here it is
Snagit
edit:
btw. - give me pair of RCA LC1 or good Tannoys , and I'm happy camper ;
or Pass SR1 (2 , whatever )
I really don't care from what era they are , as long they are singing , not recreating noises
Attachments
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Pretty decent curves, of course not going to tell you if it sounds good or not, but ...
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Thanks Zen Mod,
Those are decent curves and also a pretty good pair match.
Note that these are impedance tube measurements. That means they represent the response into an ideal resistive load. In the end the frequency response of the horn/compression driver combo is the curve shown, modified by the bottom end response of the horn, then by the top end beaming of the horn, plus any polar curve stuff going on.
They are about 20 dB down at 10K, so horn beaming won't likely EQ them to flat on axis, at least not much above 6kHz.
Still, pretty decent.
David S.
Those are decent curves and also a pretty good pair match.
Note that these are impedance tube measurements. That means they represent the response into an ideal resistive load. In the end the frequency response of the horn/compression driver combo is the curve shown, modified by the bottom end response of the horn, then by the top end beaming of the horn, plus any polar curve stuff going on.
They are about 20 dB down at 10K, so horn beaming won't likely EQ them to flat on axis, at least not much above 6kHz.
Still, pretty decent.
David S.
Bee Jeeezussss ...
Dave can you please go and listen to the speaker so they can stop the whining, Bear is so confident, he may send you a ticket ...
Better not. What if I heard them and they were the best thing I ever heard, EVER!
(All my prejudices out the window
)David S.
Dave, all the speakers you mentioned are inferior. Notwithstanding the great many wonderful recordings monitored on Altec 604s and variants thereof.
Modern speakers are potentially wonderful, and have solved a number of vexing design problems (like dispersion). BUT, and here is the BIG BUTTTTTT... that says nothing at all about how our ears perceive the information.
People love Lowther drivers, I do not, but they also have the characteristic that I term "harmonic continuity" (tm BEAR Labs). No two way or more system can or does. So, no matter how you cut the cake, IF you have a system with "harmonic continuity" (tm BEAR Labs) then you have conquered one of the greatest issues in hi-fi reproduction. The next question is how good is it, now that you have "harmonic continutity" (tm BEAR Labs)? To me that is where the Lowther fails. Full range ESLs also have this property.
Those who advocate the multi-way speaker are in effect making the same sort of argument that the ultra low distortion amp people make - if you get it to work with low enough distortion the amp becomes a wire with gain, having no effect, can't hear it. But we have learned that a) it rarely if ever works like this and b) the ear does not hear it this way at all. The ear apparently is surprisingly sensitive to the harmonic series, not the absolute level...
Anyhow, this is where things like the Altec 604 or Tannoy, and so many other speaker systems fail when I listen.
On my website I wrote this next bit up. But to simplify, a two way speaker is like having a pianist play left hand on a Bosendorfer Grand, and right hand on a cheap upright spinet. Once both hands go on one piano or the other, there is no chance that one would confuse one for the other. Yes, an exaggerated example, but it does illustrate the issue.
To me the holy grail for audio involves getting the widest range, lowest distortion "source". In essence this is what Tom Danley's Synergy Horn attempts to synthesize - albeit by blending a multiway. But this is what he is trying to do, get a single source with high sensitivity, low distortion, minimum phase shift. (can't say if it works or not, but the idea remains). If he could do it with a single driver, betcha he would.
If we list a few speakers that did this sort of thing, you start to see a trend:
- Ohm Walsh
- Hill Plasmatronics (ok, it is a 2-way)
- Acoustat ESL
- Fostex fullrange
- Lowther "fullrange"
- WE555 + horn
- others to be named?
All very very listenable speakers.
The trick is to get rid of some of the attendant problems. Which these all have, or else to minimize these problems.
What the WE555 + horn does is to minimize a great number of the most pressing of the attendant problems, and excel in quite a few.
In short, imo, these are reasons that it is as good as people find it to be.
_-_-bear
PS. I run a compression driver, 1st order on a <300Hz. horn... up to HF cutoff (>10kHkz). Heresy. Not suitable for PA/SR. 109dB/1w 16 ohms. Very very good at home levels, AND it has oodles of "harmonic continuity" and "jump factor". Clean, and smooth. Wish I had some 555 to put on...
