It is subversive not to believe in the technological program; that technology always progresses and that it inevitably offers solutions to all problems.
If you accept that a speaker from 1928 might be better than anything you can buy today, it could lead you to question lots of other things (more important things) and this might be uncomfortable.
If you accept that a speaker from 1928 might be better than anything you can buy today, it could lead you to question lots of other things (more important things) and this might be uncomfortable.
It s just like Cheese cake and onions really!
Well to me anyway it looks like it, here is my take.
If one were to set out to describe the taste of cheesecake or onions to someone who had never tasted them, you probably would be able to find words that could give them “a mental picture” of what you’re talking about. In many of the posts here, it seems to me the discussion might be like this issue because until you actually taste these things, you are stuck with what you imagine the words mean and not knowledge of the taste /sensation the words refer to. Like they say, words are only the ladder we climb to grasp a new idea or understanding.
Thus when those who “have heard” try to describe to those who haven’t, the words they use do not convey the emotional experience of hearing it and that leave those who haven’t, wondering what the other have just smoked.
When bear talked about a single wide band source in post #496, point #1 And #2, unless you have heard what this sounds like, the words are just words.
I am not sure I can explain it any better than he can but it is something I have given a lot of thought to developing my own speakers encompassing one and two.
Start with the premise that a loudspeaker transducers job is to reproduce the input signal and nothing more, ideally it produces it with an amplitude proportional to that in the signal AND not producing any sound not part of the input signal AND to do all of that at the same instant in time as they components are present at the terminals.
Most of the “free sound” (not in the input signal) as well as some other problems increase in level faster than the level of the desired signal.
If you start with a loudspeaker that is satisfactory in a movie theater level, when you move that into a living room ALL of that undesirable stuff is greatly reduced as the operating level is greatly reduced compared to the intended use. The WE drivers are old by today’s standards but they were the state of art when made AND are a work of loudspeaker art, the product of a full out engineering and artisan effort and able to fill a theater.
By having one driver cover the range where your ears have the greatest acuity, they accomplished at least two things. With one driver covering that range, the time disparity is solved, the sound is radiated from one time. The acoustic phase one can think of as time as it represents how much the signal is delayed or advanced relative to the input signal. When you audition the phase shift crossovers produce though headphones, one concludes it is mostly not audible. When that effect is produced by two separate sources, there is more to the picture.
We hear in a way that makes this confusing or at least not so obvious. We hear from two points in space but the shape of our head, our ears all cause large changes which to a measurement person look like terrible flaws. We don’t hear the comb filtering, we don’t hear the changing frequency response or any of that stuff as flaws, were not even aware of it.
Instead, that is how we can hear what direction the sound is coming from, how high it is and so on. Our stereo hearing depends on these alterations to derive what to our consciousness is a live 3d stereo image there before us.
The purpose of a stereo is to “fake” this, in my mind it’s ultimate accomplishment is to reproduce another space realistically enough that you can forget it’s not real. My personal goal is eventually to capture and reproduce that live reality. if you’re interested in Stereo imaging, try the recordings at the bottom of the company download page.
These address a different part of the problem, picking up a live image, these being two channels are more or less your visual field of view, 3 additional channels extend the image around in a circle but obviously you can’t do that with head phones.
Anyway, the point is there are BIG ways our ears are different than a mic measurement.
A few examples of “how” the sound is radiated is audible and invisible on a one channel mic.
If you have ever stood in front of a large planar speaker like a full range electrostatic, full height ribbon or other homogeneously driven source, with a soft voice playing through one speaker, you hear a large source, it sounds big and sometimes, if you close your eyes, you really can’t hear how far away the source is, the voice may sound like it’s floating “somewhere” behind the speaker.
Now, how does it sound that way?
It’s because your ears hear a 3d picture even if a mic only senses one spot.
Take a typical small hifi speaker and do the same thing and while it might measure similarly, you will usually be able to also hear the source as the source. Your ears localize the origin because there are enough differences from the right to left that your learned ability allows you to identify where the sound is coming from in physical depth.
Take a Quad esl-63, or a manger bending wave transducer in a quiet place, play a voice through one and with your eyes closed, you will be surprised how little the apparent source is tied to the loudspeakers location, the voice can sound like it is well behind or even in front of the source.
