I don't think it quite made Architectural Digest, so probably pretty unlikely to be in Google Images.
Trotsky said: "Every revolutionary, once he assumes power, becomes a reactionary".
This is exactly what happened a lot of times. For example, FIAT owner, Gianni Agnelli, led its way to one of Europe's largest car manufacturers in the late sixties, through the seventies to half of eighties. Then, his pigheadedness almost drove FIAT into the ground and almost destroyed their subsidiaries, Alfa Romeo and Lancia. A legacy they still have to do battle to repair. It took them ten years to get rid of Il Dottore as their CEO, although he remained the biggest stock holder.
I meant it is a very terrible movie.
It made my night.
Soph. It’s obvious I am stuck at this stage of ps development.
DVD eh?! Hmm…
George
They are so bloody cynical that they wanted to underscore their scorn for audiophiles by putting the M2, probably the best performing loudspeaker at the moment, on the market mainly for professionals. Indeed, the kind of folks who will also introduce a string of opamps and cables lacking pedigree into your music chain.
It is a global conspiracy of people who try to be scientific against those who dwell in magic thinking.
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If so, then how are we to understand their Citation series? They built them like many a high end company, while only keeping a rather standard case build quality, and consequently kept their manufacturing costs down. But they still boast of instantaneous currents of 100 Amps (model PA 2400)?
What makes anyone think they "are" one thing or another. Like people, they are complicated, inconsistent, motivated by different factors at different times, and sometimes exhibit self-contradictory behavior.
What might be called magical thinking usually works out more like this:
When somebody does something we feel is good, we often incorrectly tend to attribute that to the kind of people they are. And when somebody does something we feel is bad, we often tend to incorrectly attribute that to the kind of people they are. And we tend to ignore the details of the circumstances they find themselves in (for one reason, because we don't know about many or most of them), and the possible influence those circumstances have on the behavior we observe.
That being said, about 2% of the general population are psychopaths. They are incapable of feeling any epathy for what happens to other people. Of corporate CEOs, about 4% are estimated to psychopaths, and the number is about 24% for the US prison population. Because psychopaths can cause so much harm to groups of people that otherwise benefit from working together in relatively trusting and cooperative ways, our internal psychopath detectors tend to err on the side of false positives, and we may be quick to denounce people as "bad." (There is a bit more to the story, but enough for now.)
In 1972 Sidney Harman said:
"I think it correct to suggest that many of us—now regarded as pioneers—did not take ourselves very seriously in those early days and rather secretly shared the disrespect of the big companies, wondering from day to day when they would move in and take it all away from us."
"We were seen then as a foolish fringe, going nowhere"
http://www.technicalaudio.com/pdf/Audio_magazine_issues_articles/Audio_mag_v56n05_May1972.pdf Page 30
Now the Harmon Group might be better known as "Engulf and Devour"
"I think it correct to suggest that many of us—now regarded as pioneers—did not take ourselves very seriously in those early days and rather secretly shared the disrespect of the big companies, wondering from day to day when they would move in and take it all away from us."
"We were seen then as a foolish fringe, going nowhere"
http://www.technicalaudio.com/pdf/Audio_magazine_issues_articles/Audio_mag_v56n05_May1972.pdf Page 30
Now the Harmon Group might be better known as "Engulf and Devour"
Thanks Michael for the link
IMO, from all the interviewed industry figures, those that foresaw the big picture of the future were Ken Kai (Pioneer) and S. Mabuchi (Sony).
In that Audio volume what caught my eye was the adv of Bose 901.
Do you think that in principle (regardless of speaker model) there is a true relationship between the method (my blue underline) and the effect (my red underline) ?
George
Attachments
Imho, there is a relationship between the ideas and the practice per the advertisement.
If you go back and look at Dr. Bose's research that predated the speaker, he had a spherical section placed in a corner, fairly large... I think from that he figured out that if he excited the rear wall surface you'd get a pretty "big" sound in the room.
