Beyond the Ariel

[Lynn Olson]

I feel upbeat about it, because there is a growing confidence of a true fidelity approach or what we discover is our evolving preference, while seeing how far we can get along the way closer to the moving audio event horizon. SET and SS but only by revision with modern components and circuits, does give two distinct developable channels for improvement, and many of us are working on this.

For me the fidelity is closer than I have ever been, but I can see I am still well off the beach. But like most of us, the ongong joy at each new gust of wind that takes us closer.

I feel upbeat about it too. We have broken free of the stranglehold of the audio-review magazines (hooray, hooray!), and the enthusiast niche is vibrant and not accepting the conventional wisdom of our self-appointed "betters". All to the good.

SS and DHT are not in competition with each other; they do different things, and require out-of-the-box thinking to reach their full potential.

The "Golden Age" of the Fifties was actually a stagnant period for the development of vacuum-tube amplifiers; the Williamson wiped out almost every other circuit from 1947 through 1956, and a lot of the commercial amps after that were only trivial variations. It wasn't until Glass Audio in 1989, followed by Sound Practices and Vacuum Tube Valley, that we started to see some original thinking in vacuum-tube audio.

I must also give credit to Tom Danley, Dr. Geddes, Dr. Kolbrek, and the late Jean-Michel LeCleac'h for taking waveguide and horn design to new levels.

 

[zigzagflux]

I'm all for trying to optimize that last bit of realism and accuracy out of my audio system, but seriously, we need to take this all with a grain of salt.

I acknowledge that watching my 55" LED display (television, if you will) is just not the same as taking a walk in the woods, but I still enjoy watching Discovery Channel. The perfection of the display is secondary; the content that comes over it is primary.

No different than audio; I put anything from Fleetwood Mac to Tchaikovsky on my stereo to enjoy the art form at my convenience. I may not be in the concert hall or the stadium watching live, but I still appreciate the feelings and entertainment I receive.

To despondently give up on stereo because it's not the same as a live concerto, that is an unfortunate conclusion to reach.

 

[Kindhornman]

Just a few things that are going back to my original horn patent. I like to think I helped to move things forward so long ago.

Patent Citations
Cited PatentFiling datePublication dateApplicantTitleUS1314980 *Dec 27, 1917Sep 2, 1919
NowskiUS3642091 *Oct 9, 1969Feb 15, 1972Pioneer Electronic CorpUnderground acoustic deviceCA697869A *
Nov 17, 1964Frank B SmolarczykSound amplification using foam thermoplastics* Cited by examiner
Referenced by
Citing PatentFiling datePublication dateApplicantTitleUS4635749 *Aug 31, 1982Jan 13, 1987Alan M TattersallSpeaker enclosureUS4893695 *Jun 14, 1988Jan 16, 1990Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.Speaker systemUS5692060 *May 1, 1995Nov 25, 1997Knowles Electronics, Inc.Unidirectional microphoneUS5750943 *Oct 2, 1996May 12, 1998Renkus-Heinz, Inc.Speaker array with improved phase characteristicsUS5758823 *Jun 12, 1995Jun 2, 1998Georgia Tech Research CorporationSynthetic jet actuator and applications thereofUS5802196 *Dec 4, 1996Sep 1, 1998Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd.Speaker for radiating sound waves in all directions relative to a speaker supporting surfaceUS5894990 *Oct 9, 1997Apr 20, 1999Georgia Tech Research CorporationSynthetic jet actuator and applications thereofUS5957413 *Jun 5, 1997Sep 28, 1999Georgia Tech Research CorporationModifications of fluid flow about bodies and surfaces with synthetic jet actuatorsUS6009182 *Aug 29, 1997Dec 28, 1999Eastern Acoustic Works, Inc.Down-fill speaker for large scale sound reproduction systemUS6016353 *Oct 31, 1997Jan 18, 2000Eastern Acoustic Works, Inc.Large scale sound reproduction system having cross-cabinet horizontal array of horn elementsUS6056204 *Jun 5, 1997May 2, 2000Georgia Tech Research CorporationSynthetic jet actuators for mixing applicationsUS6059069 *Aug 25, 1999May 9, 2000Peavey Electronics CorporationLoudspeaker waveguide designUS6123145 *Nov 14, 1997Sep 26, 2000Georgia Tech Research CorporationSynthetic jet actuators for cooling heated bodies and environmentsUS6457654Nov 13, 1997Oct 1, 2002Georgia Tech Research CorporationMicromachined synthetic jet actuators and applications thereofUS6554607Sep 1, 2000Apr 29, 2003Georgia Tech Research CorporationCombustion-driven jet actuatorUS6644598Mar 8, 2002Nov 11, 2003Georgia Tech Research CorporationModification of fluid flow about bodies and surfaces through virtual aero-shaping of airfoils with synthetic jet actuatorsUS6868937 *Mar 26, 2002Mar 22, 2005Alpine Electronics, IncSub-woofer system for use in vehicleUS7011178 *May 14, 2002Mar 14, 2006Jean-Pierre MorkerkenSound transmitter and speakerUS7275621Jan 18, 2005Oct 2, 2007Klipsch, LlcSkew horn for a loudspeakerUS7315627 *Aug 16, 2004Jan 1, 2008Harman International Industries, IncorporatedSound-damping laminate for loudspeaker structureUS7631724 *Apr 22, 2008Dec 15, 2009Victor Company Of Japan, LimitedSound-wave path-length correcting structure for speaker systemUS7845462 *Aug 7, 2008Dec 7, 2010Moore Dana AWide frequency range horn with modular method for reducing diffraction effectsUS8213658 *Dec 12, 2008Jul 3, 2012Tannoy LimitedAcoustical hornUS20040173402 *May 14, 2002Sep 9, 2004Jean-Pierre MorkerkenSound transmitter and speaker

 

[Pano]

Not unfortunate if the canned version just does not float your boat. That would be like saying it's unfortunate to give up Nescafe because it tastes so bad. Of course a lot of people love Nescafe.

 

[Lynn Olson]

Pieter Treurniet (of Tribute Transformers) has gently reminded me that Jean Hiraga, one of the first proponents of SE circuits and DHT tubes, has been writing in the French magazine "Maison de l' Audiophile" since the late Seventies. The late Seventies and early Eighties was a time when tube amplifiers in the USA went into nearly total eclipse, and marked by the rise of the Big Two audio-review magazines.

When Hiraga was writing about 45's, 300B's and PX4's, Americans were reading about the wonders of "hand-made" $2000 cables with a profit margin of 90%. There couldn't have been more than a handful of American audiophiles who knew what a "direct-heated triode" even was, never mind how it sounded.

There's a linguistic diode between US/UK audiophiles and the rest of Europe and Asia. The rest of the world gets deluged with US/UK magazines and products, but English speakers are only rarely aware of what's happening outside their orbit. It's more than a little shameful that it took more than ten years for the writing of Neville Thiele to appear in the American Audio Engineering Society Journal ... and the original articles were in English!

The delay from Jean Hiraga to the first issues of Sound Practices was just about as long ... ten to fifteen years. It's taken the rise of the Internet to finally break down the barriers between different parts of the audio-world.

 

[daniel]

I have for a long time imagined a sound system that would in effect be that of a dome, a space around us where the walls of the dome are covered in discrete speakers, each a separate channel reproducing a specific part of the sound that would have been recorded in the inverse relationship to the playback system. A 360 sound field where we record that way and play it back in the reverse. This way we could capture the sound of the actual reverberant sound field, we could play it back the same way. but this is just a dream, I don't see us having rooms like this in our homes.

Could be said that there are 2 distinct types of recordings:
Synthetic, where the 2(or more) channel playback is the art.
And there are 'live' recordings. Current mike techniques capture only a minuscule amount of information surrounding us. You need to spatially sample "a 1m sphere at every 1cm around you" to analytically capture the whole soundfield. See the information loss there - that is the ugly elephant we all seem to ignore. Luckily to capture that soundfield perceptually, we need just a couple channels. Sadly there still isn't a commercial application.
Further info

 

[Pano]

Pieter Treurniet (of Tribute Transformers) has gently reminded me that Jean Hiraga, one of the first proponents of SE circuits and DHT tubes, has been writing in the French magazine "Maison de l' Audiophile" since the late Seventies.

Thanks for mentioning that Lynn. Jean Hiraga and crew were directly responsible for my conversion, so to speak. We worked on a number of projects together that were a blast. Mr. Hiraga is quite a phenomenon. Very technical, very smart, a great ear and always a good sense of mischievous fun.
His work isn't well enough known in the English speaking world.

