Loads of copycats on Taobao.
You can find the same item at 5 different prices, from very cheap to normal price... and buying the one at normal price doesn't guarantee you are buying the real thing!
One has to navigate through that and sometimes rely on intuition in the hopes of buying a legitimate item.
You can find the same item at 5 different prices, from very cheap to normal price... and buying the one at normal price doesn't guarantee you are buying the real thing!
One has to navigate through that and sometimes rely on intuition in the hopes of buying a legitimate item.
Got some links to these possible copies? The KEF LS50 unit is quite distinctive and would be very difficult to clone unless you had strong links to the Gold Peak factories who make the KEF stuff today.
Gold Peak own both KEF & Celestion. Their factories in Guang Zhou make some of the highest quality units & speakers. Their QC is better than ALL Western factories.
Box for LS50 unit would be a bit big for your desktop. 😊 Are there links to the KHT2005 UniQ unit too?
no, I didn't spend time looking at the KEF specifically, but I bought my share of stuff from there, and got the crap more than once.
Some of the units available on Taobao might be from the original factory, probably units with some defects, either cosmetically or out of specs.
If wchang indeed got a pair, it would be cool to have measurements taken to see if they follow production specs or not.
I had strong links with Usher at one point, until they landed the Dayton contract. Then, they kind of let go of their own market to concentrate of producing Dayton's stuff. Understandable, I guess. Too bad, as Usher made some very good drivers as well.
Some of the units available on Taobao might be from the original factory, probably units with some defects, either cosmetically or out of specs.
If wchang indeed got a pair, it would be cool to have measurements taken to see if they follow production specs or not.
I had strong links with Usher at one point, until they landed the Dayton contract. Then, they kind of let go of their own market to concentrate of producing Dayton's stuff. Understandable, I guess. Too bad, as Usher made some very good drivers as well.
I think these (TB coax and SBA MR) are very interesting ideas. For some reason Tangband isn't distributed in mainland China so I only have experience with W5-1880 (neodymium) and unlabelled W3-871SC. The TB coax line is totally unavailable but there are several other Taiwan-branded coax drivers/speakers, such as Hicastle. Taiwan drivers aren't any cheaper than the mid-range British (like Tannoy 2.5-way Precision 8, Fyne, or KEF) but some may come with XO.
On "idlefish" market (a branch of alibaba/taobao) there are two sellers who obviously shared one source. The drivers are excellent and labelled 1793 which is Meta. I basically followed KEF asymmetric XO circuit (published without part values), simplified and tweaked a bit to ensure flat FR and phase-alignment (having first confirmed time-alignment of acoustic centers) -- but in a 2.5-way LX configuration. Fully described but spread over several threads (including provenance comment)
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/search/1888209/?q=meta+1793&c[users]=wchang
Magnet (hence speaker drivers) is a "controlled material" barred from China air-freight, but there are trans-shippers who could do it at reasonable cost....
On idlefish there's a complete KHT 2005 near-new 5.1 set for ~$400 and a dirty pair for much less (sound-clip OK). Of course I don't "need" them but is there something I can learn from their design/execution, besides Al egg? I also looked at the myriad variations or subsequent editions and they were all rated by the magazine as "dynamically unexciting" haha.
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So strange, as TB moved their factory to China a few years ago.
Their main offices are still in Taipei, but their drivers are made in China now.
But, the same for some factories in Taiwan... I can't get from a local source. I have to buy from abroad, even though it is made locally.
World economics is strange sometimes.
TB has produced some very good drivers with the W6-2313 and the W8 version as well. Their older W8-1772 and 1808 were quite good as well.
They do have some average ones in the middle though.
But, looking at the whole product lineup, SBA has much better offerings for different kinds of drivers and different sizes.
Their main offices are still in Taipei, but their drivers are made in China now.
But, the same for some factories in Taiwan... I can't get from a local source. I have to buy from abroad, even though it is made locally.
World economics is strange sometimes.
TB has produced some very good drivers with the W6-2313 and the W8 version as well. Their older W8-1772 and 1808 were quite good as well.
They do have some average ones in the middle though.
But, looking at the whole product lineup, SBA has much better offerings for different kinds of drivers and different sizes.
