Who makes the lowest distortion speaker drivers

Interesting discussion......

Anyone have any experience with regard to distortion in Bandor 50 drivers? The thread is about who makes the lowest distortion drivers so these might be one of them......and I’ve just bought a pair to try out. They have a good reputation and their impulse response is pretty decent according to the supplied graph......

I have a few Jordan drivers. Bandor is made by Ted’s ex. They have similar origins.
 
Once something has been compressed/limited there is nothing that could reverse that correctly...Personally I use Auratones and I regard them as essential, especially to get the low bass right...Short of that every mix will be a compromise and frankly you can't get anywhere if you only mix for <1% of the market who actually have the right conditions and the same speakers.

This is the problem. Our interests apparently don't seem to overlap in this area.

In the improbable case that you might care about my interests on this subject as a hi-fi audio enthusiast and audio engineer, note that I don't subscribe to any of the quoted above as a valid argument for doing what many in the mastering community have been doing to the music...and trying to justify as "either I do it, or somebody else will". This is one-size-fits-all thinking in terms of marketing. That business model is no longer valid with the advent of music downloads and niche recorded music markets. The incremental cost of providing separate work products to support earbud/Auratone-type loudspeakers is now zero, since those work products are obviously created in the present processes anyway. Hitting "save" costs nothing, and putting those work products up on a web site for download...also costs nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I also don't subscribe to the argument that end users (consumers) shouldn't correct the music that has been deliberately dumbed down to sound "better" on really bad sound reproduction gear. I do know that the resulting work products that you describe above all sound like a table radio to me--and not a very good one, at that. And a little work on those music tracks corrects that problem quite effectively.

But all this apparently has little to do with "what makes the lowest distortion speaker drivers" ;) So I'll agree to move on--if you will.
Chris
 
What you state is highly unlikely in view of research by Toole and Olive, which shows that audiences prefer low over high distortion, and flat over non-flat FR. Even people with bad speakers seem to recognize a good speaker the moment they hear one, according to their findings.

While you make a good point, I don't think that one could conclude from Toole/Olive's work that an arbitrary subject will instantly recognize a good loudspeaker. On average, in a controlled situation, I agree, they will eventually, but not necessarily individually and certainly not in an uncontrolled environment.
 
What you state is highly unlikely in view of research by Toole and Olive, which shows that audiences prefer low over high distortion, and flat over non-flat FR. Even people with bad speakers seem to recognize a good speaker the moment they hear one, according to their findings.

The 'circle of confusion' has to do with the fact that many studio's do not work with flat monitoring systems for editing, so that the end product will have compensations in it for monitoring system aberrations. Then, in the listening location, there is reproduction system with its own quirks and presto, confusion rules.

In short, if people don't like your speakers, other explanations should be looked for.

Toole's experiments were comparing unfamiliar speakers in unfamiliar environments with other unfamiliar speakers. People do develop preferences, though its also true that people can get fatigued and recognize something new as better or more exciting (better is a subjective term). It all depends on the person.

To some extent it takes an educated ear to recognize a less distorted speaker, as Zaph often points out.

If Tooles experiments are so able to precisely predict the preferred speakers then you wouldn't think that variations in the recording environment would matter all that much. Yet he does bring it up. I often find too much bass in cheaper recordings and theres nothing that can correct this except equalization.
 
This is actually a part of the problem. If the translation aspect of mastering were only done on truly high quality monitors, i.e., flat FR and largely free of other nonlinear distortions in well set-up studios, then I believe that most of these discussions would die out and we would find other topics to argue about.

The problem is that the mastering guys have this notion that using bad loudspeakers is justified--like the NS-10Ms that are still being used today, or even other later generation monitors having a "NS-10M mode" selector switch--which is all talked about in Toole's and Newell's books, among other sources. However in my experience, this notion of mastering translation using bad loudspeakers and nearfield monitors is wrong.

There is something that any DIY person can do to reverse many or most of the effects of bad mastering practices (i.e., limiting, EQ, residual noise, compression effects, etc.), and the tools used are free.

