Exactly. As frequency drops impedance increases towards Fs. You can in some cases get increased extension by this method. In extremis (theoretical pure current drive) the first bass note will send the cone flying across the room!
As ever the Pass current drive article is a goo sauce of food for thought (pun intended).
As ever the Pass current drive article is a goo sauce of food for thought (pun intended).
Was it level matched comparison? If so, then what was used for matching and to what precision level?
Well, then the results from such comparison can be thrown out as it doesn't provide any useful data of amp sound evaluation.
As I mentioned before: I would have had it not been for a number of people commenting without prompting and without knowing that I changed anything at all.
And since they all described their perceived differences in the same way it does give me pause to think.
And since they all described their perceived differences in the same way it does give me pause to think.
If volume levels are different enough for people to notice audible difference, number of people will say so without knowing that you changed anything at all. You can listen to the same amp at different volume levels and you will notice a difference even when amp isn't changed. Think about that.
My personal view is just to accept that your friends have good taste and marvel at the VFM you got 🙂.
Doh!
But I certainly got that, not least because I bought them all s/h.
That way I got 3 MC2s for a total of £800 which would have been £4400 new.
But I certainly got that, not least because I bought them all s/h.
That way I got 3 MC2s for a total of £800 which would have been £4400 new.
Hi-Fi = no audible difference between output and input signal; the amplifier is so close to being "a straight wire with gain" that it makes no audible contribution to the sound.
Personal preference = anything goes. Maybe you like scratchy tinfoil recordings from the 1870s.
Is an amplifier Hi-Fi? Here is a simple, objective, sure way to find out (and it dates back many decades, but never got widespread traction):
ESP SIM (Sound Impairment Monitor)
-Gnobuddy
Personal preference = anything goes. Maybe you like scratchy tinfoil recordings from the 1870s.
Is an amplifier Hi-Fi? Here is a simple, objective, sure way to find out (and it dates back many decades, but never got widespread traction):
ESP SIM (Sound Impairment Monitor)
-Gnobuddy
Don't bring headphones into this.
They are very different animals and a flat FR is not at all desirable for them since they bypass the eq function provided by our pinnae.
The ideal curve in your link is the headphone FR that sounds flat to us. You need to look up Head Related Transfer Function.
But again this is 50 year old news.
Yeah, I've noticed.
And yet he brings it up again despite it's age and that it's only application are headphones.
And yet he brings it up again despite it's age and that it's only application are headphones.
Ever hear of the painter Modigliani? He painted a number of faces with ridiculously long noses. "Woman With Blue Eyes" is a good example.
One person with a medical background proposed that the painter had some sort of defect in his vision (astigmatism) that made him see things longer than they actually were, so he was actually painting faces the way he saw them.
The flaw in this hypothesis only takes a moments thought: if a normal nose looked long to Modigliani, then an exaggeratedly long nose in a painting would look even longer!
Therefore, if his intention was to create life-like noses, they would have ended up the correct length on the canvas, whether or not his vision was defective.
(Modigliani painted long noses because he was an artist, a creative person, and he felt like painting long noses. It became part of his painting style.)
Why did I bring this up? Because exactly the same reasoning applies to your hearing. No, of course your ears don't have a flat frequency response. Surely everyone on DIY Audio has heard of the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness contours.
But if you listen to a live orchestra, your ears modify the spectrum of frequencies they hear, and then your brain interprets that as the normal sound of a live orchestra. If you listen to white noise, your ears drastically exaggerate the midrange, but your brain interprets that peaky response as sounding like white noise - flat, equal energy at all frequencies.
If you now listen to the same orchestra through an amp that has its own tweaks to the frequency response, the amps tweaks add to the ears own tweaks - just like an astigmatism-suffering Modigliani looking at an extra-long nose on a painting, and seeing it as even longer. You get a tweak on top of a tweak; it will sound tweaked, not flat.
Imagine putting white noise through a filter that was the inverse of the Fletcher-Munson contours, drastically boosting the midrange. Will it sound like white noise? Of course not! Your ears will add their own drastic midrange boost on top of the one you put in, and that's what you'll hear - not white noise.
So, I repeat, for Hi-Fi, meaning accurate reproduction, we do not want the amp to modify the sound from the original, or at least, we want the amp to be capable of not modifying the sound.
Personally, I want tone controls on my amps, because my speakers, room, and preference of spectral balance may not match those of the recording engineer. But I also want those tone controls to have a flat, neutral setting - a reference point where the amp is as close to neutral as it can get.
For listening to music, I never want audible amounts of harmonic distortion added to it. That wouldn't be Hi-Fi, that would just be a personal preference for the sound of distortion mixed into your records, CDs and MP3s.
For creating my own musical sounds, things are different. I play guitar, and I have spent months designing and building a valve guitar amp; that one distorts a lot, and I carefully and intentionally designed all that distortion into the amp. It produces guitar tones I like; but it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Hi-Fi.
-Gnobuddy
You're quite an eloquent little bugger, aren't you Gnobuddy? ;-)
Modigliani got me into italian rap btw.
I got interested when I came across one tune but the only lyrics I could figure out was the line 'Will the real Modiglani please stand up'.
That's when I thought there might be more to this than 'hoes and dollars.
Modigliani got me into italian rap btw.
I got interested when I came across one tune but the only lyrics I could figure out was the line 'Will the real Modiglani please stand up'.
That's when I thought there might be more to this than 'hoes and dollars.
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