I tried the sample and could hear a difference in all 4 of them. I was really surprised I could hear a difference with the 20k file?? I wasn't using headphones just my computer speakers to see initially if I needed headphones. The 3db 16k is defiantly the hardest to hear and without a direct comparison I would never hear it.
Rob🙂
Rob🙂
Oii give us a chance 😀
No time for me to try things like this through the week but I'll try it over the weekend. Could I also suggest some notch versions of the signals as well as peaking ? It would be interesting to see if the commonly held notion that notches are more benign than peaks is true in this situation or not.
Besides, typical tweeter limitations will cause a dip or lack of high treble (or early rolloff) rather than a 3 or 6dB peak, so a notch may be a more representative test...
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Got to agree with this. Prob'ly why I like single cone drivers. They have a natural sounding roll-off, and once you get used to them they're quite pleasant. Sure, if you add a tweeter your first impression will be "That's what I've been missing!", but it's nothing compared to the "THAT's what I've been missing!!!" experience of someone walking into the room with a violin and playing a jig.
Yes, I found that one pretty subtle and wouldn't proclaim one version right and the other worng. A just discernable difference.
David
Really? Which ones are those?
Certainly not violins, which are designed to have frequencies beam (violinists call it "projection"). And I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me to play a guitar for them so they can "hear what the audience hears" (I work in a music store). They don't sound at all the same to the player. Electric instruments.... well, we know speakers beam. And horns, seriously? You can easily hear the changes in timbre as a well-hit cymbal rocks back and forth. Perhaps a washtub bass is omni-directional?
Maybe you need to spend some time in a studio, trying to find the best mic placements. Because, you know, making judgements about "high fidelity" requires more than just experience with a wide range of reproducers, you need to know what you're trying to reproduce.
As J. Gordon Holt (IWEWT) would have said, "BLAT!!!"
I hear live music most days for a good part of the day. There are two pianos in my house, one a Steinway grand and there are a large number of violins and violas. Nearly every week there are somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen string players here sawing away. Walk around a violin being played and you'll hear almost no change in timbre. Try it with street buskars. Walk around a piano bar and unless the lid is propped open there's practically no change at any angle. String and percussion instruments are mostly multidirectional or close to omnidirectional radiators. If you listen to a piano and the lid is not propped open and you are not in line of sight of the sounding board, strings, or harp, the piano is an indirect radiator from your perspective. An acoustic guitar is one of the few string instruments that is relatively directional.
You'd think horns (reeds and brass) would be directional and they are....but they might as well not be from the point of view of the listener. Clarinets, oboes, bassoons, tubas radiate vertically, French horns horizontallly sideways, the first arriving sound at the listener is almost always a reflection, often off the floor. Trumpets and trombones radiate diagonally downward towards the floor and ususally sit behind the less loud string players so their direct radiation towards the audience, whatever there is of it is blocked by the musicians and their instruments sitting in front of them. Get someone to point a trumpet directly at you and blow through it even at some distance and your first instinct will likely be to put your fingers in your ears to protect them from the blast.
No beaming, but I would hardly call that large enough for home/hifi use (ie relatively short listening distance), unless you are always sitting on axis...
Yes, a system that captures 440 to 441 (a modest bandwidth!) would fully capture the beat effect. However, a system not reproducing 17,600 Hz and 17,640 (the same beat interval and harmonics of 440 and 441), would not reproduce the beat tone.
MP3 has about a 17K cutoff, and most tweeters don't do much that high, other than distortion. A tweeter that does have clean extended range can reproduce parts of the recorded music that are real and lacking without.
Even though I can't hear above 15K, I can hear the difference between extended response tweeters and those that top out around 16K.
That said, I'd agree completely with your preference for using a driver not needing a transition to a tweeter at 7K and giving up some of the ultrasonic purity.
Well, back to my HF driver report, I have recorded the sound of several drivers at different levels, normalized to the same playback level, so we can all hear the difference in sound and distortion once I manage to post them.
The difference is great enough to be apparent using an MP3 encoding playing through laptop computer speakers.
