Coincidentally, it's just about time to order parts for the summer building season.
Well, let's consider the SB Acoustics 6.5" Satori MW16P-8. It's certainly extended, but what's happening above 3 kHz isn't really that pretty ... it's a little reminiscent of a Lowther, to be honest. I suspect a reflection off the large spider, but I'm not sure. The other construction features are modern and high-tech, and the paper cone and neo magnet are appreciated. (Paper usually sounds better than it measures; the opposite is true of carbon-fiber and other rigid materials.)
If I were to design a speaker around this, I'd have to deal with the region above 3 kHz. Many modern designers would just ignore the roughness smack dab in the middle of the crossover rolloff region. If it is ignored ... it doesn't have much effect on the summed response, after all ... the inter-driver phase response will wander around, which tugs the polar pattern up and down, and if used in a MTM, will open up and narrow the polar pattern. I also believe that inter-driver phase angles greater than 10 degrees are directly audible to the listener as incoherence, as a sort of unnatural blur, like poorly registered colors in a newspaper photograph.
The band-reject region needs to be as smooth as possible, preferably for an octave above the nominal crossover. If there's just a single peak there, it can be notched out, although this is an unwanted hassle to do. But if the response is just sort of rough and ripply, that's not so good, since it falls outside the scope of practical equalization with passive crossovers. If the system is expensive and intended to be multi-amped, then digital equalization can be applied on a per-driver basis, to force them into the ideal response curves. This is standard practice in self-amplified professional monitors, although it then defeats the point of state-of-the-art DACs, since the speaker can never sound better than the built-in DACs.
If I was paid to build a loudspeaker around this driver, I'd probably audition 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-order passive crossovers, and might even select a ribbon tweeter with a crossover somewhere around 4 to 5 kHz. I strongly suspect the 2nd and 3rd-order crossovers would sound rougher, thanks to inter-driver phase variations, but the silly reviewers would just love the "detail" from the overloaded ribbon and the midbass spraying out energy in the unhappy-looking 6kHz-and-up region. These are the kinds of defect that most reviewers love; they mistake the fizz and brittle sound for "accuracy", which is a comment on how much live, acoustic music they listen to.
But it's not a sound I like at all; it just sounds like a bad loudspeaker to me, even though it's what you hear when you walk into 80% of the rooms at hifi shows. So I'd probably take two paths with this particular driver: a 4th-order (electrical) crossover, to get it out of the trouble region fast, and also protect the ribbon from over-excursion, which they hate. An alternate path might be a lower-slope crossover at 2 kHz, but the demands on the dome tweeter (no ribbon would be suitable) would be very severe. A better choice might be a AMT-style tweeter; they have lots of muscle in the 2 kHz region.
So a modern-sounding system would have an MTM of a pair of the Satori MW16P-8's, and Beyma TP-150 AMT tweeter, and a 2nd or 3rd-order crossover around 2.5~3 kHz. It wouldn't sound much like an Ariel, but it would be plenty fast and resolving, and wouldn't have the thin, reedy, and dynamically washed-out sound of Chinese ribbons without enough crossover to protect them from over-excursions.
Note how little I have to say about the modern holy grail, directivity control. Frankly, I think it's pretty small potatoes compared to keeping the drivers happy, which is far more important, and immediately audible as "sounds like music" vs "sounds like hi-fi", or worse, "sounds bad".
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Imaging quality of LTOs
Hello Lynn,
First-off, I must thank you for your generous gift of the Ariels to the community. I have enjoyed a pair of these for several years now.
Can you describe the imaging quality of the LTOs? I have been very curious about the Beyond the Ariel project as the thread-count has grown. Over the years, I have become more interested in higher sensitivity designs, initially inspired by an article by Drew Daniels on the Audio Heritage site.
I listened to some Avant Garde Duo's several years ago and try as I did, I could not perceive any form of imagery / virtual field in front of me. That was a letdown as I was hoping for much better. I don't have experience with modern waveguides and have faith that the quality is there.
How would you describe the imaging quality, as I'm sure the dynamics, headroom, etc., of the LTO will be well-managed.
Thank you,
Brendon
Hello Lynn,
First-off, I must thank you for your generous gift of the Ariels to the community. I have enjoyed a pair of these for several years now.
