Hello Pano
I live with modern horns and know what the 50 and 60's horns sound like. I have 70's vintage monitors JBL 4344's in the same room with my Arrays and it's night and day.
So let me get this straight. We got it right in the 1930's lost it and never got it back??
I listen to speakers that have incorporated basically all the improvements that Dave pointed out plus what I added. I have a pair of JBL 1400 Array clones loaded with the beryllium drivers from the K2 9800. So what that statement implies is that the W.E. systems sound better than the JBL Arrays, K2 9800 and 9900 and the Everest 2 in a domestic setting even though they all incorporate all the improvements made over the last 80 years.
If this is true then there has not been any meaningful or significant progress. You can't have it both ways. All the above improvements don't happen in a vacuum and stay only in the pro sound or cinema realm. You can't just pick out one little segment (semi-domestic music listening) and say it doesn't apply across the board.
The whole crux of this discussion is either the technology has improved enough to make a audible improvement or it hasn't. It's one or the other very simple.
If you don't think speakers manufactured today sound better than one's manufactured in the 1920-1930's era that's fine by me. That said you won't convince me without doing a side by side comparison with a comparable modern set-up.
I hope he is going to the New York show. I would love to hear them. Maybe I will be amazed. In a way I really hope I am. It would be nice to be shocked in a good way for a change. But I chose to make that decision on my own. I am a skeptic what can I tell you😉
My last post on this topic I promise.
Rob🙂
Exactly!
It is foolish to generalize about such a vast field of endeavor. Got to look at specific cases and get specific about what the criteria are for measuring this supposed "progress."
"New = good, old = bad" is simplistic thinking. Absurd. The converse statement is equally retarded.
David's overview above is a move in the right direction...i.e. pinning down exactly what we are talking about, with markers of progress in the pro applications end--a well thought-out, educational contribution.
Surely there has been some useful innovation in 80 years but it is not immediately obvious what it is. There were plenty of wrong turns also...far more than successful and practical fundamental improvements. Look at the graveyard of abandoned great ideas...there is the corner of a Dayton Wright speaker sticking out of the heap.
Let's forget manufacturing economics, trick new materials just because they are new, and innovations which are more novelty than substance. There is a lot of noise in the "progress" dialogue.
You have to identify your goals and evaluate changes based on those criteria, not how cool they appear on paper or how good they look in ads.
Yeah we have beryllium and titanium diaphragms out the wazoo. Better material, right? Progress? I don't know...I see a lot of negative comments on audiophile sites. Too bright, edgy, miss that "musical" aluminum sound. etc. Are they wrong?
Are the ones who like these newer drivers wrong? Who gets to decide?
I know I dumped my TADs 2001 and 4004s and kept my all-aluminum diaphragm Altecs.
Some of the top modern speakers still use treated paper for low mass and strength like Jensen and WE did and Magnavox in 1922.
Isn't it silly to argue that a 15A is undeniably less good sounding than a horn that has wider coverage? This might be true if you got a bad seat in the Nickelodeon in 1933 but for most domestic hi-fi situations the speakers and the listening chair can be moved. What is the big deal?
60-6k in one horn, no crossover. Giant 55" per side mouth. This is obviously a very different listening experience and technical recipe than most modern CD applications. It is immediately and obviously a different world after you hear the first few notes .
You can run this 15A horn on a two watt tube amp and you don't need to tri amp with 200W amps and a digital controller to put humpty-dumpty together again...some might see modern topology as an advance and some will see it as the mark of the beast.
I see the modern DSP brain systems as a band-aid oriented approach with some really high-tech and effective band aids. Good enough for government work or the hockey game. Probably good enough for the movies too. Great for pro sound designers & contractors. It really takes a lot of pressure off for a balanced self-contained box, that has EQ, phase correction, and so on built into the speaker and horn itself the way to old timers did it.
Nowdays you can use any drivers you want, put them anywhere physically, and make it work with multi-amp digital. Is this we want and need as audiophiles? What do I want? I am not a pro install dude.
So far, I think I think I want something more like a 15A with a tube amp rather than most modern pro sound systems. In fact, I have the system and I only need the speaker to plug in at the end.
Well, I have to go drive to Philly in the rain, but let me say this in parting:
WE, arguably the smartest guys around in 1927, achieved their 1930s goals in a very sophisticated and engineering intensive cost no-object process. Respect is due to this monopolistic monster of ATT Bell WE.
It is super well made gear...not old jalopy leftovers from the stone age.
I can't prove anything to a disbeliever via words, nor should anybody 100% trust anybody's verbal arguments on subjective sound quality, but I have heard and hear a lot of very ambitious speakers. I'm going on sound and preferences...mine.
I can see why some people might like JBL Japanese market high-end models K2s or the latest pro-sumer TADs. This level of gear puts Altec model 19s and of all the vintage 50s-70s hifi horns I know to shame. I say that even though the JBLs are not "my sound" being a bit dry fakey and clinical, but they are impressive nonetheless.
Somebody who uses something like that is far ahead of the pack.