 

[Kindhornman]

Daniel,
Thanks for the pdf. I do understand the practicality of the concept, it could be done with enough discrete channels without having to cover the entire spherical surface. You could also use the speakers themselves as the capture method but that would take some real engineering to convolve the signal as received by a speaker diaphragm. I don't think we will see anything like that for anything but research purposes but it would be a unique way to reproduce a sound field. I would say it is somewhat analogous to an anechoic chamber without the absorption, it would be an inverse in that the surfaces would be the sound producers. Just one of those wild Ideas I've had for a long time. Some speakers would be producing sound and others would act as noise cancellation devices so there would be no real reflections, only synthetic space creation.

 

[NiToNi]

One American who was actually leading the DHT SET and alnico crusade over 20 years ago (in a fantastically humorous way) was of course Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg.

This and many other gold nuggets over at his former site Triode Guild.

 

[Pano]

And also Dennis Had of Cary Audio.

I once asked Dennis how he got into the DHT SET thing. He said he'd seen a WE 300B tube as a kid and just knew he wanted to build something with it. He ended up with 300B tubes carrying his brand name. Now that's following a dream!

 

[Kindhornman]

Dennis loaned me a pair of his SE amps for a Stereophile show one year. He was very friendly though I really couldn't see paying the price for a pair of those amps. I used those amps in a bi-amp system with those driving just the top horns. I had borrowed a Sumo amp to use on the bass/mid section.

 

[Ludwig Haus]

I have for a long time imagined a sound system that would in effect be that of a dome, a space around us where the walls of the dome are covered in discrete speakers, each a separate channel reproducing a specific part of the sound that would have been recorded in the inverse relationship to the playback system. A 360 sound field where we record that way and play it back in the reverse. This way we could capture the sound of the actual reverberant sound field, we could play it back the same way. but this is just a dream, I don't see us having rooms like this in our homes.

Festival Centre in South Australia has something similar in which RT60 time can be adjusted to suit the event. LARS system, or some sort. Hardly amateur in its ideal or implementation.

LH

 

[boldname]

Festival Centre in South Australia has something similar in which RT60 time can be adjusted to suit the event. LARS system, or some sort. Hardly amateur in its ideal or implementation.

LH

If a Blumlein 2 X microphone configuration could produce such excellent simple recordings, then stereo reproduction can recreate this back to the suitable auditorium.

I think this is why some of the old recordings from 1" master tape can reproduce such a good representation. multimiking and mixing is only going to smear the 'brush strokes' painting the canvas. It may at best be very small, but a price to pay for balancing the sound of say an orchestra, where the venue acoustic and instrument placement leaves something to be desired.

But still to a degree of the issue of 'being there' I listened to a recent radio broadcast of A.Cortot playing his interpretation of a well known Chopin etude. It was a masterpiece, played so specially, and uniquely. I could hear the LP scratches, digitally remastered in all its glory and with flaws. It did not matter. The level of my concentration drew out more than one would normally maintain in listening to a whole concert. Whether it was rather Cortot or really Chopin I was listening to was not the debate. It was a rare moment, where you are an observer between the composer and the performer.

 

[Kindhornman]

Boldname,
Those moments are rare but they do make you believe that special moments and performances can draw us back to the music. I understand the issue with multi-microphone recording, it is a studio technique that has been used and abused for decades. Some engineers just have a softer touch if I can say it that way. In a small studio space there is just so much you can do, but some do it much better than others. In an orchestral space it must be a difficult decision how to capture that sound.

 

[Lynn Olson]

More fun quotes from James Boyk:

I'd like to ease my way into some audio topics via anecdotes from a realm more fundamentally pleasurable, namely that of food and drink. I know a man who tasted a difference in the coffee blend he had drunk regularly for several years. The clerk in the coffee store denied that there had been any change in the coffee, but the store owner confirmed that one of the coffees in the blend was indeed now being obtained from a plantation 600 feet higher up the same hill.

I know another man who is so different from this that he fails to see any meaningful comparison among restaurants except how much food you get per dollar. It's not that he denies the importance of the food's taste and appearance, or of the restaurant's ambience or quality of service. No, it's worse: He literally does not recognize the existence of these things! To him they are just meaningless words used by other people.

Reality does exist, though; and I suggest that the first of these two individuals might be quite good at judging coffees for you, while the second would not be the author of the restaurant guide you turned to most often. To put it in a fancy way, these two people are not situated symmetrically with respect to reality. The more sensitive one is closer to the truth.