I have never heard KHT2005. But I personally know the designers ... and also of KHT2001 and LS50. And also their opinion of various KEF speakers.
The thread title says the best possible audiophile desktop speaker. For any audiophile loudspeaker you need to get rid of early reflections and diffraction. With that in mind I would avoid the typical box and instead make some egg, teardrop, or eyeball shaped enclosures. I would make them out of layers of MDF or apple-ply, but people have used Ikea bowls to good effect. Maybe attempt to make the inside like the B&W midrange enclosures. Also, the depth may be an issue with a teardrop so a large panel may work better? For that matter if your desk is up against a wall just put the speakers in the wall.
I used a 'C' shaped absorber around my desk monitors for a while. It worked well for those early reflections, of course treat the room too.
I used a 'C' shaped absorber around my desk monitors for a while. It worked well for those early reflections, of course treat the room too.
Du.uuh! The 'Egg' I have heard is the KHT 2005. I don't think there is a KHT 2001. Mea maxima culpa.
But the rest of my pontificating about KEF engineers/designers etc is pukka 😊
The big lesson is this.
If you design stuff for a big reputable speaker company, if you also make your own units as opposed to just stuff boxes with other people's units, you will dream up ju ju which you think make speakers sound better.
You put this in several speakers; perhaps in a new 'range'. You find all the speakers are good but sometimes, one is exceptional and beats all the others in DBLTs. Very often, the smallest & cheapest of that new range beats its bigger, more $$$ brothers & sisters.
I spent much of my previous life trying to do measurements which correlate with DBLTs. The VERY BEST measurements, eg waterfalls bla bla, can distinguish between poor speakers and good speakers. But a trained listener (eg a top speaker designer) can do this by ear in about 10s !!
What the VERY BEST measurements can't do is to distinguish good speakers from excellent speakers. I don't think this has changed this Millenium. The top speaker designers are still like witch doctors 😊
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So sad! But, take for example a simple inpulse response curve, it says visually a lot about a speaker's transcient fidelity (more usually, the lack thereof). So why isn't IR distortion quantified? (area ratio of input-output symmetric-difference/area-in-common)
I seem to be trying to rediscover from first principles and amateur experiments, without any audio-engineering training, what the pioneers must have figured out 50-100 years ago. Like how to find acoustic center offset by ear and time-align drivers; XO without a calculator; figuring quarterwave line's effective length; upfiring-omni; monophonic imaging depth vs stereophonic directionality; wide-even-dispersion coherent point-source etc. If I can "take their measure" by ear using music plus a tone-generator, surely they can be measured by instrument as well.
By the way, my Axia virtual point-source, ceramic-dome car tweeter reflected off of the 15-incher's convex dustcap, by-ear was basically even-loudness from 5deg to 80deg off-axis along the bounce-direction, up to 11.5khz (I only hear sinewave to 12), provided distance and (crucially) ear-angle toward the dustcap were both kept constant. Measurement using an omnidirectional mic tracing an arc, should show same. As just about anyone can test in a few minutes.
I have to second wchang here.
The time of the witch doctors has long passed.
There is not a single serious company that is going to resort to voodoo audio magic.
They will simulate everything to the last detail, build a demo out of the result and if it follows the sims correctly, come up with the technical drawing to be able to duplicate at will, or mass produce.
One wants to DIY in his/her living room? Sure, bring your golden ears and tweak to your hearts content.
It will be your favorite speaker, and yours alone. And that's fine.
Companies have no time for that voodoo stuff. They will rely on data. Data doesn't lie. Ears and personal preferences do.
And yes, it is possible to have a very good idea on how a designed speaker will sound based on data only.
The time of the witch doctors has long passed.
There is not a single serious company that is going to resort to voodoo audio magic.
They will simulate everything to the last detail, build a demo out of the result and if it follows the sims correctly, come up with the technical drawing to be able to duplicate at will, or mass produce.
One wants to DIY in his/her living room? Sure, bring your golden ears and tweak to your hearts content.
It will be your favorite speaker, and yours alone. And that's fine.
Companies have no time for that voodoo stuff. They will rely on data. Data doesn't lie. Ears and personal preferences do.