Modern speakers are potentially wonderful, and have solved a number of vexing design problems (like dispersion). BUT, and here is the BIG BUTTTTTT... that says nothing at all about how our ears perceive the information.
People love Lowther drivers, I do not, but they also have the characteristic that I term "harmonic continuity" (tm BEAR Labs). No two way or more system can or does. So, no matter how you cut the cake, IF you have a system with "harmonic continuity" (tm BEAR Labs) then you have conquered one of the greatest issues in hi-fi reproduction. The next question is how good is it, now that you have "harmonic continutity" (tm BEAR Labs)? To me that is where the Lowther fails. Full range ESLs also have this property.
Those who advocate the multi-way speaker are in effect making the same sort of argument that the ultra low distortion amp people make - if you get it to work with low enough distortion the amp becomes a wire with gain, having no effect, can't hear it. But we have learned that a) it rarely if ever works like this and b) the ear does not hear it this way at all. The ear apparently is surprisingly sensitive to the harmonic series, not the absolute level...
Anyhow, this is where things like the Altec 604 or Tannoy, and so many other speaker systems fail when I listen.
On my website I wrote this next bit up. But to simplify, a two way speaker is like having a pianist play left hand on a Bosendorfer Grand, and right hand on a cheap upright spinet. Once both hands go on one piano or the other, there is no chance that one would confuse one for the other. Yes, an exaggerated example, but it does illustrate the issue.
To me the holy grail for audio involves getting the widest range, lowest distortion "source". In essence this is what Tom Danley's Synergy Horn attempts to synthesize - albeit by blending a multiway. But this is what he is trying to do, get a single source with high sensitivity, low distortion, minimum phase shift. (can't say if it works or not, but the idea remains). If he could do it with a single driver, betcha he would.
If we list a few speakers that did this sort of thing, you start to see a trend:
- Ohm Walsh
- Hill Plasmatronics (ok, it is a 2-way)
- Acoustat ESL
- Fostex fullrange
- Lowther "fullrange"
- WE555 + horn
- others to be named?
All very very listenable speakers.
The trick is to get rid of some of the attendant problems. Which these all have, or else to minimize these problems.
What the WE555 + horn does is to minimize a great number of the most pressing of the attendant problems, and excel in quite a few.
In short, imo, these are reasons that it is as good as people find it to be.
_-_-bear
PS. I run a compression driver, 1st order on a <300Hz. horn... up to HF cutoff (>10kHkz). Heresy. Not suitable for PA/SR. 109dB/1w 16 ohms. Very very good at home levels, AND it has oodles of "harmonic continuity" and "jump factor". Clean, and smooth. Wish I had some 555 to put on...
Ravings of an archaeologist...
David...I know exactly where you are coming from. YOU are exactly the type of person who would appreciate this stuff the most.
Yes, I think you would be surprised.
MANY pro speaker engineers and high end manufacturers have been very very surprised by the WE systems in our collection. Blown away in many cases. Ask Laurence Dickie, designer of the B&W Nautilus, what he thought of the Mirrophonic M2...yeah, he laughed at it before he heard it.
I like to be surprised because that is a signal that I might learn something.
The point I am making is that although it seems as though it would stand to reason that later stuff is better sounding than the good 1930 WE...it isn't!
I'll grant the role of subjectivity in evaluation but sometimes the gap is huge.
This stance does downplay the importance of technospecs vs. subjective musical enjoyment, but my experience strongly supports this gesture.
Engineering wise, there is a lot of subtlety in WE gear. These guys were the old masters. The drivers are amazingly well designed and constructed. Study up on the 594A, for example. NO later driver beats it on FR--I think it achieves +/- 0.1db of ideal power curve (this again from Al Garcia, RCA engineer).
Conversion efficiency is unsurpassed. Field coil excitation displays fast and linear recovery to magnetic overloads in a manner AlNiCo, ferrite and rare earth magnets do not, thanks to external energy source perhaps.
