I think a bottle of wine or two and very big baffle speakers are the requirements for vinyl. A girlfriend you met at a quiz where we got 20/20 for the music round between us is the ultimate hi fi upgrade. Colleen isn't in the slightest bit interested it what or why. She tends to like LP best although she thinks it's just a quirk in her. It should be said my CD sound is better than most. None the less it always sounds a bit secondhand when listening to analogue originals. ELP Tarkus is good. Both version are better than each other. LP is more fun, CD shows more detail and sounds more like Bach. I hesitate to say about this as even I think it isn't in the spirit of this thread. DIY Audio is very untypical of common taste. It is almost we are groomed by knowing too much, head rules the heart. Friends simply prefer vinyl and are shocked that they do. My system isn't vinyl biased. It is cinema biased. I found with baffle speakers the differences between sources isn't a tonal issue as some will insist. My system is flat to 40 Hz and - 12 dB at 30Hz. I think that really helps. One or two things need a sub, 98% don't. Each bass note is a note. I can't stand box speakers as I don't hear the notes. That is long before the sound stage is noticed as suspect.So 1930's speakers and LP's are the hi fi of the future?
A bit like PAR64's are the way of the future because they are in science fiction movies....
Dan.
All joking aside Dan I think the way baffles reproduce bass is the right answer. Only on very deep bass is it obvious anything is missing. Mostly they sort the music from the noises that are thought to be bass by many. For example the LF deviation of LP and CD becomes as nothing because the problem are is just about rejected by the rapid baffle bass roll off ( sub 30 Hz ). Trying to get this with a box speaker and subsonic filter has no possitive effect. It just sounds wrong. Before anyone says I have had 46 years hands on experiance of this and will not be told I am wrong as most have not lived with the reality of this.
There is a downside. Loud is very loud ( easilly 115 dB without obvious distortion ). It makes the music have both quiet and loud bits which is the real hi fi goal. Seing as DGG said 45 dB is a hi fi dynamic range for the home goodness knows how small it is for most? 20 dB is my guess.
Isn't it odd that real hi fi is dangerous? No one really says this. I have seen pages devoted to some maths that went sour months ago and yet nothing about when it's very good it is also very dangerous.
There is a downside. Loud is very loud ( easilly 115 dB without obvious distortion ). It makes the music have both quiet and loud bits which is the real hi fi goal. Seing as DGG said 45 dB is a hi fi dynamic range for the home goodness knows how small it is for most? 20 dB is my guess.
Isn't it odd that real hi fi is dangerous? No one really says this. I have seen pages devoted to some maths that went sour months ago and yet nothing about when it's very good it is also very dangerous.
Magnepan SMGa seem to get the loud verses bass balance right. The later Magnepans seems a bit more sterile to me. Magnepans are easy to own also. My pair are now sounding great on an A and R A60 of my old boss. I think people who have failed to get a real hi fi sound would be horribly jealous of this one.
The future might be getting the past to work better. BMW motorcycles do this and are well loved for it.
The future might be getting the past to work better. BMW motorcycles do this and are well loved for it.
It is interesting to note how low the output power of the amplifiers and the power requirements of the speakers were back then.Here is the link to Vintage Audio Magazines. Kindly check the May 1972 issue. On Page 22 the Audio industry leaders predict the future from 1972-1982. Interesting read
Link
Regards.
Those seventies fashions I can remember wearing look hideous now.
I wonder what will happen when tattoos become yesterday's fashion?
Hi Nige.
I have not tried playing with OB except for quick fool around with quite compliant drivers already mounted on not large boards.
But I do recall the openness of the bass and that nice/natural sounding roll out in the lows.
My concern is the problems with the back radiation causing that delay/headphone effect of panels, electrostatic or magnetic.
In my room I run 'dead zone' damping across the wall behind the speakers, and the rest of the room is semi reflective rendered brick walls, with suitable distributed damping in the form of carpet, sofa etc.
In my room panels/OB's ought to work well, and avoid that delay caused reverb/beaming etc.