I can't imagine why anyone would prefer some of the overhyped high end junk out there. The shops of Korea and the audio shows are loaded with dreadful sounding $100k. $200k speakers. Too many trees have been wasted to carve exotic veneer for these dogs.
I can name specific names but it almost doesn't matter because so many are the same old same old, copycats of presumed "successful' designs. One year all speakers have yellow kevlar drivers...two years later every tweeter is a ceramic dome, what next? Who cares?
If you see and hear a lot of fancy modern high-end speakers, coming to it with a solid grounding in the top classics, it is hard to be impressed.
I never heard an Econowave but that seems to me a more likely road to enjoyment than a $200k beautiful ttalian made 500 lb MDF and rain forest veneer box called something like Grand Cru Utopia with 8 super expensive exotic material drivers and an computer-optimized impossible crossover with the best audiophile caps.
What I am saying is cast out a wide net and, if you are really looking for the BEST (slippery term) of all time, certain Western Electric items should be in it. Otherwise, your research is compromised and incomplete.
Yes, WE is totally hyped. I hype it up myself and I hate hype more than anybody, but I got to speak my mind and share my findings. I wasted my youth and much of my adult life learning what I think I know. Passing this hard-earned knowledge around makes my efforts more valuable and worthwhile. Learning about WE was a shock that turned me to new ways of thinking. Getting responses, pro and con, helps me understand where this info fits in the big picture and where I need to dial in my rhetoric to better make my point, both to myself and to others.
Audio needs to feed on diverse perspectives. It too easily slips into 80s high end style group think and complacency.
Sharing knowledge...That's what we are here on forums for, correct? That's why I occasionally delurk.
We take these Silbatone traveling museum exhibits into audio shows with huge speakers that blow away pretty much everything else there in some ways. Certainly in terms of showmanship. But among our biggest fans are speaker manufacturers and designers. WE is not competition--we are not selling anything...it is a lesson and simply a joy to experience.
I remember the KEF guys at Munich...they were wildly impressed and very grateful for the opportunity. Came back 10 times to listen. Those who were there know what I am saying.
Western Electric is as famous, desirable, and legendary as it is for very good reasons-- and a lot of people who heard this gear enthusiastically agree.
Admittedly, this is a radical concept. That doesn't make it intrinsically right or wrong, but it does make it a powerful idea.
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I disagree and have done so since my first post in this thread.
IMO there has been significant progress in bass response, power handling, size, cost, polar response and weight. I find all those things to be very important. They should certainly be important to anyone who makes his living from the gear, and I think to the end user, too. I was going to say I can't speak for other W.E. fans, but it seems that Joe is saying the same thing in his post above.
I can't afford the W.E. drivers & horns or clones nor the room to put them in. I'm glad there are other things I like and can afford. Be it Altec gear, Meyer Sound powered boxes, an open baffle experiment or even conventional towers with a midrange dome. All quite good and oh! so much smaller and more affordable than a W.E. horn system (except maybe the Meyer gear 😉 )
Why? Don't go. We value your opinion and experience. Stick around and join in.
Ha! We could only wish! Sorry friend, all the laws still apply, the "multi amp and digital processing" are just some of the available tools that comes with their own compromises.
I have not heard the WE components this thread is centered around though I would like to. As has been said, a driver and horn constitute a system. Engineering companies like WE, JBL and the like use combinations for solutions for specific applications. The statement quoted above is where people get into trouble, just because you can bolt a lot of this stuff together is absolutely no guarantee that it will sound good and a lot of it won't. The "processing" in an attempt to force it to is a compromise.
I do like the question of "How far have we come in 100 years", there are many things that reached a high degree of engineering maturity long ago and the advances now are incremental but advance we do.
Funny, I'm in this hobby for over 20 years and never heard a truly great system. Maybe expensive Audio Note (at over $100k ) came as a distant second. Now , I'm angry because some of the pieces I had at home costed many thousands of dollars. At this price level you should not bother with so called "synergy" which is bollock really describing faults of components counterbalanced by faults of other components. What kind of industry is this where an idiot with a screwdriver (me) have to dick in a basement in order to get something reassembling proper audio? I'd just sentence all people involved in audio manufacturing to 10 years in opera and orchestra hall acoustic music exlusively or just put to sleep (or ghettos or just castrate in Saddam's fashion🙂all audio estabilishment in its all entity and start with the new cloned generation raised only on acoustic music. You can tell that I'm from behind an old Iron Curtain 😉
What do you think about paper for compression drivers?
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So, some say this unit ....which was created for Cinema sound....is most "listenable" and todays sound is "un-listenable?
So Lucas, Skywalker sound has it wrong? The THX icon we see/enjoy is wrong & intolerable?
Granted the DB level & sometimes the steering circuits we hear on the center channel is dechipherable..........but does that invalidate the whole concept & experience?
_______________________________________________________Rick..........
So Lucas, Skywalker sound has it wrong? The THX icon we see/enjoy is wrong & intolerable?
