Specifications? We don't need no steenking Specifications!"
@ gpauk: Yeah, I'm just glad I didn't use the translator to ask something like , "Hey Klaus, has your wife, um, 'heard' your new speakers?" 😛
@ Gnobuddy: I feel your pain, brother. In the last month or so I've been stricken with the urge to get back into vinyl, and with it the sudden impulse to replace my aging Dual CS5000. I've read nice things about the Rega P3 so I decided to delve further. The website - and I am not kidding here - reveals the following "Technical Specifications":
That's it. Notice anything missing here - like measurements?
So I trekked down to a Rega dealer to seek clarification and hear one in person. I spoke to a pleasant chap named, well... let's call him "Spanky". "Spanky" showed me the whole Rega line, all the time extolling the virtues of each. But I eventually noticed I was never offered the opportunity to listen, even though each was connected to a fairly decent system. I suppose I was being sized up as a customer (or perhaps for the risks involved in stealing my wallet), but still...
That's when I broached the subject of specifications. "Spanky" replied with something akin to "Specifications? You mean there aren't any on the website? OMG I find that hard to believe. Surely there are some out there somewhere." When I assured him there were absolutely none - and that I needed objective data to be sure that new 'table was indeed superior to the old - he changed tack. Something more like, "Well, materials science and electronics have advanced a lot since your Dual was built. I can promise you the corpuscle flux and gonad-u-lactic quantum synergy you'll experience with the Rega will..."
I thanked him and opted to just replace my old AT cart with an Ortofon 2M Blue, as I could at least get specs on that (and it wasn't any more expensive there, either). But as he rang me up the Spankmeister quipped, "That's a nice cart, but you'll experience less sibling rivalry and a more lustfully vibrant bacteriophage with the Bronze." I politely declined and explained I was more than willing to accept my lot among the legions of the 'Blue-damned'. That's when I noticed the "special" IEC power cable in the showcase. That's when I made my hasty exit - not that I was afraid, but because my wife was certain I wouldn't keep my mouth shut.
Now I'm sure the Regas are fine turntables, and I may purchase one yet. But I refuse to make any purchase in a retail pressure-cooker where I'm fed steaming heaps of manure rolling from the pitchforks of earplug-impaled salespeople.
@ billshurv: The Aurora Chair seems to be a throne in your side. May I suggest a relaxed yet confusing king?
@ gpauk: Yeah, I'm just glad I didn't use the translator to ask something like , "Hey Klaus, has your wife, um, 'heard' your new speakers?" 😛
@ Gnobuddy: I feel your pain, brother. In the last month or so I've been stricken with the urge to get back into vinyl, and with it the sudden impulse to replace my aging Dual CS5000. I've read nice things about the Rega P3 so I decided to delve further. The website - and I am not kidding here - reveals the following "Technical Specifications":
- Dimensions (lid closed) H 11.7 x W 44.7 x D 36 cm
- Weight 6kg
So I trekked down to a Rega dealer to seek clarification and hear one in person. I spoke to a pleasant chap named, well... let's call him "Spanky". "Spanky" showed me the whole Rega line, all the time extolling the virtues of each. But I eventually noticed I was never offered the opportunity to listen, even though each was connected to a fairly decent system. I suppose I was being sized up as a customer (or perhaps for the risks involved in stealing my wallet), but still...
That's when I broached the subject of specifications. "Spanky" replied with something akin to "Specifications? You mean there aren't any on the website? OMG I find that hard to believe. Surely there are some out there somewhere." When I assured him there were absolutely none - and that I needed objective data to be sure that new 'table was indeed superior to the old - he changed tack. Something more like, "Well, materials science and electronics have advanced a lot since your Dual was built. I can promise you the corpuscle flux and gonad-u-lactic quantum synergy you'll experience with the Rega will..."
I thanked him and opted to just replace my old AT cart with an Ortofon 2M Blue, as I could at least get specs on that (and it wasn't any more expensive there, either). But as he rang me up the Spankmeister quipped, "That's a nice cart, but you'll experience less sibling rivalry and a more lustfully vibrant bacteriophage with the Bronze." I politely declined and explained I was more than willing to accept my lot among the legions of the 'Blue-damned'. That's when I noticed the "special" IEC power cable in the showcase. That's when I made my hasty exit - not that I was afraid, but because my wife was certain I wouldn't keep my mouth shut.
Now I'm sure the Regas are fine turntables, and I may purchase one yet. But I refuse to make any purchase in a retail pressure-cooker where I'm fed steaming heaps of manure rolling from the pitchforks of earplug-impaled salespeople.