Chris

Typical non audiophile music is going to be loaded with higher order distortion elements from the microphones, typical sibilance etc. I suppose electronic is exempt from this.

Odd order distortion tends to create a more etched harder sound. Certain studio monitors with more odd order distortion might show show the warts better.

Linear distortion is another matter and can really ruin a recording. Toole simply argues for on and off-axis linearity due to the fact that you hear the off axis reflected sound. So flat on axis but distorted off axis leads to non flat at listening position. Of course how important the off axis ultimately is will depend of many variables which don't seem to be addressed in the experiments.
 
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This is the problem. Our interests apparently don't seem to overlap in this area.

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But all this apparently has little to do with "what makes the lowest distortion speaker drivers" ;) So I'll agree to move on--if you will.
Chris

Yes we shoul;d leave this alone because the one thing that transpires is that you have no idea how I or others actually use Auratones or similar and it has nothing to do with 'being representative of crappy consumer gear'.
It would be way too OT and too much typing for me to bring you up to speed. :)

Once you own a copy of a recording I couldn't care less what you do with it but each mix is still going to cost the artist from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Money they need to recoup from sales and that is not going to happen if you aim for 1% of the potential market.
Most of the time it not going to happen even if you aim squarely at 100% of the market. The times that good money could be made by many through record sales ended in the '90s for a variety of reasons.
 
The recoding/editing professinal is the weakest link in most music I've owned. Strange that the artists name is well known, sometimes the instruments used, the brands of your hi fi, but who ever talks about the guy or gal in the recording studio that makes the final mix?
That and the Pirsig signature quote reveals that there is really more than one stream of user running invisibly here and leading to cross purposes in the discussion.

As a "classical"* music fan, I note clear differences in recordings of, say, a large orchestra playing a Bruckner symphony. But nobody is adding to the "sibilance" of the oboe. Loudness and spatial aspects are tweaked in all but the purist of recordings. There clearly are bravura recording engineers but their contribution is nothing like what I think Begun is correctly ascribing to "pop"* recording engineers. So just what would I consider "distortion" except the familiar measured parameters?

The pop engineers do all that classical engineers do but they (and their producers and even their musicians, if part of the scheme) are free to express their choices just as widely as they heck feel like.

As far as I'm concerned, pop music is all just cooked confectionary. If that's your kind of music, then no sense arguing because it is all a matter of taste.

Ben
*no good name that is generally accepted
 
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Most pop recordings, especially 80's stuff sound way better than classical music. I wouldn't even know how to capture something like an orchestra, since you cant fit them in a studio.

Someone will say its me or my system but I can't think of a single example of a classical recording that hasn't sounded distorted and terrible. The best recording of any type of music I've found is actually the Bowers and Wilkens demo cd. Also techno of course.
 
I never seen any comparison between all existing modelisations.

If you look at all of the sources of nonlinearity in a loudspeaker you find that only nonlinear inductance in a woofer, and the associated flux modulation are issues that generate higher orders of nonlinearity over a wide bandwidth. That is why all drivers should have flux modulation rings to control this problem. Once they have those then there aren't any major nonlinearities to go after - short of the coil coming out of the gap, which should never occur in a well-designed loudspeaker.
 
As far as I'm concerned, pop music is all just cooked confectionary. If that's your kind of music, then no sense arguing because it is all a matter of taste.

If by "pop" music you mean anything that is not "classical" then I could not disagree more strongly. That is the kind of position that really irks me, the misinformed belief that only classical music is worthy of a good stereo. :rolleyes:
 
Typical non audiophile music is going to be loaded with higher order distortion elements from the microphones, typical sibilance etc. I suppose electronic is exempt from this.

A good microphone is also exempt from a worry about non-linear distortion. Microphones are inherently linear owing to the small displacements of the diaphragm. Sure it's always possible to overload them, which is basically clipping, but that's easily detected and just as easily cured. So there should be no reason that a recording should be limited by the microphone.