Who makes the lowest distortion speaker drivers

Jump to Latest
#242
gedlee said:
A good microphone is also exempt from a worry about non-linear distortion. Microphones are inherently linear owing to the small displacements of the diaphragm. Sure it's always possible to overload them, which is basically clipping, but that's easily detected and just as easily cured. So there should be no reason that a recording should be limited by the microphone.
Click to expand...

Well maybe its linear distortion then. I think that certainly a very natural sounding recorded voice is the exception. There's usually some digital buzziness or sibilance there, some people say digititus but that's the wrong term.
 
#243
33Polkhigh said:
Someone will say its me or my system but I can't think of a single example of a classical recording that hasn't sounded distorted and terrible.
Click to expand...
It could be any number of things, but I know many people who get auditory overload from complex music. It puts large demands on every link in the chain. Not all classical music is orchestral or complex though, so I'm not really clear about what you are saying
 
#244
scottjoplin said:
It could be any number of things, but I know many people who get auditory overload from complex music. It puts large demands on every link in the chain. Not all classical music is orchestral or complex though, so I'm not really clear about what you are saying
Click to expand...

Maybe I overstated it a bit, but say I go over to shoutcast and listen to a station like audiophile buroque. The recordings have a distorted sound. Like old and dusty sounding.

This in comparison doesn't, I think its because it was done in a studio

YouTube
 
#246
Bigun said:
The recoding/editing professinal is the weakest link in most music I've owned. Strange that the artists name is well known, sometimes the instruments used, the brands of your hi fi, but who ever talks about the guy or gal in the recording studio that makes the final mix?
Click to expand...

There are at least two mixing/mastering engineers whose products I will never buy. Brothers no less and oddly popular but everything they touch ends up distorted and grotesquely over-compressed.
But at least they use all vintage valve compressors for that 'analogue mojo'.
Should at least keep some audiophools happy... 😀
 
#247
scottjoplin said:
It could be any number of things, but I know many people who get auditory overload from complex music.
Click to expand...

I find the issue to be speech. As I get older, understanding somebody talking to me in a noisy pub / restaurant is harder than I remember it to be. Complex music I don't mind because I'm not trying to comprehend it (most songs have such crap lyrics I prefer not to understand !).
 
#249
gedlee said:
If by "pop" music you mean anything that is not "classical" then I could not disagree more strongly. That is the kind of position that really irks me, the misinformed belief that only classical music is worthy of a good stereo. 🙄
Click to expand...
Ignoring the ridiculous interpretation and offensive reaction to my post, I say whatever kind of music you want to listen to, it should be on the sort of system it was produced to be played in.

"System" includes the room car, truck, elevator, movie theatre, or earphones while riding the school bus to grade 10. Do you know which one or which group? Or all, sort of?

"Classical" recordings would be considered crap if they were intended for anything but quality home systems. Of course they could be cherished for non-SQ reasons too.*

As for the rest of the recording world, I suppose it is best to have a quality system with lots of adjustment of all sorts so the very close-mic'ed recordings of breathy Diana Krall and her 12 foot tall double bass sound "correct".

To relate this to the issues of this thread, over in the subwoofer forum, many members positively salivate over enclosure designs that no "classical" music lover would want in their home. These are suitably good for a lot of other music**, I guess. My point is that judgments of quality or distortion are related to the music genre.

B.
*Heard Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde last night and wanted to again hear the Bruno Walter recording at home. (He premiered it but he's been dead for decades.)
**big thing for trucks is 6th order band pass and all the variants
 
Last edited:
#252
turk 182 said:
please elaborate on this statement i'm curious to know why you would say this?
as someone who has done alot of recording i've come to prize the high output high sensitivity mic's i've used.
Click to expand...

Mics don't have to be efficient, it doesn't matter. So they are very small, yielding almost no resonances in the audio band, have miniscule diaphragm displacement yielding almost zero nonlinear distortion ... A loudspeaker needs "amps" to get 94 dBSPL, an electret microphone produces Pico-coulombs of charge at this same SPL. That's a pretty big gap I would say.
 
#254
gedlee said:
If you look at all of the sources of nonlinearity in a loudspeaker you find that only nonlinear inductance in a woofer, and the associated flux modulation are issues that generate higher orders of nonlinearity over a wide bandwidth. That is why all drivers should have flux modulation rings to control this problem. Once they have those then there aren't any major nonlinearities to go after - short of the coil coming out of the gap, which should never occur in a well-designed loudspeaker.
Click to expand...

Therefore, for a direct radiator the only safe good idea is to reduce the excursions.

http://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/kli...Measurement_of_Large-Signal_Parameters_99.pdf
 
#255
Hi ZeroD,
they were on eBay and are in near perfect condition. Especially the cones which are extremely vulnerable to damage. I paid £40.00 approx. for the pair. I’m quite happy with this and am looking forward to hearing what they can do. I’d like to know how they stand up against other drivers with regard to distortion but only out of casual interest as I know they will sound good.
This thread has gone away from the original opening question and there are many, many speaker drivers worth considering that have not been mentioned to see which ones produce the least amount of distortion.
 
#256
silverprout said:
Therefore, for a direct radiator the only safe good idea is to reduce the excursions.

http://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/kli...Measurement_of_Large-Signal_Parameters_99.pdf
Click to expand...

It also stands to reason that all things being equal a larger driver playing a given frequency will have less excursion and so less distortion.

So larger drivers and also multiple drivers distribute the box noise and diffraction over a wider area.

It would be interesting to compare a single very low distortion driver like a satori to multiple cheaper ones.
 
#257
gedlee said:
Mics don't have to be efficient, it doesn't matter.
Click to expand...

I'd disagree.

As you minimise capsule size, the noise levels must increase. With studios routinely applying 20-30dB of compression, that can start to become a problem.

The dynamic mics I've worked on have of the order of 1mm Xmax. Since they're sometimes subject to SPLs of the order of 150dB, I suspect that gets used in full from time-to-time.

Happy to start a new thread on this. I think it'd be an interesting discussion.

Chris
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom