I've been wondering if there is any technology as primitive as loudspeakers. By "primitive" I mean that you can't sit down to design and then produce a system that meets high expectations*. A reasonable comparison might be the "science" of automobile tires.
At the low end (and to an extent at the high end too and we are obliged to use cross-overs in the middle), we are outside the capable range of available drivers. We have to make up for their shortcomings by trafficking in various box resonances and in-phase boosting.
None of the ordinary drivers are seriously smooth, even when examined in a limited range.
Putting it all in a room, we are even further from delivering good sound to even one listener's ear.
For sure, we patch together and fine-tune a large collection of elements and end up with something we like. Just like we kind of like the tires we put on cars.
Seems strange.
Ben
*When stepping down the hall or into another room, have EVER thought Rene Fleming was singing in your music room? Or even a simple flute or guitar? My system can fool me into thinking it is my cellphone with an electronic ringtone ringing. That's not great.
At the low end (and to an extent at the high end too and we are obliged to use cross-overs in the middle), we are outside the capable range of available drivers. We have to make up for their shortcomings by trafficking in various box resonances and in-phase boosting.
None of the ordinary drivers are seriously smooth, even when examined in a limited range.
Putting it all in a room, we are even further from delivering good sound to even one listener's ear.
For sure, we patch together and fine-tune a large collection of elements and end up with something we like. Just like we kind of like the tires we put on cars.
Seems strange.
Ben
*When stepping down the hall or into another room, have EVER thought Rene Fleming was singing in your music room? Or even a simple flute or guitar? My system can fool me into thinking it is my cellphone with an electronic ringtone ringing. That's not great.
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I don't know about you but I have seen dramatic improvements in sound reproduction in the nearly 50 years I have been doing it. Revolutionary? - No, but highly evolutionary with large improvements at every step.
I have a recording of a classical pianist playing a piano with no room acoustics. When played back in my room, the piano IS in the room with you. It can be done.
I have a recording of a classical pianist playing a piano with no room acoustics. When played back in my room, the piano IS in the room with you. It can be done.
Yes, and trumpet and saxophone - even a drum set. Often better out of the room than in it.
You are not looking at a horn loaded comp driver a direct radiating woofer in a box. You are not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box. Gaze into my eyes. You are not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box.
" I am not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box. I am not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box"
Hey this works for me! I like those kind of speakers.
" I am not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box. I am not looking at a horn loaded comp driver and a direct radiating woofer in a box"
Hey this works for me! I like those kind of speakers.
this is not a problem with loudspeakers - it is not the loudspeaker technology that is the limiting factor - it is the speaker-room interface and the conventional geometry of the stereo triangle
Very interesting example and closer to home than car tires. Not sure it has direct bearing on hearing (due to differences between sense modalities) except metaphorically.
I respectfully feel there is a crucial error in your otherwise insightful example. Shouldn't the term "clearer vision" really be "optically correct"? For sure, my perception of the world through my Nikon Digital progressive lenses is a whole lot more veridical or natural than those looking at the world with segmented lenses which divide the visual experience into pieces... not that anybody with "lines" in their lenses ever sees the abrupt discontinuies.
While you are entirely correct to say the physical optics are always compromised with progressive lenses in a way not true of segmented lenses, but the human perceptual experience is a lot better.
Ben
There are various accidental echo-free recordings out there - made in the open air, like a few parts of the famous "Queen's Birthday Salute of 1957" or Danley's fabulous firecrackers and trains recordings (steel wheels rolling over joints between rail segments are an ultimate bass test).
Didn't somebody say the piano is one instrument that can't be successfully recorded?
On the other hand.... what about kunstkopf headphone recording? Isn't that the reverse-side of your echo-free recording? Perhaps I just imagined it, but didn't somebody once hook up headphones to a live music room in a way that rotated the mics when the person rotated their head?
Ben
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"Down the hall" is a less stringent test than in the room. Which itself is a disparaging comment about the state of music reproduction.
Does your "yes" mean that you'd really have trouble saying if it was a saxophonist or a recording?
I love playing my ancient KLH demo recording of elaborate old floor-standing music boxes (1970?) and maybe it would sometimes pass the down the hall test with my ESL system. Perhaps judging the sound of a music box is closer than other "instruments" to an electronic cellphone ringer than to a musical instrument.
Ben
Yes, the greatest piano recordings exhibit some major degree of suckage, piano big, mic small. I have been involved in piano sample discs, unbelievably complex! So what will do it and can (almost) be successfully recorded? Snare drums are small enough, contained enough.. A snare will do it and due to extreme FR range and extreme dynamics it most certainly will separate the men from the less than men, Quite quickly too. It's usually obvious dynamic compression that fails the stink test.