GIP in Japan was able to beat the 594A at its own game. The 594A uses a permandur pole piece. Max purity at the time was 99.2% or so. now we can achieve 99.7% (making up these exact numbers. With the enhanced purity of materials and somewhat larger magnet structure GIP squeezed another 1.5-3dB sensitivity out of the design. This driver has 20 lbs of high purity machined permandur in it. Too expensive for the multiplex.
Where I think some practical performance advantages came with innovation is in coverage...a matter of great importance in PA sound (not so much for domestic).
I have owned and heard most of the speakers you name and dozens more. Never heard the McIntosh line arrays. Used to sell Snells. Had Tannoy blacks reds silvers, Altec 604s and other coaxes of various iterations, UREIs, Mastering Labs xovers.
My main rig at home for a decade was ALTEC 288C/1505/416B in a big Onken cabinet. HF EQ in the crossover. I loved that setup. Love the large format ALTEC sound, which I guess comes out of the Shearer project and the multicell Mirrophonic systems before that.
Still...Western Electric is on a different planet for subjective results, at least some of the speakers are.
I personally couldn't live with Advents, AR3s, L100s if I could have a WE757a or 755A instead based on my experience, tastes, and preferences. The AR-1 used the 755A as a tweeter...what a waste! The 755A sounds better if you pull out the woofer and run it full range in the same cabinet. I like the engineering idea of the AR-1 though.
Take the WE755A vis a vis the LS3/5A...It blows it away on music to my ear. I owned both at the same time. the 755A was designed to incorporate findings based on empirical hearing measurements on tens of thousands of listeners at the Bell exhibit at the New York Worlds Fair. The WE lit speaks of "the sound of presence" and a very particular formula for intelligibility was engineered into the speaker via manipulations in cone compliance and geometry. This is not a tweaky high end approach, it is subtle physics. I think that perhaps it is actually true that superior concept and engineering is represented in this design.
The KEF B139 is not an achievement of the same order.
Think about Bell Laboratories and the massive intellectual and scientific resources at their command. Has this R&D capability ever been matched by any other manufacturer of audio equipment. Even RCA Labs lags behind Bell Labs (and their theater gear is far inferior too). LC-1 was pretty good though. How can KEF, Tannoy, and MagicoD) compete?
You talk about the narrow bandwidth of old drivers but I am not seeing it in the 1930s WE units. The system goal was 60-13k more or less in 1933, 100-7k in 1928, but the drivers are superb within their ranges. Some modern ears might want a super tweeter. Well, Parts Express will take your order.
My old rule of thumb on "progress" in audio is that 90% of all items produced at any given time are junk. The top 10% of any era 1930-now is the top stuff worthy of notice and study. Most of the rest is for the mullets to flip on ebay.
I pick my 10% by listening. I can't fathom any other way to do it.
OK I just did that. I have a pr of 2" Renkus Heinz 3301s on CBH-800 CD horns set up right now. How 80s can you get, huh?
Comparing this RK unit to WE theater gear on any parameter other than coverage angle, especially the wild musical satisfaction factor, is a joke. It sounds OK, good enough, I suppose. Nice small and cheap solution. Not a keeper long-term but alright for the TV system.
I'm going to run through the last 30 years of "post Altec" drivers and horns now. Emilars, Radians, maybe a couple EVs. Check out some CD horns and modern waveguides. I don't think any of it will beat WE but it is all part of a well-balanced education.
I fully understand that an engineer has to go with paper data and there are certain institutionalized goals that one feels must be kept in focus. I also understand that an engineer must believe in progress, or else why bother?
To the degree I can recreate it in my mind, I really appreciate the engineering mindset and culture of Western Electric in the golden age of theater sound as a slice of history and the fountain of tremendous innovation and achievement. For what they were trying to do, they rocked.
The goals of music listeners are different from pure engineering and far more varied and divergent. I am ranking all this 80 year accumulation of audio stuff on musical playback...different criteria and only loosely related to the spec sheet. An experiential/emprical process but only partially objective.
The Stradivarius metaphor often comes up...it is one of the few other instances where people argue that the ancients were smarter than we are and knew things that we don't. I am not making that claim about WE. I think the answer is in shifting goals and approaches to the technical and market challenges of designing and producing PA gear. If we had the lab notebooks, they would make sense to modern scientists.
