Here are some highly speculative but thought-provoking things I've read over the years:
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. What a title! Very provocative, but even if you don't agree, it makes you wonder just how the ancients really did experience reality - almost certainly differently than we do today.
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. Good one-volume survey of the growth of Western philosophy. I admit I found the development of 20th-Century Western philosophy depressing reading, since it completely ignored the depth and wisdom of the just-recently-discovered 2500-year-old Buddhist tradition, and as a result of what can only be described as cultural parochialism, took a very dangerous turn towards nihilism. The path from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt to Nazism seems all too short.
Europe: A History by Norman Davies. Another good survey of an enormous topic.
Einstein in Berlin by Thomas Levenson. An fascinating - and pivotal - period in history, when the German cultural matrix which nourished Einstein started to edge towards collective madness. There's a moral here for Americans - we may not always be the sun-kissed favorite children of history.
IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. Yes, this is dark. It shows what the most advanced technology can be used for, and not only that, what it can make possible. This, too, is part of the human potential. It's sobering that some of the most beautiful recordings I've ever heard - were recorded in stereophonic sound on German Magnetophon tape machines at the very height of this madness. Beauty and horror, at the same time, in the same country.
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. Another good survey of the physics, neurology, and psychological aspects of music.
The World Is Sound by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. A more mystical but also more lyrical read - one of my favorites and a good antidote to the rather unsettling IBM book.
You might note all of these books have a subtext - they describe intense states of consciousness, spanning the gamut from the most astonishing and repellent depravity to the highest and most mystical states of exaltation. We have to look squarely at consciousness, as it is, not as we would want it to be.
P.S. All of these are powerful books - they will change your world-view after you read them.
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. What a title! Very provocative, but even if you don't agree, it makes you wonder just how the ancients really did experience reality - almost certainly differently than we do today.
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. Good one-volume survey of the growth of Western philosophy. I admit I found the development of 20th-Century Western philosophy depressing reading, since it completely ignored the depth and wisdom of the just-recently-discovered 2500-year-old Buddhist tradition, and as a result of what can only be described as cultural parochialism, took a very dangerous turn towards nihilism. The path from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt to Nazism seems all too short.
Europe: A History by Norman Davies. Another good survey of an enormous topic.
Einstein in Berlin by Thomas Levenson. An fascinating - and pivotal - period in history, when the German cultural matrix which nourished Einstein started to edge towards collective madness. There's a moral here for Americans - we may not always be the sun-kissed favorite children of history.
IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. Yes, this is dark. It shows what the most advanced technology can be used for, and not only that, what it can make possible. This, too, is part of the human potential. It's sobering that some of the most beautiful recordings I've ever heard - were recorded in stereophonic sound on German Magnetophon tape machines at the very height of this madness. Beauty and horror, at the same time, in the same country.
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. Another good survey of the physics, neurology, and psychological aspects of music.
The World Is Sound by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. A more mystical but also more lyrical read - one of my favorites and a good antidote to the rather unsettling IBM book.
You might note all of these books have a subtext - they describe intense states of consciousness, spanning the gamut from the most astonishing and repellent depravity to the highest and most mystical states of exaltation. We have to look squarely at consciousness, as it is, not as we would want it to be.
P.S. All of these are powerful books - they will change your world-view after you read them.
After reading the above, Sue, my wife, wrote:
Between the Drawing of the Breath,
and the Sounding of the First True Note,
there too, is Song.
Life is good, when you can inspire others to create.
Bud
Between the Drawing of the Breath,
and the Sounding of the First True Note,
there too, is Song.
Life is good, when you can inspire others to create.
Bud
Lynn Olson said:
I'll try to remember to look at what disc that sampler cut is from.
It is on the Dorian Sampler II, which makes it old now... maybe available online from some dealer or another?
Email me privately for other potential options...
_-_-bear
Salas,
Ok. Its Cilla from Pricilla not Scylla. 🙂
Bud,
Lovely! ..... sweet melody of stillness.
Lynn,
What a list! So many marvelous things have passed this way. Gosh! am I getting an education!
BTW, have you come across Bruno Latour? I have not yet read him but he comes strongly recommended.
