When I first read the review on it (and then looked at the measurements) about a month ago.. I laughed...42k, built like a "tank", engineered like sh!t.
We are in a different world then the high end people - thank goodness - I don't think I could even spend that much on building some speakers if I tried! If i did I'd be embarrassed - They brag about the diamond drivers and all but seriously they *might* sound good with less complex music , maybe real good, save the bass and those tiny bass drivers
To me, a "big sound" could use something like an electrostatic/ribbon/planar tweeter plus a 3"~4" paper mid/mini full range and a rather good midbass. See "statement" speakers.
In regards to post 1 about the little bose speakers sounding big--the 3" full range, also featured on the statement speakers (as a midrange), has generally beautiful mids with good imaging (big). Monacor's 4" (Model SP60, popular with miniature boominator) also works as a midrange and has the flat response necessary for success with active crossovers. It is imaging that makes audio sound big. As seen with the Tang Band miniature full range aboard the Statement series, these can handle high power when given helper woofers and helper tweeter.
The approach will work with any full range, most of which will need a bsc or a notch filter bypassed by a resistor when used with a solid state amp that has zero or subzero output impedance (exception, when used as the midrange in a 3-way, a simple padding resistor may work, or a padding resistor bypassed by a cap, an RC or both can eliminate hard spots without obliterating detail). However, the Monacor SP60 and a very few others, have a flat response, which is not a very good woofer but can be a fantastic midrange. The SP60 reaches such a high pitch that you can run electrostatic/planar/ribbon or tiny 3/4" or smaller dome at a really high crossover point, with the crossover artifacts pretty much hidden from the ear.
These can be used with the much more transparent Series or Devore (hybrid series) crossovers which don't shunt/ruin signal, but that sort does require more attention to driver matching per similar harmonics and similar output efficiencies.
A flat response woofer seems much harder to use; however, a flat response midrange driver is incredibly easy to use and can be rather delightful.
Bonus for imaging is an amplifier that images well, such as SSA.
In regards to post 1 about the little bose speakers sounding big--the 3" full range, also featured on the statement speakers (as a midrange), has generally beautiful mids with good imaging (big). Monacor's 4" (Model SP60, popular with miniature boominator) also works as a midrange and has the flat response necessary for success with active crossovers. It is imaging that makes audio sound big. As seen with the Tang Band miniature full range aboard the Statement series, these can handle high power when given helper woofers and helper tweeter.
The approach will work with any full range, most of which will need a bsc or a notch filter bypassed by a resistor when used with a solid state amp that has zero or subzero output impedance (exception, when used as the midrange in a 3-way, a simple padding resistor may work, or a padding resistor bypassed by a cap, an RC or both can eliminate hard spots without obliterating detail). However, the Monacor SP60 and a very few others, have a flat response, which is not a very good woofer but can be a fantastic midrange. The SP60 reaches such a high pitch that you can run electrostatic/planar/ribbon or tiny 3/4" or smaller dome at a really high crossover point, with the crossover artifacts pretty much hidden from the ear.
These can be used with the much more transparent Series or Devore (hybrid series) crossovers which don't shunt/ruin signal, but that sort does require more attention to driver matching per similar harmonics and similar output efficiencies.
A flat response woofer seems much harder to use; however, a flat response midrange driver is incredibly easy to use and can be rather delightful.
Bonus for imaging is an amplifier that images well, such as SSA.
xrk971, my post about PAR was to support my "statement" in post #11, where I said that in my opinion big sound comes from elevated bass and low distortion. PAR MKS shows both of these.
It is not a good speaker in my eyes, I prefer more "truthful" amplitude response, and neither distortion is not the best possible. When we look at THD we must notice the 5dB elevation at 100Hz, compared to eg. Magico S5 and your speaker.
Thank you Lynn for the excellent post about phase distortion! I always read your posts carefully and try to understand and learn things. I don't have any physics or electronics education (at school), I have lots to learn! I have been playing with minidsp and my 4-way speaker for almost a year now. My tens of crossover type/eq/delay/level iterations have teached me to respect phase coherence! I was happy to read that you prefer LR2 and LR4 acoustic slopes. I have found "all LR4" best for my SWMT 4-way, I even check the phase match of S/M and W/T and changes even there make miracles! Duelund approach kind of grabs on this I think.
