So Peter,
Car A looks more sporty, and the performance stats say it's better.
Car B wins hands down after a test drive.
You still gonna buy Car A when your objective is driving pleasure, Peter?
Random musings on the topic of DDR from the peanut gallery (someone who really doesn't care, anyway);
I think most (if not all) of the experts are in agreement that frequency response is the main factor in what we hear, the aspect that contains the most weight.
I'm not sure what the experts think of the following but I believe dispersion pattern and distortion are a distant second and third (where they place is how good or bad they are in their performance).
Most other factors may play some role but at a level way below the first three.
So, looking at frequency response, it's easy to get superb imaging and mind blowing detail out of just about any driver. All you need to do is have some peaks in the (roughly) 2 - 8 khz range of frequencies. This was extremely evident in my 3 or so year experimentation phase with the shrill XX6 Fostex series drivers. Close your eyes and you could "see" the singer swaying back and forth in front of the mic, hear her breath (even when standing away from the mic and not singing) place all the instruments (including individual drums) in the soundstage.
This is stuff you would not hear even if you were in the same room with the band. Why? Because the XX6 series Fostex drivers have some wild frequency response curves with big peaks in the 2 - 8 khz frequency range.
It almost literally sounds like the whispers of angels, you can almost feel their soft breath on your ear. When set up to benefit from these characteristics.
And there's your DDR. Want to hear a mouse run across the stage while the band is thrashing full tilt? Boost the 2 - 8 khz range 18 db and any driver will do it. But the drivers that do it naturally (Fostex, Feastrex, Lowther) do it because they don't have flat frequency response - they have wild spiky response with holes in response and big peaks where the ears are most sensitive. Is this really a mystery? Do we have to give it a new name and claim we haven't learned how to measure it?
Moving on to dispersion pattern - fullrange drivers have a kind of decent dispersion pattern as long as you point the speakers in your general direction, put the drivers at ear height and sit fairly nearfield. In other words they will sound ok as long as you do whatever you can to mask their natural dispersion pattern, and that's almost universally how they are used. When used like that there's no glaring problem from a dispersion point of view so no points off in that category for the "head in a vice" "audiophile" as everything possible has been done to take beaming and the room out of the equation.
THD - it's a spec that doesn't indicate the frequency or nature of the distortion issue. As such it doesn't give a lot of info but it's not irrelevant by any means. Try pushing the driver to 100 percent THD and tell me it's irrelevant. If you want the frequency and nature of the distortion it's easy enough to measure - you can find out what type of distortion is present, how loud it is compared to the original signal and how different frequencies are affected. This is nowhere near meaningless, it is full of meaning. Even order distortion may sound pleasant, fuller, louder than a clean signal while odd order is obnoxious. But since the "head in a vice" "audiophile" is usually doing critical listening (nearfield straining to hear her wistful sigh in that oh so emotional verse) and usually at only 60 - 70 db, distortion isn't a really huge issue either.
Now let's consider usage. Use the fullrange speakers in a more normal venue, a larger room or outside. Get your head out of the vice and walk around a bit. Turn it up to 90 or 100 db like regular people do on occasion.
What happens to that fantastic DDR in that situation? It sounds more like a shrieking demon ramming rusty dental tools into your inner ear. And off axis there's no real high frequencies. The bass is weak and struggling (unless the driver is in a large horn in which case it manages to sound bloated and weak at the same time) and it's just generally a bad time all around.
Driver mods are a whole other topic. Anything you can do to flatten in room frequency response will be an improvement but it usually takes awhile to adjust, as flattening the frequency response will decrease the "magic".
Painting little dots on the cone isn't going to do much aside from add a couple of grams to the Mms. That will have a small (but measurable) impact on frequency response, no effect on dispersion and basically no effect on distortion.
There is science here and it's pretty basic. You can plug your ears and disregard the experts or you can make up new words and acronyms and claim we don't know how to measure stuff. But it's really covered quite well in the bottom level basics of acoustics study. It can all be measured and it's not magic.
And let's not forget that a large majority of people advocating the special modifications are 50+ years old (with all that implies wrt natural hearing ability), some with admitted raging tinnitus and other assorted hearing damage issues. Are these really the people that are going to be the authority on low level detail? Or should we maybe trust the experts who have a proven track record in acoustics and psychoacoustics and employ vast numbers of participants in double blind testing and real scientific investigation? I wonder what Toole would say about the dots - I don't think he likes fullrange speakers in general and for pretty good reason. And we've got people like John Kreskovsky (with more acoustic education than most of the forum put together) who have a much more balanced view of what painting dots on speakers actually does.
