Mic-based measurements don't provide a mental picture of sound, but recording the output of a horn/driver playing music does.
I did just that, and the differences between drivers are apparent even listening to the recordings on crappy computer speakers.
The “Full Monty” has been posted here:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/212240-high-frequency-compression-driver-evaluation.html
A shorter version (only 3000 rather than 8000 words, and a lot less pictures) can be found here:
High Frequency Compression Driver Evaluation
The sound files in the soundforums.net posts do not have the low frequency portion of the music mixed in, listening to the HF horn alone makes it easier to hear the difference in sound quality and distortion between the drivers.
The recordings afford an insight in compression driver comparison (as far as I know) never undertaken before this study.
It would be interesting for those of us with no access to Western Electric drivers and horns to hear a recording of them playing some easy to find, well recorded music.
That would go a long ways to bridge the gap to the experience we didn't have.
Art Welter
This is very similar to the AR speaker bypass test that I referred to earlier. As I understand it is a very revealing test for the sound character or colorations of a speaker.
Of course if you are looking for the "gestalt" of the units I don't think this will reveal it.
David
Of course if you are looking for the "gestalt" of the units I don't think this will reveal it.
David
Exactly, this hits my sore spot about single-point sampling of a three dimensional field. It will reveal certain things (e.g., gross resonances), but say very little about the overall sound as perceived by a human with an unconstrained head.
Attachments
BIG, FAT, RED HERRING
This a big, fat, Red Herring:
What some people want here is measurements of the speakers, not the electronics. That you don't want to do that is understandable, even though some parameters might measure quite well - it's tedious work and costly.
What other folk here want is more complicated. They want to understand why the speakers subjectively perform the way they do. Your comment is not helpful to them. Their interest is definitely scientific.
Then there is the case load of Red Herrings:
The following is plain silly since logical positivism has nothing to do with your atavistic sentiments, which are illogical - everything we do has unintended and unforseeable consequences. That's how the modern world and science develops:
Lord save us!
None of it was possible without mathematics. Math is not "background noise." Math is the enabler. You've spent too much time in the sociology department basement. You need to get out more😀:
This a big, fat, Red Herring:
What some people want here is measurements of the speakers, not the electronics. That you don't want to do that is understandable, even though some parameters might measure quite well - it's tedious work and costly.
What other folk here want is more complicated. They want to understand why the speakers subjectively perform the way they do. Your comment is not helpful to them. Their interest is definitely scientific.
Then there is the case load of Red Herrings:
Having read Toole, Wittgenstein, and all the others, I'd say Wittgenstein, if he were interested would say, "This sounds interesting, and beautiful. Your listener is sitting in a field of higher order modes and evanescent wave forms, how much of the interest and beauty is derived from that experience. It seems reasonable to ask since we can conceive it."
The following is plain silly since logical positivism has nothing to do with your atavistic sentiments, which are illogical - everything we do has unintended and unforseeable consequences. That's how the modern world and science develops:
And then, this is kind of cute, 'I've got the very special ball. Here, look at it. It's marvelous, of course, you can't touch it. Heck you can't even talk about it. I've got it':
Ah, of course, now the incredibly complex interaction of all the people involved, and all their experiments and theory are reduced to a "fiction" - to a 'conceptualization'. Sorry, Babe, but science is not social science or even literary theory. It's a bunch of people comparing theory with experiment and sometimes applying the results in a technical or artistic fashion:
Now, now:
FINALLY, after the ritual abuse, a falsifiable statement:
This is a nonsequiter:
Congratulations. Another falsifiable statement:
And then a flourish of confusion: "A triumph of history and experience over mathematics..."
Lord save us!
None of it was possible without mathematics. Math is not "background noise." Math is the enabler. You've spent too much time in the sociology department basement. You need to get out more😀:
Also agree. The mic test can reveal a lot, but I doubt it can convey the life-like scale of these things, even on big choral works. The mic can tell a part of the story, but not the whole thing.
Maybe I just like them 'cause they're BIG.
I did just that, and the differences between drivers are apparent even listening to the recordings on crappy computer speakers.
snip>
It would be interesting for those of us with no access to Western Electric drivers and horns to hear a recording of them playing some easy to find, well recorded music.
That would go a long ways to bridge the gap to the experience we didn't have.
Art Welter[/QUOTE]
Hi Art
That is quite a nice bit of research, I imagine it took a good while to do.
It is interesting how rarely a systematic comparison like that is done, how very powerful the “lore” part is in audio.
