Herm,
I apologize.
It would be better said "as much as an order of magnitude" or perhaps just "significantly better"? Ok for you now?
With regard to the second matter - people asked, so I felt obligated to reply with more than just "no", and share my thinking. Trying to be polite?
Moray,
Not sure your analogy of the Trumpet/Trombone mouthpiece holds?
They count on distortion from going supersonic to generate sound - rather much the opposite aim for compression drivers! In the case of compression drivers excessive pressure in the throat area generates "icky" unwanted distortion products.
_-_-bear
I apologize.
It would be better said "as much as an order of magnitude" or perhaps just "significantly better"? Ok for you now?
With regard to the second matter - people asked, so I felt obligated to reply with more than just "no", and share my thinking. Trying to be polite?
Moray,
Not sure your analogy of the Trumpet/Trombone mouthpiece holds?
They count on distortion from going supersonic to generate sound - rather much the opposite aim for compression drivers! In the case of compression drivers excessive pressure in the throat area generates "icky" unwanted distortion products.
_-_-bear
Hello Lynn,
don't want necessarely to bring back the discussion on waveguides as it seems that you are more for the raal's. However I thound these two links of great value: the more theoretical one and the practical implementation . Loads on detail on both, prety interesting to me.
I hope this helps.
don't want necessarely to bring back the discussion on waveguides as it seems that you are more for the raal's. However I thound these two links of great value: the more theoretical one and the practical implementation . Loads on detail on both, prety interesting to me.
I hope this helps.
Well I shoul explain myself though for proposing these drivers. I've noticed in the few coments magnetar had that he is for high spl all the way. I think that he mentioned in a thread that even with an array of 10" drivers he felt the need for the ultimate dynamics and heardroom horns can offer.
However it seems that in the 300Hz - 1.5Khz, cone drivers may have better distorsion figures even if you push more power in them to achieve the same sound presure (see the links above).
I wonder if this difference in dynamic between CD-s and cones has something to do with the design of pro drivers. I mean, what if this is just a consequence of the materials chosen for the suspension of the cone's. I've heard some coments that supravox, phy-hp and other woofers build uppon somehow "vintage" guidelines (large alnico magnets, small moving mass, paper cone of course) don't have the "stiffness" of usual pro woofers and play not so restrained.
I know I have no way to sustain these afirmations from a tehnical point of view, so are just a matter of thought..
However it seems that in the 300Hz - 1.5Khz, cone drivers may have better distorsion figures even if you push more power in them to achieve the same sound presure (see the links above).
I wonder if this difference in dynamic between CD-s and cones has something to do with the design of pro drivers. I mean, what if this is just a consequence of the materials chosen for the suspension of the cone's. I've heard some coments that supravox, phy-hp and other woofers build uppon somehow "vintage" guidelines (large alnico magnets, small moving mass, paper cone of course) don't have the "stiffness" of usual pro woofers and play not so restrained.
I know I have no way to sustain these afirmations from a tehnical point of view, so are just a matter of thought..
Driver options
Lynn,
It would appear that Acoustic Elegance has re-entered the DIY market...
Announcement on DIY Audio
On their forum John mentions that he still has parts to build the original Lambda Acoustics Dipole 15 drivers. About two-thirds the way down this thread he posted the following:
He says that he parts for 23 drivers
Here are the TS parameters - which I think are truly unique and interesting.
These drivers are underhung with an Xmax of 12mm, and a full faraday sleeve on the pole to yield an Le of only 0.15mH. In addition, the dual eight-ohm VC's allow for various wiring options.
I believe that these drivers use the same soft-parts as the Lambda TD series drivers which I have - which produce quality bass and lower midrange - these are true woofers which can play up to 300 Hz, super clean.
Food for thought
Edward
Lynn,
It would appear that Acoustic Elegance has re-entered the DIY market...
Announcement on DIY Audio
On their forum John mentions that he still has parts to build the original Lambda Acoustics Dipole 15 drivers. About two-thirds the way down this thread he posted the following:
He says that he parts for 23 drivers
Here are the TS parameters - which I think are truly unique and interesting.
These drivers are underhung with an Xmax of 12mm, and a full faraday sleeve on the pole to yield an Le of only 0.15mH. In addition, the dual eight-ohm VC's allow for various wiring options.
