Shallow minded advertizers co-opt pretty well anything of value once a large enough number of people are looking at it - it doesn't mean the original idea has no merit, only that it ends up not being followed through to more meaningful understandings.
I just composed a huge tome to post here on how it's all in the mind but once I re-read it I saw the other side of the coin - that of course there are specific facts of system behaviour that are nameable and certifiably problematic. However what do you do when one person says "fatigue comes from rubbing coils", and another says "it comes from phase anomlies" , and so on out the yinyang. You have to at some point recognize that if you use the word fatigue, you are not talking about the system itself but the listener's response to it, and that is mental ( or psychological, if you prefer).
But if your speaker is only a two-way, you will have a continuum of distortion and intermodulation between the bass and mid long before there e.g. the mid being modulated by Doppler. And if it's a full range, well...
You do understand my use of the word "narrative" earlier..? What I mean is that it seems very easy in the audiophile world to attribute real or imagined results to what we set out to do, rather than what actually happened. So you set out to "condition" a faulty speaker by playing loud music through it for an hour, and it seems to have an effect. From that you extrapolate that all speakers respond favourably to the same conditioning. Similarly, turning off everything else in the house which seems to have the effect you were expecting. Not only do you extrapolate from that that it must be RF affecting your system, but that it affects everyone else's system in the same way - it causes "distortion". From that, you then extrapolate that all audio listening fatigue problems are "distortion" in the electronics, not the speakers. And in fact that all speakers - including an Aldi TV - are limited by the electronics, not the well known inherent limitations of dynamic speakers.
Well, I prefer my 'narrative', because most other people's narratives cause them to end up with what I might call 'hifi' sound, rather than realistic sound. If that's what they prefer, and enjoy, then I wish them well -- life is multiple choice, after all ... 🙂
Last edited:
Most people never listened to a drum kit without amplification/equalization etc . They dont know that what they listen in their cd´s isn't how the instrument sounds . Most people i know call Hifi to heavy bass and exagerated treble anyway.
Yes, I've seen 'good sound' go right over the top of some people - it just sounds too 'normal': not exaggerated, in your face, it doesn't scream, "Look at me, look at me!!". These listeners perhaps feel that reproduced sound has to be a caricature, a twisted, hyped version of the real thing to be valid. The same sort of thing can be seen on many TV screens, the colours are over-saturated, everything needs to have a zingy edge to it, so that watching it is more special - personally, I can only take so much "orange" people in my viewing ... 😉
Part of that hyped-up sound is for the thrill, I suspect part is for another reason.
When I was in the fine art printing biz we could make a print that was startlingly like the original, but the artists would rarely accept it. They wanted more contrast, more color, more pop! They wanted the print "better" than the original.
I suspect that "more pop" is there to make up for the subtle lack of life that a print has. It's hard to see, hard to analyze, but you feel it isn't the real thing. Making the copy hyped-up helps convey the same emotions as the original. Some things are inevitably lost in the copying process, we try to replace that loss with hyperness.
When I was in the fine art printing biz we could make a print that was startlingly like the original, but the artists would rarely accept it. They wanted more contrast, more color, more pop! They wanted the print "better" than the original.
I suspect that "more pop" is there to make up for the subtle lack of life that a print has. It's hard to see, hard to analyze, but you feel it isn't the real thing. Making the copy hyped-up helps convey the same emotions as the original. Some things are inevitably lost in the copying process, we try to replace that loss with hyperness.
Well i can tell you , there is no recording or system i have ever heard have the top end "pop"of real steel , most if not all would find it too bright ...
Or brass. Take a look at a cymbal sometime. It's an 18" tweeter. 😉 How do you match that with your Hi-Fi?
Supernormal stimulus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
supernormal stimuli in humans - Google Scholar
Makes up for defects or exagerates normal but you get tired or get used to it in preference to normal.
eg sharp edges on speaker boxes sharpen the sound at low SPLs but make it unpleasant at high spls.
Etc., etc.
Last edited:
Fortunately there is another way, though few people realise or achieve it consistently. There is that quantum improvement in sound reproduction, that I have mentioned many times, which fully provides the "zest" that live, natural sound has. Since this is a psychoacoustic phenomenon - it's all happening in the brain - it would be relatively hard to measure except for the characteristics of sound that are able to provide it.
Then the "feel it isn't the real thing" completely disappears, it is the real thing as far as one's subjective perception is concerned.
The "losses" are of course still there, it's physically impossible for that not to be the case, but the mind has accepted that what it hears is 'good enough', and the illusion gets the 'thumbs up' from your senses ...
I get fatigued by washed out songs.
For some reason some tracks have sound that is distance and thin.
One of Def Leopards tracks is like this, its a great song but has been ruined by having watered down sound. It has no bite or edge to it.
For some reason some tracks have sound that is distance and thin.
One of Def Leopards tracks is like this, its a great song but has been ruined by having watered down sound. It has no bite or edge to it.
Provided one is willing to work at it a bit, I have no doubt that one could create a system that could totally fool any number of critical listeners that what was behind a curtain was a live drum set ...
Five factors in electrodynamic speaker design. What are their relative contributions to fatigue, or reducing it?