What is wrongly known dies slowly, even in science itself, when a new explanation for an event is proven, it still may take a generation before ideas like Pangea, the cause of the aurora and so on are widely accepted.
I’m still pretty tied to the idea of Pluto being a planet and not declassified to just the first of many big chunks in that orbital distance.
A recording (with a measurement mic) is a good way to capture the “sound” of a speaker but it will also probably put a lot of people off if they try it.
When we hear live with our two ears and aural processor, we automatically “hear through” problems to get to the signal.
We aren’t aware of it at all until it’s strongly in play such as “hearing” a conversation across a noisy room.
We may only hear snips of some of the words but our processor delivers intact sentences without requiring our attention until it’s bogged down.
When we hear a loudspeaker the same thing is happening, our brain is cutting through some of the crud as best as it knows how.
That automatic accommodation is how we can happily listen to a loudspeaker in a room even though it may measure + - 20dB or worse at the listening position.
At least for the generation loss recording of speakers we do, ALL speakers ALWAYS sound worse through the measurement mic than they did live and I believe that is in part because with only the one channel, our processor system is missing a lot of data (from an input system capable of sensing in 3 dimensions) it would be using if live to hear through to the signal.
The mic test is pretty brutal actually, all of our electronics will tolerate at least several generations before the signal gets too contaminated but rarely will a loudspeaker go more than two generations, some can sound pretty funky just listening to the mic signal alone without our brain filtering it for us.
Personally I am absolutely sure part of what gives a single speaker it’s identifiable location in physical depth are the small difference between the right and left ears and when you minimize these, “where it sounds like” in depth is more strongly tied to the recording sound (dry, with reverb, far away or in a room etc).
This part of speaker performance is totally missed by the recording if the mic is stationary.
If you move the mic around, the you the hear these small spatial variations if present or on large scale sound, when the wind blows you hear those too.
While having your attention drawn to the loudspeaker as the source is desirable in some cases (like a podium speaker etc), it is not desirable when you’re producing a stereo image.
When they radiate that identity, with a mono voice signal you hear the mono phantom and a right and left speaker and not a single mono phantom image that the input commands. The stereo image is affected similarly.
This effect is quite strong and I believe is partly why the WE holds up so well compared to conventional hifi speakers, in the range where your ears have the greatest acuity (more or less the inverse of your ears response curve), it is a single source, no lobs and nulls, no crossover phase shift means one location in time and space over some significant bandwidth and also it’s simply loafing in small rooms.
Best,
Tom Danley
Maybe it's a little like one of these, Old but can still stir the blood very well.
http://dayerses.com/photos/norton-manx/07/
snip>
It would be interesting for those of us with no access to Western Electric drivers and horns to hear a recording of them playing some easy to find, well recorded music.
That would go a long ways to bridge the gap to the experience we didn't have.
Art Welter[/QUOTE]
Hi Art
That is quite a nice bit of research, I imagine it took a good while to do.
It is interesting how rarely a systematic comparison like that is done, how very powerful the “lore” part is in audio.
What is wrongly known dies slowly, even in science itself, when a new explanation for an event is proven, it still may take a generation before ideas like Pangea, the cause of the aurora and so on are widely accepted.
I’m still pretty tied to the idea of Pluto being a planet and not declassified to just the first of many big chunks in that orbital distance.
A recording (with a measurement mic) is a good way to capture the “sound” of a speaker but it will also probably put a lot of people off if they try it.
When we hear live with our two ears and aural processor, we automatically “hear through” problems to get to the signal.
We aren’t aware of it at all until it’s strongly in play such as “hearing” a conversation across a noisy room.
We may only hear snips of some of the words but our processor delivers intact sentences without requiring our attention until it’s bogged down.
When we hear a loudspeaker the same thing is happening, our brain is cutting through some of the crud as best as it knows how.
That automatic accommodation is how we can happily listen to a loudspeaker in a room even though it may measure + - 20dB or worse at the listening position.
At least for the generation loss recording of speakers we do, ALL speakers ALWAYS sound worse through the measurement mic than they did live and I believe that is in part because with only the one channel, our processor system is missing a lot of data (from an input system capable of sensing in 3 dimensions) it would be using if live to hear through to the signal.
The mic test is pretty brutal actually, all of our electronics will tolerate at least several generations before the signal gets too contaminated but rarely will a loudspeaker go more than two generations, some can sound pretty funky just listening to the mic signal alone without our brain filtering it for us.
