If John W got over himself what would He be? This is about what's wrong with "HAS." Anything else you want to complain to God about John W?
WHAT precisely do you find interesting about that article, Dave? 🙂
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, 'audiophiles', only IT will break the sound barrier ? The Register
We sure do find a lot of reflex standmount Monkey Coffins with poor crossovers available. People fiddle with low and shallow crossovers a lot too. Seems like there is no plan really.
Manger speakers, for all their good impulse response, are an odd thing though. like the Zerobox 103:
Manger MSW
I find them very odd to listen to. 😕
I think Roy Allison was on the right lines with his lovely Allison IC20 speaker which goes flush against the wall. A lot of thought went into that. All about including the room acoustics. 😎
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, 'audiophiles', only IT will break the sound barrier ? The Register
We sure do find a lot of reflex standmount Monkey Coffins with poor crossovers available. People fiddle with low and shallow crossovers a lot too. Seems like there is no plan really.
Manger speakers, for all their good impulse response, are an odd thing though. like the Zerobox 103:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Manger MSW
I find them very odd to listen to. 😕
I think Roy Allison was on the right lines with his lovely Allison IC20 speaker which goes flush against the wall. A lot of thought went into that. All about including the room acoustics. 😎
Attachments
nihil novi sub sole
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/105136-putting-science-back-into-loudspeakers.html
"I am a voice shouting in the wilderness"
well, nothing is going to change, never ever, because while "The Great Way is very level" indeed "people greatly delight in tortuous paths"
so if You want to make money You have to let them torture themselves, because this is precisely what they are willing to pay for
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/105136-putting-science-back-into-loudspeakers.html
"I am a voice shouting in the wilderness"
well, nothing is going to change, never ever, because while "The Great Way is very level" indeed "people greatly delight in tortuous paths"
so if You want to make money You have to let them torture themselves, because this is precisely what they are willing to pay for
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Well done, graaf for bringing this topic back into relevance. I'm not crying though. It's interesting. 🙂
What John Watkinson is talking about is the old fashioned virtues of high bandwidth and high signal to noise ratio, which is what High Fidelity always used to be about. There's no escaping it, if you understand Claude Shannon's information theory. Because what your ear is evolved to do is pick up clues about the environment from sound.
Peter Walker of Quad, way back 50 years, always agreed with some others that High Fidelity is about Dynamic Range and low distortion.
Seems to me that a lot of our designs actually blow smoke rings, and Vifa XT25 ring radiator, I'm looking at you here, and it might even be a good approach:
Here's the odd thing that I have discovered about time aligned or, even better, linear phase designs. They don't have flat frequency response:
So a lot of our goals in speaker design are actually mutually exclusive. You can't have flat frequency response, flat power response, and good spatial dispersion and good impulse response at the same time. And perhaps even distortion. So we end up in this endless cycle of the current design is better in some ways and worse in others. And never agree about anything. 😕
I mean, admit it, whatever camp of speaker building you are in, folks, there's something wrong with your speakers! 😱
Headphones might come close to an ideal sort of sound, but speakers are always variously broken. But we can agree the signal needs to be as good as you can make it. And the components in the chain need to be low distortion. 😎
What John Watkinson is talking about is the old fashioned virtues of high bandwidth and high signal to noise ratio, which is what High Fidelity always used to be about. There's no escaping it, if you understand Claude Shannon's information theory. Because what your ear is evolved to do is pick up clues about the environment from sound.
Peter Walker of Quad, way back 50 years, always agreed with some others that High Fidelity is about Dynamic Range and low distortion.
Seems to me that a lot of our designs actually blow smoke rings, and Vifa XT25 ring radiator, I'm looking at you here, and it might even be a good approach:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Here's the odd thing that I have discovered about time aligned or, even better, linear phase designs. They don't have flat frequency response:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
So a lot of our goals in speaker design are actually mutually exclusive. You can't have flat frequency response, flat power response, and good spatial dispersion and good impulse response at the same time. And perhaps even distortion. So we end up in this endless cycle of the current design is better in some ways and worse in others. And never agree about anything. 😕
I mean, admit it, whatever camp of speaker building you are in, folks, there's something wrong with your speakers! 😱
Headphones might come close to an ideal sort of sound, but speakers are always variously broken. But we can agree the signal needs to be as good as you can make it. And the components in the chain need to be low distortion. 😎
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well, not necessarily BUT on two conditions that is that we realistically aim at flat/good enough (psychoacoustically) and we do not force the loudspeaker as an electroacoustical device to do all the job which means that we accept line level active filtering - actually it's something that JW advocates for many years
yes, as far as what is being offered now on the market is concerned it's generally true, more or less
well, "low distortion" sounds simple, unfortunately it only sounds simple
we should aim rather at less audible, consonant distortions
Once I was in Poland, and while tried to figure out what people talk there. It turned out impossible. For example, take a 9 letter word in which has 7 consonants. Try to pronounce that ! Thats quite a bit of consonant distortion 😛
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which seems to be an attractive idea if you don't actually think too hard
it is however simply impossible - do the IMD math
it is however simply impossible - do the IMD math
"consonant distortion" is impossible for anything less complex than a psychoacoustic codec
the type of nonlinear distortion we tolerate at all are in our electronics, loudspeakers is from smooth nonlinearities which have low order Taylor Series expansions
that means terms of x^n - with single tone sines you do get simple n th order harmonics that when small enough are mostly masked, or give slight change in timbre - could be considered "consonant"
but when you put complex multitone signals like chords into such functions you get sum and difference frequencies - that are not "consonant", not harmonically related
the type of nonlinear distortion we tolerate at all are in our electronics, loudspeakers is from smooth nonlinearities which have low order Taylor Series expansions
that means terms of x^n - with single tone sines you do get simple n th order harmonics that when small enough are mostly masked, or give slight change in timbre - could be considered "consonant"
but when you put complex multitone signals like chords into such functions you get sum and difference frequencies - that are not "consonant", not harmonically related
One thing that is quite funny is that JW now thinks that improvement will come from the IT geeks. I remember him saying that they didn't use DSP at Celtic Audio in order to reach transient-improved behaviour due to the fact that DSP is very restricted in terms of frequency extension.