Thank you!
Cilla
Ok. Its Cilla from Pricilla not Scylla. 🙂
Bud,
Lovely! ..... sweet melody of stillness.
Lynn,
What a list! So many marvelous things have passed this way. Gosh! am I getting an education!
BTW, have you come across Bruno Latour? I have not yet read him but he comes strongly recommended.
Thank you!
Cilla
I practically got laughed off of the forum and got added at the same time to at least two persons' ignore lists for making the following statements in this thread:http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=106181
I guess I was just posting in the wrong thread!
John
I'm enjoying where this thread is meandering as it contains a lot of interesting technical and non technical info that is either helping with my designs, or giving something interesting to ponder.
Lynn Olson said:
I think that consciousness is the sub realm of our particular make believe. It all stems from our personal and social imaginary foundations.
When in the mood to sing one can attain a high bit rate and bandwidth
I submit to you Lynn, you work very well to keep your writing out of the way, striving for a higher bit rate, illuminating rather than obscuring. Providing the truth. Thank You.
That is the moment of transition from the mundane to the sublime. It IS real.
May I offer Persig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" as a primer?
Hi
Being Austrian I always feel the strong need to at least apologise due to "Adolf " was born here and also Austria joined Nazis-German - knowing that words are just words. and will not change anything of our sad history.
At least seen from here "our current successful export Arnold" seems NOT to turn out that bad – so there may be hope for the future ...
----------------------
Playing around with the concept of split OB's for wide range driver and bass drivers I propose an alternative to what Lynn described as tapped inductor XO in the distributed area concept.
Instead of adding SPL by a second driver with a simple 6 dB LP in parallel, I split the SPL by putting the second driver in series and bypass it with a capacitor to prevent it from radiating mid's.
This arrangement sounds definitely better as far as I can tell now.
Even better of course is to do that "active" – feed any speaker with its dedicated amp and insert a simple two resistor / one capacitor network at the input of the amp's.
This way you don't change Qts of the drivers and keep them under good control by the low amp's output resistance.
--------------
great lyrics !
-----------------------
Tom, thanks a lot for the humorous pyramid sound story .
------------------------
Don't forget about "memory" - personal or collectively. It is even more basic - and wide open to manipulation.
-----------------------
what gets transported upon the low bit rate of writing is INTENTION (the conscious AND the unconscious ones 😉 )
Much more is told by what is not said. This kind of communication works only if the receiver knows what the transmitter has dropped.
Which means there is a minimum common sense about something.
Lynn, its a great gift you have to be understood by so many people.
Greetings
Michael
Being Austrian I always feel the strong need to at least apologise due to "Adolf " was born here and also Austria joined Nazis-German - knowing that words are just words. and will not change anything of our sad history.
At least seen from here "our current successful export Arnold" seems NOT to turn out that bad – so there may be hope for the future ...
----------------------
Playing around with the concept of split OB's for wide range driver and bass drivers I propose an alternative to what Lynn described as tapped inductor XO in the distributed area concept.
Instead of adding SPL by a second driver with a simple 6 dB LP in parallel, I split the SPL by putting the second driver in series and bypass it with a capacitor to prevent it from radiating mid's.
This arrangement sounds definitely better as far as I can tell now.
Even better of course is to do that "active" – feed any speaker with its dedicated amp and insert a simple two resistor / one capacitor network at the input of the amp's.
This way you don't change Qts of the drivers and keep them under good control by the low amp's output resistance.
--------------
great lyrics !
-----------------------
Tom, thanks a lot for the humorous pyramid sound story .
------------------------
Don't forget about "memory" - personal or collectively. It is even more basic - and wide open to manipulation.
-----------------------
what gets transported upon the low bit rate of writing is INTENTION (the conscious AND the unconscious ones 😉 )
Much more is told by what is not said. This kind of communication works only if the receiver knows what the transmitter has dropped.
Which means there is a minimum common sense about something.
Lynn, its a great gift you have to be understood by so many people.