I might get around to trying a pair of PA 15" sub drivers in OB arrangement.
What are the driver compliance requirements, and how does the panel size and shape effect/affect directivity and bass roll out ?.
I'm not sure about clean sound being 'dangerous' as such.
Throughout my system I am incorporating some very interesting system intrinsic noise filtering ideas....sort of think BQP.
The result is that 'time' in the system becomes super stable, actually time is sort of eliminated in that each stage of the system runs in a tight 'series coupled/unison' mode.
IOW audible system intrinsic phase noise is essentially eliminated, and thus signal induced noise sidebands, signal induced jitter and signal induced PIM essentially disappear....ie signal correlated excess noise becomes essentially inaudible.
That means objectionable perceived Rec/Pb distortions and noises are removed, and individual sound source size and placement (3D out of two speakers) becomes pin spot sharp.....very interestingly, and to be expected.
So, removing correlated excess noise results in dead clean PB retrieval back to the master, sounds like back to the mics, actually back to the original sounds....real music is in the room, part of the room and not projecting from boxes.
The upshot of this cleanness/realism is that, yes with nastiness/loudness cues removed, the inclination is to keep turning it up and not fully realise the SPL...clipping is the limiting factor but even then no nasties, just sounds tonally/timbre a bit wrong is the cue/clue.
The other upshot is that the ears do not object, ie no limiting, no clamping, no ringing etc and no fatigue whatsover.
Whether this is good or bad is a question.
IME this kind of clean sound is not damaging per se, even at paint peelingly levels.
My hearing is not particularly fantastic in absolute terms (age/machinery/mishaps etc), but my hearing is very discriminatory (experience/training), and with my such filtered system, every tiniest nuance is laid bare and is correct sounding....if my hearing was cooked by now I would not be hearing this kind of detail.
I maintain hearing damage is caused by unnatural products, especially intermods which are not musically/naturally related.
Witness a closeby lightning strike....infinitely loud but no ear shutdown immediately afterward.
Try dropping a length of hard pipe...immediate ear clamp/shutdown, ringing and possibly pain.....and hearing damage.
Dan.
I have not tried playing with OB except for quick fool around with quite compliant drivers already mounted on not large boards.
But I do recall the openness of the bass and that nice/natural sounding roll out in the lows.
My concern is the problems with the back radiation causing that delay/headphone effect of panels, electrostatic or magnetic.
In my room I run 'dead zone' damping across the wall behind the speakers, and the rest of the room is semi reflective rendered brick walls, with suitable distributed damping in the form of carpet, sofa etc.
In my room panels/OB's ought to work well, and avoid that delay caused reverb/beaming etc.
I might get around to trying a pair of PA 15" sub drivers in OB arrangement.
What are the driver compliance requirements, and how does the panel size and shape effect/affect directivity and bass roll out ?.
I'm not sure about clean sound being 'dangerous' as such.
Throughout my system I am incorporating some very interesting system intrinsic noise filtering ideas....sort of think BQP.
The result is that 'time' in the system becomes super stable, actually time is sort of eliminated in that each stage of the system runs in a tight 'series coupled/unison' mode.
IOW audible system intrinsic phase noise is essentially eliminated, and thus signal induced noise sidebands, signal induced jitter and signal induced PIM essentially disappear....ie signal correlated excess noise becomes essentially inaudible.
That means objectionable perceived Rec/Pb distortions and noises are removed, and individual sound source size and placement (3D out of two speakers) becomes pin spot sharp.....very interestingly, and to be expected.
So, removing correlated excess noise results in dead clean PB retrieval back to the master, sounds like back to the mics, actually back to the original sounds....real music is in the room, part of the room and not projecting from boxes.
The upshot of this cleanness/realism is that, yes with nastiness/loudness cues removed, the inclination is to keep turning it up and not fully realise the SPL...clipping is the limiting factor but even then no nasties, just sounds tonally/timbre a bit wrong is the cue/clue.
The other upshot is that the ears do not object, ie no limiting, no clamping, no ringing etc and no fatigue whatsover.
