I could have swore he said a 10 degree window but it's very possible I misheard
Interesting, thanks Porsche. What's the XO on the Axpona ones Bmsluite heard? Are there any measurements of the MA Signature Tower speakers? Would love to be able to correlate what he heard to some hard data. Seems he didn't like a couple systems such as the Kii (and D&D) with "textbook" measurements.
Had a similar issue with the Marchand (mid ‘90s) i uses with woofers & my homebrew Accoustat 1+1. Went to no XO for a long time. And still mostly.
dave
Nah, the rich ones are looking for brand names, complexity and exclusivity to Onan off at they're friends. This is exactly like the guitar guys who will loudly proclaim that only a blackguard Tele or a burst LP is worth playing.
Axpona was the first audio show I'd ever been too. It was a little too big. I had just a couple of minutes in each room. There were many rooms that sounded bad (too bright, mid-range sounded like it was playing through a paper towel tube, etc). I had never heard some of the big name speakers before and, after hearing the speakers in a hotel room, there are many I'd never want to hear again.
There were also too many rooms where people just wouldn't shut up. You couldn't tell much of anything about the speakers/system. I don't know how you learn much from one of these shows. I could certainly understand why someone trying to manage a room might not answer very many questions so that the others in the room can hear. If I wanted a science lecture, I'd go somewhere else (the science side is important but there's a time and place). They almost need two rooms per vendor (several of the suites were set up as two rooms). One room for taking and another for listening.
There were also too many rooms where people just wouldn't shut up. You couldn't tell much of anything about the speakers/system. I don't know how you learn much from one of these shows. I could certainly understand why someone trying to manage a room might not answer very many questions so that the others in the room can hear. If I wanted a science lecture, I'd go somewhere else (the science side is important but there's a time and place). They almost need two rooms per vendor (several of the suites were set up as two rooms). One room for taking and another for listening.
Gets me interested enough to look into the product, but nothing more, that is, it doesn't mean it's good because of endorsement, which may have other factors behind the decision that aren't disclosed, sometimes not even really understood by the person making the claim.
Oh, and every line array I heard sounded bad. Sounds were coming from stange and off putting places. Line arrays obviously work for concerts so I thought the first ones that I heard might have just been poorly set up. But the rest all sounded strange. So, I don't know what to put it down to.
lol you sound like that blowhard Miami audio dealer who, when proper controls were applied could not distinguish his precious Pass monoblocs from a Yamaha integrated in his own room on his own reference Duntechs.
Listening with your eyes must be fun for some people though.
Sure, I acknowledge that, especially since one of my vehicles is a carbureted truck. But in the context of this thread, the notion presented was essentially "Diesel trains and EFI engines are bad, steam engines and carburetors are better", just about passive vs. active.
It was a Marchand. Don’t know if the problem was particular to them, but at the time I assumed it was true of ALL active gain stages. I was one of the first people in my high school class of 300 to get a CD player, and from the mid 1980s on, I used a passive volume control between my CD player and amp with no preamp, as I felt that all preamps were simply a waste of money if you didn’t play LPs.
There was also a pro audio company called White engineering which made “cut-only” 10 band and 31 band graphic equalizers with no active components, all from cascaded RLC filters.
These are not endorsements. It's the product being chosen most by the top professionals in the industry. The artist is paying top dollar for it. The boxes are black so most people don't even know what they are. There's no advertising or back room deals. It's literally the most chosen products by people who care about putting the best shows on. Do you really think that the top Mix engineers and artists on the planet don't know how to choose the best technology to put on their shows?
Are you talking about line array speakers at a hifi show or at actual concerts? It's a different kind of line array. Because I certainly agree that hifi line arrays sound strange to me.
But if you're talking about concerts and sounds coming from the stage then you probably heard stage monitors, amplifiers and drums..........
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White Instruments also made the 4700 one-third octave 28 band equalizer with digitally controlled R-C active filters, with adjustable high and low-pass filters and 10 memory presets. Single rack space.
The audio path was all analog, filters were adjusted in 0.5dB steps with a keypad.
I owned four of the 4700-2 two channel version, they sounded excellent, but the digital interface was terrible, even for the 1980s. Our monitor engineers hated how long they took to adjust compared to pushing faders up and down.
That said, having an "analog only" signal path that could also recall 10 different curves was something that would really be useful for setting loudness contours and genre specific settings.
Art
The ones at the show. It was just strange sounding.
The pro arrays at shows sound decent. His, of course, varies with the venues but they definitely did not have that same strange "splash" sound that the hifi ones did.
It's nearly impossible to explain the sound of it
This at least reinforces what we heard. I am still shocked by how many of them were, for lack of a better word, just plain "bad".
We went on Sunday. Most the rooms were empty or had only one or two very quiet people in the room. I'm guessing you were there on Saturday. I try to never go to conventions of any kind on a Saturday
I did not bash DSP. I said we didn't like the DSP systems. How is that "bashing" DSP? My critical opinion is automatically "bashing"? You give too much credence to 3 simple peoples' opinion I think. This goes back to guys who like to make active systems, very sensitive and instantly defensive. I do not understand why this is.
People who praise DSP run around this forum telling anyone who will listen that DSP is better. So much so that I was going to make an active system as my next system.
Yet, one person, one time, writes about an experience where they didn't like DSP and ya'll come out of the woodwork in defense. There must be some sociological or psychological effect happening that I am unaware of.
I am far past defending my opinion and now just utterly fascinated by the sociological/psychological effect occurring here. Is anyone a phycologist and can spread some light on this subject?
This all reminds me of when stability control and traction control on sports cars started to get big. It was said that stability control was always superior. You could cover up bad suspension design, bad aerodynamics, bad tires, non linear torque output of the engine, crappy steering, poor chassis rigidity, etc. Soon they found out that some control systems were MUCH better than others. And very soon after they found that you couldn't just make a lump of steel and slap some control systems on it to get a fast, enjoyable sports car.
Same thing with all wheel drive. Now, this was much easier to metric. Lap times around a race track. One winner, one loser.
People quickly realized in tandem that the control systems could make a slow driver faster. But it actually made a great driver slower. To this day, lap times are set by race car drivers who turn all the systems off. This is 40 years into the technology and still a chassis control system cannot defeat a world class race car driver.
These are all the reasons why I still want to try out DSP on a build. I went to the show hoping an active system would blow me away. I was really expecting that. The freedom DSP would allow would let me tinker endlessly without having to spend another dime on more components.
I am not sure how long DSP has been around for but maybe it needs some time to mature. Or maybe what I heard was not representitive of DSP as a whole. Until I hear something active that blows me away I'll probably stick to passive.
There are other things I need to learn first anyways. Next up is using multiple woofers and their effects on the system. Still figuring out how to pose my questions once I have them collated in my head.