The problem is who designs the test? The test can be contrived to skew the results any way you want to. By selection of program material, by room acoustic for example. Take two speakers, one with a rolled off high end and one with a shrill high end. In a live room with program material that is on the bright side the shrill speaker will be unbearable. Then put them in a dead room and play material that is skewed away from extended high frequencies and the rolled off speaker will sound dull and muted.
This is why without means to control the performance to achieve predictable consistent results we end up with a chaos of differeing opinions none of which has any more validity than the others.
I thought you were going to tell me that the test was which one got to earn a certain magazine's best speaker in the world of the month award.
The guys in Seattle do a nice speaker test, ask Terry O. It's well thought out, well run and pretty darn fair. Some allowance is made for program material that will not de-favor small speakers. That would not be needed if speakers of a same class were tested.
I guess soundminded does not mean common sense 😕 Only someone that thinks subjectivity is meaningful would have this question. The design of the test is grade school logic and common sense. Remove variables that lead to highly subjective conclusions.
Put the speakers in a level matched tests, hide all branding, pricing, etc that skews the conclusions. Nothing you posted would matter then. If you do not understand what I posted then I suggest you learn about it, experiment with it and figure it out.
btw, you continue to miss the original point being made when it comes to Geddes accepting any comment about his speakers.
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I've got a new flash for you, hearing is subjective. Ultimately all of our senses are. How accurate a sound system is depends on memory. Even an LvR demo depends on memory from one moment to the next. The problem is that the sciences of acoustics and psychoacoustics have not found measurements that correlate well to subjective accuracy. Toole's work revolved around what people liked (aside from his work on subwoofers.) That's not research about acoustics and accuracy, that's marketing research.
Since I haven't heard every speaker in the world and I haven't heard Geddes' speaker I can't say specifically what I think of them. However I have heard several very expensive full range and hybrid electrostatic speakers in recent years and they did not strike me as particularly accurate. In fact the Martin Logan Summit at $10,000 had five obvious FR distortions I heard on just one recording.
Is it just my imagination or has this thread drifted slightly from the topic of cheap tweeters?
Is it just my imagination or has this thread drifted slightly from the topic of cheap tweeters?
It was a hostile takeover...I think somewhere around page 6 and 7.
Ah well.
Edit: page 7-8.
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Thanks Mike for the kind words. We certainly take great pains to present a level playing field. Like any competition, there are winners and losers and while every one of our contestants would like to be the eventual winner, we have never had one complaint about the "fairness" of the evaluation protocol.
Best Regards,
TerryO
Yes, this is important. I find it can come down to within an eighth of a dB in this region, and such peaks are characterised by a sibilance that is consistent in its nature between recordings.
Compression is a more worthy interest in a domestic environment where (I for one) rarely listen louder than what sounds right, e.g. natural for the distance the lead vocalist is placed.
Perhaps, but a waveguide is not known for favouring gain.
Is it just my imagination or has this thread drifted slightly from the topic of cheap tweeters?
Its the "Should HiFi loudspeakers be flat?" thread come to life again. It reserves the right to crop up any place, any time.😀
David
You like to coment on Toole's tests being popularity tests. His early group appraisals filled in a questionaire with 1 to 10 scales on: Clarity, Softness, Fullness, Spaciousness, Presence, Distortion, Fidelity, etc. There was one category called "Pleasentness". Do we enterpret that as the "I think it will sell" category?
That he could later find the correlation between the scoring on these tests and measureable accuracy (axial flatness, smoothness, response extension), while many other measurements were found not relevant seems to remove it from the realm of simple popularity.
No response to my "flat direct sound plus flat reflection doesn't add to flat" comments?
"Should HiFi loudspeakers be flat?"
Well, of course they should. They could hang on the wall like a poster. They could be posted like a letter.
I don't think you are going to do it though, not today at any rate.
Terry 🙂
Well, of course they should. They could hang on the wall like a poster. They could be posted like a letter.
I don't think you are going to do it though, not today at any rate.
Terry 🙂
On a slightly less jovial note, I wonder if it keeps cropping up again and again because the whole debate on the importance of off axis response vs on axis response (and polar response in general) is still somewhat of an open question even amongst experts, yet it fundamentally drives so many of the important design decisions of a speaker, including selection of tweeter, crossover frequencies and so on.
One might argue that apart from low cost and simplicity of design, one of the main reasons to select a dome tweeter (and push its crossover frequency low) is a belief that high frequency dispersion should be extremely wide and that narrowing of the polar response at the crossover is unacceptable. This is a design methodology that puts wide dispersion ahead of everything else, including distortion, dynamic range and so on.
Yet this belief, taken almost as gospel by so many that not allowing the polar response to narrow at all (below 180 degrees) until the high end treble is important and a desirable trait doesn't seem to be backed up by a lot of the research that you keep referencing which says things like small dips in the power response at the crossover go largely unnoticed, listener axis response at high frequencies is the dominating factor rather than power response, wall reflections from the off axis response of a speaker don't have to closely match the same spectral balance as the on axis response etc.
Until that fundamental debate is answered (and it may never be) a dome tweeter may be considered a good choice or a bad choice, depending which side of that argument you fall on and what parameters you prioritise.
