A head with two ears and a brain is not a measurement microphone.
ergo all measurements are pointless.
QED
Spend enough money and within a given power band a tube amps can be nearly as accurate as say..... a top line off the shelf receiver at Best Buy. 😀
LOL. What a way to drop a bomb in the middle of a post. Completely untrue, of course, but a totally different subject. 😉
Excellent post, Tom ... that bolded point is key to what I aim to achieve, the "are to a degree" factor is reduced and reduced, until it effectively becomes zero. People will dispute that this is possible ... but there is at least a section of the populace for whom it does 'work', 🙂.When using the cocktail party effect (listening in on a conversation across the room in a noise place) we only hear the snips of words and we understand, we do not hear much about the noise. It is the same listening to loudspeakers, we seek the good and are to a degree unaware of the bad.
And of course, it involves more than the speakers ... 😀
I love vinyl. Subjectively, the double wides here look more like houses now than they did in the 70s.
1986 just called Dave. They want their dogma back. 😛
Anyway, what's all that got to do with loudspeaker technology?
1878 just called Pano, Thomas Edison wants his phonograph dogma back 😛
Yes , caught the Irony too huh ... 🙂
Glad to see you had no argument or opinion on the links I provided. You asked and I gave you the answer.
Been there done that , if you have bad analog then you have bad analog , my digititis friends say i have bad digital after hearing the analog vs digital ..🙂
Frankly speaking i favor none , i have all formats at my disposal and even those biased as you towards digital have said they prefer the sound of analog after being exposed to it again , they just not going back , no software ..🙂
Well that settles it then. All that listened to YOUR vinyl system were converted.🙄 case closed.
You might have been better to invoke Emile Berliner, but whatever. The Edison company did make some fine recordings, top of the line at the time. Not perfect, but very enjoyable.1878 just called Pano, Thomas Edison wants his phonograph dogma back

Surprised to see you say that. What leads you to this surprising insight? My statement that ears and mics are different? Not sure I can follow the logic.ergo all measurements are pointless.
DSP and Mix n Match, primitive.
At the moment I guess my ultimate universal speaker system would probably use some impressive DSP technology with very high bit rate, with wide bits (maybe 32 bit or more and code tests to reduce digital artifacts), to compensate for room effects and some moving coil driver behavior. Electrostatic quality highs and mids with a constant directive horns dispersion, and a good sealed bass driver.
I saw some deceptively ordinary looking speakers, at the Hamburg HiFi show, Particularly the smallest they had with the tweeter from the biggest with the subwoofer sounded very impressive to me.
On hearing the speakers without DSP they sounded more real than most speakers at the show, I suspect they optimized the speakers, to reduce the need for DSP, and used the measurements to optimize the design considerably. With the DSP the stereo imaging approached that of an Electrostatic speaker, but had a much wider sweet spot. The sound suffered a little from compression to my ears without DSP. I suspected something was added in digital artifacts that was not positive, but I would have bought them if the price and lack of open source software did not matter to me.
They used some form of in room measurements to set it up, but since it was a HiFI demo, and I said I used Linux (which they don't support), they knew they would not make a sale.
Im sure such DSP technology will be common one day.
At the moment I guess my ultimate universal speaker system would probably use some impressive DSP technology with very high bit rate, with wide bits (maybe 32 bit or more and code tests to reduce digital artifacts), to compensate for room effects and some moving coil driver behavior. Electrostatic quality highs and mids with a constant directive horns dispersion, and a good sealed bass driver.
I saw some deceptively ordinary looking speakers, at the Hamburg HiFi show, Particularly the smallest they had with the tweeter from the biggest with the subwoofer sounded very impressive to me.
On hearing the speakers without DSP they sounded more real than most speakers at the show, I suspect they optimized the speakers, to reduce the need for DSP, and used the measurements to optimize the design considerably. With the DSP the stereo imaging approached that of an Electrostatic speaker, but had a much wider sweet spot. The sound suffered a little from compression to my ears without DSP. I suspected something was added in digital artifacts that was not positive, but I would have bought them if the price and lack of open source software did not matter to me.
They used some form of in room measurements to set it up, but since it was a HiFI demo, and I said I used Linux (which they don't support), they knew they would not make a sale.
Im sure such DSP technology will be common one day.
Well that settles it then. All that listened to YOUR vinyl system were converted.🙄 case closed.
Yes, your point ... 🙄
The high HP DSP solution has already been done - Lexicon MP-20 processor - very impressive according to people who've heard it, but it's bit the dust - the ol' 'unobtanium' problem ...
The high HP DSP solution has already been done - Lexicon MP-20 processor - very impressive according to people who've heard it, but it's bit the dust - the ol' 'unobtanium' problem ...
I would not be surprised, high power embedded chips are getting cheaper and easier to code for.
Did a quick Google search and does not sound open source, but I expect with so many channels it does act as a DSP based cross over.
The 'killer' function is that it digests the source material, and separates out the strands to a fair degree. Say, jazz recording, 4 instruments, 4 speakers in front of you, pump out one instrument per speaker ...
Yes, your point ... 🙄
I see that sarcasm is lost on you. Enjoy your pops and ticks.
snip
On hearing the speakers without DSP they sounded more real than most speakers at the show, I suspect they optimized the speakers, to reduce the need for DSP, and used the measurements to optimize the design considerably. With the DSP the stereo imaging approached that of an Electrostatic speaker, but had a much wider sweet spot. snip
Some little speakers have so many twists and turns in their complicated crossovers (based on lots of testing) that they approach a DSP'ed system in their subtlety.
Ben
Regarding Tom Danley's very productive post, it helpful to think of hearing like perception psychologists (starting with Helmholtz) do. Your eyes and ears take in a great mess of "cues" and process them with remarkably crude sensors and then your brain makes a best posit (Helmholtz' term was "unconscious inference") about what is being seen or heard.
Some cues have greater importance and/or are typically given greater precedence by the brain than others. For sure, a moment of thought will help anybody see that there are conflicting location cues when you listen to speakers in a room* (and conflicting cues are often present, speakers or not). So the brain always has to construct the percept in an effort to create a coherent image, discarding some cues.
The cues brains favor and rely on the most aren't necessarily the ones that fit neatest into engineering-speak... or make the cutest pictures, like comb filtering.
Ben
*not to mention what happens if you are listening with your eyes open
Some cues have greater importance and/or are typically given greater precedence by the brain than others. For sure, a moment of thought will help anybody see that there are conflicting location cues when you listen to speakers in a room* (and conflicting cues are often present, speakers or not). So the brain always has to construct the percept in an effort to create a coherent image, discarding some cues.
The cues brains favor and rely on the most aren't necessarily the ones that fit neatest into engineering-speak... or make the cutest pictures, like comb filtering.
Ben
*not to mention what happens if you are listening with your eyes open
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