@ billshurv: The Aurora Chair seems to be a throne in your side. May I suggest a relaxed yet confusing king?
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Soitenly!
I do wonder if Dr. Toole and his peers sometimes feel like they're spitting into the wind these days. The audio field must be a frequent source of frustration for anyone making an honest effort to put some real information out there, in the midst of this raging torrent of junk science and marketing nonsense.
The cynical part of me (that's the big, fat part) likes to think it's because the majority of the buying public just doesn't demand that stuff anymore.
For me, microphones as a category seem to sit very close to the line between music production and music reproduction. I'll admit that back when I was running a few meager sound jobs for my buddies' rock and roll bands, I tended to think of mics more as instruments (musical that is, not measurement), and thus exempt from some of the accuracy & neutrality rules. But that Shure "presence peak" still makes me chuckle. I've encountered a lot of bands that had boxes full of 57s and 58s and not much else. The "presence peak" becomes kind of pointless when the whole band has that same characteristic curve. 🙄
I blame our modern "convenient" website product ratings infrastructure / mindset for a lot of this, but I don't see that genie going back in the bottle anytime soon. 😡
-- Jim
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Soitainly, Jim!
I'm glad you got a laugh out of that one. That story unfolded almost exactly a month ago and - sadly - it's all true except for "Spanky's" exact snake-oil terminology. I only wish I were making up the rest. And thanks for the Floyd Toole link. It was a timely sanity-check after last month's aborted turntable heist. 😀
I'm glad you got a laugh out of that one. That story unfolded almost exactly a month ago and - sadly - it's all true except for "Spanky's" exact snake-oil terminology. I only wish I were making up the rest. And thanks for the Floyd Toole link. It was a timely sanity-check after last month's aborted turntable heist. 😀
I can't believe you refused that offer. I've searched high and low - quite fruitlessly - for a more lustfully vibrant bacteriophage for years now!
-Gnobuddy
Turntables and dealers
Well, I did listen to one top line rega with its best arm and still could here pops and clicks..old or dirty LPs... I am staying with my old obsolete table. I put a new cartridge on it and replaced some of the old electronic cable connections and I think it sounds great. I think I was being fed SNAKE OIL.
I've also looked at Rega and Project and a few others at stereo stores. They don't talk about specs. They always tell me my Dual 1249 is so old it is way behind the vast improvements in these new turntables.
Well, I did listen to one top line rega with its best arm and still could here pops and clicks..old or dirty LPs... I am staying with my old obsolete table. I put a new cartridge on it and replaced some of the old electronic cable connections and I think it sounds great. I think I was being fed SNAKE OIL.
Believe it or not, I had never heard of the SM58/57 until just a few years ago - I had had nothing to do with live music until then, other than playing guitar by myself in the spare bedroom, or an occasional sing-along during my college days.
When I got back into music circa 2009, I started attending jams as a guitarist, and then singing myself. I started looking around for a microphone to buy. All roads once led to Rome, and these days, all searches for a live hand-held vocal microphone lead to the Shure SM58.
But when I listened to people using these, I noticed that some singers with beautiful singing voices - particularly sopranos - sounded thin, screechy, and muffled, all at the same time, when singing through SM58s.
Then I noticed that many baritones sounded as though they were singing from the bottom of a particularly cavernous barrel when they were using SM58s.
I couldn't believe how bad these mics sounded, so I looked for any frequency response plots I could find. What I found shocked me; the advertised "presence peak" appears to in fact be several ragged, very poorly controlled, mechanical resonances. Even in the very heavily smoothed frequency response plots that Shure makes available, you can see that there are multiple tall peaks with deep dips in between.
Now it began to make sense. With this mic, deep male voices (baritones, basses) suffer badly from too much proximity effect (bass boost). Sopranos (and some high tenors) end up thin and screechy due to the tremendous and quite irregular "presence boost".
Women with lower voices - altos - seem to be the only ones who can still sound passably good through these horrid microphones. With some bass roll-off to tame the proximity effect, some upper midrange cut to tame the shrieky resonances, and a little treble boost at the high end to bring back some "air", they can sound okay. (A fifty-cent electret mic capsule sounds far better, though.)
Having discovered the emperor (SM58) was naked, I searched for alternatives, and ended up buying a Nady SPC-25 electret condenser mic for myself. It cost less than half as much as an SM58, and sounded vastly better. I've looked at other alternatives since then, and for live use, that Nady has proven hard to beat - I still haven't found anything better at any price point I'm willing to stretch to.
Nady, of course, does not have the brand clout that Shure does. Most musicians I meet think I must be a moron, and a tight-fisted/cheap one at that, for using a Nady mic.