The multiple speakers idea probably was a cost saving method, and the only practical method to make a small speaker that did this trick and still had HF response, not requiring a separate tweeter section, which would increase the size of the speaker.
The EQ was severe, and ate amplifier power - making money for the Phase Linear company, no doubt!
Big sound for the day... IF you had a hard flat and mostly empty wall to place them against they were fairly spectacular with some Led Zep spun up on ur turntable... lot's of "slam"...
They also had the benefit of having a smooth harmonic structure across the bandwidth, since all the sound came from the same drivers, no crossovers. The down side was that the double 4 x 4 in the rear created a pretty big interference pattern, but I suppose that was smoothed by the trip to and bounce off the rear wall...
Pretty tough speaker to get a definitive "frequency response" for - each room and placement to the wall and between the speakers is/was different!
Very fun speakers.
If you go back and look at Dr. Bose's research that predated the speaker, he had a spherical section placed in a corner, fairly large... I think from that he figured out that if he excited the rear wall surface you'd get a pretty "big" sound in the room.
The multiple speakers idea probably was a cost saving method, and the only practical method to make a small speaker that did this trick and still had HF response, not requiring a separate tweeter section, which would increase the size of the speaker.
The EQ was severe, and ate amplifier power - making money for the Phase Linear company, no doubt!
Big sound for the day... IF you had a hard flat and mostly empty wall to place them against they were fairly spectacular with some Led Zep spun up on ur turntable... lot's of "slam"...
They also had the benefit of having a smooth harmonic structure across the bandwidth, since all the sound came from the same drivers, no crossovers. The down side was that the double 4 x 4 in the rear created a pretty big interference pattern, but I suppose that was smoothed by the trip to and bounce off the rear wall...
Pretty tough speaker to get a definitive "frequency response" for - each room and placement to the wall and between the speakers is/was different!
Very fun speakers.
Who would doubt that?
In fact you have realized the basis of any controlled listening (sensory) test, but there seems to be a somewhat naive believe that "our perception" would be per se less easily biased "by many other things than hearing" .
I am a believer in sound controlled listening tests, "DBT" isn´t a synonym for "good or sound" .
Before beeing able to evaluate such a difference one has first to find out, what a difference would be descripted by "night and day" .
Wrt to "inattentional blindness" or "inattentional deafness"- does a gorilla, that remains undetected during an experiment qualify for "night and day" ?
Does an electric guitar suddenly mixed into a piece of well known (to the participants) orchestral music qualify?
If you had already realized that perception is a mysterious thing than you must certainly have noticed that verbalization of percepted "reality" can´t be less mysterious.
Look into the data of well documented listening experiments and you´ll discover that participants of controlled tests (yes of course including the "DBT" feature) were not less biased, sometimes even more, provided it was a multidimensional test.
Testing onedimensional features is less prone to biases .....
So. you don´t read the journals and did never dig deeper into the data of published experiments, right?
But notwithstanding you have very strong beliefes about the perceptibility of the effects we are discussing in this thread (and others). Not to mention strong believes about the "wife in the kitchen", right?
You should sometimes carry out an experiment with participants listening "en passant" , you might be in for a surprise.....
But, if you are _really_ interested i´ll cite some test results....
Corporate "philosophies"
From the outsider's perspective many suppose that there is some well-defined set of players and notions within a large audio company. One could suppose it is something enunciated by the CEO and faithfully executed by his or her minions below. This is rarely the case and certainly was not the case at Harman.
The outsider might well imagine a differentiation among the brands, and suppose that a Harman-Kardon powered loudspeaker has emerged from a set of h/k engineers and marketers, perhaps running around as Dre and Iovine love to construct in white lab coats and carrying clipboards. There would then be a different set for JBL branded products, and so on.
The reality is that once brands had some recognition they were used willy-nilly, and depending on the degree of cravenness of a manager, slapped on products of questionable quality. This resulted in eventual trashing of the given brand, a situation from which it took a long time to recover. Lots of people still wince when they see a JBL logo on something and are prepared to hear all of the things they believe should be there. This is another reason for blind testing.