I think most (if not all) of the experts are in agreement that frequency response is the main factor in what we hear, the aspect that contains the most weight.
I'm not sure what the experts think of the following but I believe dispersion pattern and distortion are a distant second and third (where they place is how good or bad they are in their performance).
Most other factors may play some role but at a level way below the first three.
So, looking at frequency response, it's easy to get superb imaging and mind blowing detail out of just about any driver. All you need to do is have some peaks in the (roughly) 2 - 8 khz range of frequencies. This was extremely evident in my 3 or so year experimentation phase with the shrill XX6 Fostex series drivers. Close your eyes and you could "see" the singer swaying back and forth in front of the mic, hear her breath (even when standing away from the mic and not singing) place all the instruments (including individual drums) in the soundstage.
This is stuff you would not hear even if you were in the same room with the band. Why? Because the XX6 series Fostex drivers have some wild frequency response curves with big peaks in the 2 - 8 khz frequency range.
It almost literally sounds like the whispers of angels, you can almost feel their soft breath on your ear. When set up to benefit from these characteristics.
And there's your DDR. Want to hear a mouse run across the stage while the band is thrashing full tilt? Boost the 2 - 8 khz range 18 db and any driver will do it. But the drivers that do it naturally (Fostex, Feastrex, Lowther) do it because they don't have flat frequency response - they have wild spiky response with holes in response and big peaks where the ears are most sensitive. Is this really a mystery? Do we have to give it a new name and claim we haven't learned how to measure it?
Moving on to dispersion pattern - fullrange drivers have a kind of decent dispersion pattern as long as you point the speakers in your general direction, put the drivers at ear height and sit fairly nearfield. In other words they will sound ok as long as you do whatever you can to mask their natural dispersion pattern, and that's almost universally how they are used. When used like that there's no glaring problem from a dispersion point of view so no points off in that category for the "head in a vice" "audiophile" as everything possible has been done to take beaming and the room out of the equation.
THD - it's a spec that doesn't indicate the frequency or nature of the distortion issue. As such it doesn't give a lot of info but it's not irrelevant by any means. Try pushing the driver to 100 percent THD and tell me it's irrelevant. If you want the frequency and nature of the distortion it's easy enough to measure - you can find out what type of distortion is present, how loud it is compared to the original signal and how different frequencies are affected. This is nowhere near meaningless, it is full of meaning. Even order distortion may sound pleasant, fuller, louder than a clean signal while odd order is obnoxious. But since the "head in a vice" "audiophile" is usually doing critical listening (nearfield straining to hear her wistful sigh in that oh so emotional verse) and usually at only 60 - 70 db, distortion isn't a really huge issue either.
Now let's consider usage. Use the fullrange speakers in a more normal venue, a larger room or outside. Get your head out of the vice and walk around a bit. Turn it up to 90 or 100 db like regular people do on occasion.
What happens to that fantastic DDR in that situation? It sounds more like a shrieking demon ramming rusty dental tools into your inner ear. And off axis there's no real high frequencies. The bass is weak and struggling (unless the driver is in a large horn in which case it manages to sound bloated and weak at the same time) and it's just generally a bad time all around.
Driver mods are a whole other topic. Anything you can do to flatten in room frequency response will be an improvement but it usually takes awhile to adjust, as flattening the frequency response will decrease the "magic".
Painting little dots on the cone isn't going to do much aside from add a couple of grams to the Mms. That will have a small (but measurable) impact on frequency response, no effect on dispersion and basically no effect on distortion.
There is science here and it's pretty basic. You can plug your ears and disregard the experts or you can make up new words and acronyms and claim we don't know how to measure stuff. But it's really covered quite well in the bottom level basics of acoustics study. It can all be measured and it's not magic.
And let's not forget that a large majority of people advocating the special modifications are 50+ years old (with all that implies wrt natural hearing ability), some with admitted raging tinnitus and other assorted hearing damage issues. Are these really the people that are going to be the authority on low level detail? Or should we maybe trust the experts who have a proven track record in acoustics and psychoacoustics and employ vast numbers of participants in double blind testing and real scientific investigation? I wonder what Toole would say about the dots - I don't think he likes fullrange speakers in general and for pretty good reason. And we've got people like John Kreskovsky (with more acoustic education than most of the forum put together) who have a much more balanced view of what painting dots on speakers actually does.