Whether this is good or bad is a question.
IME this kind of clean sound is not damaging per se, even at paint peelingly levels.
My hearing is not particularly fantastic in absolute terms (age/machinery/mishaps etc), but my hearing is very discriminatory (experience/training), and with my such filtered system, every tiniest nuance is laid bare and is correct sounding....if my hearing was cooked by now I would not be hearing this kind of detail.
I maintain hearing damage is caused by unnatural products, especially intermods which are not musically/naturally related.
Witness a closeby lightning strike....infinitely loud but no ear shutdown immediately afterward.
Try dropping a length of hard pipe...immediate ear clamp/shutdown, ringing and possibly pain.....and hearing damage.
Dan.
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Thanks Marce and gpauk. but credit goes to the kind soul who painstakingly archived those vintage magazines. Most of the audio expert of that era did predicted the future right. Like Multichannel systems, Receivers with memory, Lighter Tonearms. etc.
@ radiosmuck
I am not nostalgic about vinyl sound and analogue systems. But most of my vinyl listening is due to the content. Indian Classical/songs and some western music of earlier period sounds good to me. I do listen to digital too.
Best Regards.
@ radiosmuck
I am not nostalgic about vinyl sound and analogue systems. But most of my vinyl listening is due to the content. Indian Classical/songs and some western music of earlier period sounds good to me. I do listen to digital too.
Best Regards.
A cubic metre of air weighs about a 1300 grams - quite a substantial amount of mass, actually! Google says a typical house mouse weighs 19 grams, so one cubic metre of air weighs about the same as sixty eight mice!
(I first discovered how heavy air is as a young boy, I made a hot-air balloon and was amazed at how much inertia it had even when it was floating weightlessly in the air. If you let out the hot air and folded it up, it had noticeably far less inertia. Aha, there's a lot of mass in the air!)
The other thing that is frequently forgotten is that air doesn't have a lot of it's own damping, either. Make a loud 1KHz sound, and it will travel for a hundred metres or more, taking roughly 285 milliseconds to do it. At 1 kHz, that means 285 cycles of sound. That's a pretty high-Q system, if it keeps oscillating for hundreds of cycles once set into motion!
It's worth noting that in ye olde traditional ported loudspeaker enclosure, it's the coil and magnet in the driver that provides most of the damping for the air in the port bouncing on the air in the enclosure...the air on its own has way too high a Q.
So, aside from all the other obvious problems that plasma speakers have, they can also have a surprisingly large amount of moving mass, and poor damping to go with it!
Along the same lines, electrostatic speakers sound as though they should be a wonderful idea, but I recently watched a video clip of a Floyd Toole talk where he mentioned measuring one that had a huge array of poorly controlled mechanical resonances.
Evidently a big flappy membrane with air on both sides is actually not very well damped at all, at least at audio frequencies; contrary to popular belief, which is based on our human experiences of fanning ourselves with a newspaper, dropping a sheet of plywood on top of a stack, and so on.
The trouble is that things are very different at audio frequencies than they are when you drop that sheet of plywood. At audio frequencies, with a large membrane, the air doesn't have time to flow out of the way, allowing its viscosity to absorb energy in the process.
Instead, the electrostatic speaker membrane "bounces" on the air on both sides of it, just like the air in the tuned port in the traditional ported enclosure bounces on the air in the box. Same problem of too high a Q, ergo, poorly controlled resonance. Except much worse, because a large floppy membrane bouncing against an elastic medium has a lot of resonant modes!
So it turns out, after all, that a well-designed and manufactured thin rigid cone driven by a voice coil controlled by a magnet, may still be the best we can do...