How does it do that? These sources radiate as a simple point source and not a complex field which contains the clues that allow you to hear it’s depth, so now there is no “source identity” that your ears detect.
As the Unity and later Synergy horns got closer and closer to one driver in the output, I noticed this floating voice or source identity effect and was puzzled what it meant.
The WE driver on a proper horn would radiate as a simple source over much of it’s band too.
Who cares?
If you like stereo imaging, not the effects but things, people floating across the stage in front of you, this matters a lot. The mono phantom image is the heart of stereo, if you present two identical signals to your right and left ears, it sounds like its right in front of you (as it does with headphones except your lacking all that external directional head / ear stuff I mentioned earlier).
What harms this is any significant extra information that is not part of the ideal Mono.
If you have a speakers (as the majority of hifi speakers I have heard do) that shouts its physical location “here I am right here”, then while playing the mono signal you hear a mono phantom AND a right and left source.
To the degree they do that, they are greatly harming any ability to produce the original stereo image intensity, THEY should NOT be part of the image.
In commercial sound now, one rough measure of how well you can understand words is how much the direct sound is above the reflected sound level.
Large scale sound generally sucks because as the distance to the audience increases, so does the acoustic power required.
As the room’s volume increases, the surface area where the absorption is, increases at a slower rate than the room volume where the energy is stored. In a movie theater, the directivity the large horn size they used would greatly reduce the reflected energy, for the largest area of intelligibility, you want the sound to go where the people are and not the walls, ceiling or floor.
There is a thread about directivity, a powerful demonstration; set up your stereo outdoors in a normal configuration and listen to some of your favorite music with the best stereo images.
Do this and your feelings about the desirability of room effects will change. Re-creating that experience indoors in a living room requires significant directivity to avoid the room effects.
You set up a set of large Horn like those WE’s and sit in front and guess what, it sounds unreal enough to make most who have listened convinced they were on to something, and they were, even before stereo and that makes it pretty cool I think.
Think about how we hear and how / what we measure.
Lastly, I mentioned closing your eyes a couple times. Also that we have learned what all the artifacts our ears cause and take in are as positional and other spatial ques.
For the most part I don’t think people are aware how much “processing” our brains do for us without our knowledge.
Blind tests have a bad name because they strip away the inputs from other sense and prior knowledge leaving us to judge with only one sense like hearing.
While we see that effort when we take an eye sight or hearing test, there is no red light to indicate the tone and the you read random letters not words you can guess, you either hear or see or not.
Anyway, this is a cool example of how deep the” learned part” of our hearing is and how tightly it is tied to what we see, this is from a show on ones senses which was also amazing.
Try the Mcgurke effect;
Try The McGurk Effect! - Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? - BBC Two - YouTube
You only hear reality with your eyes closed
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
I like big horns and I cannot lie,
those little horns make me cry.
Well to me anyway it looks like it, here is my take.
If one were to set out to describe the taste of cheesecake or onions to someone who had never tasted them, you probably would be able to find words that could give them “a mental picture” of what you’re talking about. In many of the posts here, it seems to me the discussion might be like this issue because until you actually taste these things, you are stuck with what you imagine the words mean and not knowledge of the taste /sensation the words refer to. Like they say, words are only the ladder we climb to grasp a new idea or understanding.
Thus when those who “have heard” try to describe to those who haven’t, the words they use do not convey the emotional experience of hearing it and that leave those who haven’t, wondering what the other have just smoked.
When bear talked about a single wide band source in post #496, point #1 And #2, unless you have heard what this sounds like, the words are just words.
I am not sure I can explain it any better than he can but it is something I have given a lot of thought to developing my own speakers encompassing one and two.
Start with the premise that a loudspeaker transducers job is to reproduce the input signal and nothing more, ideally it produces it with an amplitude proportional to that in the signal AND not producing any sound not part of the input signal AND to do all of that at the same instant in time as they components are present at the terminals.
Most of the “free sound” (not in the input signal) as well as some other problems increase in level faster than the level of the desired signal.
If you start with a loudspeaker that is satisfactory in a movie theater level, when you move that into a living room ALL of that undesirable stuff is greatly reduced as the operating level is greatly reduced compared to the intended use. The WE drivers are old by today’s standards but they were the state of art when made AND are a work of loudspeaker art, the product of a full out engineering and artisan effort and able to fill a theater.
