it a reality. Extremely strong fiber and well damped at the same time.
John
Ping Nick
Nick, Your Alive!
Pleased you have returned, my long lost friend.
Still have, and still am, using all the drivers you built for me. And yes (to stay on topic, kinda) they all have that magnificent hunk o copper in them.
So, how be you? Or should I ask?
You can also reach me at <myname at earthlink dot com>
Welcome back! Oh, man, you have been missed...
Paul B
Nick, Your Alive!
Pleased you have returned, my long lost friend.
Still have, and still am, using all the drivers you built for me. And yes (to stay on topic, kinda) they all have that magnificent hunk o copper in them.
So, how be you? Or should I ask?
You can also reach me at <myname at earthlink dot com>
Welcome back! Oh, man, you have been missed...
Paul B
John_E_Janowitz said:
John,
Thanks for the details, impressive. Though with an Mms of 44g they should be pretty beefy cones, quite a bit to move around (and stop) (thinking: mating them with the RAAL)
How would you compare the driver it to a 18Sound 10ND610 ?
Any measurements ?
TIA,
Florian
Ambience... or not?
Interesting comments... about the "Sounds of Silence"... hmmnnn wonder why that phrase sounds so familiar
.. maybe a folk group from the '60's was prescient???
I've often heard the "ambience artifacts" being somehow modified in recordings pre-mpeg compression... reminded me of the pumping and breathing that occurs using the old "dbx" and "dolby" nr systems when overdone or improperly setup, or maybe limiter or gating abuse on the recording end.
Different setups also seem to highlight or suppress this quality (or lack thereof) and, perhaps, multi channel systems can tend to accentuate these errors in recordings, due to the (sometimes) increased information content in the reproduction.
So... I wonder if this is a manifestation of some form of low-level distortion... in that the quiet info in a reproduced venue is being corrupted (be it by bad speakers. poor recordings, or process chain non-linearities)?
If so, no wonder steady state derived data is so misleading.
John L.
Lynn Olson said:
Interesting comments... about the "Sounds of Silence"... hmmnnn wonder why that phrase sounds so familiar
.. maybe a folk group from the '60's was prescient??? I've often heard the "ambience artifacts" being somehow modified in recordings pre-mpeg compression... reminded me of the pumping and breathing that occurs using the old "dbx" and "dolby" nr systems when overdone or improperly setup, or maybe limiter or gating abuse on the recording end.
Different setups also seem to highlight or suppress this quality (or lack thereof) and, perhaps, multi channel systems can tend to accentuate these errors in recordings, due to the (sometimes) increased information content in the reproduction.
So... I wonder if this is a manifestation of some form of low-level distortion... in that the quiet info in a reproduced venue is being corrupted (be it by bad speakers. poor recordings, or process chain non-linearities)?
If so, no wonder steady state derived data is so misleading.
John L.
Yet another OB mid: New from ScanSpeak/Tymphany
Does anyone here have any experience with this new ScanSpeak Illuminator 6.5'' mid ?
A bit low sensitivity, but good power handling -- and darn good looks for OB.
Maybe an alternative to the PHL 1120 ?
Does anyone here have any experience with this new ScanSpeak Illuminator 6.5'' mid ?
A bit low sensitivity, but good power handling -- and darn good looks for OB
. Maybe an alternative to the PHL 1120 ?
Hello!
I have made some observations at the Highend in Munich this year I want to share here because I think they could be relevant for this project.
There has been a lot of rave about the Lithophon Miracle, so I visited the room this year to see what that´s all about. In this speaker a large Mundorf AMT is combinded with a SEAS Excel magnesium midrange, crossed at 1500Hz. The first thing when I entered the room was being impressed by the transparency. But in my ears it was absolutely inconsistent with the rest of the speaker, and it was no pleasure for me to listen to that speaker for long.
An other speaker with a large AMT was the Heil Kithara with the Precide Heil crossed at 700Hz. The cheapo Eminence bass was shockingly muddy compared to that wonderful driver, but I didn´t hear these annoying midrange inconsistencies.
My assumption is, if RAAL ribbons are really as good as most who have heard them say, crossing it at 1500Hz can only be worse than the Lithophon.