WECO gear sounds different because it is in many ways from a different world.
David...I know exactly where you are coming from. YOU are exactly the type of person who would appreciate this stuff the most.
Yes, I think you would be surprised.
MANY pro speaker engineers and high end manufacturers have been very very surprised by the WE systems in our collection. Blown away in many cases. Ask Laurence Dickie, designer of the B&W Nautilus, what he thought of the Mirrophonic M2...yeah, he laughed at it before he heard it.
I like to be surprised because that is a signal that I might learn something.
The point I am making is that although it seems as though it would stand to reason that later stuff is better sounding than the good 1930 WE...it isn't!
I'll grant the role of subjectivity in evaluation but sometimes the gap is huge.
This stance does downplay the importance of technospecs vs. subjective musical enjoyment, but my experience strongly supports this gesture.
Engineering wise, there is a lot of subtlety in WE gear. These guys were the old masters. The drivers are amazingly well designed and constructed. Study up on the 594A, for example. NO later driver beats it on FR--I think it achieves +/- 0.1db of ideal power curve (this again from Al Garcia, RCA engineer).
Conversion efficiency is unsurpassed. Field coil excitation displays fast and linear recovery to magnetic overloads in a manner AlNiCo, ferrite and rare earth magnets do not, thanks to external energy source perhaps.
GIP in Japan was able to beat the 594A at its own game. The 594A uses a permandur pole piece. Max purity at the time was 99.2% or so. now we can achieve 99.7% (making up these exact numbers. With the enhanced purity of materials and somewhat larger magnet structure GIP squeezed another 1.5-3dB sensitivity out of the design. This driver has 20 lbs of high purity machined permandur in it. Too expensive for the multiplex.
Where I think some practical performance advantages came with innovation is in coverage...a matter of great importance in PA sound (not so much for domestic).
I have owned and heard most of the speakers you name and dozens more. Never heard the McIntosh line arrays. Used to sell Snells. Had Tannoy blacks reds silvers, Altec 604s and other coaxes of various iterations, UREIs, Mastering Labs xovers.
My main rig at home for a decade was ALTEC 288C/1505/416B in a big Onken cabinet. HF EQ in the crossover. I loved that setup. Love the large format ALTEC sound, which I guess comes out of the Shearer project and the multicell Mirrophonic systems before that.
Still...Western Electric is on a different planet for subjective results, at least some of the speakers are.
I personally couldn't live with Advents, AR3s, L100s if I could have a WE757a or 755A instead based on my experience, tastes, and preferences. The AR-1 used the 755A as a tweeter...what a waste! The 755A sounds better if you pull out the woofer and run it full range in the same cabinet. I like the engineering idea of the AR-1 though.
Take the WE755A vis a vis the LS3/5A...It blows it away on music to my ear. I owned both at the same time. the 755A was designed to incorporate findings based on empirical hearing measurements on tens of thousands of listeners at the Bell exhibit at the New York Worlds Fair. The WE lit speaks of "the sound of presence" and a very particular formula for intelligibility was engineered into the speaker via manipulations in cone compliance and geometry. This is not a tweaky high end approach, it is subtle physics. I think that perhaps it is actually true that superior concept and engineering is represented in this design.
The KEF B139 is not an achievement of the same order.
Think about Bell Laboratories and the massive intellectual and scientific resources at their command. Has this R&D capability ever been matched by any other manufacturer of audio equipment. Even RCA Labs lags behind Bell Labs (and their theater gear is far inferior too). LC-1 was pretty good though. How can KEF, Tannoy, and Magico
D) compete?You talk about the narrow bandwidth of old drivers but I am not seeing it in the 1930s WE units. The system goal was 60-13k more or less in 1933, 100-7k in 1928, but the drivers are superb within their ranges. Some modern ears might want a super tweeter. Well, Parts Express will take your order.
My old rule of thumb on "progress" in audio is that 90% of all items produced at any given time are junk. The top 10% of any era 1930-now is the top stuff worthy of notice and study. Most of the rest is for the mullets to flip on ebay.