Since that time, I've found $6 dynamic mics intended for karaoke (sold in the dollar stores) that (to my ears) sound better than an SM58. These are the Chinese-made cheapies that don't even include a transformer inside the mic - they just overwind the microphone voice coil, and run an unbalanced signal out to the connector. 😱 They hum like crazy, but still sound smoother than an SM58!
Here's the part I still can't make sense of: the SM58 continues to be the most popular live vocal mic on planet earth, by a huge margin. Sound professionals, and famous singers, all use them. And, to my ears, these mics are almost the worst-sounding ones you can find today, short of pulling the moving-iron microphone out of a vintage 1960's era Bell telephone.
I suspect the reason so many people seem unable to hear how awful these mics are has to do with something Floyd Tool mentions in that video: once people form a mental judgment about an audio product, they stop hearing it. If they see an expensive and beautiful speaker, it automatically sounds good. And, I suppose, if they see the microphone that is used by so many very famous singers, it too automatically sounds good.
Either that, or it's because I'm personally deficient, lacking a sufficiently lustfully vibrant bacteriophage! 😀
-Gnobuddy
The SM58 was launched in the mid 1960s, according to Wikipedia. From what I've read, that was a time when much of the (live sound) audio chain was frequently lacking in the treble department. P.A. speakers, reel-to-reel tape recorders, even P.A. amps often had limited treble extension. I've seen photos of a lot of speakers from that era that didn't even have tweeters at all.
My guess is that a huge screechy SM58 "presence peak" was much less obnoxious - and might even have been a good thing - if the speakers and/or (tape) recording was extremely treble-deficient and dull-sounding. The peaky mic might have been compensating for the dull-sounding speakers and tape recorders of the era.
Times have changed, the SM58 hasn't. I haven't seen a speaker system without a tweeter in a long time, except in a guitar amp. And today's digital audio recorders have ruler-flat frequency responses throughout the entire audio band and beyond.
-Gnobuddy
snake oil beyond anything I've seen
I was killin time on the web and found a site that said something like " Price no object worlds best stereo systems". One example was a setup with many huge electric purifiers between the wall and each component. They must have cost thousands. The system was said to cost about $1million. What really blew me away were these 7 foot tall wooden mpingo stands. They said each stand had three groups of mpingo disks at three different heights. I think the person describing everything said the disks, which looked liked hockey puck size, were oriented to provide the best room response. There were at least six, maybe nine, of these tall things. They also showed that wooden mpingo discs were on the ends of the heads of the tape players. I could go on but won't. Bottom line is they were using this youtube bit to sell their tape machines which stared at $12,000. Oh, and all the cabling was way larger than garden hose size and all were off the floor resting on some mpingo or other exotic/expensive cable supports. Maybe they sell in Dubia.
I'm amazed but probably shouldn't be.
I was killin time on the web and found a site that said something like " Price no object worlds best stereo systems". One example was a setup with many huge electric purifiers between the wall and each component. They must have cost thousands. The system was said to cost about $1million. What really blew me away were these 7 foot tall wooden mpingo stands. They said each stand had three groups of mpingo disks at three different heights. I think the person describing everything said the disks, which looked liked hockey puck size, were oriented to provide the best room response. There were at least six, maybe nine, of these tall things. They also showed that wooden mpingo discs were on the ends of the heads of the tape players. I could go on but won't. Bottom line is they were using this youtube bit to sell their tape machines which stared at $12,000. Oh, and all the cabling was way larger than garden hose size and all were off the floor resting on some mpingo or other exotic/expensive cable supports. Maybe they sell in Dubia.
I'm amazed but probably shouldn't be.
Mpingo discs! I didn't know they were still a thing, but I shouldn't be surprised either.
This one particularly bugs me because it's such a waste of precious natural resources. Mpingo (aka African Blackwood) isn't endangered, but is described here as "near threatened":
The Wood Database
If anything, this stuff should be for clarinets and oboes - not magic hockey pucks. 😡
-- Jim
I totally agree about the use of woods. I'm a professional flute player and have other woodwinds made of rare woods. I also have guitars made with exotic woods. I think those mpingos, and other snake oil devices made of exotic woods, are a shameful waste of a dwindling resource, I think they are absurd sound enhancement ********.
The truth is, with only minimal hyperbole, just about everything (except cows, chickens, dogs, cats, and jellyfish) is threatened, or near threatened, now.
Some years ago, I read a newspaper article about how a species of whale had supposedly recovered from the edge of extinction. There were now an estimated 5000 individuals alive world-wide, therefore the powers that be decided that it was time to celebrate the successful recovery of the species.