One of my favorite examples was when listening panels picked from employees had a huge difference in preference when they could see the loudspeakers, which included a Theil model with a beautiful and imposing cabinet, but had low-order crossovers that led to a poor directivity index. Alongside was a JBL powered loudspeaker of appreciably more modest maximum SPL, a lower price, and a much cheaper appearance. When the speakers could no longer be seen, the rating of the JBL improved a lot and the Theil got a good deal worse. Stereophile was at the paper session when these data were presented, and they came away with a completely wrong impression, namely that the JBL scored higher when it could be seen, and attributed this to the people seeing "their" company logo. But it was the reverse---they downgraded the smaller speaker when they could see it! As Toole joked in a letter to SP (never printed) "of course we fired the lot of them".
The brands are maintained now as much or more for the OEM automotive business than for revenues from their sale, which in relative terms is negligible. The only division that preserved some semblance of a coherent philosophy until recently (some significant changes in Consumer are occurring now) is the professional group, and until Multimedia's brief and generally successful run was about the only division (besides automotive) making money. The current CEO gutted Multimedia so now it is pretty much down to Pro, with the old guard displaced from Consumer. Then there is the luxury audio division with some very fine people, but also prized for the branding potential for automotive.
Historically there were some good people and products, including the cited Citation (see what I did there?). Sometimes a less-schooled but very good engineer would champion the high-current products for example, and even introduced the power cube measurements as part of the story.
From the outsider's perspective many suppose that there is some well-defined set of players and notions within a large audio company. One could suppose it is something enunciated by the CEO and faithfully executed by his or her minions below. This is rarely the case and certainly was not the case at Harman.
The outsider might well imagine a differentiation among the brands, and suppose that a Harman-Kardon powered loudspeaker has emerged from a set of h/k engineers and marketers, perhaps running around as Dre and Iovine love to construct in white lab coats and carrying clipboards. There would then be a different set for JBL branded products, and so on.
The reality is that once brands had some recognition they were used willy-nilly, and depending on the degree of cravenness of a manager, slapped on products of questionable quality. This resulted in eventual trashing of the given brand, a situation from which it took a long time to recover. Lots of people still wince when they see a JBL logo on something and are prepared to hear all of the things they believe should be there. This is another reason for blind testing.
One of my favorite examples was when listening panels picked from employees had a huge difference in preference when they could see the loudspeakers, which included a Theil model with a beautiful and imposing cabinet, but had low-order crossovers that led to a poor directivity index. Alongside was a JBL powered loudspeaker of appreciably more modest maximum SPL, a lower price, and a much cheaper appearance. When the speakers could no longer be seen, the rating of the JBL improved a lot and the Theil got a good deal worse. Stereophile was at the paper session when these data were presented, and they came away with a completely wrong impression, namely that the JBL scored higher when it could be seen, and attributed this to the people seeing "their" company logo. But it was the reverse---they downgraded the smaller speaker when they could see it! As Toole joked in a letter to SP (never printed) "of course we fired the lot of them".
The brands are maintained now as much or more for the OEM automotive business than for revenues from their sale, which in relative terms is negligible. The only division that preserved some semblance of a coherent philosophy until recently (some significant changes in Consumer are occurring now) is the professional group, and until Multimedia's brief and generally successful run was about the only division (besides automotive) making money. The current CEO gutted Multimedia so now it is pretty much down to Pro, with the old guard displaced from Consumer. Then there is the luxury audio division with some very fine people, but also prized for the branding potential for automotive.
Historically there were some good people and products, including the cited Citation (see what I did there?). Sometimes a less-schooled but very good engineer would champion the high-current products for example, and even introduced the power cube measurements as part of the story.
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When my horn-loving friends razz me for being prejudiced against the genre after me hearing dozens of examples of, "Oh, those other ones suck, THESE are the ones you'll love!" which reliably disappointed, they often like to point out that I haven't heard any horns under blind conditions and it could just be my biases making me fool myself, and... they're absolutely correct.
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