Last edited:
Toole's research suggests that off-axis response and its relation to the on-axis response is more important than the on-axis response.
And while i will be 1st to aggree that distortion (in the sense that we want the output to be as close to the input as possible) is very important (speakers in general are bad at this) the only scientific study that i know of that looked at distortion (Geddes) concluded that the metric we currently use to quantify it is useless.
Neither of these, as far as i know, have been verified by independent studies -- needed to make them truly scientific results.
I have had extensive experience with the FE126 in particular. You really think these image well? Says a lot about differences in what we think of as an image.
Now the FE127e has similar resonance issues to the FE126e. We have treated both of these, 1st to help quell the response issues, and then EnABL on top of that. Look at this graph (granted it is limited by 3 different measurement environs -- althou the Mark Audio & the factory will be quite similar. We do know that the factory data is heavily smoothed.
The flatter treated FE127eN images considerably better than the stock unit. That suggests that you supposition is not very valid.
Is your FR experience only stock FExx6?
Come to diyFEST and listen. Lots of FRs, most of the listening is outside, and with 4-10 people listening at the same time you are rarely in the sweet spot.
That is a contradiction of what DDR is… fantastic DDR is about how well a device does at preserving and passing along very low level information.
Indicates to me somewhat limited experience.
Measurements show closer to a couple tenths of a gram. Not enuff to significantly move T/S measures. Certainly less than the production tolerances.
Nothing you have said is in anyway scientific (there is actually very little scientific results when it comes to hifi).
Which you seem to have done at least a couple times in this post.
Now some HF roll-off is expected as we age (at least in one of the 2 hearing mechanisms we have), it does not mean that the ability to distinguish nuance goes away. And as far as that hearing loss goes what are we talking about? 1 octave out of 10 with little information in it.
You don't seem to be, given your comment above about FR & distortion. There are many experts that would laugh at you.
dave
First of most Mics aren't flat and there off axis response is usually even less flat. (Unless you have a expensive test mic (B&K). Secondly in an average room at about 6to 10 feet the reverberant sound is as loud as the direct so the room contributes have the sound. Unless you do this test with a proper mic and anachoic room. Good luck hearing the speakers.
Cbdb,
My UMIK-1 has been calibrated by third party and has off axis calibrations as well as on axis. That's why there had been a discussion of using convolver to account for mic response. If you place mic about 0.5m away - at 85dB the majority of the sound is direct and reflected is minimized. I also plan to use a sound absorber screen to make a mini recording booth behind the mic. You definitely hear the speaker. I don't know if you have listened to my sound clips in previous threads but the impact of the room is not huge. You still hear the speaker.
My UMIK-1 has been calibrated by third party and has off axis calibrations as well as on axis. That's why there had been a discussion of using convolver to account for mic response. If you place mic about 0.5m away - at 85dB the majority of the sound is direct and reflected is minimized. I also plan to use a sound absorber screen to make a mini recording booth behind the mic. You definitely hear the speaker. I don't know if you have listened to my sound clips in previous threads but the impact of the room is not huge. You still hear the speaker.
Did you even read the book? I find it amusing the amount of confirmation bias going on in audio discussions. People pick and choose what they want to hear and that's all they talk about.
Granted, Toole didn't talk about this a lot. Why? Because it's the absolute basic fundamentals that everyone should know and the book was mainly about more advanced concepts.
But if you look close you will find little gems like this.
"Frequency response is the single most important aspect of the performance of any audio device. If it is wrong, nothing else matters.
...
It is interesting to consider that for as long as anyone in audio can remember, all electronic devices had basically flat frequency responses. No manufacturer of an amplifying device, a storage device, or a music or film distribution medium would even momentarily consider a frequency response specification that was far from what could be drawn with a ruler from some very low frequency to some very high frequency. Yet, when we come to loudspeakers, it is as though we threw away the rule book and suddenly tolerances of +/- 3 db or more are considered acceptable."
Page 372, Chapter 18, section 18.2
He does go on to talk about off axis being important too (as that is one of the most important and not as widely known subjects that this book is about), but let that first quoted sentence sink in for a bit. I could pick out some other quotes that say basically the same thing but don't want to get too wordy here.