I believe that these drivers use the same soft-parts as the Lambda TD series drivers which I have - which produce quality bass and lower midrange - these are true woofers which can play up to 300 Hz, super clean.
Food for thought
Edward
bear said:
Well, for me, realistic vocal performance comes first, especially on massed choirs, either classical or gospel music. And very few speakers sound like a real person that's in the room - this is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Ariel and the Quad ESL57 it is modelled on. Frankly, I've never heard this from horns or waveguides, although I've heard other instruments sound thrilling and vivid. But singers, um well, not so much - I always hear just a bit of megaphone coloration, and on most horns, a lot. I think audibility of this coloration varies strongly with the auditioner - I just happen to quite sensitive to it, and not as sensitive to dynamic compression.
If you're walking around your house and it sounds like you've a got real singer in your living room - and not a "hifi" reproduction - that means the speaker and the rest of the hifi are well-aligned. This is a very rare illusion, and something I've never heard at any hifi show.
I first heard it at the BBC Research Labs in 1975, listening to a special quadraphonic mastertape of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, recorded live at Last Night of the Proms. The recording was made with a prototype Calrec Soundfield microphone, in discrete quadraphonic, on a 1/2" Studer with no Dolby processing running at 15IPS, played over the large bi-amplified BBC monitors in a fairly small listening room.
Every single singer in a hundred-strong choir was audible, you could hear each separate handclap for hundreds of feet in every direction, and there was no distortion at the loudest climaxes of the Ninth and of the long applause at the end. Very few people have heard realism at this level - I've certainly never heard anything like this in the context of commercially available hifi, that's for sure.
To audition a hifi system using an "audiophile" gold-plated Red Book CD of a dry studio-recorded close-miked Blues trio - as I've seen magazine reviewers do - seems nothing short of laughable. The magazine and online reviewers don't even know what hifi is - just that it's expensive and people are silly enough to spend $100,000 impressing their neighbors.
So - to get back to the point - I aim for vocal realism, first, last, and always. The other virtues of tonal vividness, true-to-life dynamics, spatial realism (as in realistically conveying the size of the recording venue) all come after that - they're important, true, but the voice comes first - and is easiest to evaluate, since we all know what voices sound like - and it ain't like a hifi, that's for sure.
The HF driver gives the sense of excitement, sparkle, and dynamism, but the truth of the midrange has to be there first. This is why table radios and really simple systems usually sound more "right" than complex multiway systems.
One test for overall system integration is simple - does it play quiet background music better than a table radio? Most high-end systems - especially in the more than $20,000 category - fail this test dismally. It's a simple test, too - carry on a conversation with a friend while music is quietly playing in the background.
If the hifi gets in the way and subtly annoys you, then it's not realistic at low levels - real background music, played by real musicians, has a harmonious quality that makes conversation more interesting and more entertaining. Much of Baroque music was composed for background music at parties, after all.
Much of high-end audio, to me, in a misguided attempt to be "exciting", is more annoying than anything, and has little of the ingratiating quality and emotionally affecting tonal beauty of live music. The replacement of LP's by CD's accelerated this trend - what's missing from the low-resolution Red Book 44.1/16 CD is then artificially added by doses of synthetic "accuracy" and "slam", taking 44.1/16 PCM even further from anything like the beauty of live music.
I suspect that few people even know what live music even sounds like anymore, a feeling that is reinforced when I read of somebody preferring the sound of a hifi system to a live concert - to me, that taste seems as depraved as preferring an inflatable plastic doll to a human being. Then again, watching the latest TV news stories of the low-life antics of US politicians, maybe I shouldn't be surprised after all.
''I first heard it at the BBC Research Labs in 1975, listening to a special quadraphonic mastertape of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, recorded live at Last Night of the Proms. The recording was made with a prototype Calrec Soundfield microphone, in discrete quadraphonic, on a 1/2" Studer with no Dolby processing running at 15IPS, played over the large bi-amplified BBC monitors in a fairly small listening room.''
Was it the LS5/8 with a 12 inch poly behind a baffle aperture, and an Audax 1&1/4 tweeter?
As for your approach, well you seek the truth in Aristotle's way. Modal logic. Aristotle defines his philosophy as "the science of the universal essence of that which is actual."