Can you describe the imaging quality of the LTOs? I have been very curious about the Beyond the Ariel project as the thread-count has grown. Over the years, I have become more interested in higher sensitivity designs, initially inspired by an article by Drew Daniels on the Audio Heritage site.
I listened to some Avant Garde Duo's several years ago and try as I did, I could not perceive any form of imagery / virtual field in front of me. That was a letdown as I was hoping for much better. I don't have experience with modern waveguides and have faith that the quality is there.
How would you describe the imaging quality, as I'm sure the dynamics, headroom, etc., of the LTO will be well-managed.
Thank you,
Brendon
Two final comments:
1. Ariels occasionally (but rarely) become available on the used market.
2. I built my ariels because I recognised that effective crossover design was beyond my means. There is another way, especially for small rooms, and that is the path of the single driver.
Hello Brendon,
I don't want to reply in place of Lynn but I think that his message
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/100392-beyond-ariel-858.html#post3452450
is a very interesting reading about the imaging of the LTO.
Best regards from Paris, France
Jean-Michel Le Cléac'h
"Note how little I have to say about the modern holy grail, directivity control."
Some of that may be related to how well tuned you are to certain types of coloration- as soon as you hear misbehaving woofers, (which you have plenty of descriptors for) you're "out" of it, and there's not much more to say. Many or most CD speakers have higher-efficiency woofers with breakup an octave (sometimes less) above XO.
One interesting vintage 15" that some others might want to play with (out of production so not useful for your projects, which need to have available product) is the JBL 2035H. SFC geometry means an undercut pole, overhung geometry with a shorting ring around the base of the pole. Perhaps more importantly, there's a copper sleeve through the gap, not common in JBL woofers. It has lower power handling, but higher sensitivity than a JBL 2226h, and doesn't need impedance compensation so you can get it to respond nicely to your filters without too much trouble. It still has the characteristic "pro 15" breakup around 2kHz though, a little higher than some 15"s. High power handling, decent Xmax (7mm or so), and low distortion.
Some of that may be related to how well tuned you are to certain types of coloration- as soon as you hear misbehaving woofers, (which you have plenty of descriptors for) you're "out" of it, and there's not much more to say. Many or most CD speakers have higher-efficiency woofers with breakup an octave (sometimes less) above XO.
One interesting vintage 15" that some others might want to play with (out of production so not useful for your projects, which need to have available product) is the JBL 2035H. SFC geometry means an undercut pole, overhung geometry with a shorting ring around the base of the pole. Perhaps more importantly, there's a copper sleeve through the gap, not common in JBL woofers. It has lower power handling, but higher sensitivity than a JBL 2226h, and doesn't need impedance compensation so you can get it to respond nicely to your filters without too much trouble. It still has the characteristic "pro 15" breakup around 2kHz though, a little higher than some 15"s. High power handling, decent Xmax (7mm or so), and low distortion.
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Hi,
Thank you.
Indeed, there are many suggestions for DIY speakers.
From my stand, there are two points:
1. I have already speakers which I consider to be excellent (Brodmann VC-2). I'd attempt at DIY speakers only should I have indications that what I'd be going to build may, potentially, sound better than the speakers I have already. I'm not looking at building speakers for the fun and joy of DIY. This is on top of the fact that I'm retired, with an extremely tight budget. So, I'd spend the little money I have on something really promising.
2. There are various approaches by DIY enthusiasts and by audiophiles. To my view, the two major approaches are: the degree the music reproduced by sound setup is involving, on one hand - and, on the other end, the degree the sound setup produces impressive sound. I belong to the first category. When I hear, or read recommendations for anything concerning the sound setup, I can relate seriously only to recommendations coming from people who belong to the same category as I do. More often than not, reading forum posts, I cannot tell where the one writing is coming from. Therefore I ignore posts by people who I don't know where they are coming from. I trust Lynn Olson and some others. I don't follow posts by people who I don't know where they are coming from. Should Lynn, or someone else I trust, come up with DIY speakers that aren't too big and that are affordable by me, I'd build it. Else, I'm happy with the speakers I already have.