While we're at it, let's look at what the book REALLY says.
Toole spends the first half of the book constantly talking about large performance spaces, concert halls, churches, etc, and specifically mentions a primary goal of an entertainment audio system being to reproduce the principle perceptual variables (direct quote, page 33) of those spaces in a domestic (or car) environment.
These variables include direction (localization), distance, timbre, and spaciousness (the two components being apparent source width and listener envelopment).
Interesting to note is that Toole specifically does not care for pinpoint imaging, he much prefers spaciousness, saying this:
"Perhaps because they lack other pleasures of live performances, many audiophiles have come to think that pinpoint localizations are a measure of excellence, so there are opposite points of view. It is a perspective also cultivated by the bulk of popular recordings, many of which are uncomplicated, left, right and center."
The tools he advocates to accomplish these goals of accurately reproducing the principle perceived variables are multi channel systems (at least 5 channels with the center channel being very important) comprised of multi-way speakers with flat frequency response and consistent off axis dispersion (definitely not fullrange drivers as they usually fail pretty miserably in those categories). Controlled reflections and minimal absorption, and most certainly no absorption at the first reflection points as that screws up the IACC (inter aural cross correlation) and timbre of reflections (it absorbs the high frequencies and leaves the low frequencies intact, greatly disrupting the frequency response of the reflection).
He goes on to say that wires and electrical components mostly sound the same unless specifically designed to sound different.
If you actually read the book he argues pretty convincingly that multi channel systems with multi way speakers are much better than full range, for the most part the electronics and cables don't matter, and that audiophiles don't really know what they are doing and prefer a specific sound that is not preferred by the rest of the world.
Would you like to discuss Toole some more? I've got the book right here, I've read it and I know exactly what his points of view are. He doesn't talk about DDR and PRAT and other mysterious acronyms for things that can't be measured. Instead he gives load of references to studies and scientific information to show that just about everything CAN be measured and quantified with the current vocabulary, no need to make up new terms or insinuate that we aren't quite smart enough yet to quantify certain things.
Are you referring to THD expressed as a single number? That is pretty vague, but if that's the "metric we currently use" perhaps we should be looking at the readily available distortion measurements that show frequency vs several types of distortion. This is not useless at all, if there's high levels of odd order distortion at certain frequencies you definitely shouldn't be using the driver at those frequencies. It most certainly will sound bad.
I've gone through 206, 126, 108, BOFU, A11, and the old CSS (WR125 or something? - the full range one, not the one that needed a tweeter) as well as a few others. Most of them were pretty highly regarded in this forum. While interesting they (fullrangers as a concept) were not able to hold my attention for more than a few short years.
But yes, I was able to get the 126 to image quite well. Not sure why you had a problem with it. Maybe it was bad enclosure design. Remember, I built the Frugal Horns and they turned out to be the single worst sounding speaker I've ever heard. Seriously, the midbass was so pronounced that female vocals caused my duct grates to audibly vibrate. That was a seriously terrible design. Ten db resonant spikes at 110 and 220 hz IIRC? And the proposed level 2 and level 3 (suprabaffle and horn mouth wedge or whatever you called it) did absolutely nothing to improve anything.
I'm really not interested in measurements in which I know nothing about the conditions. Not really interested in subjective opinions either, as that has led me down the wrong path too many times (like the Frugal Horn debacle).
The 206 were Decware treated (purchased cheap second hand). They basically just cut out the dustcap and added a socket for a phase plug and colored the cone black and felted the magnet and basket legs. The 126 were purchased from Chris, treated by you with the dammar (or whatever coating) colored black and with the trifoil pattern. The 108 were stock purchased cheap second hand (I believe they were once in Hornshoppe Ed's hands), never modified in any way. The Pioneers (Bofu and A11) were not treated (the Bofu was pretty spectacular when put in the box designed by Scott and paired with a cheap tweeter and a single cap crossover), the A11 just kinda sucked, and the CSS was not treated.
My favorite was the 206 and 126. Not quite favorite enough though, I got rid of it all.
That's the point - if a small group is actively listening they won't be too far from the sweet spot. Tell me how it sound way off axis at 100 db.