Regards,
Oliver
I have made some observations at the Highend in Munich this year I want to share here because I think they could be relevant for this project.
There has been a lot of rave about the Lithophon Miracle, so I visited the room this year to see what that´s all about. In this speaker a large Mundorf AMT is combinded with a SEAS Excel magnesium midrange, crossed at 1500Hz. The first thing when I entered the room was being impressed by the transparency. But in my ears it was absolutely inconsistent with the rest of the speaker, and it was no pleasure for me to listen to that speaker for long.
An other speaker with a large AMT was the Heil Kithara with the Precide Heil crossed at 700Hz. The cheapo Eminence bass was shockingly muddy compared to that wonderful driver, but I didn´t hear these annoying midrange inconsistencies.
My assumption is, if RAAL ribbons are really as good as most who have heard them say, crossing it at 1500Hz can only be worse than the Lithophon.
Regards,
Oliver
ScottG said:
I think that Lynn has not been thinking of using any RAAL that low in freq..
consider instead somewhere between 7-12 kHz (mated with a compression driver and horn for that 1500Hz transition).
I haven´t followed the thread for the last 50 pages, but as far as I know that was at least considered in the first 100. So is Lynn now thinking more like the "one who is not allowed to post here"? Or even considering to use the RAAL developed on his request?
Thanks for all the good comments, I've been a little busy the last few days.
Those of you who have heard the RAAL realize that their level of transparency makes them hard to combine with other drivers - particularly conventional direct-radiators. Before I heard them at the last RMAF, I knew from their specs that they'd be good - but I was taken by surprise at the sonics, which are pretty much like a Plasmatronics ionic tweeter, or a much smoother (and more dynamic) Heil tweeter. Well, that's good and all - we always want the best possible transducer, right?
But there's a problem - the same as the woefully unsuccessful electrostat/dynamic hybrids, where the crossover is painfully obvious, and eventually makes extended listening impossible - just too artificial, too mechanical, too in-your-face. Some defects are impossible to ignore.
Unlike other designers, I feel the dominant sound of a driver is mostly present in the characteristics of the direct sound, and polar pattern is less important than the underlying physical properties of the diaphragm itself. Speaking for myself, it's the first thing I notice, and can't ignore no matter how hard I try. When radically dissimilar diaphragms are joined together, no amount of crossover trickery, polar-pattern legerdemain, or other stunts can disguise the fact. This is why I don't care for soft, highly damped midbass cones used with metal-dome tweeters, or rigid cones used with soft-dome tweeters (although the latter seems to work better). Highly resolved drivers sound best when the other drivers have the same hallmark - otherwise the difference in (subjective) resolution in the different parts of the spectrum will be all too apparent.
The Bastanis Apollo system I first heard a couple of year ago at the RMAF combined what I suspect was a small-format phenolic horn tweeter with the big 12" paper cone midbass driver. There was some dissimilarity in sound, but what made it possible in the first place was the soft tonal quality of the tweeter. I'm pretty sure a more dynamic and snappy-sounding tweeter (a Heil, for example) would not have worked well at all, and would have been inharmonious. The big 12-incher was dynamic in the lower mids, but got gradually softer sounding towards the upper midrange - as you'd expect from such a big driver - it became more and more decoupled, and sounded like it. Still, it was very artistically arranged, and for my own tastes, far preferable to any whizzer cone. (I know that is damning with faint praise, but it isn't intended that way - the system sounded very good, and preferable to the audiophile speakers at the show.)
We will silently walk by a certain feline in Boston - the one that commissioned the Water Drop - and look a little deeper at what kind of drivers work together. In subjective terms, metal-diaphragm compression drivers are considered the ultimate in resolution - in the frequency band where they are well-behaved, and once you find a horn or waveguide that isn't riddled with serious time-domain artifacts.
In developing the Amity, Aurora, and Karna amplifiers, the high-efficiency systems always, without fail, revealed the most about what was going on inside the amplifier - and the high-efficiency systems always revealed the most. Not to mention the extraordinary pleasure of hearing tonal colors, and emotional aspects of the performance, as I'd never heard them before. This has been the entire impetus of going beyond the Ariel - and the 92 dB/metre Ariel revealed far more than the 86 dB/metre LO-2 speaker I had built for Audionics in 1979.
