I whole heartedly disagree with this.
Given: there are things one might lean to like more than other things, put more focus on etc etc yes.
But many stereo's are so flawed that of any realistic representation one can't speak. So with all these colours, errors etc one has to choose one likes the most.
In the case of Joe's speakers (amongst others and given plenty of time to dial in, tweak etc), it's just on another level all together.
What this means?
Given the fidelity of those systems, not liking it and e.g. choosing a lot less truthfull system, to me is like choosing to rather look at movies through colored lenses instead of the real thing.
Yes, to each their own, but it's more wanting the limitations of the system then wanting what the musicians did.
Given: there are things one might lean to like more than other things, put more focus on etc etc yes.
But many stereo's are so flawed that of any realistic representation one can't speak. So with all these colours, errors etc one has to choose one likes the most.
In the case of Joe's speakers (amongst others and given plenty of time to dial in, tweak etc), it's just on another level all together.
What this means?
Given the fidelity of those systems, not liking it and e.g. choosing a lot less truthfull system, to me is like choosing to rather look at movies through colored lenses instead of the real thing.
Yes, to each their own, but it's more wanting the limitations of the system then wanting what the musicians did.
A speaker system that has very high resolution will not make a bad recording sound worse or better it will simply reveal the flaws more clearly. Your tolerance to listening to these flaws may shorten you listening time to that recording, however. Of course, the opposite would be true for excellent recordings.
Exactly. With my system, I can hear, for e. g., that the music in the pre 1970s was recorded and mixed with tube equipment (my analog system is fully tubed, not a single IC or transistor being used). In the 1970's, the music often became that transistor sound, but is still colorfull. Transparency has been lost.
In the 1980s, the sound often becomes very muddy and the tone engineers began to use their panels extensively to equalize the sound (mostly on pop- records).
In the 1990s, the sound was often so equalized that it would best to audition on small audio systems without real big woofers, thats why the audio engineers enhance the lows and highs and compress the whole recorded music so to play best with the low budget systems.
All that is clearly audible, and I don't have written about all other aspects of the sound like different staging, 3D- effects, ping pong stereo and what all can be done at the mixing desk. Thats what I expect from a high definition audio system, and being very dynamic in its response.
That doesn't mean the system do harm to these bad sounding records or make them more listenable. It just shows exactly, what quality is pressed on the record. One can justify that easily. A good system has to play with much resolution without the tendency to sound harsh. Thats a fact that most companies fail to deliver. All high end, high definition systems on audio fairs tend to sound harsh and sharp, because they try to squeeze out any detail but become unlistenable instead. The sound gets lost in an overpronounced, harsh detailed pronouncing audio experience.
Of course there are better and more worse drivers, I've got them on my list. They differ much in price, availability and data. But at last, what counts is the end product, the whole speakers sound. Much can be optimized by its design and with a bad design, even the best drivers will perform far from their top experience level what is possible.
So to buy the best, with a lot of cash not even leads straight towards the way of best sound in DIY. If one chooses the route of the pre- manufactured speakers, he might not found what he is looking for, too. Because others have done the thinking, choosing and designing for him. For me, with lots of ideas and some knowledge and experience, it was possible to build a speaker that matches my desires. If I had deeper pockets, the way may have ended in a different system, optimised for a bigger room size. But at the end, what sounds best isn't a single component of this puzzle, but the whole result in a given environment.
In the 1980s, the sound often becomes very muddy and the tone engineers began to use their panels extensively to equalize the sound (mostly on pop- records).
In the 1990s, the sound was often so equalized that it would best to audition on small audio systems without real big woofers, thats why the audio engineers enhance the lows and highs and compress the whole recorded music so to play best with the low budget systems.
All that is clearly audible, and I don't have written about all other aspects of the sound like different staging, 3D- effects, ping pong stereo and what all can be done at the mixing desk. Thats what I expect from a high definition audio system, and being very dynamic in its response.