It absolutely is not a contradiction. If DDR is ability to discern low level information and frequency response is largely responsible for what we hear and drivers with great claimed DDR have fantastic cone breakup spikes in the 2 - 8 khz region (which is the exact reason they produce low level detail quite well), then logically those spikes in frequency response are going to HURT if you turn it up to 90 or 100 db.
I'm not really interested in your perception of me, as I'm sure you are not interested in my perception of you. It's irrelevant. Let's stick to facts here. Not subjective impressions that can't be proved. Pull out your sources, links, the Toole book, whatever you need to prove a point.
And seriously, if enabl is so earth shakingly great send out a pair to be passed around. A pair to John K, MJK, and a few notable others would have gone a long way to prove your points. Or prove it's nonsense. Send me a pair (and a control pair without dots). I'll happily sing your praises if I can hear an improvement. And send them back on my dime. Put your money where your mouth is. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
What needs to be said? How do I scientifically prove dots don't do anything but add mass? It's pretty hard to prove a negative. It should be pretty easy to prove your claims though, but all I've seen is junk science, buzzwords, catchphrases, and claims that aren't even possible. Bud's foray into the effects of cab and wall treatment on the effect of room modes don't really help your case much.
Hearing damage (especially types like tinnitus) can affect large bandwidths at different frequencies. It isn't necessarily just the 10 - 20 khz range drooping a bit. With old people all bets are off. They could be impaired at ANY octave to ANY degree.
And aside from that, please forgive me if I don't trust the completely subjective opinion of the guy that actually sells the stuff (especially after the Frugal Horn debacle).
Take a look at my synopsis of the first half of the Toole book above. Honestly, who do you think he would be laughing at?
How many examples of fullrange speakers are there sold by any of the subsidiaries of Harmon? How many of their drivers have dots painted on them? Is that because they can't paint dots on cones? I'm sure they would if they thought there was any practical benefit. Have you seen Toole or Olive or any of the others discussing DDR and how there are certain mystical qualities we can't figure out how to measure?
Do you really think I'd be the one he was laughing at?
Last edited:
on my 3rd pass thru it. Plus all the times i have gone back to look for particular snippets.
And i went to see Floyd give his talk based on the book.
Actually he did.
He did, but he also said that the off-axis was more important than the on-axis.
Speakers are crude, and just like THD +/- 3dB is what stuck. You can have some pretty different curves that fall within that range.
One of the clues that his work is a start not a finish… and until such time as an independent study verify the same points have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Which shows his biases.
Mine is also handy.
None of which are outstanding -- i can make them quite a bit better, but wouldn't want to live with themeven then (i might be able to live with FE108 after i treated them -- i should have our Aiko back soon, so i will be able to reevaluate). For those with really small SE amps the FE126/166/206 (treated) are good options -- they really do need to be used with a high output impedance amplifier. Anyway that indicates that your FR experience is limited.
Then you have not experienced REALLY good imaging.
The 1st Gen? Yes they had issues. But the initial goal of those was to give people something similar to the EdHorn, and they did (just) surpass them. And it did lead to the Frugel-Horn Mk3, which is outstanding.
The FEs are what is called "forward". Some are fine with that.
Really hard to measure a rear loaded horn that needs the room for completion that low… Ed Schilling said it best -- what do you want? Move the mic a couple inches and you get a different measure. That low you cannot remove the room.
The FH1 has been obselete for some 6 years… not worth talking about. It did what it did and it served its purpose.
My Chris? Dammar for the trifoil, puzzlekoat for the rest (and now we know too much of that). The best examples of FR drivers have come a LONG way in the decade+ since those would have been done.
That does not jive with the flatter drivers having better DDR.
Done that. It got me little traction and costs more than i can afford.
Send the money and i'll be happy to do that.
Except for HF loss my hearing is pretty good. Chris has tinnitus. Some of the "kids" have good hearing and little or no HF loss.
That is understandable. But i do it because of the passion, not because there is money in it. You do know the answer to the question "How do you make a million dollars in the audio business?"? Start with 10 million.
A lot. They just don't often have a Harmon name on them. Early eMacs are a good source for the 35mm JBLs. I know of more, but am not at liberty to talk about them.
Full Ranges certainly have compromises, but they (good ones) also have some significant advantages. If those fit your needs then they are the speakers for you.
Because the industry is incredibly conservative.
See above.
dave
Then the performance stats is false in car A
) Other than that, all people can have their opinion. In my work, I have to state drying time, curing energy and so forth. If result is not good, measure, measure and find the problem. No customer is interested to hear fairy tales.....