In audio, if two people. A & B, do a listening comparison and A hears a difference while B hears none, then we know two things: there is a difference, and A is the more sensitive listener.

Of course B knows his own experience better than anyone else does, but A knows the reality better than B.

A scientific approach puts all sorts of caveats on the process by which A and B do their listening, but it does not affect the fundamental idea. And while I see nothing wrong with a scientific approach—it would be odd if I did, teaching at Caltech as I do—I do see something wrong with rejecting out of hand, prior to a formal test, the considered judgment of those who work in a field.

...

The burden of these burdensome remarks, then, is first, that if you do a careful test and no one hears differences, maybe the system has too little resolving power; and second, if certain people do hear differences, they may well be right!

These sensitive people are a gift to the rest of us. If they use their sensitivity in creating with food, we call them master chefs; while those who consume the food with discrimination we call gourmets. If they create in paints, we call them artists, while those who appreciate the artists' work sensitively are called connoisseurs. But turn to audio and they are disparagingly called golden-ears or tweaks, and letters to the editor are written impugning their intellectual honesty. Can you imagine Brillat-Savarin being called a food tweak?

I would submit that most consumers are in Category B; consider the worldwide popularity of McDonald's, Coke, Hollywood comic-book movies, MP3 compression, Pandora, and Beats headphones. The market for quality is smaller, usually much smaller, than the mass-market.

Quality always costs more, and most people think it is silly, wasteful, and self-indulgent ... morally weak, in other words. OK for the wealthy who don't value money, but not for good, upstanding, middle-class folks who know the value of a dollar. There is an unspoken Puritanical subtext to this, which plays into the hands of advertisers ... why drink that yuppie locally made craft brew when you should be drinking, good, honest, Budweiser/Coors/Schlitz beer? There's no difference, so why pay more? Who are you trying to impress?

The debunker variant is to flatly state that since quality can't be objectively measured, it doesn't exist, and that connoisseurs are engaged in a form of group self-hypnosis. The old Calvinist argument is wrapped in the garb of the modern priest, complete with a flickering oscilloscope as a stage prop.

 

[Kindhornman]

I still don't like caviar, to salty!

It is the same with automobiles, some people will say they all have four wheels and go on down the road. I can feel the difference between normal pneumatic tires and run flats any time.

The same with audio, some will turn up a distorting audio system and I want to turn it off as it is so annoying.

 

[Joshua_G]

…
The debunker variant is to flatly state that since quality can't be objectively measured, it doesn't exist, and that connoisseurs are engaged in a form of group self-hypnosis. The old Calvinist argument is wrapped in the garb of the modern priest, complete with a flickering oscilloscope as a stage prop.

 

[Lynn Olson]

Having worked at Tek for nine years, I'm always entertained to see old analog Tek scopes used as props in a "science lab" scene in a TV show or movie. The scope is always a little out of focus, partly so the viewer can't see the ridiculous display and settings, and partly so the Tek logo and model number aren't visible.

What looks most dramatic are slow sweeps with some kind of AM-like waveform, or sometimes wrinkly 60 Hz line noise picked off a short piece of wire. The analog flicker and slow phosphor decay gives it that unmistakable "real science being done here" vibe. Modern digital displays aren't nearly as cool looking, since everyone has seen those and isn't impressed by them.

The most classic of all, of course, are the opening scenes of "Outer Limits", one of my all-time favorite TV shows (and they hold up really well today ... excellent writing, music, and film-noir cinematography). Not a Tek scope, though ... no graticule is visible. From the blurriness of the trace, most likely a cheap Heathkit fed by two oscillators in X-Y mode.

 

[DIYBras]

Too simple but occurs very often: "For the believer no proof is necessary. For the skeptic no proof is sufficient."

 

[SMathews]

...... At these times, I'm focusing only on everything else, such as the structure of the music, technical issues of performance (balance, ensemble, phrasing, style choices, intonation, articulation, etc.). I can hear these things in the music easily regardless of the audio quality (within reason), so iTunes on my computer works just fine.

........
Gary Dahl

Totally Agree. I think its tough to listen to the music, when you are in awe/dismay on how good/bad your system/venue/etc is.

SMathews

PS. Hopefully one day I will have the time to pursue building a system helped by discussions in this thread. Learning alot here. Thanks to Lynn and all.