Joshua
It's a very sane approach and I tend to partially share it. The joy of building for the sake of building fun somehow doesn't excite me as much as I thought it would ( I'm just lazy
The only way you can move forward is to acquire difficult to achieve skill of pointing out the system shortcomings and addressing them correctly. It can be difficult if you don't know whats technically possible. I also happen to partially share Lynn's views on many aspects of sound reproduction but because he is a sort of "sound engineer" and everybody knows that good "sound engineer" is a "dead sound engineer" your chances of getting what you want is 50/50 which is still pretty good Regards, L
It's a very sane approach and I tend to partially share it. The joy of building for the sake of building fun somehow doesn't excite me as much as I thought it would ( I'm just lazy
The only way you can move forward is to acquire difficult to achieve skill of pointing out the system shortcomings and addressing them correctly. It can be difficult if you don't know whats technically possible. I also happen to partially share Lynn's views on many aspects of sound reproduction but because he is a sort of "sound engineer" and everybody knows that good "sound engineer" is a "dead sound engineer" your chances of getting what you want is 50/50 which is still pretty good
Regards, L
Thanks, L.
At present, the greatest shortcomings of my setup are decent pre-amp and phono stage. I can live happily with my present speakers to the end of my (hearing) days.
P.S.,
In the past, for a short while, I also was sound engineer. However I doubt whether this is what determined my 'audiophile' preferences. I've known sound engineers with varying sound preferences.
At present, the greatest shortcomings of my setup are decent pre-amp and phono stage. I can live happily with my present speakers to the end of my (hearing) days.
P.S.,
In the past, for a short while, I also was sound engineer. However I doubt whether this is what determined my 'audiophile' preferences. I've known sound engineers with varying sound preferences.
The piece of sound engineers was just a joke Since a union leader and an electrician became infamous president of my old country many people there don't trust electricians either
Looking up your Brodmann VC-2 speakers I don't picture Lynn approving this resonances based design. I listen to Living Voice Avatar speakers which in drivers choice and configuration resemble Ariel but it has very "lively" particle board reflex cabinet which clearly has the sound on it's own. It is enjoyable speaker just hard to wrap the head around the retail price. You know, when you manage to put $40k MSRP not totally mismatched gear in the room and your Honda Civic default radio provides as much or more musical enjoyment it's probably time to quit and spend more time in vegetable garden...
Since a union leader and an electrician became infamous president of my old country many people there don't trust electricians eitherLooking up your Brodmann VC-2 speakers I don't picture Lynn approving this resonances based design. I listen to Living Voice Avatar speakers which in drivers choice and configuration resemble Ariel but it has very "lively" particle board reflex cabinet which clearly has the sound on it's own. It is enjoyable speaker just hard to wrap the head around the retail price. You know, when you manage to put $40k MSRP not totally mismatched gear in the room and your Honda Civic default radio provides as much or more musical enjoyment it's probably time to quit and spend more time in vegetable garden...
General comments about the last several posts:
My professional background in audio started with the invention and development of the Shadow Vector quadraphonic decoder, one of the first variable-matrix SQ decoders, and as far as I know, the first variable-matrix decoder with symmetric separation and imaging at the cardinal points and all intermediate localizations. The other decoders at the time (CBS Paramatrix, first-generation TATE, and Sansui Vario-Matrix) were only optimized for the cardinal points, with more diffuse localization at intermediate localizations.
I spent a lot of time listening to the image quality that extended over the entire room, since subtle defects in decoder design only revealed themselves if you had a pretty good idea of what the decoder was doing, and were listening for the artifacts. Otherwise the artifacts were only evident as a general sense of listening fatigue.
The Shadow Vector was specifically designed so the diffuse sense of hall ambience would not "pile up" around the speakers, or shimmer around the room as the dynamic matrix followed the dominant-sound localization. This was the most common, and most annoying, defect of commercially available decoders back then, and the reason I invented the Shadow Vector in the first place (it's the same reason I design my own loudspeakers and amplifiers). If the dynamic decoding coefficients are carefully designed, the randomized phase energy will not bounce up and down as the dynamic matrix does its thing, so the dynamic action of the decoder pretty much disappears, and the overall sound is as spacious as a static matrix, or a bit more so. (Commercially available dynamic decoders had quite truncated and somewhat unstable ambient sound fields.)