It will be no coincidence if you totally succeed again. Best of practical luck, and LOL for the teenage doll analogy.
Was it the LS5/8 with a 12 inch poly behind a baffle aperture, and an Audax 1&1/4 tweeter?
As for your approach, well you seek the truth in Aristotle's way. Modal logic. Aristotle defines his philosophy as "the science of the universal essence of that which is actual."
It will be no coincidence if you totally succeed again. Best of practical luck, and LOL for the teenage doll analogy.
It was a revelation when I first heard Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" at the Seattle Symphony Hall - which I think probably has some of the best acoustics in the USA. I'd always thought it has a harsh-sounding piece whenever I heard it on record or CD, no matter how good the hifi. But hearing it live, in a wood-panelled and wood-floored symphony hall, I was stunned - literally at a loss for words - just how astonishingly beautiful the whole piece was. Hard to play, yes, and incredibly dense, with the music going in several directions all at once - but just beautiful throughout, in a way I had never, ever heard on any hifi system, at any performance level.
I've subsequently heard "modern" 20th-century classical music - a genre I've never particularly liked before - in live performances, and suddenly "got" what they were all about. In recordings, these pieces are harsh and brutal, downright repellent: performed live, they are complex, fascinating, and engaging, nothing like the recordings at all. It is an entire genre that simply doesn't come off well in recorded form - that's all there is to it.
This experience confirmed a feeling I've had for a long time that popular music is shaped by the recording technology, more specifically, by the limitations of the technology. When LP's, vacuum tubes, and simple loudspeakers were the standard during the ealry Fifties through the mid-Sixties, the most popular music on the radio dial and in the record stores was classical, popular singers like Sinatra, and for a few, jazz. Rock-n-roll was actually confined to a small audience and a limited portion of the AM dial.
When high-powered transistor amps replaced tubes, the sound became harsher, faster, and louder - partly because early quasi-complementary, high-crossover-distortion, low-slew-rate, high-feedback transistor amps didn't "do" beauty, lyricism, or carry off emotional shadings with any fidelity. So the music itself changed, to a harsher, cruder, and more in-your-face sound, ending up with the heavy-metal style of the early Seventies. Think about it: a Crown DC300 and Phase Linear 400 playing through a JBL L200 is going to be a lot better at Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath than Frank Sinatra or Doris Day (who was a very good singer).
This trend continued when low-resolution Red Book CD's replaced LP's (and Red Book was retrograde - the established standard of the Seventies was the Soundstream/Denon 50/16 system with military-grade ADC's). Now the obvious difference between EMT reverb plates and synthetic digital reverb was masked (which is easily heard on high-res PCM, DSD, and analog), and a new disembodied style of performers collected from around the world, playing to a click-track, and spliced together into single recording come into vogue.
Wehn we lost the LP as a mass-market medium, I personally think that high-end audio lost its way, and we entered the benighted era of "boutique" audio and the wretched high-profile brands of the Eighties.
Think about it - what is the collectible value of a Krell, Wilson, or Audio Research model from the Eighties? Who wants a $7,000 late-Eighties CD player, or worse, set of boutique cables? This was probably the lowest point in the entire history of audio. It took the renaissance of tubes, triodes, and the DIY era in the early Nineties for things to find their way back to reality and the reason for quality artisan audio to exist in the first place.
I've subsequently heard "modern" 20th-century classical music - a genre I've never particularly liked before - in live performances, and suddenly "got" what they were all about. In recordings, these pieces are harsh and brutal, downright repellent: performed live, they are complex, fascinating, and engaging, nothing like the recordings at all. It is an entire genre that simply doesn't come off well in recorded form - that's all there is to it.
This experience confirmed a feeling I've had for a long time that popular music is shaped by the recording technology, more specifically, by the limitations of the technology. When LP's, vacuum tubes, and simple loudspeakers were the standard during the ealry Fifties through the mid-Sixties, the most popular music on the radio dial and in the record stores was classical, popular singers like Sinatra, and for a few, jazz. Rock-n-roll was actually confined to a small audience and a limited portion of the AM dial.
