Sound Quality Vs. Measurements

[bcarso]

Originally Posted by SY

My dog's taste apparently runs to soggy sponges, since my speakers are nowhere near that efficient. She usually ignore the stereo when I play commercial recordings. But I was playing some of our home recordings a few days ago and she ran around frantically trying to figure out where those people were. When she heard my wife's voice at one point, she sat down and started howling in confusion.

Her Master's Voice (tm)

[SY]

She is much bigger than Nipper.

[scott wurcer]

Originally Posted by FrankWW

And? I know the NS -10. It was used as a nearfield monitor stood sideways on the meter bridge. So, what, 2 or 3 ft from the listener? That's not how most home users listen to their speakers. And the bass response wasn't good.

Here is Newell's paper on it

http://www.soundonsound.com/pdfs/ns10m.pdf

It was apparently not a successful consumer product.

The SOS article is interesting, also

The Yamaha NS10 Story

Yamaha has them proudly displayed in their "History of Yamaha" room or at least they did in 1988. They were one of the first speakers that drove me to put my hands over my ears at normal listening levels, why I don't know. Is there a clue in all those measurements? BTW I only heard them with the grills removed.

[a.wayne]

In the eighties and early nineties , NS10's were in every studio , I ever walked in, most of the successful recordings of the time were mixed on them , they were a tool , same as aurotone , nothing to do with sound quality ...

[ThorstenL]

Hi,

Originally Posted by dvv

my experience tells me that once you get an efficiency of say 90 dB/2.83V/1m is quite sufficient for room listening, assuming you have a little more than a weedy little thingie deliverling like 8 Watts.

My experience is that literally there is no limit to which increasing speaker efficiency improves things, honest. And it has zip to do with low powered amplifiers.

A good friend of mine has a pair of Altec VOTT A7's with the bigger HF horn in his fairly modest size living room. These are 101dB/1W/1m. He drives them with a pair of 110W Air Tight ATM-3 Monoblocks and complained that the Air Tight 300B SE Amplifier had "bad dynamics"...

I would not necessarily agree with the "bad dynamics" bit, but my listening habits differ.

Originally Posted by dvv

I will agree that a more efficient loudspeaker will fare better with what has been called "microdynamics",

Yep.

And they completely KILL on Macrodynamics and all dynamics inbetween.

BTW, you can make a lowish efficiency speaker behave very much the same.

You must avoid surrounds with too much hysteresis, have a similar Mms/BL ratio as the large systems woofer, avoid cones with too low breakup frequency and minimise both distortion and compression to levels similar to the higher efficiency system for a given SPL...

Ciao T

[AudioLapDance]

So Sy,

Instead of the audiophile cliche "my wife could tell the difference from the other room ..." you've upped the ante to "my dog could tell the difference from the other room ..."

You should make some recordings of the dog park and have her really go nuts!

Or some nice outdoor nature sounds ... and she'll poop on the floor!

Cheers,
Jeff

[a.wayne]

High efficiency , meaning horn speakers have poor microdynamics , they do loud, louder very well , never getting soft , always big , like some big mouth ESL speakers that are popular amongst that crowd ..

[ThorstenL]

Hi,

Originally Posted by a.wayne

In the eighties and early nineties , NS10's were in every studio , I ever walked in, most of the successful recordings of the time were mixed on them , they were a tool , same as aurotone , nothing to do with sound quality ...

Yet they NEVER EVER where the main monitors nor, where they really much used for mastering, except to check how the mix would sound on a crappy japanese stereo. Their near ubiquitousness however turned them into a "Standard", as everyone knew how their mixes would sound on NS-10, so they could bridge the differences in the sound of the large monitors easier. It did not matter that they where a very crooked straight edge, the point was that you had them everywhere...

Personally I thought they approached "worst speaker" ever, but that honour is held by products from a company who's name is a four letter swearword of the worst kind in India...

Ciao T

[jacco vermeulen]

Originally Posted by AudioLapDance

the audiophile cliche

With the advent of a cat, now a dog, my audio junk (now esl2905) had to move to the 2nd level.
Both could be fooled from above, but so still does any cat or dog sound on TV.

Speaking of waveguides and 2-ways, i recently audited B&W's Prestige Monitor, not in Utopia Diablo price league, but >>90dB/W/m JBL monitors, nèèèh. (me living on a boat in a few year's time, hard choices)

Hey, careful there, my neighbor has 901's in his horrible decorated livingroom.

[ThorstenL]

Hi,

Originally Posted by a.wayne

High efficiency , meaning horn speakers have poor microdynamics , they do loud louder very well , never getting soft , always big , like some big mouth ESL speakers that are popular amongst that crowd ..

You are confusing many different issues.

High Efficiency does not necessarily means "Horns".

Past that, you are suggesting the HE Speakers are always loud, that is, that they play low level sounds louder than lower efficiency ones. Now with respect, there is simply no physical mechanism in the kind of electromechanical system represented by a loudspeaker.

What exists however is a mechanism that produces attenuation at very low signal levels, namely hysteresis in the suspension. For high efficiency speakers lossy and high hysteresis surrounds and spiders are a no-no, you loose too much efficiency in the process, so one has to either live with the resulting un-damped cone resonances or find different ways to solve them.

In contrast, in current low efficiency "HiFi" Speakers Spider and Surround are often deliberately made lossy, to damp out resonances. In the process they also often acquire hysteresis.

Hysteresis just as thermal compression is quite easy to measure if you have a anechoic chamber with sufficiently low noise level. Simply use sweeps starting from a level just below your measurement limit (often microphone imposed), like 20dB SPL and run each sweep with precisely 10dB increase in SPL. Normalising the 10dB steps out is easy. Then you can very easily see compression and hysteresis losses at low and high SPL's.

One thing that is often true is that high efficiency systems have a better linearity with SPL/power changes than low efficiency ones, though it is not an absolute truth, more a 70/30 kind of gig.

Another issue is the way resonances are treated. If you resort to heavy handed damping them out (pretty much staple for HiFi Drivers) you reduce not only amplitude but also Q of the resonances, so they are lower in level but much easier excited.

In the end driver design is an extremely complex discipline (and few designers are consciously aware of all the different angles). Funnily enough, most of the issues with Speakers are comparably easily to measure (passing nod to Mr. Klippel) and to correlate to listening experience.

Yet most of those who constantly strain at minor issues in electronics performance routinely swallow the whole camel of speaker performance and deny that it's a camel or that they swallowed it too...

Oh well. As Charles Lutwidge Dodgson once wrote: "Such is Human Perversity".

Ciao T