I pick my 10% by listening. I can't fathom any other way to do it.
OK I just did that. I have a pr of 2" Renkus Heinz 3301s on CBH-800 CD horns set up right now. How 80s can you get, huh?
Comparing this RK unit to WE theater gear on any parameter other than coverage angle, especially the wild musical satisfaction factor, is a joke. It sounds OK, good enough, I suppose. Nice small and cheap solution. Not a keeper long-term but alright for the TV system.
I'm going to run through the last 30 years of "post Altec" drivers and horns now. Emilars, Radians, maybe a couple EVs. Check out some CD horns and modern waveguides. I don't think any of it will beat WE but it is all part of a well-balanced education.
I fully understand that an engineer has to go with paper data and there are certain institutionalized goals that one feels must be kept in focus. I also understand that an engineer must believe in progress, or else why bother?
To the degree I can recreate it in my mind, I really appreciate the engineering mindset and culture of Western Electric in the golden age of theater sound as a slice of history and the fountain of tremendous innovation and achievement. For what they were trying to do, they rocked.
The goals of music listeners are different from pure engineering and far more varied and divergent. I am ranking all this 80 year accumulation of audio stuff on musical playback...different criteria and only loosely related to the spec sheet. An experiential/emprical process but only partially objective.
The Stradivarius metaphor often comes up...it is one of the few other instances where people argue that the ancients were smarter than we are and knew things that we don't. I am not making that claim about WE. I think the answer is in shifting goals and approaches to the technical and market challenges of designing and producing PA gear. If we had the lab notebooks, they would make sense to modern scientists.
WECO gear sounds different because it is in many ways from a different world.
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Thanks Joe,
An interesting and well reasoned response.
I guess I'll just have to hear a set and prepare to be amazed!
Regards,
David Smith
Are you kidding me, listening to a lot of badly designed speakers i guess...
Because they were poorly designed speakers, period ! Not because they were multi-way designs...
exaggerated ..? try apples and oranges ...
To me the holy grail for audio involves getting the widest range, lowest distortion "source". In essence this is what Tom Danley's Synergy Horn attempts to synthesize - albeit by blending a multiway. But this is what he is trying to do, get a single source with high sensitivity, low distortion, minimum phase shift. (can't say if it works or not, but the idea remains). If he could do it with a single driver, betcha he would.
If we list a few speakers that did this sort of thing, you start to see a trend:
- Ohm Walsh
- Hill Plasmatronics (ok, it is a 2-way)
- Acoustat ESL
- Fostex fullrange
- Lowther "fullrange"
- WE555 + horn
- others to be named?
All very very listenable speakers.
Well the acoustat was and all had mucho limitations ....(never heard the WE555)
The trick is to get rid of some of the attendant problems. Which these all have, or else to minimize these problems.
What the WE555 + horn does is to minimize a great number of the most pressing of the attendant problems, and excel in quite a few.
In short, imo, these are reasons that it is as good as people find it to be.
_-_-bear
PS. I run a compression driver, 1st order on a <300Hz. horn... up to HF cutoff (>10kHkz). Heresy. Not suitable for PA/SR. 109dB/1w 16 ohms. Very very good at home levels, AND it has oodles of "harmonic continuity" and "jump factor". Clean, and smooth. Wish I had some 555 to put on...
Harmonic continuity is not difficult to achieve , the problem today is too much software, make a lot of deaf people think they can design speakers..
Hi
Accuracy is subjective and when based on a recording that you didn’t make, you are only guessing what it should sound like (a problem with single ended comparisons).
Accuracy could be thought of as the speakers ability to reproduce the input signal and nothing more and to do it at the proper time as well although how we hear and how we measure are not the same thing.
For example, a measurement microphone uniformly picks up the acoustic pressure at a single point in space while ones ears / brain hear from two locations and use angle dependent frequency response and time delays to compose a single mental picture of the width, height and depth of the source.
When we started our company 7 years ago, we wanted a way to keep track of what we were doing refining the Synergy horns relative to our competition as our easiest way to get sales was in side by side comparisons.
An answer turned out to be a refinement of a procedure I used with the earlier Unity horns and even that was a variation of an OLD method called a “generation loss test”.