I tend to fall on the side of putting dynamic performance and distortion ahead of worrying about moderate narrowing of the polar response at the crossover.
So long as there is no huge overall shift in directivity index from midrange to treble, as you might find on a large full range driver used by itself, I find some narrowing of the polar response at the crossover has little effect if the tweeter also has controlled directivity, and the payback in terms of dynamics and low distortion of using a larger midrange driver and a higher crossover frequency can be considerable.
If I was using a dome tweeter I would not even consider crossing it over below 3Khz, and I doubt that I would willingly use a dome tweeter in anything other than a small bookshelf sized design in the future. For a large full size system I would now only consider wave-guide loaded ribbons, large (non-ribbon) wave-guides, or possibly line arrays. Dome's are pretty much off my radar.
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Dome's are pretty much off my radar.
Of course they are! That's because SpeakerDave has made them flat! Being two dimensional they will never again bother your radar!
On the other hand, I respect domes and will use them quite readily, a nice dome mid crossed in at 1K and a tweeter crossed in at 10K. Perfect.
Terry
Of course they are! That's because SpeakerDave has made them flat! Being two dimensional they will never again bother your radar!
On the other hand, I respect domes and will use them quite readily, a nice dome mid crossed in at 1K and a tweeter crossed in at 10K. Perfect.
Terry
And it will have to be answered by academic researchers, not by us yammering away on an enthusiast web site (yes, yours truly included).
Actually, I think the debate has been answered, if you read the studies and connect the dots a bit. Its just that the academic papers don't cover "whats the best dispersion for a good tweeter" but go more into "what is the threshold for acoustic source widening with reflections arriving from 60 degrees laterally".
Connect the dots.
David S.
So why is it that the design "ideal" that so many designers (professional as well as diy) strive towards (sacrificing many things along the way) is essentially "as wide as possible dispersion maintained to as high a frequency as possible" if its not supported by the research ? (After all the ultimate realisation of this end goal is an omni...)
It seems almost like an over-reaction to the limitations of early speakers. A few decades ago (before the 70's ?) most speakers had terrible dispersion at treble frequencies, so any increase in high frequency dispersion was an improvement. Somehow that grew into an ethos of "wider must always be better". However is too much of a "good" thing a bad thing ? Have we gone past the optimal in very wide dispersion designs ?
I think it is easy to fall prey to the oversimplified notion. "If only I could achieve perfect linear phase." It is certainly easier to sell a speaker that shouts "only one performance factor matters. We discovered it and slayed it".
Ultra wide dispersion appeals to our idealism. We also don't know when to quit on a design path. If 5" tweeters were too beamy then 2" tweeters were better. Then 1" tweeters were better still. Then 1/2"? Where do you stop once you've established the notion that "wider is better"?
Prefessional speaker designers have as many unfounded prejudices as anyone else. Most are only superficially up on contemporary research.
David S.
Ultra wide dispersion appeals to our idealism. We also don't know when to quit on a design path. If 5" tweeters were too beamy then 2" tweeters were better. Then 1" tweeters were better still. Then 1/2"? Where do you stop once you've established the notion that "wider is better"?
Prefessional speaker designers have as many unfounded prejudices as anyone else. Most are only superficially up on contemporary research.
David S.
So did anyone actually ask the question "what is cheap?" I certainly would not have called the hiquphon OWI a cheap tweeter!!! !
I'm very happy with my Morel DMS37's (definitely cheap compared to the hiquphon) but not what I personally would have called cheap. Terry will know where I'm coming from, as he is the one who let me in on the secret 😉
Just curious (based on Simon's comment about narrowing polar at the crossover frequency) if anyone can pick the crossover frequency from the attached plot. No cheating if you have seen my thread 😀 and a hint it Isn't between 2 and 2.1Khz 😉
Tony.
I'm very happy with my Morel DMS37's (definitely cheap compared to the hiquphon) but not what I personally would have called cheap. Terry will know where I'm coming from, as he is the one who let me in on the secret 😉
Just curious (based on Simon's comment about narrowing polar at the crossover frequency) if anyone can pick the crossover frequency from the attached plot. No cheating if you have seen my thread 😀 and a hint it Isn't between 2 and 2.1Khz 😉
Tony.
Attachments
Is there really one answer? I think its up to individuals to choose their own priorities.
If someone wants a speaker that recreates the soundwaves that real instruments creates then they have to set a higher priority on polar response curves. Anyone have the polar response of a real piano? or a Guitar or any of the horns?
If someone just wants a speaker that they like to listen to and not worry about technical accuracy then go out and try and do proper listening tests to find that speaker.
My audio world is not subjective at all. I left that world 20+ years ago, I left it after winning thousands in betting audiophiles that product X does not actualy sound different during my years at Waterloo University.
Acurracy has nothing to do with your memory or senses and yes we have hijack the thread so I will only want to take about tweeters again (I have 20+ tweeters in my garage, what do yo want? 😉 ). If you want to create a new thread on this topic Im sure it would be a fun but truely wasted topic because there are two sides...believers and then there is audio science. Hard core believers are the ones battling constantly to keep the status quo and continue to ensure confusion about audio is the top priority in the name of profits.
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