-Gnobuddy
My OB speakers started when Robin Marshall ex of Epos and BBC said to me the least important thing with the Quad ESL was the electrostaic bit. He argued that all the other parameters were not too far away using suitable drive units. Mine are 15 inch with Qts of 1.2 and 12 inch full range ( 12 Lta ) of 0.5 the tweeter a cheap one that suits the sensetivity. It is used as a super tweeter. Surprisingly disspersion is better at lower than the obvious frequency down into the mid band and that is in contrast to the big make OB's. A first order cross at 6.5 kHz helps! It is in phase. The PA drivers hardly move even with large EQ. A good point to talk of air mass as this also reduces the advantage the electrostatic might have in reality. The big problem I see it the rigidity of the electrostaic is not fantastic. Unreal that they work at all. I " think " OB's unify the sound sources to give their best. If so the last octave is supect regardless of source and that might just be the reality of it and not LP verses CD. Real life suggests this might be true.
The bigger thing in hi fi is lower grade devices are now usable. The iPhone is a good way to show music, it has a poor reputation if thinking of price. I do find the HD files on the iPhone are nothing special. The MP3 style files not as good as TV. All the same perfectly usuable. The future probably is OK digital for all. MP3 for all of it's ill's sounds pleasent these days, The Sony professional devices proved it could and low cost followed.
The bigger thing in hi fi is lower grade devices are now usable. The iPhone is a good way to show music, it has a poor reputation if thinking of price. I do find the HD files on the iPhone are nothing special. The MP3 style files not as good as TV. All the same perfectly usuable. The future probably is OK digital for all. MP3 for all of it's ill's sounds pleasent these days, The Sony professional devices proved it could and low cost followed.
It's like a never-ending magic trick, like crack cocaine for the music lover, and so ruthlessly revealing of anything upstream without due plausibility. Rigidity, indeed! Thanks for keeping them out of unsuspecting hands. Mine once turned me into a werewolf.
Big breakthrough already made by Tom Danley with Synergy and it's been adapted for domestic use here on diyaudio
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...lti-way-point-source-horn-25.html#post4644522
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...lti-way-point-source-horn-25.html#post4644522
Hahahaha. But seriously, decent sound is getting cheaper and more proliferated. The absolute high end will likely remain in backwaters because it's fashion/ideology and not innovation that drives that market (largely, there are obvious exceptions).
Speaking of fashion and ideology, I predict cassette tapes will make a comeback.
Oh, wait ...
Great Big Story
Oh, wait ...
Great Big Story
An anechoic chamber is the gold standard, but creative engineers can find some work-arounds which are better than nothing.
I once worked with a speaker engineer who sometimes used close-miking to estimate the bass response of a speaker system - you position the microphone within a few millimetres of the woofer cone. Measurements made this way are only good at low enough frequencies for the cone to be treated as a piston, and for the travel time for sound from the far edges of the cone to be negligible. Still, it's a technique that helped tune the bass end of the frequency response, say an octave or two around the fundamental speaker resonance.
It's also possible to use close-miking with a tuned-port system, miking both the port and the woofer cone, scaling the response curves by port and speaker cone area, and splicing them together. Clumsy, but this guy made it work.
Still another technique is to dig a hole in the middle of the parking lot (!), lower the loaded speaker enclosure into the hole, speaker cones facing up, and build some sort of baffle that smoothly and seamlessly connects the front face of the speaker enclosure to the paved surface of the parking lot. The idea is that the speaker is operating into a half-sphere, and there are no obstacles around to create reflections except the ground itself. You suspend the microphone above the speaker, and make your measurements as usual.
The worst aspect of the parking-lot measurements was having to wait until everyone else had gone home, and the parking lot was empty and quiet, before we could make measurements!
We came up with one more oddball method. This involved stringing a horizontal cable between two lamp posts in the parking lot, building a little rig that held the measurement microphone in the proper location in front of the speaker enclosure, and then winching the whole thing (speaker plus mic) up into the air. This gets you a full-space measurement, good down to lowish frequencies, depending on how high off the ground you raise the speaker. You can (should) also gate the measurements to remove that part of the time axis which might include ground reflected sound.
None of these methods is exactly home-friendly, unfortunately, and if you try them, you might have neighbours calling the mental-health hotlines on your behalf!
