Pretty easy, Bob. Undistorted sound has 'percussive energy', PE, automatically - that's what's on the recording. Therefore, lack of PE is a form of distortion, normally caused by hitting the limits of the capabilities of the amplifier - even cheap speakers will do this quality well, if driven properly. The only caveat with low end drivers is that they have be conditioned well each time from cold, IME, to achieve this - higher quality units or using different technologies most probably means less problems here ...
So, to 'measure it' means high quality recording with a microphone of the speaker output, and sophisticated comparison with source waveform to see where the damage is done, I believe. Unfortunately, the bits and pieces to do this are not available off the shelf ...
Perfect answer, thx Frank.
Drunken designated drivers are ok, it's the sober kangaroos that we have to watch out for....and the bacon.
Dan.
Dan, any snow in the neck of your woods?
Two Legged Greyhound....
Try Googling 'Perth, Western Australia'....or 'Western Australia'....or 'Australia'....
I have had Canadians tell me about moose and deer getting stuck in the headlights shining far ahead...at least you mob get a visual warning.
Dan.
In Western Australia ?....Haha, no not the merest chance.Dan, any snow in the neck of your woods?
Try Googling 'Perth, Western Australia'....or 'Western Australia'....or 'Australia'....
I have had Canadians tell me about moose and deer getting stuck in the headlights shining far ahead...at least you mob get a visual warning.
Kangaroos miraculously appear from behind cover vegetation at right angles, and at breakneck speed.....most country vehicles have good 'roo bars.
Dan.
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It's not just the quality of the cans themselves but also the quality of the headphone amp and its volume control.
As for the cables (wiring); just use good common sense and quality copper.
...With solid connectors (gold).
Soldered or clamped; that is the question. And if soldered, with what; silver or?
And audio paths from quality print circuit boards (double - triple layers), and short, and gold conduits, or silver, or pure copper, or?
* Nice meeting you, & Happy Holidays DVV!
The volume control is Alps Blue, my standard unless I manage to get my hands on discrete 24 point resistor rotary switch, though they van be a bit awkward on occasion. The banalnce control is also Alps Blue.
A total of 3 switches. Te one for power, another for mode (stereo/L+R) so you can adjust it exactly to your hearing and setup and the last for source selection (A or B). Switches are Made in France, life expectancy over 100,000 switchings, internally silver plated.
PCBs are single layer, but dual side. The upper side is mostly ground leads. An old practice I picked up from the RF people. Holes fully metalized for better contact.
All internal audio wiring uses all silver cabling from Neotech. The rest is from van den Hul. All connectors Teflon insulated, heavy duty, gold plated.
All soldering using British made solder with the largest silver component I could find.
All components purchased directly from manufacturers (Motorola/ON Semi, Siemens, Telefunken, Philips, Fisher & Tausche, etc). All components hand matched to 1% tolerance or better (fully complementary circuits, so it needs to be done).
Version A uses bipolars throughout (output devices 50W transistors), version B uses FETs at the input and MOSFETs at the output (output devices rated at 70W), version C uses tubes (designed by a good friend, who has been into tubes for the last 30+ years).
The BJT and FET/MOSFET version will drive a loudspeaker in a room to reasonable volumes, proving the point that they are in fact power amplifiers limited only by their supply line voltages and heat sink size. As a load, to them headphones are like a joke.
True dual mono construction, with separate 50VA toroids for each channel, and separate shunt power supplies.
I think you could say I have my bases pretty well covered. Wide bandwidth, low global NFB circuitry, just the way I like it. Can also be used as preamps, if you're happy with just two sources, they have a pair of RCA cinch outputs for a power amp at the bac, and the solid state versions can easily drive both the power amp and the phones at the same time.
I do not claim they are the world's best ever, but I do say they are definitely of the good guy persuasion. They never fail to impress people with modest headphones at showing what's really available with proper drive.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too.
Drunken designated drivers are ok, it's the sober kangaroos that we have to watch out for....and the bacon
Dan.
A friend lost her son on xmas day , no deer , car hit a tree ...