That doesn't mean the system do harm to these bad sounding records or make them more listenable. It just shows exactly, what quality is pressed on the record. One can justify that easily. A good system has to play with much resolution without the tendency to sound harsh. Thats a fact that most companies fail to deliver. All high end, high definition systems on audio fairs tend to sound harsh and sharp, because they try to squeeze out any detail but become unlistenable instead. The sound gets lost in an overpronounced, harsh detailed pronouncing audio experience.
Of course there are better and more worse drivers, I've got them on my list. They differ much in price, availability and data. But at last, what counts is the end product, the whole speakers sound. Much can be optimized by its design and with a bad design, even the best drivers will perform far from their top experience level what is possible.
So to buy the best, with a lot of cash not even leads straight towards the way of best sound in DIY. If one chooses the route of the pre- manufactured speakers, he might not found what he is looking for, too. Because others have done the thinking, choosing and designing for him. For me, with lots of ideas and some knowledge and experience, it was possible to build a speaker that matches my desires. If I had deeper pockets, the way may have ended in a different system, optimised for a bigger room size. But at the end, what sounds best isn't a single component of this puzzle, but the whole result in a given environment.
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The signal is static...you are looking at it at a different perspective than I am portraying...I agree with you, a signal presents Dynamic material but in a very crude sense, the signal is static....
I took a picture of some signal to prove my point...stare at it for as long as you like....come back tomorrow...this signal is not going to change...I can take this signal imprint it on vinyl, cd, mp3, stream, etc....slight variations result in different material that in the same sense are static...so for our experiment....we take the one source playing one track, over several various systems....measure the recreation over the various systems....and the rms and peak energy will have changed(measure the rms and peak energy in this picture today or tomorrow it will not change)...point made.
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The high resolution system has less flaws, thus it won't mask signal flaws as much....its like watching a 4k movie on a 1080p LED......the signal wins "always" in the Audio realm. A perfect impulse response has yet to be produced or something along those lines lol.
There are some tricks to expose certain things in a recording....for example...with a very low xmax driver... a recording whos track levels are not balanced, in particular, the kick drum... the xmax represents a "threshold" than can expose transient peaks, as the distortion seemingly rises significantly faster as the peaks push the excursion into its mechanical limits...
Lets not lose sight of the forest for the trees here, your technicality is correct but irrelevant... It seems you want to get down to brass tacks, so..
There is much that needs to be correct before tuning by ear, in the speaker and the speaker to room relationship.. things that can only be done with measurements because they cannot be specifically identified by ear sufficiently to fix beyond audibility (in the context of the highest quality of reproduction). Attempts to tune such a system by ear before completing this will fail in the form of not being able to find satisfaction.
Beyond this however, your ear becomes the final arbiter of tonal balance. Yes, you won't exceed the limitation of stereo itself, but it's satisfying as it is.
Have you noticed that people don't feel the need to compensate their speakers according to their specific audiologically tested idiosyncracies? The fact is that having your speakers tuned 'natural' will let someone hear as they always hear around them... Based on this I worry that when I am in need of hearing aids I'll dislike the adjustment.
Your statement reminds me of this research by Floyd Toole. Loudspeaker directivity influenced preferences depending on music style. Narrow directivity (reduced lateral reflections/higher resolution(?)) had lower preference except for jazz.
Although, maybe I misunderstand what high resolution means in the context of the loudspeaker. The thread is about compression drivers so I think high resolution means narrow directivity through the use of horns.
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In the ball park but no nickel.
It is controlled directivity with no abrupt changes in directivity at the crossover between drivers. A smooth transition between drivers and an overall smooth slope of in room power response is what Floyd Toole and Sean Olive found in their multiple Regression speaker preference research.
Thanks DT
Imagine you are standing in front of a painting or a photography of apples in a national museum. If you hear someone next to you says, "these apple are so real and look so tasty", you would think he is very uneducated. While recorded music is an art, and the sound of recorded musical instruments is totally manipulated by human, you always hear audiophiles say "this guitar sounds so real". Very uneducated? I feel so.
Lets face it: most of the recorded music has been optimised since decades for optimum sound experience on small, consumer gear. Compressed, equalized, enhanced, mixed down, all tracks recorded with every musician play solo, mixed together afterwards, played in high damped environments, room acoustics added later, recorded using electronic synthesizers and other artificial tone sources.