5000 didn't seem that big a number to me. At the time, the world's human population was around 7,000,000,000. Hmm!
That meant that there were nearly one and a half million human beings on earth for each single whale (of that species) on earth.
Think about that for a second - one and a half million humans per whale. Fifteen good-sized cities full (population 100,000 each) of humans to one whale.
So I thought "Whales are large. Maybe we shouldn't expect lots of whales on earth?"
Still, startled by the magnitude of that one-million-plus number, I thought about it a bit more. I realised that essentially the same math applied not just to whales, but to tens, thousands, tens of thousands, of other species.
Basically, if a wild creature is the size of a dog or bigger, there are probably at least a million humans on earth for each one of those creatures living. In many cases, there are ten million humans per animal or more. In a few cases, there are "lots" of that animal - say a world population of 100,000 - meaning there are "only" 75,000 humans for each single member of that animal species.
I don't care how homo-centric one's world view is, a world where there are a million humans for one whale, or a hundred thousand humans per hippo, is a world that's badly out of balance. One single species (unless it's tiny, insect-sized or less) should never dominate all others by such a huge ratio. Life on earth was supposed to be mostly bacteria, viruses, and insects; nothing the size of a human being should have a population in the billions.
It's not just animals, of course - essentially the same sort of thing applies to trees, too. There are a heck of a lot more trees on earth than there are whales or hippos, but many grow slowly, and many only grow in a few places on earth.
So how many mpingo trees are there on earth? A brief search has proved futile; I couldn't find a number anywhere. But I'll bet it's much less than a million trees, and I hope it's more than ten thousand trees. Let's split the difference (on a log scale), and take a wild guess that there are 100,000 mpingo trees on planet earth.
If that's remotely close to correct, there are at least 75,000 humans on earth for each mpingo tree.
If just one in every 1000 humans wants a piece of mpingo for herself, for her woodwind or what have you, that means there are 75 people fighting over each mpingo tree. Not good odds for the unfortunate tree.
Now, if someone would take up the cause of proving that jellyfish are the ultimate audio device, we might have something. Just think about it, all that gelatinous, floopy stuff that jellyfish are made of has to be good for audio damping, and those delicate trailing tentacles surely magically connect to the earth's Ley-lines and "conduct heat away from the fuse".
Even better for the marketers, jellyfish have rather a short shelf life once out of the water, so you can make a lot of money on repeat sales, as with disposable contact lenses, Microsoft Office 365, and montly subscriptions to overpriced Adobe software.
Hmmm - time for Jellyfish Audio, to go head-to-head with Coconut Audio?
-Gnobuddy
I have an entire dining hutch made of the stuff which I bought second hand from a South African years ago. It lives in the main listening room, and I can't say it has made any real difference to the sound.
I wish I could expand on your other observations, but it's getting late, and my brain is slowing down, so instead I'll just say thanks for the late-night playlist suggestion. 🙂
Here's one of the coolest little pop tunes ever written:
Jellyfish - "Calling Sarah"
Call me a sucker, but I was turned off when Spanky didn't throw in a free box of Lucky Charms as part of the deal. As we're all aware, it's been "clinically proven" that LVPs have an affinity for the purple horseshoes. All I have is King Vitaman! 🙄
Yeah, like the others here, I'm discovering that "speclessness" (five 'esses' -not all in a row) is apparently more and more the norm. And when they speak of 'vast improvements', It's almost like they're simultaneously suggesting that merely following the laws of Newtonian Mechanics just doesn't cut the mustard.
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gonad-u-lactic could be the result of bad german again? 😀
Sounds painful, so it must sound good....
Probably because renting an anechoic chamber and understanding the kit is too expensive and way beyond their understanding. Besides, who needs that when you've sorted the frequency / spacial response by holding hands in a circle around the speaker and sacrificing an engineer to the gods of High Audio?
Of course no one has mentioned the main advantage of the SM58, which is that the lead singer, whilst swinging it round his head can accidently hit the sidewall monitor cab and the mic will continue to work. In live beatings proof works. There was even a program once on fakes where they dropped an SM58 off the roof of the shure building to prove how tough it was.
When I did live sound stuff as a student the only mic that was molly coddled was for the kick drum. IIRC AKG D12. When a punk band kicked it across the stage they were not popular...
When I did live sound stuff as a student the only mic that was molly coddled was for the kick drum. IIRC AKG D12. When a punk band kicked it across the stage they were not popular...
The version I usually hear is "It's tough enough to drive nails with!"
I usually reply that that's the only good use I can think of for an SM58 - driving nails with it! 😀
-Gnobuddy
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