Yes, always so sad when a young one is nipped before their prime.A friend lost her son on xmas day , no deer , car hit a tree ...
A close friend's young son was in the back of a Lotus that got crashed - all were killed.....such a sad loss.
I have no idea how I survived my push bike racing days...I should have died a dozen times.
Ditto driving a seriously tweaked 2L Escort.
Nowadays, cruise control is my best friend.
Dan.
Perfect answer, thx Frank.
Yes and no , problem ..? Yes , perspective ...
Frankie takes everything out of perspective, all speakers have PE, if not we wouldnt hear them secondly , lack of , is relative to "real" the term lack of is in relation to such, if real is a "ten out of ten" and the speakers in discussion is a 3 then it would be determined to have a lack of PE ..
Perspective ..!
Now what frank purpose is that if he gets close enuff to his favorite utube speaker it will have a high enuff PE factor to sound real , this is where we disagree , because while the increase in SPL will happen the perspective will still be too small to sound real, ( headphones suffer from this) one would be amazed at how much power is necessary to reproduce the high hats alone on a drum kit , impossible from a single point source driver , the distortion level would be off the chain. Magico speakers for eg, has very good bandwidth, try it vs say MBL, or Gen1.2 and see which one comes closer to the "real deal ", horns do PE very well and many who search for that realism go that route , others like myself prefer large Linesource , the difference is the coloration and all speakers currently suffer from it, some more than others and i find it more so with horns others may not .
Frank cannot achieve what we are speaking about from his small speakers , he is trying very hard to convince himself ..
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Yes very sad ..
Today the young ones start too fast too early , if bikes they start riding 600cc or 1000cc , thay have'nt even learnt the basics , some can barely ride a bicylce yet they jump on these big bikes , with the cars, the same , bigger turbos and then More boost, No basics thought , poor brakes etc.
Sad ....
My Mother (occupational therapist) forbid that I even think about ever having a motor bike (good advice).
Should I have done so, I would have been dragged by the ear, first to the casualty ward, and then the rehab ward.
I used to wear my front wheel racing silk tubular bike tyres up past the rubber and fray the sidewall threads, and had to replace a few sets of alloy pedals because of grounding them (and grinding them down into the bearings) on roundabouts and corners every day.....just normal .
1100cc...100+HP....death.
Here we have youngsters who are legally perfectly entitled to drive 6L V8 sedans and utes....there are not very many used, good condition such vehicles surviving.
I grew up in the back seat of an AM DB5....I do understand high power cars, and when to use them.
Dan.
Should I have done so, I would have been dragged by the ear, first to the casualty ward, and then the rehab ward.
I used to wear my front wheel racing silk tubular bike tyres up past the rubber and fray the sidewall threads, and had to replace a few sets of alloy pedals because of grounding them (and grinding them down into the bearings) on roundabouts and corners every day.....just normal
.1100cc...100+HP....death.
Here we have youngsters who are legally perfectly entitled to drive 6L V8 sedans and utes....there are not very many used, good condition such vehicles surviving.
I grew up in the back seat of an AM DB5....I do understand high power cars, and when to use them.
Dan.
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The day before yesterday, a guy wanted to buy my hand made, 100% custom made Yugo look-alike. He asked if he could drive it, and I flatly refused. He asked why, and I told him the unpleasant truth - that's a car which he needs to learn to drive to get what it can give. As a series model, it's top version had a 1.3 litre 65 bhp engine, and this one is a bit ligter than the serial model, but has a heavily tweaked (rebuilt actually) FIAT 1.6 litre engine, delivering 142 bhp It'll do 0-62 mph (0-100 km/H) in 6.5 seconds, it's small and very light and agile, and it will take on many smaller BMWs on for good measure all the way up to 210 km/h (app. 131 mph), but man, it's SCARY.
If one is used to the pedestrian version, as this guy was, he is likely to hit the first lamp post, because this is the essence of brutality, touch that gas pedal and it's off like a rocket. No way I'd ever let anyone without some experience with such cars just sit back and try to have fun, he's likely to have an accident. It will go 62-0 mph in about 100 feet, I've done serious work with the entire undercarriage and especially the brakes, but I believe people who rely on brakes too much are prime candidates for accidents.