In the bad old days of open reel tape, it was common place to record some music and then play it back, re-recording the music.
With each generation, there was a “loss” in sound quality and increase in noise floor.
In theory, a perfect medium can be recorded an infinite number of times before suffering from generation loss.
What we ended up doing is to raise a loudspeaker up on a tower about 15 feet in the air and placing a decent measurement mic like an m-55 at a meter or two (for a larger cabinet).
The use of a tower outdoors eliminates room effects and most non-direct sound BUT if one does this test from the same location in a room with different speakers, one has folded in the effect of directivity in preserving the signal as well.
Using a 24/96 multi track recorder, a music track was recorded and then played through the speaker (usually at 80dB avg).
On one channel the mic signal was recorded and another, the music track re-recorded. For the first generation, the speaker signal is played back through the speaker and re-recorded as well as a music track. AS with any use of this kind of test, each generation is an increasing caricature of “what is not perfect” or the difference between the input signal and the output is as discerned by our hearing and not a measurement.
Usually, for most speakers we recorded, by generation one or two the flaws were extremely audible some unlistenable AND once you heard the caricature of what’s wrong, it became easy to hear that same flaw listening directly to music.
Our plan back then was to have audition buttons on our web site with some of our competitor’s speaker s as well as ours but we never got that far with the old web guys and now some new folks are working on a new site so who knows if that will happen.
Anyway, to the degree (or not) a loudspeaker system is “input signal accurate”, it can be included within a reproduction chain and allow a greater number of generations before being unlistenable.
With the ubiquitous measurement mic and good sound cards, this kind of test is easily done at home too and might be useful here too.
On the WE loudspeakers that have mythic status, there is an important perspective to keep in mind.
Most all of the sounds a loudspeaker driver produces that are not part of the input signal, increase in level faster than the actual desired signal.
Also, if one examines the equal loudness curves and acoustic masking, one concludes that an inverse shape of the equal loudness curve is related to our hearing acuity.
Also, in this era, the drivers of the day were a mixture of physics and calculated values but much more a work of art that evolved to it’s final product.
For example, how the VC former connects to the radiator is not something that was calculated but found by trial and error (R&D).
In the home, what one has is a driver that was intended to be “loud enough” to be used in a movie theater and so at home levels, those non-linear things are pretty far down in level.
One has a large horn which has much more directivity than most people in hifi are used to and so more of the direct sound arrives at the LP and less reverberant sound. The later sounds “real” but competes / clutters from the image in the direct sound or understanding of the words on a larger scale.
While it doesn’t show in a response measurement, we also hear spatially, depending HOW a source radiates, it’s location in depth is wither obvious or not.
The large WE systems would radiate more like a simple source over a broad band than a typical multi way home speaker made of two or three separate acoustic sources. As a result, these do sound pretty different and do some things well I thought.
If you ever heard a good voice recording quietly played through a Manger, a Quad ESL-63 or a good tiny full range driver , you hear the voice is somewhere behind or not strongly identified with the physical location in distance.
A speaker radiating a complex field pattern can be much more localizable in depth and remains so even in stereo playing a mono phantom image. These sources often sound like a right and left speaker and a mono phantom instead of just the phantom.
On the other hand, things like flat response and wider bandwidth are important too, unless one is myopically focused on the stereo image those things are just as important in most cases and more easily addressed.
Directivity can only be achieved with size or an interference pattern the latter partially defeats the objective of a single acoustic source in time and space, the inverse of the microphone or directional microphone.
As always though, the icky stuff normally gets louder faster than the good stuff and so it remains “headroom is your friend”.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
Some low Bass on TV, about 3 min in.
http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Showpage.aspx?sid=13287
Accuracy is subjective and when based on a recording that you didn’t make, you are only guessing what it should sound like (a problem with single ended comparisons).
Accuracy could be thought of as the speakers ability to reproduce the input signal and nothing more and to do it at the proper time as well although how we hear and how we measure are not the same thing.
For example, a measurement microphone uniformly picks up the acoustic pressure at a single point in space while ones ears / brain hear from two locations and use angle dependent frequency response and time delays to compose a single mental picture of the width, height and depth of the source.