And yes, it is possible to have a very good idea on how a designed speaker will sound based on data only.
Yes. This is the case else we wouldn't spend our time and money dreaming up ju ju to put in our speakers and fancy measurements to help us design them.
But the best speaker designers (and I mean the BEST) still don't really know how they manage to make speakers which outperform all others in DBLTs (ie the exceptional ones) ... if they are being honest.
Of course we will claim its because of all the new ju ju that we have put in. 😊
I use KEF as an example cos I know the people involved. Why don't the later "Eggs" do as well as KHT 2005 in DBLTs? Why is LS50 so good in DBLTs when some of its measurements are blah?
These are just the opinions of the people who designed the stuff so can't be as correct as diyAudio experts 😊
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Maybe you got confused by this labelling KHT2005.2 HTS2001 satellite SP3375 (I'm considering buying).
Re: DBLT, I can't do them but I found the L/R speakers can be nearly directly compared, on 2ch music, by playing twice in succession quickly swapping channel inputs before the amp. (1ch music of course no need to swap.) If both times the same speaker half-soundstage sounded better than the other speaker half-soundstage, it is the winner. I have used this method for tweaking XO series vs parallel etc.
(No it isn't DBLT and doesn't eliminate potential bias.)
(No it isn't DBLT and doesn't eliminate potential bias.)
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p.s. I think witch doctors have trade secrets they won't admit to having. My college prof Les Valiant (later Turing recipient) wrote a learning-algorithm book titled Probabilistically Approximately Correct.
I'm working on trying to figure out imaging and depth perception for audio (audio-lensing thread).
p.p.s. Even if data don't lie, their interpretation, prioritization, and causal explanation often do lie.
I'm working on trying to figure out imaging and depth perception for audio (audio-lensing thread).
p.p.s. Even if data don't lie, their interpretation, prioritization, and causal explanation often do lie.
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Me neither. Not major loudspeaker manufacturers at any rate. They might chuck the latest buzz-word out to justify this years' refreshed model range, which realistically speaking is rarely very different from pevious types, or chuck a few extras in there that were derived more with an eye to advertising than anything else, but within the constraints of budget, styling & marketing, the basic performance is cold hard engineering.
I sometimes think waterfall plots get mentioned so often by those involved with KEF because they popularised them. 😉 Last I checked, most are just a different way of displaying the same data as in an FR plot. Which can be useful as a visual aid, but they're not all that profound either & far too much often gets made of them.
That's simply not true in my experience. Most decent designers can look at two sets of measurements & speaker configurations & identify differences & characteristics, and from those pick which should suit a given set of conditions / requirements over the other. The question is mostly whether the available data is comprehensive enough.
I don't think it's a matter of choice. A designer / engineer almost certainly has a theory that guides their design choices. But then reality may or may not align with what they thought they knew.
A couple of possible examples come to mind:
Cleaner, lower distortion speakers being less preferred than more coloured speaker models. It seems like the same old story as with amplifiers. My experimental theory on this, is that other types of distortion, such as amplitude modulation, may become unmasked if HD is "too low". Here masking is not some kind of psychological cop-out. If one takes the trouble to draw sine waves on engineering paper to figure out what's going, by adding a steady-state wave on top of a modulated wave with the same centre frequency, the actual min vs max ratio of AM distortion goes down.
Similarly, I noticed a trend among "measurers", that equipment tends to be subjected to steady-state waves over a period of many seconds. Essentially this gets the system to oscillate, and asymmetry is reduced to an unrealistic minimum.
I think there are many of these "garden paths". I for one have lots of theories. But I notice some people try to eschew too much 'thinking' and instead focus on gathering data on subjective impressions.
I can tell you that each time I hear or read that a speaker has coloration, or my absolute favorite, "character", I know I will hate that speaker.
I will usually answer with, to me, they sound ear scratching or fatiguing.
Old school is all about "character", "details" comes from a few dBs rise in the high-mids and some distortion. Which leads to ear fatigue ... but I guess some people get used to it.