Peter
Since you've got the book handy find me the quote that says off axis is more important than on axis frequency response.
Think about it. Speakers are sometimes used outside and in very large rooms. Outside the off axis response doesn't have any impact at all and in large rooms it has little impact as the waves have to travel a great distance and are greatly reduced in amplitude by the time they make their way back to the listener.
The book spends a great deal of time addressing the off axis because it's less well known than the on axis. The quote I showed clearly indicates that he thinks the on axis frequency response is the single most important aspect of performance.
Not all speakers are crude. Many are very flat and have very low distortion and superb on and off axis response. It's not that hard if you pick drivers carefully and make sure they have what it takes to cruise along at the desired output levels.
On the other hand, fullrangers are pretty well known for wild erratic frequency response and bad off axis behavior, especially the more expensive brands. So I'm not sure what your point is. Even if you are right (off axis is more important than on axis) you are using the wrong type of speaker to achieve this goal.
Confirmation bias. It's ok to quote Toole on some subjects but consider him a beginner in others?
Of course he's biased. Everyone is. The difference is that he's done the research, spent the money (Harmon's money) and done the required testing to form his biases and he's fully capable of proving why his biases are correct.
By the way, this work he's done is considered science.
A few years ago a lot of the drivers I mentioned were at the top of the list of stuff you were selling (along with the XX7 series stuff). Now it's junk that you wouldn't want to live with? I quit buying fullrange stuff before MarkAudio came along but I find it hard to believe it's worlds better than the stuff you regularly sold a few years ago.
And I'm pretty sure Mark said that enabl was a bunch of bunk too in the beginning, at least until you started selling his drivers.
You haven't got a clue what I've experienced. You don't know who I am and you didn't know I bought Chris's drivers that you treated. There's a lot more you don't know so stop assuming.
I think it was Stereophile or some such that measured Ed's horns - they didn't have any problem at all measuring the 10 or so db peaks at around 110 and 220 hz. And I got the same results when I measured mine.
This was NOT the FE drivers, this was enclosure resonance. Easily simulated.
I will agree the XX6 series were forward. Especially compared with something like the BOFU. The 108 was kind of a middle of the road compromise. But I liked all in their own ways, and none enough to keep them. If I had kept any it probably would have been the 108 to use as a midrange in a multi way speaker.
The design was absolutely terrible. There's no other way to say it.
The same drivers did not make my vent grates rattle with any other enclosure I tried them in, and there were a few from small ported to large BIBs.
On the other hand, every driver I stuck in the frugal horns (including the 108, the A11 and the CSS 4 inch among others) had the same terrible resonance issues and made my vent grates rattle with female vocals. It's an enclosure issue, not a driver issue.
Like I said, I went through a lot of fullrange drivers. Whether or not you consider your earlier work to be unfulfilling is irrellevant, those were not the only drivers I tried.
Again, completely subjective. Since you apparently can't measure DDR your subjective comments are worth no more than the paper you write them on, except of course to yourself.
The only reason I can think of for not gaining any traction is because the people you sent them to were not impressed. What other reason could there be?
And how did you lose any money? I suggested a pair of drivers that make the rounds, people test and forward them on. Then you get them back. It would cost you nothing at all.
I'm not buying drivers. I can paint my own dots on my own speakers.
But let's talk about this. If it works the way you say it does it should work on ANY surface, right? So how come you aren't enabl'ing your cabs and walls and furniture?
Again, subjective opinion from you, Chris and the "kids". In most cases I'm sure they were fully aware of what they were listening to and well aware that their guru was beyond excited about the dots. That's uncontrollable bias. Toole even talks about sight and brand bias in the book.
I'm pretty sure Toole and a lot of others started with very little and ended up with more than 10 million. All it takes is marketing. I don't want to speculate on your income (although I could do some simple math, as you have listed your prices and given a pretty good idea about what and how much product your order and mod) and I'm sure you are not starving. The financial incentive does raise questions. The passion is clearly evident but financial interests will ALWAYS raise questions regardless of who, how much, etc.
Are you joking? The only example you can give is built in computer speakers? I'm not talking about built in speakers in consumer electronics, can you name even one fullrange ACTUAL SPEAKER from Harmon or any of it's subsidiaries?