When we started our company 7 years ago, we wanted a way to keep track of what we were doing refining the Synergy horns relative to our competition as our easiest way to get sales was in side by side comparisons.
An answer turned out to be a refinement of a procedure I used with the earlier Unity horns and even that was a variation of an OLD method called a “generation loss test”.
In the bad old days of open reel tape, it was common place to record some music and then play it back, re-recording the music.
With each generation, there was a “loss” in sound quality and increase in noise floor.
In theory, a perfect medium can be recorded an infinite number of times before suffering from generation loss.
What we ended up doing is to raise a loudspeaker up on a tower about 15 feet in the air and placing a decent measurement mic like an m-55 at a meter or two (for a larger cabinet).
The use of a tower outdoors eliminates room effects and most non-direct sound BUT if one does this test from the same location in a room with different speakers, one has folded in the effect of directivity in preserving the signal as well.
Using a 24/96 multi track recorder, a music track was recorded and then played through the speaker (usually at 80dB avg).
On one channel the mic signal was recorded and another, the music track re-recorded. For the first generation, the speaker signal is played back through the speaker and re-recorded as well as a music track. AS with any use of this kind of test, each generation is an increasing caricature of “what is not perfect” or the difference between the input signal and the output is as discerned by our hearing and not a measurement.
Usually, for most speakers we recorded, by generation one or two the flaws were extremely audible some unlistenable AND once you heard the caricature of what’s wrong, it became easy to hear that same flaw listening directly to music.
Our plan back then was to have audition buttons on our web site with some of our competitor’s speaker s as well as ours but we never got that far with the old web guys and now some new folks are working on a new site so who knows if that will happen.
Anyway, to the degree (or not) a loudspeaker system is “input signal accurate”, it can be included within a reproduction chain and allow a greater number of generations before being unlistenable.
With the ubiquitous measurement mic and good sound cards, this kind of test is easily done at home too and might be useful here too.
On the WE loudspeakers that have mythic status, there is an important perspective to keep in mind.
Most all of the sounds a loudspeaker driver produces that are not part of the input signal, increase in level faster than the actual desired signal.
Also, if one examines the equal loudness curves and acoustic masking, one concludes that an inverse shape of the equal loudness curve is related to our hearing acuity.
Also, in this era, the drivers of the day were a mixture of physics and calculated values but much more a work of art that evolved to it’s final product.
For example, how the VC former connects to the radiator is not something that was calculated but found by trial and error (R&D).
In the home, what one has is a driver that was intended to be “loud enough” to be used in a movie theater and so at home levels, those non-linear things are pretty far down in level.
One has a large horn which has much more directivity than most people in hifi are used to and so more of the direct sound arrives at the LP and less reverberant sound. The later sounds “real” but competes / clutters from the image in the direct sound or understanding of the words on a larger scale.
While it doesn’t show in a response measurement, we also hear spatially, depending HOW a source radiates, it’s location in depth is wither obvious or not.
The large WE systems would radiate more like a simple source over a broad band than a typical multi way home speaker made of two or three separate acoustic sources. As a result, these do sound pretty different and do some things well I thought.
If you ever heard a good voice recording quietly played through a Manger, a Quad ESL-63 or a good tiny full range driver , you hear the voice is somewhere behind or not strongly identified with the physical location in distance.
A speaker radiating a complex field pattern can be much more localizable in depth and remains so even in stereo playing a mono phantom image. These sources often sound like a right and left speaker and a mono phantom instead of just the phantom.
On the other hand, things like flat response and wider bandwidth are important too, unless one is myopically focused on the stereo image those things are just as important in most cases and more easily addressed.
Directivity can only be achieved with size or an interference pattern the latter partially defeats the objective of a single acoustic source in time and space, the inverse of the microphone or directional microphone.
As always though, the icky stuff normally gets louder faster than the good stuff and so it remains “headroom is your friend”.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
Some low Bass on TV, about 3 min in.
http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Showpage.aspx?sid=13287
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well ...... even without reminder about apples and oranges , we can't say that for Altec and Tannoy coaxes .
they're completely different animals , with own virtues (and flaws)
same thing as saying that you're badly designed , comparing to Black Mamba
Tom ...Your comments on stereo imaging from large wide range horns is interesting and clearly in the "unintended consequences for the future" dimension that David referred to and dismissed above. 1928 was a bit early for stereo, so this is a good case in point.