The result of the Shadow Vector project, along with demos for the engineering staff of EMI records and the BBC research team, trained me so I was quite sensitive to the sound of uneven or unstable sound fields, and aware of the sound of 90-degree phase arcs on the side walls of the listening room. When I was drafted into loudspeaker design, I could easily hear the same phase arcs on a smaller scale, across the drivers on the front panel, or the peculiar misregistered overlapping-image effect of cabinet-edge diffraction. Without the three to four years inventing, developing, and fine-tuning the Shadow Vector prototype, I'm not sure I'd approach speaker design in the same way.
When I took a long vacation from high-end audio in the Eighties, the two major magazines in the USA developed this weird cult of pinpoint imaging, while more or less completely disregarded phasiness, ambient impression, or for that matter natural-sounding tone. The speakers they gave top reviews had serious design errors in driver layout, atrociously bad crossovers, and very erratic spatial impression.
The magazine reviewers couldn't even point the speakers in the right direction: the classic BBC aim-at-a-point 1 to 3 feet in front of the listener was replaced by the near-parallel approach used today, which gives unstable central imaging, and severely truncated front-to-back impression. It does splash more energy onto the side walls, but if the sound stage is too narrow, that's not the way to go about it. Too-narrow soundstage is a direct result of too much diffraction, which results in "detenting" and compressing the image into the speakers. (Class AB transistor electronics with unstable biasing also results in image detenting, since the narrow HF spikes are confined to each channel, and draw attention to the speaker location.)
I was appalled, but since I was sitting on the sidelines of audio, there wasn't much I could do, until I developed the Ariel in 1993 as a counter-example, what my friend John Atwood calls an "existence proof". Rather than pointlessly complain about the degraded state of high-end audio, I could design something that showed things could be done differently.
This is why I have to qualify my subjective descriptions of image quality; I am not using the same terminology as the magazine reviewers, who have, in my view, seriously degraded the discourse over the last thirty years. I listen for tonal naturalness, which at the highest level becomes a strong illusion of reality, of being present at the performance. That's mostly a Go/NoGo impression; either the speaker sounds real or there's a sense of something wrong. I can usually pin that down to crossover defects or driver problems, but I won't waste a lot of time analyzing what the designer did wrong if it's obvious there are multiple problems.
I also hear, and usually cannot ignore even if I try, the overall ambient impression, and if there are distortions or odd truncations. This is where I have problems with conical horns. It feels like I'm looking into a bright light, with the rest of the room in darkness. If I walk around the horns to confirm the impression, yup, sure enough, they blink off once you walk beyond the intended coverage angle. That's OK for a PA system or a movie theater, but sounds really weird in a space as small as a living room, and nothing at all what a real, physical instrument like a violin or piano would sound like in the same space. Physical instruments fill the room with sound, no matter where you walk, and the rest of the house is filled with music as well. This does not seem to happen with conical horns, with the bass more or less omnidirectional and rumbling around the room, and the floodlight of sound coming from the horns aimed at the listening couch and nowhere else.
That's why I found the sound of LeCleac'h horns so intriguing. The unpleasant floodlight-in-the-face effect isn't there; they have the image quality of direct-radiators, but with more precision (which may or may not be a good thing). If attention is paid to matching the exit angle of the compression driver to the entrance angle of the horn, the image quality is further enhanced with an additional smoothness and spaciousness, lending the presentation something of a large-panel electrostatic quality (without the lateral venetian-blind comb-filtering of large ES panels).
The trick is then to find bass radiators with an equivalent sense of dynamics and snap, and most of all, tonality, which is pretty lacking in low-efficiency audiophile drivers. Many of the big prosound 12" and 15" drivers are kind of dull-sounding (tonally), which leads to explorations of underhung voice-coils, magnet type, and good edge damping on the suspension. This is fairly subjective, somewhat akin to auditioning various moving-coil cartridges, where specs don't tell you much about the sound.
My professional background in audio started with the invention and development of the Shadow Vector quadraphonic decoder, one of the first variable-matrix SQ decoders, and as far as I know, the first variable-matrix decoder with symmetric separation and imaging at the cardinal points and all intermediate localizations. The other decoders at the time (CBS Paramatrix, first-generation TATE, and Sansui Vario-Matrix) were only optimized for the cardinal points, with more diffuse localization at intermediate localizations.