It is not a good speaker in my eyes, I prefer more "truthful" amplitude response, and neither distortion is not the best possible. When we look at THD we must notice the 5dB elevation at 100Hz, compared to eg. Magico S5 and your speaker.
Thank you Lynn for the excellent post about phase distortion! I always read your posts carefully and try to understand and learn things. I don't have any physics or electronics education (at school), I have lots to learn! I have been playing with minidsp and my 4-way speaker for almost a year now. My tens of crossover type/eq/delay/level iterations have teached me to respect phase coherence! I was happy to read that you prefer LR2 and LR4 acoustic slopes. I have found "all LR4" best for my SWMT 4-way, I even check the phase match of S/M and W/T and changes even there make miracles! Duelund approach kind of grabs on this I think.
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I sometimes wonder if most of the "engineering" is selecting the right demo music at hifi shows, so the faults of the speaker are never exposed. One sneaky advantage - for the exhibitor - of those miserable music servers they now use at shows is that exhibitors don't have to play selections from the show-goer's CD's any more.
True story - I was at a hifi show, responding to a request from an exhibitor that I tune their very out-of-balance bi-amplified loudspeaker, so I asked for a classical symphony recording. Any recording, just so long as there was an orchestra in it somewhere. No audiophile blues, no little-girl-with-a-guitar, a real orchestra, please, if you will. I know that those sound like. Just one track, that's all.
So the exhibitor puts on a solo violin piece. Some ancient historical recording with a warbly-sounding and very thin-sounding violin. Useless. One guy says in a loud stage whisper, "uh, an orchestra has more than one instrument", while the rest of the people in the room start to snicker. I give the guy at the phonograph a dirty look, and say "I asked for an orchestra ..." so after some hesitation, he picks out a record at random, but it thankfully has something that's more or less recognizable as orchestral music, I twist the knobs so the system sounds more or less OK, make a quick exit, not looking back, and making sure not to return to that room during the show so I don't get blamed for the knob-twisting.
Why didn't the exhibitor at least have some FFT measurement apps on his iPhone? Sheesh, don't ask me. If the situation like that ever comes up again, I think I should bring some pink-noise tracks on a USB stick, along with the FFT software that I have on my iPhone. It's not lab-grade, but it's better than guessing.
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Surely someone could devise a system with N mics on an adjustable clamp stand to measure the near field, plus an array of mics around the listening position. A USB-based box containing multichannel sound card, amp for each driver supplying impedance info back to the PC. Press a button and retire to a safe distance. Ten minutes later the PC spits out the schematic of the optimum crossover based on your preferences. Or less primitively saves an impulse response file for the required active crossover filters..?
You'd still need to know something about what you were doing, but it would lop a few decades off the apprenticeship.
Call me a dreamer...
I was never very fond of these minis but do really like some of there qualities. Since I'm modifying my others I have been playing around with them and ended up stacking only to save a little space working on the room. It absolutely made them little 6.5's sound much much bigger opposed to having the sw's on the floor. Not only because of the obvious presence of more bass, it expanded sound stage greatly I was surprised.
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One more thing, coaxials sound good and image well usually.Tthis obviously comes from c-c spacing being zero. When crossover is well matched it takes care of front-back time alignment - then there is no phase match problems even off-axis vertically! Speakers that use coaxial mid-tweeters a coming to "real" high end now, done By TAD and KEF, not to forget Genelec monitors.
Other thig that I have found/seen with minidsp - LR4 slopes require more precise phase match than LR2 because things happen faster, in a narrower band. This can be one reason for the difficulty of making LR4 sound good.
Here is my present AINOgradient XO graph, acoustic response at 1m little below tweeter axis. 60ms gating to show bass better.
Other thig that I have found/seen with minidsp - LR4 slopes require more precise phase match than LR2 because things happen faster, in a narrower band. This can be one reason for the difficulty of making LR4 sound good.
Here is my present AINOgradient XO graph, acoustic response at 1m little below tweeter axis. 60ms gating to show bass better.
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A hybrid series is an ordinary series crossover Plus some more filters added at the midrange and tweeter to assist with driver matching convenience.
Lynn they probably didn't have that stuff either because the "designer" thinks measurements are evil...it's what you hear vs. how it measures. And/or they probably didn't know how to use the gear in a meaningful way.
It seems to me that in those 5 and 6 figure price points people are selling emotion over actual performance...you know, how does it make you feel?
It seems to me that in those 5 and 6 figure price points people are selling emotion over actual performance...you know, how does it make you feel?