The career of technological artifacts often far exceeds the original intentions, use contexts, and world views of their creators.
I never ran across the notion of "mono center image" from old lit although two side by horns were often used, for room coverage obviously. It seems that the clarity and intelligibility of two speaker mono and stereo localization are somehow connected at this juncture. Since two channel mono occurs in a phantom center space, the notion of localization applies even though the source is not stereo. The mono image is still received and processed stereophonically by the two-eared listener.
Aside from the raw notion of localizability, I think that the big horns uniquely present a realistic sense of scale. This is rarely experienced in home audio.
Mini monitors and such give shrunken mini dioramas, yet are often praised for "imaging." If I play my harmonica in my bedroom on a fender Champ, it is a huge "thing"...not a tiny little avatar-sized thumbnail sketch.
I recently graduated to a new level of experiencing this realistic-sized stage when I heard one of the 12A/13A systems Silbatone set up.
This is the earliest WE Wide Range horn system. Two 555 driver based horns, no crossover. Bass horn is run 2dB louder than upper horn via aturoformer attenuators.
Pics here: hifi heroin: Western Electric 12a and 13a combination..
Now, I used to record the Philadelphia Orchestra and other performers in the Academy of Music in Philly and my brother ran the concession in the hall so I could sneak in and hear everybody from BB King to Issac Stern. I have that big hall sound stored in my brain.
This 12A/13A system is the first time I heard a truly realistic "hall sized" image from any audio system. It was like being in an actual hall.... Surely it didn't hurt that this horn rig was playing in a near hall-sized room! But it was so shockingly different, that I sat amazed for a long time drooling on my shoes.
"Scale" raises the issue of what the heck are we talking about with stereo imaging. Size distortion is not really factored in.
Wide range biggie horns force consideration of this question.
Realistic sound is big sound. You get that with big full range horns.
The career of technological artifacts often far exceeds the original intentions, use contexts, and world views of their creators.
I never ran across the notion of "mono center image" from old lit although two side by horns were often used, for room coverage obviously. It seems that the clarity and intelligibility of two speaker mono and stereo localization are somehow connected at this juncture. Since two channel mono occurs in a phantom center space, the notion of localization applies even though the source is not stereo. The mono image is still received and processed stereophonically by the two-eared listener.
Aside from the raw notion of localizability, I think that the big horns uniquely present a realistic sense of scale. This is rarely experienced in home audio.
Mini monitors and such give shrunken mini dioramas, yet are often praised for "imaging." If I play my harmonica in my bedroom on a fender Champ, it is a huge "thing"...not a tiny little avatar-sized thumbnail sketch.
I recently graduated to a new level of experiencing this realistic-sized stage when I heard one of the 12A/13A systems Silbatone set up.
This is the earliest WE Wide Range horn system. Two 555 driver based horns, no crossover. Bass horn is run 2dB louder than upper horn via aturoformer attenuators.
Pics here: hifi heroin: Western Electric 12a and 13a combination..
Now, I used to record the Philadelphia Orchestra and other performers in the Academy of Music in Philly and my brother ran the concession in the hall so I could sneak in and hear everybody from BB King to Issac Stern. I have that big hall sound stored in my brain.
This 12A/13A system is the first time I heard a truly realistic "hall sized" image from any audio system. It was like being in an actual hall.... Surely it didn't hurt that this horn rig was playing in a near hall-sized room! But it was so shockingly different, that I sat amazed for a long time drooling on my shoes.
"Scale" raises the issue of what the heck are we talking about with stereo imaging. Size distortion is not really factored in.
Wide range biggie horns force consideration of this question.
Realistic sound is big sound. You get that with big full range horns.
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well ...... even without reminder about apples and oranges , we can't say that for Altec and Tannoy coaxes .
they're completely different animals , with own virtues (and flaws)
same thing as saying that you're badly designed , comparing to Black Mamba
I'm black mamba ............
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