The "gotcha" is I don't care for the overall character of commercially available high-efficiency systems - the front-horn loaded Lowthers and AERs, Avant-Garde Duos and Trios, big studio monitors, and old-school JBLs and Altecs. I've heard all of them, and used with superb electronics. Not for me. But I liked what they did - a lot. There's something in there worth pursuing. This is why I am working off-line with horn designers, and finding out where the strengths and weaknesses of compression drivers are. Not so much on a subjective basis - that's for later, the fine-tuning phase - but more at the level of system-design tradeoffs. This is why I'm doing the historical research, trying to find out why the original designers made the set of compromises they did.
Wente, Thuras, Hilliard, Lansing, and Harry F Olson were some of most brilliant engineers in the history of audio, and the decisions they made were very carefully considered in light of what they had to do with the technology they had at their disposal. We have better technology, but the brutal truth is we don't have engineers at the level of the five I mentioned above - nor do we have any modern equivalent of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs, and the BBC labs have been greatly weakened in the past decades. THX is a marketing exercise aimed at a niche sector, not a R&D effort at all.
Unlike the cheerful optimism of many in the our profession, who see audio just getting better and better, I see our position as being akin to medieval scholars dumbstruck at the achievements of the ancients, and wondering how on Earth they accomplished as much as they did - and with such primitive tools. How did they do it? Well, they were smart - the Teslas of the day.
But time moves on. The best minds left audio more than fifty years ago - they're now in nuclear physics (bomb-making), computers, genetic engineering, and other more interesting (and profitable) pursuits. Frankly, we just get the leftovers, which is fundamentally why modern audio is frequently only a little better - and quite often worse - than recordings and systems designed more than fifty years ago. The tools are better, but the engineering just isn't as good - it's descended to the level of fill-in-the-blanks checklists.
Noise not audible? Check.
Measures flat most of the time? Check.
Sounds loud enough to impress teenage video-gamers and the boom-car crowd? Check.
Cheap, cheap like the birdies sing? Check.
Reviewers and magazines lined up with the PR campaign? Check.
All done then. Job over, we won't need you any more, Mr. Engineer. Don't bother to listen to it, or tell us what you think. You're not paid to do that. Go home, don't spend your paycheck all in one place.
This is a long long way from the days of Bell Labs hiring Stowkowski as a on-staff musical consultant, RCA's Sarnoff consulting with HF Olson, and the dedication, vision, and sheer, incredibly determined persistence of Major Armstrong and Alan Blumlein. (Read a biography of Armstrong if you want an eye-opening insight into how inventors are really treated by industry. He committed suicide over the theft of FM radio, which he invented in the face of enormous opposition from RCA/NBC.)
I'm not bitter about this. We live in a different age with different priorities, and I'm grateful for it. Audio has gone from being at the forefront of technology - which it was in the Twenties and Thirties - to being an appliance - an iPod playing "CD-quality" lossy-compressed audio. The mountain labors, grunts, and we get supposedly "inaudible" lossy-digital compression in a gleaming white box smaller than a pack of cigarettes. The pinnacle of 21st-Century audio.
That's why you see me doing what amounts to archeological work. The search for excellence has left the industry, and is now the domain of enthusiast amateurs, as it was back in the beginning. It isn't that late-Thirties and Forties-era movie theater technology was all that great, but there are some very interesting solutions in there - just as direct-heated triodes working in Class A have some very interesting properties that just aren't there with bipolar transistors or MOSFETs.
The point of this huge digression is that I'm interested in technologies that are inherently efficient, inherently low distortion, and are capable of good time-dispersion performance. Some of these characteristics are usually seen as being in opposition, but there are some useful tradeoffs that can be made.
Yes, I work slowly. I like to have a modest degree of understanding of what I'm working with, and that takes a while. What's different about this thread is a process I usually do in private, with the collaboration of a few others, is being done in public.