And when played on a "high end" equipment some kind of audiofool talks or writes articels about the "natural sounding" recording.
And all that mixing is being done nowadays using consoles that employ hundreds of cheap IC amps, mostly build the same as every PCB based computer. That audio is controlled by speakers that I would never ever listen to in my living room, because they are mostly able to sound black and white, means only highs and lows are presented, all mids are washed out of the sound. Compare that with the tubed mixing consoles of the 1960s and an Altec 604 alnico pair hanging in the studios for monitoring.
Thats whats audible- the modern mixing console worked like a gas chamber for life like music- no survivors left the room. Its a shame what we do to music -but its a business anyway in which only counts market success and money. And therefore it has to adopt to the mass market. It could be an art- but mostly its an instrument to make big money.
And when played on a "high end" equipment some kind of audiofool talks or writes articels about the "natural sounding" recording.
And all that mixing is being done nowadays using consoles that employ hundreds of cheap IC amps, mostly build the same as every PCB based computer. That audio is controlled by speakers that I would never ever listen to in my living room, because they are mostly able to sound black and white, means only highs and lows are presented, all mids are washed out of the sound. Compare that with the tubed mixing consoles of the 1960s and an Altec 604 alnico pair hanging in the studios for monitoring.
Thats whats audible- the modern mixing console worked like a gas chamber for life like music- no survivors left the room. Its a shame what we do to music -but its a business anyway in which only counts market success and money. And therefore it has to adopt to the mass market. It could be an art- but mostly its an instrument to make big money.
Pretty bleak perspective ... makes me want to poke out my ear drums and be satisfied with my memory of "day's gone by" 🙁
On second thought ... nah.
On second thought ... nah.
The market dictates the quality of the product. We all have to face the situation, that the industry operates with lower quality gear compared to that in former decades. And that has happended since the multi IC based mixing consoles were installed in most of the studios.
How could one hear sound and judging it, when the mixing engineers hear with such nasty, low efficiency, plastic sounding monitor speakers ? Impossible.
So on one side we have a recording industry, producing products to low standards with bad sounding equipment and monitoring gear, and on the other side we have an audio "high end" industry that splits into those people, who swear to that new technology and another train, who has decided to ride in the different direction, right back to the post war audio era. And those guys with their high efficiency, high definition gear can hear what the others, with their PC based audio technology, couldn't hear any longer.
Well, there are some famous musicians who have started to claim that modern recording technology is a step backwards instead of forward and to do their recordings with old technology, some of them analog all the way. And we have a new hype of recording studios, which are proud of not having trashed the old gear but using this until today. But the mass of recordings in every section uses this low quality new technology which bleaches out music like no other.
Bob Dylans new LP is such an example. A famous singer/ songwriter, who seem to have absolutely no interest in good recording quality, his LP sounds so overequalized, so bleached out of any tone colors, so compressed that it's a shame for the recording industry. I wouldn't wonder if this recording wins the Grammy this year. Because its a good album, with a very bad sound. And for that, the recording industry took all the credits. This is like buying a new, first class sedan from Mercedes in 2020 and drive it only in third world countries with demolished streets. Thats the situation in Audio today.
Bad sounding source material mostly, and one can choose which route to go with it.
Of course, nobody in the Hifi shop will tell you this, because they will sell their gear.
But the quality of the source material can be easily judged by a high definition, high quality audio rig, if one can use something like this today. And thats a very rare case. I think, the industry knows that fact. So they can get away with all that rubbish they produce and sell now and since some decades.
How could one hear sound and judging it, when the mixing engineers hear with such nasty, low efficiency, plastic sounding monitor speakers ? Impossible.
So on one side we have a recording industry, producing products to low standards with bad sounding equipment and monitoring gear, and on the other side we have an audio "high end" industry that splits into those people, who swear to that new technology and another train, who has decided to ride in the different direction, right back to the post war audio era. And those guys with their high efficiency, high definition gear can hear what the others, with their PC based audio technology, couldn't hear any longer.