I spent a lot of time listening to the image quality that extended over the entire room, since subtle defects in decoder design only revealed themselves if you had a pretty good idea of what the decoder was doing, and were listening for the artifacts. Otherwise the artifacts were only evident as a general sense of listening fatigue.
The Shadow Vector was specifically designed so the diffuse sense of hall ambience would not "pile up" around the speakers, or shimmer around the room as the dynamic matrix followed the dominant-sound localization. This was the most common, and most annoying, defect of commercially available decoders back then, and the reason I invented the Shadow Vector in the first place (it's the same reason I design my own loudspeakers and amplifiers). If the dynamic decoding coefficients are carefully designed, the randomized phase energy will not bounce up and down as the dynamic matrix does its thing, so the dynamic action of the decoder pretty much disappears, and the overall sound is as spacious as a static matrix, or a bit more so. (Commercially available dynamic decoders had quite truncated and somewhat unstable ambient sound fields.)
The result of the Shadow Vector project, along with demos for the engineering staff of EMI records and the BBC research team, trained me so I was quite sensitive to the sound of uneven or unstable sound fields, and aware of the sound of 90-degree phase arcs on the side walls of the listening room. When I was drafted into loudspeaker design, I could easily hear the same phase arcs on a smaller scale, across the drivers on the front panel, or the peculiar misregistered overlapping-image effect of cabinet-edge diffraction. Without the three to four years inventing, developing, and fine-tuning the Shadow Vector prototype, I'm not sure I'd approach speaker design in the same way.
When I took a long vacation from high-end audio in the Eighties, the two major magazines in the USA developed this weird cult of pinpoint imaging, while more or less completely disregarded phasiness, ambient impression, or for that matter natural-sounding tone. The speakers they gave top reviews had serious design errors in driver layout, atrociously bad crossovers, and very erratic spatial impression.
The magazine reviewers couldn't even point the speakers in the right direction: the classic BBC aim-at-a-point 1 to 3 feet in front of the listener was replaced by the near-parallel approach used today, which gives unstable central imaging, and severely truncated front-to-back impression. It does splash more energy onto the side walls, but if the sound stage is too narrow, that's not the way to go about it. Too-narrow soundstage is a direct result of too much diffraction, which results in "detenting" and compressing the image into the speakers. (Class AB transistor electronics with unstable biasing also results in image detenting, since the narrow HF spikes are confined to each channel, and draw attention to the speaker location.)
I was appalled, but since I was sitting on the sidelines of audio, there wasn't much I could do, until I developed the Ariel in 1993 as a counter-example, what my friend John Atwood calls an "existence proof". Rather than pointlessly complain about the degraded state of high-end audio, I could design something that showed things could be done differently.
This is why I have to qualify my subjective descriptions of image quality; I am not using the same terminology as the magazine reviewers, who have, in my view, seriously degraded the discourse over the last thirty years. I listen for tonal naturalness, which at the highest level becomes a strong illusion of reality, of being present at the performance. That's mostly a Go/NoGo impression; either the speaker sounds real or there's a sense of something wrong. I can usually pin that down to crossover defects or driver problems, but I won't waste a lot of time analyzing what the designer did wrong if it's obvious there are multiple problems.
I also hear, and usually cannot ignore even if I try, the overall ambient impression, and if there are distortions or odd truncations. This is where I have problems with conical horns. It feels like I'm looking into a bright light, with the rest of the room in darkness. If I walk around the horns to confirm the impression, yup, sure enough, they blink off once you walk beyond the intended coverage angle. That's OK for a PA system or a movie theater, but sounds really weird in a space as small as a living room, and nothing at all what a real, physical instrument like a violin or piano would sound like in the same space. Physical instruments fill the room with sound, no matter where you walk, and the rest of the house is filled with music as well. This does not seem to happen with conical horns, with the bass more or less omnidirectional and rumbling around the room, and the floodlight of sound coming from the horns aimed at the listening couch and nowhere else.
That's why I found the sound of LeCleac'h horns so intriguing. The unpleasant floodlight-in-the-face effect isn't there; they have the image quality of direct-radiators, but with more precision (which may or may not be a good thing). If attention is paid to matching the exit angle of the compression driver to the entrance angle of the horn, the image quality is further enhanced with an additional smoothness and spaciousness, lending the presentation something of a large-panel electrostatic quality (without the lateral venetian-blind comb-filtering of large ES panels).