Max, some very serious, and in the hands of the uninitiated deadly, machines have been made available to the public. Suzuki Hayabusa for example has a 1.3 litre engine delivering serious 180 bhp, I honestly don't know who wants to drive that on a civillian road. Unfortunately, it appears the law is dead silent on such matters as limiting the availability of such machines to more than puberty ridden kids. If I were a lawmaker, I'd limit machines with a power to weight ratio into classes, and their availablity to ages of 21 and say 25.
If one is used to the pedestrian version, as this guy was, he is likely to hit the first lamp post, because this is the essence of brutality, touch that gas pedal and it's off like a rocket. No way I'd ever let anyone without some experience with such cars just sit back and try to have fun, he's likely to have an accident. It will go 62-0 mph in about 100 feet, I've done serious work with the entire undercarriage and especially the brakes, but I believe people who rely on brakes too much are prime candidates for accidents.
Max, some very serious, and in the hands of the uninitiated deadly, machines have been made available to the public. Suzuki Hayabusa for example has a 1.3 litre engine delivering serious 180 bhp, I honestly don't know who wants to drive that on a civillian road. Unfortunately, it appears the law is dead silent on such matters as limiting the availability of such machines to more than puberty ridden kids. If I were a lawmaker, I'd limit machines with a power to weight ratio into classes, and their availablity to ages of 21 and say 25.
I'd have the insurance companies deliver the driving licenses. And of course legalize all possible discrimination.
That would be fun. "Sir, since you belong to the young idiot demographic group with no previous driving experience, we believe the likelyhood you'll crash this sports bike is 90%, so we'll charge you $1000/month insurance premium. Would you be interested in full coverage for burial expenses ?"
Over here the insurance companies limit young peoples access to fast machinery either by not insuring them at all or charging enormous amounts of money.
Famously back in the '90s annual insurance premium for a Ford RS Cosworth if you were a male under 25 was more than the car cost to buy new which was about £22k.
To legally ride a motorbike which produces more than 34bhp you have to have 2 years experience. As it happens most people who die in bike accidents here are in their 50s.
These are usually men in their midlife crisis who buy a 750 or bigger after their kids leave home because that is what they rode in their 20s forgetting that back then a 750 produced less than half the power they do now.
Famously back in the '90s annual insurance premium for a Ford RS Cosworth if you were a male under 25 was more than the car cost to buy new which was about £22k.
To legally ride a motorbike which produces more than 34bhp you have to have 2 years experience. As it happens most people who die in bike accidents here are in their 50s.
These are usually men in their midlife crisis who buy a 750 or bigger after their kids leave home because that is what they rode in their 20s forgetting that back then a 750 produced less than half the power they do now.
Incorrect, fortunately. The distortion you hear in conventional playback is due to the electronics misbehaving, I've done the necessaries so many times, with a variety of driving chains, and speakers - the difference between "hifi", and correct, sound is very stark, once you've experienced the two types of behaviour from a particular set of kit, and you are able to go from one behaviour to the other almost at will - it just makes the sort of thing you're talking about come across as nonsense to me.
As a simple example: a hifi some distance away is loud, and sounds 'impressive' - trouble is, the closer you get to it the more it sounds like hifi; right next to the speakers it's downright obnoxious; live sound: some distance away is loud, and sounds impressive - the closer you get the more intense and vivid it becomes, the PE
climbs and climbs- until you standing right besides the instrument, literally a foot away from the sound generating mechanism - the sound fills and overwhelms your being, it excludes all else in the vicinity. The latter experience is what you're after, and, yes, a cheap speaker driven properly will do that - because, I've heard it happen over and over again ...
Interesting, the conversation of having intense experiences in modes of transport - I was never into that sort of thing, thrill seeking by moving fast and 'recklessly' has never been my bag - however, having air move over my eardrums in that fashion does do it for me, even now - which is why PA systems really p!ss me off, they're like a kid's $200 bomb with the exhaust done, trying to sound impressive ...
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