Those of you who have heard the RAAL realize that their level of transparency makes them hard to combine with other drivers - particularly conventional direct-radiators. Before I heard them at the last RMAF, I knew from their specs that they'd be good - but I was taken by surprise at the sonics, which are pretty much like a Plasmatronics ionic tweeter, or a much smoother (and more dynamic) Heil tweeter. Well, that's good and all - we always want the best possible transducer, right?
But there's a problem - the same as the woefully unsuccessful electrostat/dynamic hybrids, where the crossover is painfully obvious, and eventually makes extended listening impossible - just too artificial, too mechanical, too in-your-face. Some defects are impossible to ignore.
Unlike other designers, I feel the dominant sound of a driver is mostly present in the characteristics of the direct sound, and polar pattern is less important than the underlying physical properties of the diaphragm itself. Speaking for myself, it's the first thing I notice, and can't ignore no matter how hard I try. When radically dissimilar diaphragms are joined together, no amount of crossover trickery, polar-pattern legerdemain, or other stunts can disguise the fact. This is why I don't care for soft, highly damped midbass cones used with metal-dome tweeters, or rigid cones used with soft-dome tweeters (although the latter seems to work better). Highly resolved drivers sound best when the other drivers have the same hallmark - otherwise the difference in (subjective) resolution in the different parts of the spectrum will be all too apparent.
The Bastanis Apollo system I first heard a couple of year ago at the RMAF combined what I suspect was a small-format phenolic horn tweeter with the big 12" paper cone midbass driver. There was some dissimilarity in sound, but what made it possible in the first place was the soft tonal quality of the tweeter. I'm pretty sure a more dynamic and snappy-sounding tweeter (a Heil, for example) would not have worked well at all, and would have been inharmonious. The big 12-incher was dynamic in the lower mids, but got gradually softer sounding towards the upper midrange - as you'd expect from such a big driver - it became more and more decoupled, and sounded like it. Still, it was very artistically arranged, and for my own tastes, far preferable to any whizzer cone. (I know that is damning with faint praise, but it isn't intended that way - the system sounded very good, and preferable to the audiophile speakers at the show.)
We will silently walk by a certain feline in Boston - the one that commissioned the Water Drop - and look a little deeper at what kind of drivers work together. In subjective terms, metal-diaphragm compression drivers are considered the ultimate in resolution - in the frequency band where they are well-behaved, and once you find a horn or waveguide that isn't riddled with serious time-domain artifacts.
In developing the Amity, Aurora, and Karna amplifiers, the high-efficiency systems always, without fail, revealed the most about what was going on inside the amplifier - and the high-efficiency systems always revealed the most. Not to mention the extraordinary pleasure of hearing tonal colors, and emotional aspects of the performance, as I'd never heard them before. This has been the entire impetus of going beyond the Ariel - and the 92 dB/metre Ariel revealed far more than the 86 dB/metre LO-2 speaker I had built for Audionics in 1979.
The "gotcha" is I don't care for the overall character of commercially available high-efficiency systems - the front-horn loaded Lowthers and AERs, Avant-Garde Duos and Trios, big studio monitors, and old-school JBLs and Altecs. I've heard all of them, and used with superb electronics. Not for me. But I liked what they did - a lot. There's something in there worth pursuing. This is why I am working off-line with horn designers, and finding out where the strengths and weaknesses of compression drivers are. Not so much on a subjective basis - that's for later, the fine-tuning phase - but more at the level of system-design tradeoffs. This is why I'm doing the historical research, trying to find out why the original designers made the set of compromises they did.
Wente, Thuras, Hilliard, Lansing, and Harry F Olson were some of most brilliant engineers in the history of audio, and the decisions they made were very carefully considered in light of what they had to do with the technology they had at their disposal. We have better technology, but the brutal truth is we don't have engineers at the level of the five I mentioned above - nor do we have any modern equivalent of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs, and the BBC labs have been greatly weakened in the past decades. THX is a marketing exercise aimed at a niche sector, not a R&D effort at all.
Unlike the cheerful optimism of many in the our profession, who see audio just getting better and better, I see our position as being akin to medieval scholars dumbstruck at the achievements of the ancients, and wondering how on Earth they accomplished as much as they did - and with such primitive tools. How did they do it? Well, they were smart - the Teslas of the day.