Yes, precisely. I had to go look.
I have an old Denon CD anechoic recording of a symphony orchestra. Playing that back in my room doesn't sound real, it just sounds weird.
Then how about sitting in the room and the soundstage locates maybe a performer foot-tapping or calling out cues, outside of the room walls. Expecting that friends have dropped by...maybe turning off the song and walking outside?
Yes, that's a superior test protocol because it uses the sound system as it was designed to be used (rather than listening to the system from down hall... which is not how it was designed to be used).
But in AllenB's specific example, he finds a muffled sound on the recording to be reminiscent of the muffled sound of his friends outside his house. Umm.
I like the down-the-hall protocol because we've all listened to our systems from down the hall. And, at least in my case, not seriously thought "the real thing" was in my music room.
In days of yore, there were a number of renowned live versus recorded tests, some in big halls. That great businessman, Edison, started the concept, so far as I know. Somewhere I read that Edison loaded the dice in some way but I can't remember the revisionist version. Anybody?
Not easy to set up psychology experiments that are beyond criticism. For example, being tested in a sonically unfamiliar environment - without getting people's ears familiarized with it - can be lead to the kind of random choices that are designated "can't tell the difference" (AKA "not statistically significant") between live and recorded. I recall that Toole and the Harmon testers were aware of this issue in their test suite and so had some familiarization, I think.
Thinking of Edison's successful tests of music cylinders leads me to add: anecdotes, especially posted from this sophisticated audience, can illuminate how our sound systems work and are interesting to hear, but only blind tests have validity.
Ben
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Ben,
Sorry, don't recall having heard Rene Fleming singing, but having recorded many artists in my home studio, there have been times when I have mistaken playback for the real thing.
The room, speaker placement and adjacent room all tend to interfere with your "high expectations", even leaving speaker quality out of the picture.
If you could do a (good) ambient recording of Rene Fleming singing in your music room, then play it back through one (good) speaker in the same position, your "high expectations" could be met.
However, since your particular listening room is populated by multiple speakers that are all not time aligned to any point in said room, there is no way you will meet your "high expectations" without sitting down to design and then produce a system that can perform the function that you desire, or purchasing speakers that have been designed with the parameters that would allow your expectations to be met.
Others have had no problem reaching the goal of a good audio representation of the recording- probably better as far at fooling my ears than even a 3-D film or TV in convincing the representation it is reality.
Art
I think that things have gotten better but in the process we lose some things we used to value. Sort of how Society grows. With that said it seems like we got off track of the design, build, test, redesign process when it comes to building speakers. I have yet to hear a pair of speakers measure great and sound bad. Speakers that measure well in transient response (temporal response), absolute phase and frequency response always sound good. The problem is that speakers that measure bad in some of those areas can still be very enjoyable and have audio aspects one can enjoy. The room interaction is also key but a well designed speaker takes into account the middle range of rooms it will be listened to in the design.
DIY is quickly matching what the big boys were able to do because the tools are now readily available and affordable. We also have the benefit of collective knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge those before us (ie. bell labs) have assembled. Go back 10 years and only a few people owned measurement mics and were really testing drivers and measuring speakers they built themselves. We are on the cusp of a point where CNC and 3D printing will allow the DIYer to design and build speakers even the most advanced speaker builders dream of today. IMO these factors will bring about a revolution in speaker design, here to unseen before.
DIY is quickly matching what the big boys were able to do because the tools are now readily available and affordable. We also have the benefit of collective knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge those before us (ie. bell labs) have assembled. Go back 10 years and only a few people owned measurement mics and were really testing drivers and measuring speakers they built themselves. We are on the cusp of a point where CNC and 3D printing will allow the DIYer to design and build speakers even the most advanced speaker builders dream of today. IMO these factors will bring about a revolution in speaker design, here to unseen before.
As far as I know the famous tests were done with Edison Diamond Disks, not the earlier cylinders. A very different beast. By far the best acoustical playback I've ever heard - they are remarkable.
I believe that Edison taught his artists to "sing like the record" to enhance the illusion during playback.
I didn't say that. If the information is on the recording I can hear when a drummer rests his foot over the kick pedal, how loose the mechanism is, what type of shoes he's wearing and what the floor surface is made of.
That's the point. If you ask "innocent" people, how good a reproduction resembles the live original, most of them will judge the "playback quality" only: whether the musicians sing/play exactly the same notes at exactly the same pace with exactly the same phrasing.
They certainly don't think much about the timbral or reverb differencies.
Rudolf
Hey !
That was me yesterday playing with my new 3- way
Just inverting the midrange polarity
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