Greetings
Michael
mige0 said:
All too many Americans, ignorant of world history, have the attitude "it can't happen here." Well, they're wrong. Fascism can happen anywhere, and the most beautiful, elegant, and refined civilizations can succumb to the deadly lure of the nationalist-supremacy fantasy.
In my short visit to Zurich and Munich, the intellectual depth and artistic beauty of the German-speaking peoples was plain to see - a culture that's been building superb crafts, musical instruments, and startlingly advanced technology for not just centuries, but going all the way back to the time of the Romans.
Yet the combination of modern mass-psychology and propaganda techniques, mass communications, and a deeply cynical business aristocracy led this same culture - and nearly the whole world - to the brink of annihilation. World War II was a much closer thing than people think - if Hitler had just left Russia alone, Europe would probably still be fascist today, and democracy would be trembling on the edge.
I grew up in Japan and China - both ancient, elegant, and refined civilizations, and both succumbed to despotism - for the Japanese, an especially fanatical and racist militarism (ask the survivors of the Rape of Nanking), and the Chinese, the depravity and ruthlessness of Mao (ask the Tibetans and the survivors of the Cultural Revolution).
In Hong Kong, I knew Englishmen who were survivors of the Stanley-prison death camp during WWII, and our cook was a former Shanghai businessman who fled the Communists in 1949. I lived in Hong Kong during the height of the Cultural Revolution, when the population of HK grew by a million refugees fleeing Communist terror.
If the German-speaking peoples, the Japanese, and Chinese all fell under the sway of vicious mass-murderers, despite their ancient and brilliant civilizations, where is it written under the stars that Americans, with its very young civilization, will stay immune to this disease - purposefully created with a high-tech combination of info-warfare mass psychology, efficiently synchronized mass-media control, and plays on themes of world domination and racism?
Totalitarianism, whatever its guise, can strike any civilization, anywhere.
Interesting comments and thought by many in this thread, but gees, get with the "doing" , instead of the armchair philosophy !!!!!
ie.. would someone PLEASE build some loudspeakers !!!
ie.. would someone PLEASE build some loudspeakers !!!
Guys, you know our no politics rule. Any more mentions of Arnie and people will be spending time in the bin. 😉
Andy Graddon said:
Aww.... Come on Andy. Plenty of people are. Just not these. 😛 Not yet. Looks like it may be awhile for someone does. It's Lynn's baby, after all.
Lynn, should someone start building based on what's been posted, or do you prefer to have a direct hand and ear in it?
OK, You Asked For It
'Nuff off-topic stuff, here's a little bit of data - three drivers, rather crudely normalized in Photoshop (the 8NMB420 graphic was pretty bad to start with). I tried to get the 1 kHz and 20 kHz frequency markers and 10 dB markers to align with each other, so the curves would be roughly comparable.
To answer the question mentioned above - my goodness, don't wait for me!!! I've been hoping some of you would have the nerve to actually try these drivers - and measure and listen for yourselves. This whole project is very much a "tune to taste" kind of thing - my aspect of it is the reliance of subjective pink-noise audition and vocal music for making the go/nogo decision on the basic sonic character of the widerange drivers.
Anyway, here's three candidates I plan to try some time after the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in mid-October - the 12" Alnico Tone Tubby, the 18Sound 12NDA520, and the 18Sound 8NMB420. I'll start by auditioning them full-range, as mentioned before, and then auditioning them with simple rolloff network, probably a series inductor low-pass followed by a tunable shunt notch filter.
The most likely frequencies for the notch filter look like 2 kHz for the 12NDA520, 2.3~2.4 kHz for the Tone Tubby, and possibly 4 kHz for the 8NMB420 - the data looks kind of sketchy for that driver.
The goal is a very gentle, rounded-off, "soft" rolloff without a sharp corner frequency - this sounds better all by itself, and also makes for a smoother phase transfer to the tweeter. Note that all three drivers have smooth out-of-band regions, very different than many other drivers. This is the same kind of out-of-band performance I saw in the 5.5" Vifa used in the Ariel.
Looking over at the EnABL thread, I shouldn't be expecting the EnABL process to have much of a visible effect on the driver's frequency response, so the crossover is still going to need to smooth out the rolloff transition - although these are pretty well-behaved drivers by the standards of the prosound world.