But time moves on. The best minds left audio more than fifty years ago - they're now in nuclear physics (bomb-making), computers, genetic engineering, and other more interesting (and profitable) pursuits. Frankly, we just get the leftovers, which is fundamentally why modern audio is frequently only a little better - and quite often worse - than recordings and systems designed more than fifty years ago. The tools are better, but the engineering just isn't as good - it's descended to the level of fill-in-the-blanks checklists.
Noise not audible? Check.
Measures flat most of the time? Check.
Sounds loud enough to impress teenage video-gamers and the boom-car crowd? Check.
Cheap, cheap like the birdies sing? Check.
Reviewers and magazines lined up with the PR campaign? Check.
All done then. Job over, we won't need you any more, Mr. Engineer. Don't bother to listen to it, or tell us what you think. You're not paid to do that. Go home, don't spend your paycheck all in one place.
This is a long long way from the days of Bell Labs hiring Stowkowski as a on-staff musical consultant, RCA's Sarnoff consulting with HF Olson, and the dedication, vision, and sheer, incredibly determined persistence of Major Armstrong and Alan Blumlein. (Read a biography of Armstrong if you want an eye-opening insight into how inventors are really treated by industry. He committed suicide over the theft of FM radio, which he invented in the face of enormous opposition from RCA/NBC.)
I'm not bitter about this. We live in a different age with different priorities, and I'm grateful for it. Audio has gone from being at the forefront of technology - which it was in the Twenties and Thirties - to being an appliance - an iPod playing "CD-quality" lossy-compressed audio. The mountain labors, grunts, and we get supposedly "inaudible" lossy-digital compression in a gleaming white box smaller than a pack of cigarettes. The pinnacle of 21st-Century audio.
That's why you see me doing what amounts to archeological work. The search for excellence has left the industry, and is now the domain of enthusiast amateurs, as it was back in the beginning. It isn't that late-Thirties and Forties-era movie theater technology was all that great, but there are some very interesting solutions in there - just as direct-heated triodes working in Class A have some very interesting properties that just aren't there with bipolar transistors or MOSFETs.
The point of this huge digression is that I'm interested in technologies that are inherently efficient, inherently low distortion, and are capable of good time-dispersion performance. Some of these characteristics are usually seen as being in opposition, but there are some useful tradeoffs that can be made.
Yes, I work slowly. I like to have a modest degree of understanding of what I'm working with, and that takes a while. What's different about this thread is a process I usually do in private, with the collaboration of a few others, is being done in public.
FlorianO said:
The 10ND610 has a Mms of 30g, and this seems important to mate with the RAAL. The 10ND610 has Fs = 89Hz. A lower Fs and dipole friendly Qts might need a 16 ohm voice coil. The 10ND610 SPL increases with increasing frequency, and this needs to get flatter for home use.
Attachments
LineSource said:
First, thanks for chiming in there.
Honestly, I was more thinking about that driver XOed 2nd order at 1.5k (maybe even some underlap) with a BMS 4540ND in a DDS ENG 1-90 horn (with some gentle EQ on the BMS driver to flatten it out).
However, some indep measurements on 10ND610 would be great (I don't have that driver at hand and haven't found any measurements).
Brandon (augerpro) , any testing plans with that driver
?Regards,
Florian
FlorianO said:However, some indep measurements on 10ND610 would be great (I don't have that driver at hand and haven't found any measurements).
Brandon (augerpro) , any testing plans with that driver
Regards,
Florian
Oh I'd love to BUT...I have so much on my plate right now- the major one being a trip to Italy and Greece to see for myself the work of the ancients as Lynn said. After that I have two speaker projects that I MUST finish this summer. I do have some testing I'll do for this project, B&C 15NW76, B&C DE250 in possibly Geddes waveguide, and maybe an AE TD15X. I want to revamp my testing before I do any others, to include impulse responses and using Klippel's performance based method to measure xmax to bring more value to these comparisons. But all that is late summer at the earliest.
Lynn Olson said:
Lynne
I not only don't agree with your statements, I find them insulting.
