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Well maybe its linear distortion then. I think that certainly a very natural sounding recorded voice is the exception. There's usually some digital buzziness or sibilance there, some people say digititus but that's the wrong term.
It could be any number of things, but I know many people who get auditory overload from complex music. It puts large demands on every link in the chain. Not all classical music is orchestral or complex though, so I'm not really clear about what you are saying
Maybe I overstated it a bit, but say I go over to shoutcast and listen to a station like audiophile buroque. The recordings have a distorted sound. Like old and dusty sounding.
This in comparison doesn't, I think its because it was done in a studio
YouTube
There are at least two mixing/mastering engineers whose products I will never buy. Brothers no less and oddly popular but everything they touch ends up distorted and grotesquely over-compressed.
But at least they use all vintage valve compressors for that 'analogue mojo'.
Should at least keep some audiophools happy...
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I find the issue to be speech. As I get older, understanding somebody talking to me in a noisy pub / restaurant is harder than I remember it to be. Complex music I don't mind because I'm not trying to comprehend it (most songs have such crap lyrics I prefer not to understand !).
Ignoring the ridiculous interpretation and offensive reaction to my post, I say whatever kind of music you want to listen to, it should be on the sort of system it was produced to be played in.If by "pop" music you mean anything that is not "classical" then I could not disagree more strongly. That is the kind of position that really irks me, the misinformed belief that only classical music is worthy of a good stereo.
"System" includes the room car, truck, elevator, movie theatre, or earphones while riding the school bus to grade 10. Do you know which one or which group? Or all, sort of?
"Classical" recordings would be considered crap if they were intended for anything but quality home systems. Of course they could be cherished for non-SQ reasons too.*
As for the rest of the recording world, I suppose it is best to have a quality system with lots of adjustment of all sorts so the very close-mic'ed recordings of breathy Diana Krall and her 12 foot tall double bass sound "correct".
To relate this to the issues of this thread, over in the subwoofer forum, many members positively salivate over enclosure designs that no "classical" music lover would want in their home. These are suitably good for a lot of other music**, I guess. My point is that judgments of quality or distortion are related to the music genre.
B.
*Heard Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde last night and wanted to again hear the Bruno Walter recording at home. (He premiered it but he's been dead for decades.)
**big thing for trucks is 6th order band pass and all the variants
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please elaborate on this statement i'm curious to know why you would say this?
as someone who has done alot of recording i've come to prize the high output high sensitivity mic's i've used.
this deserves a thread of it's own there is just so much wrong with that it's astounding.
back to low distortion in loudspeakers...
Mics don't have to be efficient, it doesn't matter. So they are very small, yielding almost no resonances in the audio band, have miniscule diaphragm displacement yielding almost zero nonlinear distortion ... A loudspeaker needs "amps" to get 94 dBSPL, an electret microphone produces Pico-coulombs of charge at this same SPL. That's a pretty big gap I would say.
You do realize that I was Director of Engineering for a microphone company for several years! How many mics have you designed? I'll stand by my statement.
Therefore, for a direct radiator the only safe good idea is to reduce the excursions.
http://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/kli...Measurement_of_Large-Signal_Parameters_99.pdf
Hi ZeroD,
they were on eBay and are in near perfect condition. Especially the cones which are extremely vulnerable to damage. I paid £40.00 approx. for the pair. I’m quite happy with this and am looking forward to hearing what they can do. I’d like to know how they stand up against other drivers with regard to distortion but only out of casual interest as I know they will sound good.
This thread has gone away from the original opening question and there are many, many speaker drivers worth considering that have not been mentioned to see which ones produce the least amount of distortion.
they were on eBay and are in near perfect condition. Especially the cones which are extremely vulnerable to damage. I paid £40.00 approx. for the pair. I’m quite happy with this and am looking forward to hearing what they can do. I’d like to know how they stand up against other drivers with regard to distortion but only out of casual interest as I know they will sound good.
This thread has gone away from the original opening question and there are many, many speaker drivers worth considering that have not been mentioned to see which ones produce the least amount of distortion.
Therefore, for a direct radiator the only safe good idea is to reduce the excursions.
http://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/kli...Measurement_of_Large-Signal_Parameters_99.pdf
It also stands to reason that all things being equal a larger driver playing a given frequency will have less excursion and so less distortion.
So larger drivers and also multiple drivers distribute the box noise and diffraction over a wider area.
It would be interesting to compare a single very low distortion driver like a satori to multiple cheaper ones.
I'd disagree.
As you minimise capsule size, the noise levels must increase. With studios routinely applying 20-30dB of compression, that can start to become a problem.
The dynamic mics I've worked on have of the order of 1mm Xmax. Since they're sometimes subject to SPLs of the order of 150dB, I suspect that gets used in full from time-to-time.
Happy to start a new thread on this. I think it'd be an interesting discussion.
Chris
Law of physics always wins versus marketing, and all loudspeakers drivers are designed to achieve a low THD rate.