Subjectively, the TT sounds very good, but I wouldn't describe the vocal region as free of coloration - there's a bit of a "honk" there, as the curves indicate. There is a version of the 12" Alnico Tone Tubby that has what they call a "darker" response - I suspect it's not as peaked-up as the standard model. It might be worth trying this original version of the Tone Tubby instead of the standard model.
As for the choice between the 12NDA520 and the 8NMB420, I dunno. Smoother curves for the 8-incher, true, and better dispersion as well, but a bit less efficiency and somewhat less headroom - and I really don't want to hassle with MTM's again, especially with a time-aligned ribbon tweeter that's going to be sitting about 2 inches behind the front plane of the driver. This is the kind of thing best determined by direct audition - all of these curves are really pretty decent, and free of the kind of nasty narrowband glitches that are so common in high-efficiency drivers.
What I'm trying to avoid are the really violent narrowband deviations seen in many prosound and most of the exotic-cone audiophile drivers. My experience with trying to equalize these things to be flat has not been favorable - and I don't like trying to pretend to ignore the un-equalized peaks either, so peaky drivers in any case are out.
'Nuff off-topic stuff, here's a little bit of data - three drivers, rather crudely normalized in Photoshop (the 8NMB420 graphic was pretty bad to start with). I tried to get the 1 kHz and 20 kHz frequency markers and 10 dB markers to align with each other, so the curves would be roughly comparable.
To answer the question mentioned above - my goodness, don't wait for me!!! I've been hoping some of you would have the nerve to actually try these drivers - and measure and listen for yourselves. This whole project is very much a "tune to taste" kind of thing - my aspect of it is the reliance of subjective pink-noise audition and vocal music for making the go/nogo decision on the basic sonic character of the widerange drivers.
Anyway, here's three candidates I plan to try some time after the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in mid-October - the 12" Alnico Tone Tubby, the 18Sound 12NDA520, and the 18Sound 8NMB420. I'll start by auditioning them full-range, as mentioned before, and then auditioning them with simple rolloff network, probably a series inductor low-pass followed by a tunable shunt notch filter.
The most likely frequencies for the notch filter look like 2 kHz for the 12NDA520, 2.3~2.4 kHz for the Tone Tubby, and possibly 4 kHz for the 8NMB420 - the data looks kind of sketchy for that driver.
The goal is a very gentle, rounded-off, "soft" rolloff without a sharp corner frequency - this sounds better all by itself, and also makes for a smoother phase transfer to the tweeter. Note that all three drivers have smooth out-of-band regions, very different than many other drivers. This is the same kind of out-of-band performance I saw in the 5.5" Vifa used in the Ariel.
Looking over at the EnABL thread, I shouldn't be expecting the EnABL process to have much of a visible effect on the driver's frequency response, so the crossover is still going to need to smooth out the rolloff transition - although these are pretty well-behaved drivers by the standards of the prosound world.
Subjectively, the TT sounds very good, but I wouldn't describe the vocal region as free of coloration - there's a bit of a "honk" there, as the curves indicate. There is a version of the 12" Alnico Tone Tubby that has what they call a "darker" response - I suspect it's not as peaked-up as the standard model. It might be worth trying this original version of the Tone Tubby instead of the standard model.
As for the choice between the 12NDA520 and the 8NMB420, I dunno. Smoother curves for the 8-incher, true, and better dispersion as well, but a bit less efficiency and somewhat less headroom - and I really don't want to hassle with MTM's again, especially with a time-aligned ribbon tweeter that's going to be sitting about 2 inches behind the front plane of the driver. This is the kind of thing best determined by direct audition - all of these curves are really pretty decent, and free of the kind of nasty narrowband glitches that are so common in high-efficiency drivers.
What I'm trying to avoid are the really violent narrowband deviations seen in many prosound and most of the exotic-cone audiophile drivers. My experience with trying to equalize these things to be flat has not been favorable - and I don't like trying to pretend to ignore the un-equalized peaks either, so peaky drivers in any case are out.