By having one driver cover the range where your ears have the greatest acuity, they accomplished at least two things. With one driver covering that range, the time disparity is solved, the sound is radiated from one time. The acoustic phase one can think of as time as it represents how much the signal is delayed or advanced relative to the input signal. When you audition the phase shift crossovers produce though headphones, one concludes it is mostly not audible. When that effect is produced by two separate sources, there is more to the picture.
We hear in a way that makes this confusing or at least not so obvious. We hear from two points in space but the shape of our head, our ears all cause large changes which to a measurement person look like terrible flaws. We don’t hear the comb filtering, we don’t hear the changing frequency response or any of that stuff as flaws, were not even aware of it.
Instead, that is how we can hear what direction the sound is coming from, how high it is and so on. Our stereo hearing depends on these alterations to derive what to our consciousness is a live 3d stereo image there before us.
The purpose of a stereo is to “fake” this, in my mind it’s ultimate accomplishment is to reproduce another space realistically enough that you can forget it’s not real. My personal goal is eventually to capture and reproduce that live reality. if you’re interested in Stereo imaging, try the recordings at the bottom of the company download page.
These address a different part of the problem, picking up a live image, these being two channels are more or less your visual field of view, 3 additional channels extend the image around in a circle but obviously you can’t do that with head phones.
Anyway, the point is there are BIG ways our ears are different than a mic measurement.
A few examples of “how” the sound is radiated is audible and invisible on a one channel mic.
If you have ever stood in front of a large planar speaker like a full range electrostatic, full height ribbon or other homogeneously driven source, with a soft voice playing through one speaker, you hear a large source, it sounds big and sometimes, if you close your eyes, you really can’t hear how far away the source is, the voice may sound like it’s floating “somewhere” behind the speaker.
Now, how does it sound that way?
It’s because your ears hear a 3d picture even if a mic only senses one spot.
Take a typical small hifi speaker and do the same thing and while it might measure similarly, you will usually be able to also hear the source as the source. Your ears localize the origin because there are enough differences from the right to left that your learned ability allows you to identify where the sound is coming from in physical depth.
Take a Quad esl-63, or a manger bending wave transducer in a quiet place, play a voice through one and with your eyes closed, you will be surprised how little the apparent source is tied to the loudspeakers location, the voice can sound like it is well behind or even in front of the source.
How does it do that? These sources radiate as a simple point source and not a complex field which contains the clues that allow you to hear it’s depth, so now there is no “source identity” that your ears detect.
As the Unity and later Synergy horns got closer and closer to one driver in the output, I noticed this floating voice or source identity effect and was puzzled what it meant.
The WE driver on a proper horn would radiate as a simple source over much of it’s band too.
Who cares?
If you like stereo imaging, not the effects but things, people floating across the stage in front of you, this matters a lot. The mono phantom image is the heart of stereo, if you present two identical signals to your right and left ears, it sounds like its right in front of you (as it does with headphones except your lacking all that external directional head / ear stuff I mentioned earlier).
What harms this is any significant extra information that is not part of the ideal Mono.
If you have a speakers (as the majority of hifi speakers I have heard do) that shouts its physical location “here I am right here”, then while playing the mono signal you hear a mono phantom AND a right and left source.
To the degree they do that, they are greatly harming any ability to produce the original stereo image intensity, THEY should NOT be part of the image.
In commercial sound now, one rough measure of how well you can understand words is how much the direct sound is above the reflected sound level.
Large scale sound generally sucks because as the distance to the audience increases, so does the acoustic power required.
As the room’s volume increases, the surface area where the absorption is, increases at a slower rate than the room volume where the energy is stored. In a movie theater, the directivity the large horn size they used would greatly reduce the reflected energy, for the largest area of intelligibility, you want the sound to go where the people are and not the walls, ceiling or floor.
There is a thread about directivity, a powerful demonstration; set up your stereo outdoors in a normal configuration and listen to some of your favorite music with the best stereo images.
Do this and your feelings about the desirability of room effects will change. Re-creating that experience indoors in a living room requires significant directivity to avoid the room effects.