I had always appreciated "big" sound, and unsurprisingly, found some relationship between big sound and big speakers.
For the past few decades, churches have been equipped with teensy little speakers, and the sound of the priest seemed like it was uncomfortably compressed through an aperture. When I had the opportunity to equip a church, I used large wooden combo sound reinforcement speakers -- not very high-power ones because they compress too -- and the resulting sound was very clear, free, and open. "Big", you might say.
They didn't look bad because I painted them to match the background. By and large, Satanic Black is the wrong motif for a church.
For the past few decades, churches have been equipped with teensy little speakers, and the sound of the priest seemed like it was uncomfortably compressed through an aperture. When I had the opportunity to equip a church, I used large wooden combo sound reinforcement speakers -- not very high-power ones because they compress too -- and the resulting sound was very clear, free, and open. "Big", you might say.
They didn't look bad because I painted them to match the background. By and large, Satanic Black is the wrong motif for a church.
It's a well-kept secret, I believe: the most challenging recordings that I use are actually of string orchestras and those of orchestras with solo violin, not jazz combos, drums, close-miked acoustic guitars, etc.
The violin has the most complex and delicate timbre of any instrument that I know of. Sting orchestra violin sections usually come off sounding either muffled or steely on anything that I've heard trying to reproduce them. I'm not sure that even the best microphones recording them are in fact doing a good job.
Big sound and relation to speakers seems to have been well covered here.
However, not much has been mentioned about acoustics which also play a vital role.
An ETC that measures like the "After" illustration will yield big sound. There are other means too. Generally speaking, a bigger space will more easily give a spacious soundfield.
However, not much has been mentioned about acoustics which also play a vital role.
An ETC that measures like the "After" illustration will yield big sound. There are other means too. Generally speaking, a bigger space will more easily give a spacious soundfield.
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Realistic-sounding massed violins, cellos, concert grand piano, and in-the-room singing voice are very, very difficult, at least in my experience. Maybe it's been easy for other folks, but it hasn't been easy for me. I don't think I've ever heard it at hifi shows, and I've going to them since the CES was held in Chicago during the Seventies. I've occasionally heard it at home, and when visiting other people's homes.
The standard for many reviewers, and some readers of this forum, is replicating the PA sound of a rock concert. I have no interest in that. I heard the Beatles in Hong Kong in 1965, the Grateful Dead in Los Angeles in 1970, and the sound was God-awful both times. I've been to plenty of other rock concerts since, and the sound ranges from awful to not-too-bad. The massive PA sound is loud, all right, as loud as a 747 taking off, but it's not usually what I'd consider musical. It sounds like what it is, an industrial-sized machine that makes sound.
I've never heard a hifi system sound like the Seattle Symphony playing Stravinsky's Firebird from a 15th-row seat on the main floor. Ever. Not even close. After hearing a live symphony do its thing, it's hard to listen to any kind of hifi in the days that follow ... then I sort of adjust and electromechanical sound becomes acceptable again.
The crudeness of electromechanical reproduction is most apparent with massed violins, cellos, concert grand piano, and singing voices, as mentioned above. It just has a sort of mechanical, clanking, heavy, thudding sort of sound compared to the delicacy and shimmering beauty of the real thing. The kind of audiophile hifi you hear at shows is even worse, with obvious frequency-balance manipulations intended to cater to the tastes of magazine reviewers.
Returning to the question of the original post, "big" sound has many meanings. If you're in the (very) small minority that goes to the symphony hall every now and then, it's the sound that you hear there. In my experience, reproducing this at home is very difficult, but it's a target to aim for (if you like that kind of music).
Reproducing the sound of a big PA system is a different issue. I'm not saying it's easy ... I would guess it's not ... but a PA system is already a big electromechanical system, and all a hifi does is pass it through another electromechanical system (just not as big). With any luck, the colorations of the original electromechanical system will dominate, so the listener won't notice the faults of the second pass-through. Purely a guess on my part, but I'd imagine the goal of a hifi system intended for this kind of music is intensity and a sense of power.
As for systems aimed at home theater, I would think anything goes, since movie soundtracks are extremely complex assemblages of rather artificial-sounding mono dialog recorded in a small sound booth, snippets of well-recorded symphonic music, and very complex SFX, intended for playback in (front-to-back) asymmetric arrays of 7.1 and higher, going all the way up to n-channel Dolby Atmos systems.