1. Small or large speaker - e.g. based on 6" woofer or 12"?
2. Sealed enclosure or ported?
3. Full range, two way, three way or four way?
4. Passive or active crossover (separate amp for each driver)?
5. Full phase and time alignment (DSP active)?
Intuitively, I would expect all of these aspects to contribute to listener fatigue:
1. Small speakers just can't do the bass without straining themselves. A lack of bass isn't natural or 'warm' and the listener may even turn the volume up to compensate.
2. A ported enclosure goes lower for its size, but the response falls off rapidly below the port resonance and cone goes out of control. Plus the output of the port is lagging by one cycle and so smears transients. Sounds like a recipe for listener fatigue.
3. Drivers in a two way speaker are way out of their comfort zones at the crossover region. Plus we know about Doppler shift and the mid range riding on the large cone displacements of the bass. Go three way or four way and everything is suddenly better - but it makes a passive crossover more complex.
4. Passive speakers insert a lump of jelly between the amp and the drivers, impose a difficult load on the amplifier, absorb power, force the amplifier to cover the full frequency range and provide only a very approximate crossover function that can't be changed without attacking it with a soldering iron. Every item on the list sounds like an f-ing ('fatiguing') disaster.
5. We can do phase correction and time alignment so that a square wave in gives a square wave out, and an impulse comes out as an impulse. Our ears will thank us for it.
To me, it seems like a long list of real problems that can be tackled positively (rather than just using of exotic materials and hoping they will have a magical effect).
When you think about it, the signal in an analogue-only system with passive speakers, has been on a very long and bruising journey; the music just about manages to stagger out at the end. The DSP-based active system is more like the Star Trek transporter: the digits are unaffected by their journey, and the music is then re-constituted, fresh as a daisy, in the air in front of the speakers.
1. Small or large speaker - e.g. based on 6" woofer or 12"?
2. Sealed enclosure or ported?
3. Full range, two way, three way or four way?
4. Passive or active crossover (separate amp for each driver)?
5. Full phase and time alignment (DSP active)?
Intuitively, I would expect all of these aspects to contribute to listener fatigue:
1. Small speakers just can't do the bass without straining themselves. A lack of bass isn't natural or 'warm' and the listener may even turn the volume up to compensate.
2. A ported enclosure goes lower for its size, but the response falls off rapidly below the port resonance and cone goes out of control. Plus the output of the port is lagging by one cycle and so smears transients. Sounds like a recipe for listener fatigue.
3. Drivers in a two way speaker are way out of their comfort zones at the crossover region. Plus we know about Doppler shift and the mid range riding on the large cone displacements of the bass. Go three way or four way and everything is suddenly better - but it makes a passive crossover more complex.
4. Passive speakers insert a lump of jelly between the amp and the drivers, impose a difficult load on the amplifier, absorb power, force the amplifier to cover the full frequency range and provide only a very approximate crossover function that can't be changed without attacking it with a soldering iron. Every item on the list sounds like an f-ing ('fatiguing') disaster.
5. We can do phase correction and time alignment so that a square wave in gives a square wave out, and an impulse comes out as an impulse. Our ears will thank us for it.
To me, it seems like a long list of real problems that can be tackled positively (rather than just using of exotic materials and hoping they will have a magical effect).
When you think about it, the signal in an analogue-only system with passive speakers, has been on a very long and bruising journey; the music just about manages to stagger out at the end. The DSP-based active system is more like the Star Trek transporter: the digits are unaffected by their journey, and the music is then re-constituted, fresh as a daisy, in the air in front of the speakers.
Not possible with small point source speakers and when i say small i mean what most use in domestic environment ...
Really big like an XLF and much better would be a large panel or line-source with bass units..
Like this for eg ...
Attachments
The size of the speaker only counts for the bottom couple of octaves - Bose was right! A box barely big enough to mount the drivers is good enough for the rest of the spectrum, provided the structure is extremely rigid and can dissipate the vibrational energy imparted to it. Have a look at some of the best JBL high frequency drivers - fit in the palm of your hands, and can produces SPLs that will split your head into two.
It's all about having amps and drivers that can cleanly produce the peak levels required - if you want the bass to be "perfect" to the lowest possible frequency only then you will need extremely well engineered large drivers, and huge boxes, or power amps with huge headroom.
As I've already mentioned, having a system capable of 132dB peaks would do the trick, which can be achieved with readily available drivers, actively driven, with really "smart" DSP to make it all come together.
It's all about having amps and drivers that can cleanly produce the peak levels required - if you want the bass to be "perfect" to the lowest possible frequency only then you will need extremely well engineered large drivers, and huge boxes, or power amps with huge headroom.
As I've already mentioned, having a system capable of 132dB peaks would do the trick, which can be achieved with readily available drivers, actively driven, with really "smart" DSP to make it all come together.
CopperTop, I have to disagree with your #4. Some of the least fatiguing, most natural systems I've heard used passive crossovers. Unless great care is taken, active crossovers wear me down.
indeed. PAsive speakers can be as good, and some would say better then active and all the electronics adds up going active. I personally use active for the bass up to 300hz with separate amps for the base, but the rest of the spectrum is passive, no problem at all.