You set up a set of large Horn like those WE’s and sit in front and guess what, it sounds unreal enough to make most who have listened convinced they were on to something, and they were, even before stereo and that makes it pretty cool I think.
Think about how we hear and how / what we measure.
Lastly, I mentioned closing your eyes a couple times. Also that we have learned what all the artifacts our ears cause and take in are as positional and other spatial ques.
For the most part I don’t think people are aware how much “processing” our brains do for us without our knowledge.
Blind tests have a bad name because they strip away the inputs from other sense and prior knowledge leaving us to judge with only one sense like hearing.
While we see that effort when we take an eye sight or hearing test, there is no red light to indicate the tone and the you read random letters not words you can guess, you either hear or see or not.
Anyway, this is a cool example of how deep the” learned part” of our hearing is and how tightly it is tied to what we see, this is from a show on ones senses which was also amazing.
Try the Mcgurke effect;
Try The McGurk Effect! - Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? - BBC Two - YouTube
You only hear reality with your eyes closed
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
I like big horns and I cannot lie,
those little horns make me cry.
'centering' the text makes text much more readable on my computer.
i'm asking the mod who found this obnoxious to pm me ...
at least you tried. and i think you did a good job.
certainly some of the most intelligent posts in this tread.
as one works toward a goal, the long term, abso!ute final end, might be a wise consideration.
after all, eternity is all around us.
certainly, but not the way you and your sidekick are going about.
and, 'tho this may not matter to you,
ask yourself, 80 years from now, will the products you designed,
be as collectible as the western electrics?
(and the early jensens).
will people make new copy, of what you designed?
quite true.but only for certain people.
all their 'investments' time, effort, education, strategic business alliances, etc.,
the fear all that could go down the drain.
and yet,
one can always got to work at mcdonalds. literally a huge opportunity.
from here -
13 Disturbing Facts About McDonald?s
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Seriously, why would you want to close the best thread currently on the site?
Yes the WE horn would sound good if it was straight, if anything better.
Am I his sidekick?
Hard to tell with your rambling posts.Beanie babies used to be "collectibles" too but once the bubble burst people ended up with just stuffed kid's toys.
I highly doubt anyone cares or should care what will be considered 'great" 80 years from now.Perhaps they just want to design a good speaker that plays the recordings as originally intended and not cost an arm and a leg.
I would hope 80 years from now that people would design NEW speakers with modern improvements instead of trying to copy an old design.
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I thought my description of the AR experiment was an answer to that. It was a bypass test. A black box, the speaker and a microphone in an anechoic chamber, could be switched in and out of circuit just like your ADC/DAC.
What speakers would fare well in such a test? If a speaker did very well in the test, could hardly be distinguished from the bypassed condition, would we still accuse it of not bringing out the emotion in the music? Of lacking in "fun"?
What would that imply?
David
What speakers would fare well in such a test? If a speaker did very well in the test, could hardly be distinguished from the bypassed condition, would we still accuse it of not bringing out the emotion in the music? Of lacking in "fun"?
What would that imply?
David
I set up a similar test to the one you describe, (outside rather than an anechoic chamber) recorded the results (both music and dual tones), and posted them:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/212240-high-frequency-compression-driver-evaluation.html
High Frequency Compression Driver Evaluation
At lower drive levels, I find the more accurate driver's response almost identical to the original recording, while the less accurate don't sound as "real", but in some cases still sound good despite the different response.
I was hoping for some responses to find out whether listeners preferred the more accurate driver's response, or the response of the more harmonically rich (distorted) drivers.
Dave, I think we may be in the minority of people reading this thread when it comes to a preference for accuracy over "fun" sounding speakers.
Art
To me it would imply a few things technical and esthetic. I'll try to explain.
A speaker that can be put in a anechoic chamber, then be picked up by a mic and be practically indistinguishable from a wire would be quite a good speaker, in that test. And surely in others tests as well. However, I don't listen to a single speaker in an anechoic chamber with a microphone. I listen to 2 or more speakers in an imperfect room with two ears stuck on the sides of my big, fat head. As you've already mentioned, the test does not take power response into account. Nor does it take into account ears, heads, bodies, rooms, etc.