Floyd Toole incompetent? Dick Small?
Harry Olsen's book is so riddled with errors that I don't trust it anymore.
Its not that I disagree with the basis of what you say - the ancients did move fast and development was staggeringly effective, but they were starting from scratch. Its easy to progress from nothing - the first small step is a comparitive giant leap.
And audio today - don't get me started. To quote one of the "current giants": "I have no illusions about audio today - its in the dumpster."
The incompetance that you see at the product level is not because of the engineering, its because of the market. There is no market for good sound quality, so there is no emphasis in the marketplace for pursuing it.
I could have been a Nuclear Physicist (I recently read graduate texts on General Relativity and String Theory) - I choose audio. And yes, you are correct, it was a mistake - the other option would have paid better.
augerpro said:
Brandon,
Thanks for considering anyway.
Regarding the B&C I've read very good reports on that driver in the DDS ENG 1-90 I mentioned above (i.e. folk that liked it more than the aforementioned BMS). But I'm sure you knew this already
Regards,
Florian
P.S. Wrt 10NDA610....Re-reading the early posts in this thread about this driver and the 12NDA520 (that Lynn eventually purchased) make me even more curious about indep. measurements. I'm sure that a proper driver summation btw. 12NDA520 and 6NDA410 -- like Lynn was (still is ?) planning -- should be better. Unfortunately that summation (and the resulting XOs) takes its man to get right and that's not me ...
Lynn Olson said:
gedlee said:
You too? (being paid better that is
)We'll see, that might finally swing back in the right direction for me this year... Fingers crossed.
I wanted to jump out of lurk mode and emphatically agree with Earl on this matter.
Lynn, you managed to skip over many amazingly bright people there, not the least of which was Dick Heyser... While I agree, like Earl, that quality engineering is hugely devoid from the most visible products in the market, I put the blame squarely on our own industry and those designing products.
Along with Earl's point of progress from nothing happening quickly, the "ancients" had the benefit of not being bombarded with marketing seudo-science (which is disingenious to even call it science). They didn't have anything to un-learn!
For anyone wanting to continue to investigate various matters of sound, I would recommend following the approach Tom Danley impregnated on me... Look skeptically on what all the "experts" say. If everything you know of physics tells you it should work, try it! It will either work or you will learn why it didn't. Along these same lines, when reading the oppinions, papers, and claims of others, focus more on the observations and measurements made than the conclusions that others drew from them. See if you come to the same conclusion and compare why you did or didn't. Of course this is just good scientific practice, but in an industry driven by sales & marketing, it is even more important to hold fast to.
As an example and tip of the hat to Earl and Tom Danley, working with Tom I made plenty of observations of what made some of his designs function well and sound good subjectively. I had suspicions about various designs, particularly bandpass designs, which *should have* been able to both perform well and sound good while market examples were generally horrible. I gestated the idea for a while with modeling and investigations that started to make sense of it, but only after I read Earl's work on distortion audibility did I finally get the last push to build one I knew *should* work.
Guess, what? It did exactly what I expected.
Over the next year there will be 4-6 related designs of mine hitting the market. So far I've been able to trudge through the market momentum against it, we'll see what happens after many get delivered.The ugly reality is that a great design design alone does not make a sucessful and desireable product. I am lucky in that early in life I became familiar with the sales and marketing world and I was often reminded the importance of being able to teach or explain what I was doing or what I thought I understood.
The ability to explain in basic, conceptual terms why an idea or method will work better, is paramount to convincing and allowing salespeople and marketeers do their thing. Doing so without grossly offending all of someone's current knowledge tends to be hard for many designers, and with so much BS touted by others designing and selling products in the industry, most don't know what to think as the physics of sound gets such little attention by the general populous.
Just last week I took a couple hours from my day to visit my sister's 1st grade class and do a fun little lesson of "Sound for 1st graders." The kids response and interest was impressive, not to mention the further questions that came from the lesson. I'm told they're still talking about it. Considering how big a role sound & music plays in current culture and lifestyle, hopefully our industry may some day right itself and invest a little toward education about it. I know I plan to.
Rant over, and off the
.