The industry (like most industries) will do whatever it can to sell more units. if they though dots were a good idea there would be dots. Patented or not they would make the idea their own and use it, textured cones, colored rings, there's a bunch of ways to get around the IP ownership. It hasn't happened because it's simply useless.
So these sensible people would never want to play an instrument (like a horn for example) or attend any type of concert (even unamplified acoustic music can easily exceed 100 db).
This is straw man. The fact is that most Fostex drivers with their fraction of a mm xmax exceed xmax at well under a single watt in most of the popular enclosures. While they will play significantly past xmax with no damage the distortion comes on quickly and brutally.
This kind of argument is about what you would expect from people that advocate speakers that can't get past mid 80s db before exceeding xmax. it's not the argument a real music lover would present unless there was some skin in the game - like the passion for extremely low max spl speakers.
Last edited:
one interesting test could be to take an inexpensive driver where the enabl process is believed to be helpful, then compare with the dot rings either shifted from the tap test positions or random dots. I assume the dots do something or P10 would not apply hundreds of them to a driver. Whether it can be measured (?) my hearing is limited and damaged but good enough where I'm never satisfied with lp dubs - they always seem to lose something in playback vs direct - same for my 501-ES in the 80s - maybe my better A-D and D-A will improve the dubs over a Tascam/
Of course the dots do something. They add a bit of mass, they change the appearance of the driver (Dave is actually pretty good at making them rather attractive and eye catching) and they double the price of the driver. The dots do a lot of things. But I'd like to see some kind of proof that they actually do what they are claimed to do.
I ask again, my Chris? I ask because he has never had FE126 and i do all the selling.
Mark Fenlon has a number of pair of EnABLed drivers, and i have been selling Mark Audio since the Jordan J6T. It is a conservative business, it would not be good for him to comment on my drivers.
Even the very best speakers are crude. They are just the best we have been able to make so far.
Except for the A11 the ones you have gone thru are but a small fraction of what i have tried. You are taking your personal opinions on a smattering of good value to OK speakers and saying they are all like that. You can do the same thing with any genre of speakers and end up with a conclusion that is pretty weak.
Not without getting in trouble.
There are not a lot of units to be sold in FR speakers. At least not now.
I'm not starving, but that is down to other jobs, the wife's job, and no rent or mortgage. The hifi biz doesn't pay all the bills.
I did say that the frugel-horn 1 had its issues. That is why it was superseded. As to the vocals what amp(s) were you using?
I encourage you too. I have always been very helpful to those rolling their own.
I have never said that.
I don't think anyone has yet. Put the word jitter where you have DDR. Jitter was around since day 1 and it was people talking about something wrong that encouraged some to come up with a way of measuring it. That took years. No one disputes its importance now.
DDR is an attempt to make more technical and define what people have called detail, inner detail, resolution etc for at least half a century. You are chastising me for trying to push forward a more technical approach to this phenomenon? It has to be talked about and get someone with some real serious measurement chops to get interested and come up with a way of quantifying it.
dave
Mark Fenlon has a number of pair of EnABLed drivers, and i have been selling Mark Audio since the Jordan J6T. It is a conservative business, it would not be good for him to comment on my drivers.
Even the very best speakers are crude. They are just the best we have been able to make so far.
Except for the A11 the ones you have gone thru are but a small fraction of what i have tried. You are taking your personal opinions on a smattering of good value to OK speakers and saying they are all like that. You can do the same thing with any genre of speakers and end up with a conclusion that is pretty weak.
Not without getting in trouble.
There are not a lot of units to be sold in FR speakers. At least not now.
I'm not starving, but that is down to other jobs, the wife's job, and no rent or mortgage. The hifi biz doesn't pay all the bills.
I did say that the frugel-horn 1 had its issues. That is why it was superseded. As to the vocals what amp(s) were you using?
I encourage you too. I have always been very helpful to those rolling their own.
I have never said that.
I don't think anyone has yet. Put the word jitter where you have DDR. Jitter was around since day 1 and it was people talking about something wrong that encouraged some to come up with a way of measuring it. That took years. No one disputes its importance now.
DDR is an attempt to make more technical and define what people have called detail, inner detail, resolution etc for at least half a century. You are chastising me for trying to push forward a more technical approach to this phenomenon? It has to be talked about and get someone with some real serious measurement chops to get interested and come up with a way of quantifying it.
dave
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.