I don't know why, but large speakers are almost always more convincing to me than small speakers. Those big speaker may be giant snails, 6ft tall electrodynamic or electrostatic panels, or a big group of cone drivers - the big ones work better for me. And it's not SPL dependent. Does the speaker and microphone in the chamber test take that into account? I doubt that it does. Why? I don't know the answer to why big speakers sound better to me (despite their flaws), but I'm very curious to find out.
On an esthetic point of view, the whole recording and playback process is an odd one. At best, it picks up the whole soundfield at 2 points then sprays it back out of two larger devices in another room. That's difficult enough - and mostly recordings are much more complicated than that. I believe that was SY's point in his post. In source and amplification a slavish devotion to the signal is a good thing, but speakers and rooms are more complicated than that.
Can we really be faithful (fidel) to the original sound when the path is so convoluted? Is our devotion to the signal, or to the sound? That's my point.
Many will argue (quite convincingly) that we can't know the original sound, so the signal is our only guide. But is it? If we build a system that consistently sounds "life-like" or "realistic" recording after recording, and to a large number of people; isn't that a type of fidelity? Fidelity to what we know instruments and voices sound like. If that system measures like poop (not likely) would it matter to its sonic fidelity? No. We might be astonished at the bad measurements, but the measurements would not change how it sounds.
Art, in my first round of listening to your tests, I preferred the clean samples. The over driven (distorted) samples sounded "thick" to me. Not unpleasant, but I preferred the clean samples. The clean samples also seemed more revealing of tiny details in the recordings.
Exactly. When it comes to speakers, you're taking a single-valued time dependent signal and translating it to a 3d sound field, which will NOT be equal to (or anything like) the 3d soundfield present at the original event. Putting something in an anechoic chamber removes the 3d nature and returns you to a single value, which correlates to on-axis response. There, accuracy has some meaning. Unfortunately, that translation into a 3d soundfield is the essence of how a loudspeaker works...
"Accuracy" is completely meaningless for speakers in rooms. You can certainly color things by manipulating the on-axis response (which is the "reproduction" part of the speaker's response), but the sound will also depend on what's happening in the rest of the soundfield, which the speaker and room by definition create rather than recreate.
If we're bringing up inconvenient truths, here's another one: The only way to get real accuracy is to sit in the room where the mix was finalized and listen to it on the studio monitors the engineer used. In most recordings, the engineer--not the performer--was the ultimate arbiter of the final product, and all his decisions were based on what he heard from those speakers in that room.
And for the most part that is the mastering engineer, not the guy who mixes.
The mastering engineer is stuck between what he thinks will sound good on most systems and what the artist or producer wants. He who pays, wins.
Many producers, and engineers I've talked to would love to hear their mix on a "really great system." Even they imagine that it can sound better than what they heard in the mixing and mastering suites.
The mastering engineer is stuck between what he thinks will sound good on most systems and what the artist or producer wants. He who pays, wins.
Many producers, and engineers I've talked to would love to hear their mix on a "really great system." Even they imagine that it can sound better than what they heard in the mixing and mastering suites.
What would be the qualities of an ideal loudspeaker? Such a transducer would perhaps be point source, have zero distortion, infinite bandwidth, a linear response over its entire bandwidth and a smooth linear off-axis response. The WE trades off some of these qualities to excel in others, whereas some "other" (read conventional) designs trade-off other qualities. This is really the crux of the issue.
The WE behaves somewhat like a point-source covering a large bandwidth, with low distortion and presumably a somewhat linear response (not enough measurements to prove this yet) over that bandwidth. Modern multiway speakers, in contrast, are not point sources, but the combined output of multiple drivers covers a wider bandwidth, with perhaps a more linear response, and have apparently less distortion.
I'm sure there are other parameters I've missed. But surely, the key lies in the point-source nature and the covering of a large bandwidth, which is mostly where all the music is, that is making the WE design tick.
The WE behaves somewhat like a point-source covering a large bandwidth, with low distortion and presumably a somewhat linear response (not enough measurements to prove this yet) over that bandwidth. Modern multiway speakers, in contrast, are not point sources, but the combined output of multiple drivers covers a wider bandwidth, with perhaps a more linear response, and have apparently less distortion.
I'm sure there are other parameters I've missed. But surely, the key lies in the point-source nature and the covering of a large bandwidth, which is mostly where all the music is, that is making the WE design tick.
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