What are benefits of adding HF driver 7khz up?

[Robh3606]

I tried the sample and could hear a difference in all 4 of them. I was really surprised I could hear a difference with the 20k file?? I wasn't using headphones just my computer speakers to see initially if I needed headphones. The 3db 16k is defiantly the hardest to hear and without a direct comparison I would never hear it.

Rob

[DBMandrake]

Originally Posted by speaker dave

All that debate over whether response problems above 10 k are audible and only one person has downloaded the examples? Come on guys.

Oii give us a chance

No time for me to try things like this through the week but I'll try it over the weekend. Could I also suggest some notch versions of the signals as well as peaking ? It would be interesting to see if the commonly held notion that notches are more benign than peaks is true in this situation or not.

Besides, typical tweeter limitations will cause a dip or lack of high treble (or early rolloff) rather than a 3 or 6dB peak, so a notch may be a more representative test...

[speaker dave]

Happy to try some other suggested shapes if the interest is strong enough.

David

[Keriwena]

Originally Posted by Pano

FWIW, I think most tweeters suck. And I have since I was a young whipper-snapper who could hear >16Khz. Very few sound natural to me, they don't sound like what I hear in natural sounds. I'd rather not have the content up there than the artificial sizzle that most speakers provide. Is it the tweeters themselves or the implementation? I dunno, but I don't like most of them - they sound fake. They sound like tweeters.

Got to agree with this. Prob'ly why I like single cone drivers. They have a natural sounding roll-off, and once you get used to them they're quite pleasant. Sure, if you add a tweeter your first impression will be "That's what I've been missing!", but it's nothing compared to the "THAT's what I've been missing!!!" experience of someone walking into the room with a violin and playing a jig.

[speaker dave]

Originally Posted by Robh3606

The 3db 16k is defiantly the hardest to hear and without a direct comparison I would never hear it.

Rob

Yes, I found that one pretty subtle and wouldn't proclaim one version right and the other worng. A just discernable difference.

David

[Keriwena]

Originally Posted by Soundminded

When you consider that many musical instruments can be heard with little or no tonal variation at any horizontal or vertical angle...

Really? Which ones are those?

Certainly not violins, which are designed to have frequencies beam (violinists call it "projection"). And I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me to play a guitar for them so they can "hear what the audience hears" (I work in a music store). They don't sound at all the same to the player. Electric instruments.... well, we know speakers beam. And horns, seriously? You can easily hear the changes in timbre as a well-hit cymbal rocks back and forth. Perhaps a washtub bass is omni-directional?

Maybe you need to spend some time in a studio, trying to find the best mic placements. Because, you know, making judgements about "high fidelity" requires more than just experience with a wide range of reproducers, you need to know what you're trying to reproduce.

As J. Gordon Holt (IWEWT) would have said, "BLAT!!!"

[Soundminded]

Originally Posted by Keriwena

Really? Which ones are those?

Certainly not violins, which are designed to have frequencies beam (violinists call it "projection"). And I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me to play a guitar for them so they can "hear what the audience hears" (I work in a music store). They don't sound at all the same to the player. Electric instruments.... well, we know speakers beam. And horns, seriously? You can easily hear the changes in timbre as a well-hit cymbal rocks back and forth. Perhaps a washtub bass is omni-directional?

Maybe you need to spend some time in a studio, trying to find the best mic placements. Because, you know, making judgements about "high fidelity" requires more than just experience with a wide range of reproducers, you need to know what you're trying to reproduce.

As J. Gordon Holt (IWEWT) would have said, "BLAT!!!"

I hear live music most days for a good part of the day. There are two pianos in my house, one a Steinway grand and there are a large number of violins and violas. Nearly every week there are somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen string players here sawing away. Walk around a violin being played and you'll hear almost no change in timbre. Try it with street buskars. Walk around a piano bar and unless the lid is propped open there's practically no change at any angle. String and percussion instruments are mostly multidirectional or close to omnidirectional radiators. If you listen to a piano and the lid is not propped open and you are not in line of sight of the sounding board, strings, or harp, the piano is an indirect radiator from your perspective. An acoustic guitar is one of the few string instruments that is relatively directional.

You'd think horns (reeds and brass) would be directional and they are....but they might as well not be from the point of view of the listener. Clarinets, oboes, bassoons, tubas radiate vertically, French horns horizontallly sideways, the first arriving sound at the listener is almost always a reflection, often off the floor. Trumpets and trombones radiate diagonally downward towards the floor and ususally sit behind the less loud string players so their direct radiation towards the audience, whatever there is of it is blocked by the musicians and their instruments sitting in front of them. Get someone to point a trumpet directly at you and blow through it even at some distance and your first instinct will likely be to put your fingers in your ears to protect them from the blast.

[pos]

Originally Posted by speaker dave

In the vertical angle the throat directivity is essentially the same as the narrow 40 degree coverage of the horn, so no beaming there either.

No beaming, but I would hardly call that large enough for home/hifi use (ie relatively short listening distance), unless you are always sitting on axis...

[weltersys]

Originally Posted by speaker dave

Beats in musical instruments are perceptual without being real tones. For example (I tune pianos occaisionally) a piano with a string at 440 and one at 441 will have a 1 cycle per second beat. You will perceive the amplitude modulation, but you aren't hearing 1Hz. A system that captures 440 to 441 (a modest bandwidth!) would fully capture the effect.

David

Yes, a system that captures 440 to 441 (a modest bandwidth!) would fully capture the beat effect. However, a system not reproducing 17,600 Hz and 17,640 (the same beat interval and harmonics of 440 and 441), would not reproduce the beat tone.

MP3 has about a 17K cutoff, and most tweeters don't do much that high, other than distortion. A tweeter that does have clean extended range can reproduce parts of the recorded music that are real and lacking without.

Even though I can't hear above 15K, I can hear the difference between extended response tweeters and those that top out around 16K.

That said, I'd agree completely with your preference for using a driver not needing a transition to a tweeter at 7K and giving up some of the ultrasonic purity.

Well, back to my HF driver report, I have recorded the sound of several drivers at different levels, normalized to the same playback level, so we can all hear the difference in sound and distortion once I manage to post them.

The difference is great enough to be apparent using an MP3 encoding playing through laptop computer speakers.

Art

[AndrewT]

Originally Posted by gedlee

You are putting in and taking out everything above 7 kHz - of course you will hear that. ........................ frequencies above 7 kHz with a different driver was not going to make much of a difference, especially if the OP was over 50.

I said I was running the bas mid without it's crossover. That is the same as saying the speaker is operating as a full range speaker. I can confirm that the amplifier feeding it is also full range. That does not equate to

taking out everything above 7 kHz

I did not say that.

What I said was

I crossed in the tweeter using two passive single pole filters (LR2) @ 7kHz. Turning the treble only amplifier ON OFF

My poor ears, by comparison to a youngster, can clearly hear the reinforcement given by adding in the tweeter.