Personally I am absolutely sure part of what gives a single speaker it’s identifiable location in physical depth are the small difference between the right and left ears and when you minimize these, “where it sounds like” in depth is more strongly tied to the recording sound (dry, with reverb, far away or in a room etc).
This part of speaker performance is totally missed by the recording if the mic is stationary.
If you move the mic around, the you the hear these small spatial variations if present or on large scale sound, when the wind blows you hear those too.
While having your attention drawn to the loudspeaker as the source is desirable in some cases (like a podium speaker etc), it is not desirable when you’re producing a stereo image.
When they radiate that identity, with a mono voice signal you hear the mono phantom and a right and left speaker and not a single mono phantom image that the input commands. The stereo image is affected similarly.
This effect is quite strong and I believe is partly why the WE holds up so well compared to conventional hifi speakers, in the range where your ears have the greatest acuity (more or less the inverse of your ears response curve), it is a single source, no lobs and nulls, no crossover phase shift means one location in time and space over some significant bandwidth and also it’s simply loafing in small rooms.
Best,
Tom Danley
Maybe it's a little like one of these, Old but can still stir the blood very well.
http://dayerses.com/photos/norton-manx/07/
Indeed it is and his making statements like the following doesn't win him any friends on here either.........."Although this thread is among the most tedious experiences of my life, there is some learning going on. I can't expect brutish objectivist pinheads to come to terms with the profound theoretical and practical deficiencies of their methods. This would take a self-directed interest in further education.
I hinted at a few of the profound delusions that underpin the retarded notion of the subjectivist/objectivist split."
I thought personal attacks weren't allowed but he seems to slip by that rule by attacking all the objectivists in mass so that's "okay" I suppose. 🙄
Nice guy.
This is pretty much what I have been saying here and elsewhere, and for a long time. Even if I have to say it myself now.
The two parts are key.
The first part is that the brain is processing. IF and when the sonic information presented happens to "fit" closely to the way that we are set up to receive sound naturally, then it is easier and faster for our brains to "decode" it. We can decode rather messed up sounds, but then we are left with the main part, for lack of a better term, the "first order information". The "higher order" information, the stuff that we all probably associate with the highest quality reproduction, all that depth, detail, air, etc. really requires that the the brain literally have time to process that stuff, before to much new sound fills up the FIFO brain buffer. Otherwise the sound is more or less dumped and the next stuff is processed... the faster the brain can identify and acquire the first order stuff, the more time can be spent on the higher order stuff.
SO, the job of the speaker is to get the first order stuff to the ears in the way that the "ears want to hear it". Then the ear/brain combo can possibly decode the more subtle information... that's the way I see it conceptually.
The second part is also exactly what I have been espousing, a single coherent, clean source of the widest bandwidth spanning across the midrange, with low distortion, and what I call "Harmonic Continutity" tm bearlabs which is the inevitable effect of a single driver, where the harmonic spectra automatically always come out the same. The only question is if one can get those spectra as low as possible, since the effect in the case of a higher distortion driver may still be pleasant (as is oft the case, but not always) but the presentation will be colored if not low in level.
Seems like we're on the same page... 😀 Different words to describe, perhaps.
_-_-bear
Guys,
I'm by no means a supporter of Toole, but what he has shown is how to achieve exactly what you guys are talking about: supplying the brain with correct clues to help it better decode the signals it is receiving. And his conclusions were what speaker dave has stated many times in this thread.
However, there has to be more to it than Toole's conclusions. The Quads for one certainly don't fit Toole's recommendations and yet they are highly preferred. The folks over in the full range forum also are not fools. Despite the sometimes large amplitude variations, there is 'something' about full range drivers that appeals. It is not exotic, unobtanium materials or drivers, it is not $$$$, it is something about the sound, which we sadly have not been able to put into measurements. Yet.
I'm by no means a supporter of Toole, but what he has shown is how to achieve exactly what you guys are talking about: supplying the brain with correct clues to help it better decode the signals it is receiving. And his conclusions were what speaker dave has stated many times in this thread.
However, there has to be more to it than Toole's conclusions. The Quads for one certainly don't fit Toole's recommendations and yet they are highly preferred. The folks over in the full range forum also are not fools. Despite the sometimes large amplitude variations, there is 'something' about full range drivers that appeals. It is not exotic, unobtanium materials or drivers, it is not $$$$, it is something about the sound, which we sadly have not been able to put into measurements. Yet.