Well, there are some famous musicians who have started to claim that modern recording technology is a step backwards instead of forward and to do their recordings with old technology, some of them analog all the way. And we have a new hype of recording studios, which are proud of not having trashed the old gear but using this until today. But the mass of recordings in every section uses this low quality new technology which bleaches out music like no other.
Bob Dylans new LP is such an example. A famous singer/ songwriter, who seem to have absolutely no interest in good recording quality, his LP sounds so overequalized, so bleached out of any tone colors, so compressed that it's a shame for the recording industry. I wouldn't wonder if this recording wins the Grammy this year. Because its a good album, with a very bad sound. And for that, the recording industry took all the credits. This is like buying a new, first class sedan from Mercedes in 2020 and drive it only in third world countries with demolished streets. Thats the situation in Audio today.
Bad sounding source material mostly, and one can choose which route to go with it.
Of course, nobody in the Hifi shop will tell you this, because they will sell their gear.
But the quality of the source material can be easily judged by a high definition, high quality audio rig, if one can use something like this today. And thats a very rare case. I think, the industry knows that fact. So they can get away with all that rubbish they produce and sell now and since some decades.
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This will improve now as mixers are turning digital. AD conversion out in the Mic and no more OP-amps seen until maybe in your living room ;-)
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The speakers tested did not have smooth off-axis, the information is from chapter 7.4.2 The Effect of Loudspeaker Directivity - Toole 1985.
Toole's directivity research preceded Olive and Toole's work you referenced.
Really though, I have no idea what "high-resolution" speaker means. I looked on Google but couldn't figure it out. Well, other than internet forum posts where people said they wanted high resolution speakers but didn't define what that meant. Because this is a thread about compression drivers and Joe has a multi-way horn setup I'm assuming it means narrow directivity to him. I'm trying to understand the term by using context because there doesn't seem to be a definition.
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@ Bradley, Toole's opinions and findings about a preference for a given level of reflections, are instructive, but are not universally shared here. Some, like myself think that dialling in more or less early reflected energy isn't that simple, and I wouldn't approach it from a quantity standpoint.
Do you feel some early reflected energy improves intelligibility?
@camplo, an odd statement on its own.. I wasn't aware we had come to a consensus on the meaning of resolution.
Do you feel some early reflected energy improves intelligibility?
@camplo, an odd statement on its own.. I wasn't aware we had come to a consensus on the meaning of resolution.
I just did for us to save time....you take real life visuals display it at 4k and it wont look as sharp is the same in real life because of the distortions...sound or anything else, no less...
Headphones lol....people mix and master with headphones nowadays...loudspeakers are a secondary check for some people .... the picture painted above is kind of grim....just like we have “super star drivers” ....the production world has stand out hardware that “we” all know about and all the emulation surrounds these products...older once upon a time products. The above rant is somewhat reminiscent of rants I hear from mastering engineers so the problem is elsewhere....Augspurger loudspeakers are still common in the big studios....nowadays the have huge 7.7.7 systems...with accumulation of woofers....that’s high efficiency. I agree with a lot said above but some things said don’t line up....if you really know what you are talking about be specific and name the systems you claim are sooooo bad so we can validate
One of the most popular systems is PCM and I dislike it cause I was taught not to by this board (lol) but the volt dome mid range is a winner....the atc midrange (atc is very popular, and rightfully so) might be the best dynamic mid range ever.... so where are these crappy systems spoke of? Kii 3 and Dutch and Dutch? These are hot right now? These suck to you compared to some old Altecs?
A few genres of music have suffered from “the big squeeze” but jazz and classical are not over compressed...it’s funny, the blame was placed on the audio engineer when all I read in mastering engineer group is complaints about how the label and the clients ( who pay the bills) want louder at all cost lol
I was listening to a new rap song today and I could hear something being over driven in the bass region and I just look at the screen and wonder why? What’s the angle....I have not assembled my high efficiency system...my basement is untreated and my nice performing near field 3 way can hear it.....they definitely can here it in the million dollar studio, the idea that they can’t hear it is absurd....audio engineers miss the “old days” just like sort of expressed above...those old iconic mixing consoles go for millions....soon digital will replicate them 100%....
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