Attachments
Lynn what makes you think that 2 inches behind baffle are going to align the ribbon? If you are roughly talking vc resting points, I have found that cones with caps, practically have their mids radiation centre at about 3/5 their depth from rim to neck - vc joint.
The electrical lowpass filter will also acoustically delay the 8 or 12-inch driver a little bit - good question how much, but an inch isn't unreasonable. One thing I know for sure the RAAL ribbon isn't going to be on the same plane as the front of the driver - it'll be some distance behind that.
Haven't decided whether to mount the RAAL on top or the side, or how to connect it, since Alexander is providing the option of series or parallel connection (8 ohms resistive per section). Once an agreeable-sounding widerange driver is chosen - and I'm seriously thinking of asking BudP to give it the magic EnABL treatment before I even start auditioning it - then the tweeter development starts, with the goal of flat response at 3~5 meters distance. (EQ'ing for 1~2 meters will certainly be wrong at longer distances.)
I'm hoping once the appropriate tweeter level is chosen, BudP or Alexander can provide a custom step-down transformer of the right ratio, so I don't have to use series resistors to pad down the tweeter - Gary Pimm and I found out that even modest values of series R (like 0.5 ohm) have a strongly negative effect on tweeter dynamics. That's part of the reason the Ariel was originally designed to have no tweeter attenuation at all.
The lowpass and highpass filters will probably be low-Q 2nd-order filters, since I've used them before for quasi-time-aligned speakers, and they work pretty well if you accept a small amount of ripple in the crossover region.
I appreciate the previous comment about series vs parallel connection of the bass array - the only issue I see is trying to find decent-sounding caps with large values. It's hard enough to find caps that sound even acceptable in the 5~10 uF range - it gets a lot worse for values that are ten times bigger.
In the Ariel, I settled on the 5.0 uF Jupiter cap, which sonically are comparable to Teflon caps, but available in much larger values. I'm not expecting 50~100 uF Jupiter or Teflon caps, though - just the usual crummy-sounding metallized polypropylene, which I don't much care for. Maybe there are OK-sounding large-value caps, but I haven't found them yet - I'm certainly open to any and all suggestions.
Haven't decided whether to mount the RAAL on top or the side, or how to connect it, since Alexander is providing the option of series or parallel connection (8 ohms resistive per section). Once an agreeable-sounding widerange driver is chosen - and I'm seriously thinking of asking BudP to give it the magic EnABL treatment before I even start auditioning it - then the tweeter development starts, with the goal of flat response at 3~5 meters distance. (EQ'ing for 1~2 meters will certainly be wrong at longer distances.)
I'm hoping once the appropriate tweeter level is chosen, BudP or Alexander can provide a custom step-down transformer of the right ratio, so I don't have to use series resistors to pad down the tweeter - Gary Pimm and I found out that even modest values of series R (like 0.5 ohm) have a strongly negative effect on tweeter dynamics. That's part of the reason the Ariel was originally designed to have no tweeter attenuation at all.
The lowpass and highpass filters will probably be low-Q 2nd-order filters, since I've used them before for quasi-time-aligned speakers, and they work pretty well if you accept a small amount of ripple in the crossover region.
I appreciate the previous comment about series vs parallel connection of the bass array - the only issue I see is trying to find decent-sounding caps with large values. It's hard enough to find caps that sound even acceptable in the 5~10 uF range - it gets a lot worse for values that are ten times bigger.
In the Ariel, I settled on the 5.0 uF Jupiter cap, which sonically are comparable to Teflon caps, but available in much larger values. I'm not expecting 50~100 uF Jupiter or Teflon caps, though - just the usual crummy-sounding metallized polypropylene, which I don't much care for. Maybe there are OK-sounding large-value caps, but I haven't found them yet - I'm certainly open to any and all suggestions.
To Lynn..
have you seen these?
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gradds55/peerlessPA.jpg
edit.......
Ok.... they are in the WES catalog (Australia) but not on the Madisound web site or DST web site.
Asking some questions.. will get back to you !!!
have you seen these?
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gradds55/peerlessPA.jpg
edit.......
Ok.... they are in the WES catalog (Australia) but not on the Madisound web site or DST web site.
Asking some questions.. will get back to you !!!