I'm happy to see that the old school companies, and their dedicated reviewers, are starting to get pointed out for what they are. Charging premium on less than stellar performance, and reviews based on "reputation" instead of actual performance. And when it is less than stellar, they use superlatives to describe the sound. That's when I know it is a load of manure.
Reviewers like Erin Hardisson, for example, that combines subjective and data backed reviews, who doesn't hesitate to point out flaws, even when they threaten to sue him. He favors a balanced sound, with minimal distortion, and I have to agree with that.
But audio is very personal, and traditions are hard to break.
I like old school music, prog rock, etc ... but I want the best sound to listen to that. A balanced sound, low distortion, and absolutely, no "character"
Personally, I aim to reproduce live music front-row sound perspective (somewhat close to conductor's or minimalist-mic'ed), what I call "audiophile-purist", based on my listening experience. I think I have succeeded a few times since taking up diy during Covid (e.g. thread msg#16, also LX micor55, Ultrae, hifibird fullrange-head-in-vise). But there are at least several dichotomies of opinion on what are important or relatively unimportant in audio/diyaudio so (almost) no two people will agree on everything much less agree with me. Same is true in other fields haha.
(below translated)
What is Sound Quality (SQ)? Perfect reproduction doesn't (or at least didn't) exist, so a vocabulary of descriptive or evaluative words and phrases came about, each narrowing on a different aspect of sound quality, the distinction often nuanced and subtle. Here was my attempt at organizing and differentiating many of these "magazine" terms (glossary originally bilingual, see thread msg#51) -- sometimes labelled "audiophile" or "subjective" (as opposed to quantitatively measured/measurable by some nonhuman/nonbiological scientific instrument).
clarity: transparency, openness/unveiled-highs, no resonant boxy-sound/fuzzy-notes, black-background/no-extraneous-sound
transcient response: fast, pluck/punch, unsmeared
dynamics: microdynamics linearity/articulation (soft-loud-slow-fast-variations), macrodynamics uncompressed-range
sound: resolving power, fullness, texture
frequency-response: balanced, flat, wide-directionality (not beaming)
integration: seamless/consistency, organic/natural
midrange: smoothness/fineness/ungrained, sweetness/rounded (not hard-edged), density/weight (not thin)
high: detailed, evenness, accurate voice/instrument tonality, air
low-end: extension/depth, power/enveloping-robustness, lively bounce, supple fullness (not dry)
soundstage: pin-point localization, realistic imaging, solidity/stability, width-depth, sense of space
presentation: palpable realism, audiophile/surrounded-on-stage, purist/front-row-audience
musicality: passionate/spontaneous live-performance (not practice), cross-dialogue among musicians/parts, emotionally moving
How well does your system score across all of these dimensions?
(below translated)
What is Sound Quality (SQ)? Perfect reproduction doesn't (or at least didn't) exist, so a vocabulary of descriptive or evaluative words and phrases came about, each narrowing on a different aspect of sound quality, the distinction often nuanced and subtle. Here was my attempt at organizing and differentiating many of these "magazine" terms (glossary originally bilingual, see thread msg#51) -- sometimes labelled "audiophile" or "subjective" (as opposed to quantitatively measured/measurable by some nonhuman/nonbiological scientific instrument).
clarity: transparency, openness/unveiled-highs, no resonant boxy-sound/fuzzy-notes, black-background/no-extraneous-sound
transcient response: fast, pluck/punch, unsmeared
dynamics: microdynamics linearity/articulation (soft-loud-slow-fast-variations), macrodynamics uncompressed-range
sound: resolving power, fullness, texture
frequency-response: balanced, flat, wide-directionality (not beaming)
integration: seamless/consistency, organic/natural
midrange: smoothness/fineness/ungrained, sweetness/rounded (not hard-edged), density/weight (not thin)
high: detailed, evenness, accurate voice/instrument tonality, air
low-end: extension/depth, power/enveloping-robustness, lively bounce, supple fullness (not dry)
soundstage: pin-point localization, realistic imaging, solidity/stability, width-depth, sense of space
presentation: palpable realism, audiophile/surrounded-on-stage, purist/front-row-audience
musicality: passionate/spontaneous live-performance (not practice), cross-dialogue among musicians/parts, emotionally moving
How well does your system score across all of these dimensions?
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