Regards
Charles
Regards
Charles
well, perhaps it is no more that restricted? the progress is steady and rather fast
Actually that is usually true, it is not always true, one CAN make a loudspeaker system that appears to be a single crossover less driver that preserves the input wave shape over a broad band without DSP and using a high order passive crossover.
To do this, alone needs to do is have the drivers close enough together (less than ¼ wl at the highest frequency they interact) such that they add coherently into one new source and not radiate as independent sources (like happens when the driver spacing is greater than about 1/3 or ½ wl). Then, you need a crossover topology which sums with flat phase / GD, without the “all pass” phase shift and GD normal for conventional crossovers over first order. A side benefit of the coherent addition from the close spacing is that if one goes on to correct with DSP, one is correcting the entire output, not just in one location like with spaced sources in “regular” speakers.
While larger and much more headroom than needed in a living room, here is one example, an SH-50.
One set of curves shows my old passive SH-50 in my living room and the other set when one corrects what’s left with DSP (first try).
Once one has the “rules”, then one can even build a very large system that does this.
Best,
Tom
Attachments
You're right Tom. A coaxial speaker has some strengths. It doesn't produce lobing that reveals its two way nature. It still adds information about its filter though. And I think its going to have limited dispersion. I'm not sure if it's actually disimilar to a Manger transducer:
There are limits on what you can do in loudspeakering. Does anybody accept that there are tradeoffs deep in the very physics of a two way or a full ranger? Or a horn design? Yes or No?
Let's suppose you apply the very best digitally filtered, impulse corrected signal to a loudspeaker, or even to individual drivers in a multiway design. You can do this with enough computing power, and enough resolution. It can even be done with analog tape recorders with a bit of cleverness and a willingness to play the music backwards.
Is it going to be perfect, a perfect window on the sound? Or are you going to hear every single transducer and amplifier and filter in the chain?
You are really playing with the poles and zeroes of the transfer function. In the real causal world, the poles are on the left, and the zeroes on the right.
You see, the original recording might sound like the simplest twin microphones in the Concert Hall in some sort of ideal world. But what you will get in your living room is the added information about every other item in the playback chain. You see every item is adding it's own poles and zeroes. Even the room itself!
And its even and odd harmonics and information destroying distortion, and additional thermal noise and spatial response pattern. Not hard too see, is it?
So what I'm saying, is we are trying to design a speaker that doesn't add information about itself. That doesn't say "Here I am!". Now THAT is interesting. 🙂
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
There are limits on what you can do in loudspeakering. Does anybody accept that there are tradeoffs deep in the very physics of a two way or a full ranger? Or a horn design? Yes or No?
Let's suppose you apply the very best digitally filtered, impulse corrected signal to a loudspeaker, or even to individual drivers in a multiway design. You can do this with enough computing power, and enough resolution. It can even be done with analog tape recorders with a bit of cleverness and a willingness to play the music backwards.
Is it going to be perfect, a perfect window on the sound? Or are you going to hear every single transducer and amplifier and filter in the chain?
You are really playing with the poles and zeroes of the transfer function. In the real causal world, the poles are on the left, and the zeroes on the right.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
You see, the original recording might sound like the simplest twin microphones in the Concert Hall in some sort of ideal world. But what you will get in your living room is the added information about every other item in the playback chain. You see every item is adding it's own poles and zeroes. Even the room itself!
And its even and odd harmonics and information destroying distortion, and additional thermal noise and spatial response pattern. Not hard too see, is it?
So what I'm saying, is we are trying to design a speaker that doesn't add information about itself. That doesn't say "Here I am!". Now THAT is interesting. 🙂
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