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Lynn, the Grateful Dead on 4/28/71 at the Fillmore East were fantastic sounding. The Grateful Dead with their huge vertically stacked arrays with the differential mics, fantastically clean sound! Effortless. (the HF array still could have been better...). House position does play a role in how a live show sounds. A recent Jeff Beck/Beach Boys show in the local 3500 seat former movie/vaudville theater was dreadful in some seats and quite ok in others. Such is the nature of most PAs in most theaters. But that's just an aside. Almost all of the shows in the last two or more decades have been WAY too loud.
People have been suggesting that "big bass" = big sound.
I think that this is incorrect IF the idea of "big sound" is soundstage, not impact or "thump". Very good line arrays when the volume is increased merely give the impression of getting closer to the stage, not that the bass got bigger, or that anything else in terms of the relationships in virtual space of the program material changed - it just appears that you moved closer to being on the stage. The effect remains the same even with the bass not present. It's not quite "natural" to listen without the bass and/or low bass being present, but the sound stage ought not disappear without the bass.
Adding in bass will not give this effect to a speaker that can not do this.
Loudness does not produce this effect.
In fact enough loudness will tend to over excite the room to the point where you have merely created too much of a reverberant field, and this gives an impression of size without sufficient definition.
It's also important to consider that most commercial recordings are artificially produced. Mostly multi-tracked mono, panned left-right. Producing a natural or realistic soundfield from that may or may not happen properly. Best bet to acquire or do your own actual 2mic recordings and see what is what!
_-_-bear
The Grateful Dead with their huge vertically stacked arrays with the differential mics, fantastically clean sound! Effortless. (the HF array still could have been better...). House position does play a role in how a live show sounds. A recent Jeff Beck/Beach Boys show in the local 3500 seat former movie/vaudville theater was dreadful in some seats and quite ok in others. Such is the nature of most PAs in most theaters. But that's just an aside. Almost all of the shows in the last two or more decades have been WAY too loud. People have been suggesting that "big bass" = big sound.
I think that this is incorrect IF the idea of "big sound" is soundstage, not impact or "thump". Very good line arrays when the volume is increased merely give the impression of getting closer to the stage, not that the bass got bigger, or that anything else in terms of the relationships in virtual space of the program material changed - it just appears that you moved closer to being on the stage. The effect remains the same even with the bass not present. It's not quite "natural" to listen without the bass and/or low bass being present, but the sound stage ought not disappear without the bass.
Adding in bass will not give this effect to a speaker that can not do this.
Loudness does not produce this effect.
In fact enough loudness will tend to over excite the room to the point where you have merely created too much of a reverberant field, and this gives an impression of size without sufficient definition.
It's also important to consider that most commercial recordings are artificially produced. Mostly multi-tracked mono, panned left-right. Producing a natural or realistic soundfield from that may or may not happen properly. Best bet to acquire or do your own actual 2mic recordings and see what is what!
_-_-bear
For sixty years I lived in Rochester, where almost every night of the school year the hot Eastman students gave free recitals, in a wonderful old hall. Now I live down South in Dogpatch and I just want to cry. I just want to cry.
Thanks for your kind comments
May I reiterate, the biggest problem is the crossovers and the noise they produce copiously while the music is playing and hardly anybody gives it a thought. because, they cause a situation where voltage and current don't track each other, it is in fact the current that gets corrupted by voltage and not the other way.
The best result, where speakers can contract and expand soundstage as per source material, can only be gotten unless we adopt a "current model" or at the very least keep an eye on it. But voltage is so easy and intuitive, even our software is based on it. I live in Sydney, the home of Thiele-Small Parameters, and I am engaging local guys here and a discussion why we are not always looking in the right place.
The very best speakers don't just sound big - just plaster drivers and cover a wall, that would do it - but rather they can go from very small and incredibly focused and suddenly expand to huge scale that envelops the whole room, even if only using a stereo pair. Unless people have heard this affect from just two speakers, they will not believe it can be done - here hearing is believing.
But then when things gets sonically that big, then another test comes along, because while that goes on, the small sounds inside that now humongous soundfield, should stay as small and tightly focused as before, all at the same time. So few have heard this and it is a revelation when you do.
The biggest killer to make that possible? Noise - the speaker system's own noise floor.
But I am very confident that this will become known more broadly in time and loudspeaker research is entering a new phase.
Cheers, Joe
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