The trick is then to find bass radiators with an equivalent sense of dynamics and snap, and most of all, tonality, which is pretty lacking in low-efficiency audiophile drivers. Many of the big prosound 12" and 15" drivers are kind of dull-sounding (tonally), which leads to explorations of underhung voice-coils, magnet type, and good edge damping on the suspension. This is fairly subjective, somewhat akin to auditioning various moving-coil cartridges, where specs don't tell you much about the sound.
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Lynn, we know you do good work, but do you REALLY need to re-post like that?
Nothing wrong with repeating it every two years or so
Not all people like "natural" sound , actually I find them to be minority these days. You know many like the sound of their "approved' systems more than the sound of music in concert hall .There could be many reasons but it becomes symptomatic. My nephew prefers the sound of his i-phone to my system , granted that my system leaves a lot to be desired but it's hard to change once acquired taste. Even though Lynn repeats that he is designing the speaker to suit his and only his taste I'm not sure most who are reading this really gets it.
I'm reading again Sound Practices and see all the enthusiasm they had back then , thinking that SET revolution is right behind the corner and we will be blessed by "real-fi " (my friend's phrase ) soon enough and old High-end establishment will be bankrupt in no time . Well, that didn't happen. I think the reason is people in majority prefer processed sound and we lost touch with acoustic music. I bet that among all DIY community registered users here you won't find 3 persons to whom classical music is absolute priority .
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I have had several of the big JBL 4675C systems at home for the last three years. Both the one intended for passive filtering and using 2035 and the one intended for active filtering with the 2226. Comparing those and using an active crossover at 600Hz they pretty much sounded the same. This is with calibrated levels and trying to put both variants on the exact same spot in the listening room.
But used as a JBL 4670 (had the parts laying in my garage), wich has the same mid/bass section but with a much smaller horn (JBL 2380A) intendet for 800Hz crossover, the 2035 and the 2226 really sounded different. I used the same slopes as the original filter and I experimented with others.
Looking at the curves its not surprising. But even when EQed to a quite similar measurable result (and also using Audiolense) they do sound different. My subjective opinion is that the 2226s has a distinct sound of its own past 500Hz. This is coloring the midrange in a quite (for me) unacceptable manner. It also masks details that I know is in the musical material. My 4Pi with original crossover has many virtues but it also shares this coloring from the 2226.
A JBL 4670 with the 2035 do not color the sound up to 8-950Hz in any way that I can put my finger on.
This allowed med to try a bit higher crossover frequency to lessen the strain on the JBL 2380A horn wich to me sounds somewhat overloaded when asked to play down to a 800Hz crossoverpoint.
In an application where I dont need the extra output under 50Hz, I would consider the 2035 an equal to the 2226. But if I need to cross at >500Hz I would prefer the 2035.
Nothing wrong with repeating it every two years or so
Not all people like "natural" sound , actually I find them to be minority these days. You know many like the sound of their "approved' systems more than the sound of music in concert hall .There could be many reasons but it becomes symptomatic. My nephew prefers the sound of his i-phone to my system , granted that my system leaves a lot to be desired but it's hard to change once acquired taste. Even though Lynn repeats that he is designing the speaker to suit his and only his taste I'm not sure most who are reading this really gets it.
I'm reading again Sound Practices and see all the enthusiasm they had back then , thinking that SET revolution is right behind the corner and we will be blessed by "real-fi " (my friend's phrase ) soon enough and old High-end establishment will be bankrupt in no time . Well, that didn't happen. I think the reason is people in majority prefer processed sound and we lost touch with acoustic music. I bet that among all DIY community registered users here you won't find 3 persons to whom classical music is absolute priority .
Indeed.
I go frequently to classical music concerts. I know that no sound system in world, at no cost, will be able to recreate faithfully and realistically a live concert, will it be a symphony, a string quartet, or even a single violin, or any other acoustic instrument. Yet, what I'm looking for is that my experience of listening to reproduced music will resemble, as close as possible, the experience of listening to live music. As far as I can see, I'm in a small minority group. I'm glad whenever I encounter 'birds of the same feather' as I am. Anyhow, in my mind, the degree of realism of the reproduced music is far more important than the gear people use.