Like I said before, there are many paths. Toole's is one, and one which has been very reliable and hugely influential on the industry. That doesn't make it the only one.
I still have the same feeling about single drivers that I have about horns- I keep hearing about how great they are, but haven't heard one yet that made me want to toss out my 5-ways and go the single driver route. And like horns, my experiences included some very expensive and highly reputed ones.
I still have the same feeling about single drivers that I have about horns- I keep hearing about how great they are, but haven't heard one yet that made me want to toss out my 5-ways and go the single driver route. And like horns, my experiences included some very expensive and highly reputed ones.
People use their eyes to approve film and TV quality, why can't I use my ears to judge sound?
Why do I need a dusty old book telling me what sounds good? I am not just trying to be "communicated" with, I want to be fooled.
Now that is silly and outdated.
WE was ahead of it's time, so Toole is behind the times, despite arriving later.
I agree with ra7, "have not been able to put into measurements. Yet."
It's not rocket science, does it sound real or not? Is the box colouring the sound? Does the cone impede dexterity?
So here is a challenge, take your toole speakers, or whatever other parameters you deem proper, make a live recording of an acoustic guitarist. Now play that back with your "perfected" speakers.
Are they "identical", verified by others? if so congrats, your speakers are perfect and we can stop all further research.
Now if they are not "identical" then you precious book is full of holes, not much more then a guideline, let along being used in the context to disparage WE horns.
Why do I need a dusty old book telling me what sounds good? I am not just trying to be "communicated" with, I want to be fooled.
Now that is silly and outdated.
WE was ahead of it's time, so Toole is behind the times, despite arriving later.
I agree with ra7, "have not been able to put into measurements. Yet."
It's not rocket science, does it sound real or not? Is the box colouring the sound? Does the cone impede dexterity?
So here is a challenge, take your toole speakers, or whatever other parameters you deem proper, make a live recording of an acoustic guitarist. Now play that back with your "perfected" speakers.
Are they "identical", verified by others? if so congrats, your speakers are perfect and we can stop all further research.
Now if they are not "identical" then you precious book is full of holes, not much more then a guideline, let along being used in the context to disparage WE horns.
They can't be, no matter how good they are. The HUGE data compression inherent in stereo recording and playback guarantees that.
I should have clarified, a mono test.
Technically the acoustic guitar propagates as mono, stereo is created from that point on, a mono sound being bounced around a room and into two ears becomes "stereo".
The only way to test would be mono.
Technically the acoustic guitar propagates as mono, stereo is created from that point on, a mono sound being bounced around a room and into two ears becomes "stereo".
The only way to test would be mono.
I've been playing guitar for about 40 years and never heard or played one that was a point source or an omni or anything else with a smooth, speaker-like polar pattern. They radiate differently in different directions and that interacts with the room to tell you that it's "live."
Yes, but they are certainly not stereo.
The same could be said for anything.
I would say it is a point source.
The same could be said for anything.
I would say it is a point source.
A guitar (acoustic, of course) isn't a point source. Period. Two minutes trying to mike one (I do a lot of recording of acoustic guitar) will convince you of that. Again, no speaker in the world will sound like a live guitar in a room. At best, you can get one that doesn't screw up the tonality too much so you can identify the make and details on the playing. And will have adequate spatial resolution so you can, in a stereo setup, identify where in the room the guitar is positioned.
That's best case, sorry. The imperfections of the stereo paradigm are overwhelmingly huge.
That's best case, sorry. The imperfections of the stereo paradigm are overwhelmingly huge.
Forget about stereo for a minute, as it is basically an "effect" like 5.1 and 7.1 which is not exactly how we hear in real life.
Point source is a matter of semantics. Stars far away from earth are considered point source, despite being larger then the earth, due to proximity.
Move the guitar outside and your problems should subside.
What would you consider a good, mono, point source to compare the reproduction of sound to the real thing?
Point source is a matter of semantics. Stars far away from earth are considered point source, despite being larger then the earth, due to proximity.
Move the guitar outside and your problems should subside.
What would you consider a good, mono, point source to compare the reproduction of sound to the real thing?
None. You've touched on a fundamental issue in reproduction. Now we're in a realm of illusion and not "accuracy" in any meaningful sense, as opposed to the simple task of moving an electrical signal undamaged from one point to another. And just as someone like David Blaine can make some people gasp with shock when he does a trick, while others see immediately what he's done, some speakers do a good job with illusions for some people and not others. That's why you have some people who swear by horns, and others who swear at them.