-Gnobuddy
Since old, low-quality audio formats continue to experience new surges of popularity, why not get the jump on the Next Big Thing, and start manufacturing the original Edison tinfoil recordings, vintage circa 1880 or so?
I predict monophonic tinfoil recordings will be the next huge hit, especially if you can have actual *tin* foil manufactured specifically for you. None of this modern new-fangled aluminium foil masquerading as tin!
-Gnobuddy
While it is always dangerous to bet on a single horse, if I'd had to I'd bet on this: "The future of digital audio is digital". Meaning, that the CD was just the beginning and already looks rather primitive from today's point of view. Now, that we have all signals as a digital abstraction, the possibilities become (at least in theory) endless. How did Leibniz (the inventor of binary arithmetics) say: "omnibus ex nihilo ducendis, sufficit unum." "To create all from None, all that's needed, is One." (0 and 1) The first realization of the nature of this beast may have been, what now is known by the term "MultiMedia". One machine could suddenly display all information.
Complex filters, equalization like never before, room-correction, cross-overs in software, that all is happening already.
For the future I could imagine stuff like "Sound-Gear Modelling". Have a processor mix in "the sound" of old vintage audio-gear. This would require to "record" the sound of different products in order to recreate them and mix them into the signal. Want to hear that 70's hardrock album the way it was meant to be played (because the producers mixed it for the gear the customers had back home then)? Just select your favourite amplifier model from that era with an equalizer, that "tunes" your speakers' character to the one of that time.
I don't know, how realistic this idea is, but similar things are happening in the musician's markets for guitar amplifiers and guitar-effects for years.
Whatever happens, we will see engineers diving into bending the sound to their will, as much as physically possible, by the use of high-performance DSP processing. Someone, who puts a lot of money and effort into such a system can can be found here (digitalroomcorrection.hk). He utilizes the BACCH technology.(Stereophile report). While freakingly expensive (now?), it even uses headtracking (!) to deliver optimum sound at the listening-spot. Let's not discuss this here, I just wanted to show, what is possible these days.
Another thing I could imagine is, now, that it seems to be proven, that the brain can go beyond 20KHz (and it doesn't need the ears to do so) and, that these hypersonic frequencies pleased the listeners, I could see these being mixed into the audio-stream, once there is chains, that can reproduce these HSFs.
Of course, this post should be read with a grain of Science-Fiction salt ;-) I just wanted to show, what new possibilities exist with DSP processing and I am sure, that this will be the mainstream-development for the next 20 years or so, starting right now.
Complex filters, equalization like never before, room-correction, cross-overs in software, that all is happening already.
For the future I could imagine stuff like "Sound-Gear Modelling". Have a processor mix in "the sound" of old vintage audio-gear. This would require to "record" the sound of different products in order to recreate them and mix them into the signal. Want to hear that 70's hardrock album the way it was meant to be played (because the producers mixed it for the gear the customers had back home then)? Just select your favourite amplifier model from that era with an equalizer, that "tunes" your speakers' character to the one of that time.
I don't know, how realistic this idea is, but similar things are happening in the musician's markets for guitar amplifiers and guitar-effects for years.
Whatever happens, we will see engineers diving into bending the sound to their will, as much as physically possible, by the use of high-performance DSP processing. Someone, who puts a lot of money and effort into such a system can can be found here (digitalroomcorrection.hk). He utilizes the BACCH technology.(Stereophile report). While freakingly expensive (now?), it even uses headtracking (!) to deliver optimum sound at the listening-spot. Let's not discuss this here, I just wanted to show, what is possible these days.
Another thing I could imagine is, now, that it seems to be proven, that the brain can go beyond 20KHz (and it doesn't need the ears to do so) and, that these hypersonic frequencies pleased the listeners, I could see these being mixed into the audio-stream, once there is chains, that can reproduce these HSFs.
Of course, this post should be read with a grain of Science-Fiction salt ;-) I just wanted to show, what new possibilities exist with DSP processing and I am sure, that this will be the mainstream-development for the next 20 years or so, starting right now.
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