Art
I said I was running the bas mid without it's crossover. That is the same as saying the speaker is operating as a full range speaker. I can confirm that the amplifier feeding it is also full range. That does not equate to
I did not say that.
What I said was
My poor ears, by comparison to a youngster, can clearly hear the reinforcement given by adding in the tweeter.
I think that you are confusing a beat tone with a beat frequency. There is no "tone" at 440 Hz unless the system is non-linear.
Even a 4" driver makes for an awful tweeter. I agree with Gordon Holt in his comment about the original 4" CTS driver in Bose 901 not being able to produce high frequencies because overcoming the inertial mass of the cone and voice coil is not practical through equalization. Even if it were, due to the relatively large diameter of the cone compared to the wavelength of the top ocatave, radiation would be entirely on axis. The larger the diameter and higher the mass of a cone driver, the worse these problem become.
A 440Hz sine wave should not be called a "tone"? What about a piano string tuned to 440Hz?
Agreed. But we are talking about changing the treble driver (as Gedlee put it) to hear if treble from 7kHz and above through a different driver can make a difference or can be heard.
My experience says it can be heard. I offered that experience.
I did not say using the mid bass alone would make a good full range speaker.
I specified what I did in a controlled experiment and reported the results.
Jeez Andrew, even I can hear that! 😀
But wasn't the original question about the benefits of letting one driver handle it, or pass it off to a tweeter at 7K?
That's precisely what my experiment did.
I detailed what I did.
The Thread opener can use or discard the information as he pleases.
What cannot be correct is that some other Member/s corrupt/s what I offered to make a different point seem more plausible.
I detailed what I did.
The Thread opener can use or discard the information as he pleases.
What cannot be correct is that some other Member/s corrupt/s what I offered to make a different point seem more plausible.
That's the way I understood the original posting. Then the subject seemed to have changed from tweeter A to tweeter B. That's a horse of a different feather so to speak. Do different tweeters sound different from each other? Of course they do, otherwise the cheapest one on the market would be the only one on the market (except that it seems to me there's a school of thought that has it that the more you spend, the better you get. That's why it's so much fun to rebrand Belden wire and sell it as audiophile wire 😀 )
What Earl is saying about "beat frequency" and "beat tone" is correct but might be clearer to you if we call the first the "frequency of beating". In my example of 440 and 441Hz strings, the difference between the two makes them add and subtract over a one Hz period. You hear the level come and go at a one Hz rate, the frequency of beating. You don't hear a 1 Hz tone (you couldn't hear that frequency, and it isn't actually generated).
If there is nonlinearity in the system then there will typically be intermodulation products generated at sum and difference frequencies. This is similar to tests where 19kHz and 20kHz are fed to an amplifier or CD player. If third order nonlinearity exists then 18 and 21kHz will be generated (as well as 1kHz and several other products). The level of the difference tones is down to the amount of the nonlinearity.
Supersonic tones can only intermodulate and generate audible tones if there are appropriate nonlinearities present. Someone (the military?) was developing a highly directional sound source that used very high frequency upscaled audio with two carriers that would beat and intermod down to an audible frequency. I can't remember if they were using nonlinearity in the air or in our hearing. The concept was that the high carriers could be made extremly directional (very short wavelengths) and you could whisper to one person in issolation.
Once the actual audible range of music is recorded there is no reason to capture inaudible frequencies for the sake of any subharmonics they might later generate. They would only be generated if the playback system is nonlinear and we will, of course, take care to avoid that.
David
p.s. I assume Earl was referring to the 1 Hz (or 40Hz) difference frequency rather than 440.
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I never made any claims one way or the other regarding the goodness or otherwise of a 90 x 40 pattern. The OP had already chosen the horn with that beamwidth. The question was whether it would "beam" at high frequencies and benefit from crossing over at 7k. The answer is no, the horn holds that directivity to beyond 12kHz.
David
That's the guys down in San Diego. You can see their devices in use by the Navy and the Japanese whaling ships. Non-linearity of the air is exploited.
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