Granted the DB level & sometimes the steering circuits we hear on the center channel is dechipherable..........but does that invalidate the whole concept & experience?
_______________________________________________________Rick..........
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He doesn't say paper; he says cellulose, which is pretty nifty stuff:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...VyW3CIKanjrvCK86A&sig2=kI36_ekocAlTqp0tt6RvXg
So who knows what he's cooked up?
He's a DIYA member. There's a thread here about another product. Impressive looking goods on his website
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/full-range/162861-i-want-these-12-field-coil-ebay.html
So, I read this whole thread, all 6 pages of it (and I have a lot of posts per page set up, I think 50 or so), and observed the discussion, although I began to gloss over certain points that started to repeat themselves. Coming from a science/engineering background, I can see a lot of speaker dave's points - but to be fair, science is not yet capable of fully explaining our auditory and neurological system yet. Certain things may sound better to the average human, without us knowing yet why.
Rather than try to find explanations to why these sound so good to certain people, I think the first thing I need to do is find out whether they sound good to me. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict, I couldn't make it to the High End show last year, but I will definitely try to make it this year.
One question for Joe or whoever else knows: Where the Western Electric 1928 speakers discussed in this thread already designed and used for stereo sound reproduction? Or was that still the days of mono? Wikipedia says that Western Electric coined the phrase "stereo" in 1927, so the tech would have been there.
I see from the youtube video in the first post the demo was done in mono, but that could have just been for lack of a second speaker in similar condition.
Also, the speaker(s) that will be at this years High End, are they going to be a stereo pair? Quite looking forward to hearing what the fuss is all about.
Rather than try to find explanations to why these sound so good to certain people, I think the first thing I need to do is find out whether they sound good to me. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict, I couldn't make it to the High End show last year, but I will definitely try to make it this year.
One question for Joe or whoever else knows: Where the Western Electric 1928 speakers discussed in this thread already designed and used for stereo sound reproduction? Or was that still the days of mono? Wikipedia says that Western Electric coined the phrase "stereo" in 1927, so the tech would have been there.
I see from the youtube video in the first post the demo was done in mono, but that could have just been for lack of a second speaker in similar condition.
Also, the speaker(s) that will be at this years High End, are they going to be a stereo pair? Quite looking forward to hearing what the fuss is all about.
Ah, so one speaker-"box" contains two channels with their own independent horn and drivers? not much channel separation then, I take it. And do I see correctly, 2 555s per side/horn?
as was the western electric telephone in the home.
in more ways than one -
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Let me try this one more time.
There is a clearly audible benefit when the widest portion of the audible spectrum, in particular the "speech range" of 300-3000Hz (AT MINIMUM) is reproduced by a single driver.
The better the performance is of that driver, and the wider the range of that driver, the better the perceived sound is likely to be.
No doubt there are better materials, better simulation methods, better engineering, and in some cases better measuring speakers today. PA/SR systems ARE much better than ever before. Zero doubt there.
The question is if there is any competing product that can cover a similar wide band today, without putting a crossover point somewhere in the 300-3000 band? My thesis is that putting the crossover in that band causes problems that can not truly be overcome entirely. In effect a fatal flaw.
Anyone want to discuss this?
_-_-bear
There is a clearly audible benefit when the widest portion of the audible spectrum, in particular the "speech range" of 300-3000Hz (AT MINIMUM) is reproduced by a single driver.
The better the performance is of that driver, and the wider the range of that driver, the better the perceived sound is likely to be.
No doubt there are better materials, better simulation methods, better engineering, and in some cases better measuring speakers today. PA/SR systems ARE much better than ever before. Zero doubt there.
The question is if there is any competing product that can cover a similar wide band today, without putting a crossover point somewhere in the 300-3000 band? My thesis is that putting the crossover in that band causes problems that can not truly be overcome entirely. In effect a fatal flaw.
Anyone want to discuss this?
_-_-bear
Bear, you need to check out inlowsound.com. With a jbl 2445 and that 300 hz tractrix horn, it sounds extremely good.
Measurements in post 7:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/190326-building-johns-paper-mache-horns.html
Like dave says, the directivity starts increasing beyond 3kHz, and its pretty much a straight beam at 16kHz, but the midrange is gorgeous.
I was at west point couple weeks ago, thought about contacting you, but the schedule wqs too tight. If you're ever in the north west, drop a line.
Measurements in post 7:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/190326-building-johns-paper-mache-horns.html
Like dave says, the directivity starts increasing beyond 3kHz, and its pretty much a straight beam at 16kHz, but the midrange is gorgeous.
I was at west point couple weeks ago, thought about contacting you, but the schedule wqs too tight. If you're ever in the north west, drop a line.
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300-3000 hz would require 150hz tractrix horn which is absolutly huge and completely unpractical in mid range use making setup, time aligment and channel integration hardly possible. Bad idea, also there is a question of suitable drivers with low enough fs. The question is not what WE did in the past but what would they do if they existed now to satisfy barbarian hords going to the movie theaters nowadays. They would make the same loud crap like it exist today those THX xbs etc.