When high-powered transistor amps replaced tubes, the sound became harsher, faster, and louder - partly because early quasi-complementary, high-crossover-distortion, low-slew-rate, high-feedback transistor amps didn't "do" beauty, lyricism, or carry off emotional shadings with any fidelity. So the music itself changed, to a harsher, cruder, and more in-your-face sound, ending up with the heavy-metal style of the early Seventies. Think about it: a Crown DC300 and Phase Linear 400 playing through a JBL L200 is going to be a lot better at Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath than Frank Sinatra or Doris Day (who was a very good singer).
This trend continued when low-resolution Red Book CD's replaced LP's (and Red Book was retrograde - the established standard of the Seventies was the Soundstream/Denon 50/16 system with military-grade ADC's). Now the obvious difference between EMT reverb plates and synthetic digital reverb was masked (which is easily heard on high-res PCM, DSD, and analog), and a new disembodied style of performers collected from around the world, playing to a click-track, and spliced together into single recording come into vogue.
Wehn we lost the LP as a mass-market medium, I personally think that high-end audio lost its way, and we entered the benighted era of "boutique" audio and the wretched high-profile brands of the Eighties.
Think about it - what is the collectible value of a Krell, Wilson, or Audio Research model from the Eighties? Who wants a $7,000 late-Eighties CD player, or worse, set of boutique cables? This was probably the lowest point in the entire history of audio. It took the renaissance of tubes, triodes, and the DIY era in the early Nineties for things to find their way back to reality and the reason for quality artisan audio to exist in the first place.
The first hints in audio history where from your articles. I think this is just as in any other theoretical dicipline. You can't bring something else (i'm not saying something new as this would start a philosophical debate probably) if you don't know the history of the domain you are activating in. I think audio lost it quite fast in this perspective. And even more, just digging for history is not a trivial nor sufficient task. You have to actualy get the changes in paradigm in order to understand the history of ideas.
I think I can go on an on with this as somehow I think this is related to the social and humanistic theoretical area I'm more familiarised with.
Thanks again Lynn for another genuine point of view!
I think I can go on an on with this as somehow I think this is related to the social and humanistic theoretical area I'm more familiarised with.
Thanks again Lynn for another genuine point of view!
Absolutely agree - and can remember reading about how the music of several famous composers was shaped by the venues for which their music was intended. Mainly to do with reverberation time IIRC - wish I still had the article! Also interesting is considering what HASN'T changed. The "constants" can give valuable insight into the human aspect as opposed to the technology.
Lynn Olson said:
ha ha ha, love that quote, and it could very well become a staple of mine.
I think that the point you make could be a little limited though. I'm a dead certain it applies to live classical music vs home sound, but you would be in a minority.
For starters, the vast majority of the population just aren't into classical, and for the ones who are it would be only a small percentage who actually visit the concert halls (look at how much government subsidy has to go into the national operas and symphony orchestras). I listen to a lot of classical, but the last time I went to the opera was probably twenty years ago.
No, the majority of the punters prefer rock etc. And MANY is the time when I've been to a rock concert where the sound at the venue was atrocious. I too have almost come to the conclusion of "why bother going to see a band and have to put up with drunken (or otherwise) idiots when in most cases I can get a much better sound at home"?
I hope the upcoming Nine Inch Nails concert will be the exception that proves the rule! Someone like the Blue Man Group I'd go and see, on the assumption that they at least would care about the sound at the venue.
As the majority of rock music is not a 'live' recording, there can also be many instances when part of the attraction in the material is the added studio 'tricks' as it were, something that probably is not even feasible to try and duplicate in a live performance.
Most orchestral concert halls are actually acoustically fairly pants, your experience of the music can vary dramatically depending on where you are sitting. That's why a lot of recordings are made in small halls, such as Cecil Sharpe House or Hackney Town Hall in London.
How to get that "Classical Concert Hall Sound" - get a 31 band graphic, randomly boost half a dozen frequencies up 6dB, cut another half dozen the same, stick in one 12dB peak and one 12dB cut at random, (go bigger if your graphic can do it), then feed the whole thing through several frequency dependant reverbs, with all controls set by a small child.
How to get that "Classical Concert Hall Sound" - get a 31 band graphic, randomly boost half a dozen frequencies up 6dB, cut another half dozen the same, stick in one 12dB peak and one 12dB cut at random, (go bigger if your graphic can do it), then feed the whole thing through several frequency dependant reverbs, with all controls set by a small child.