Did you state what acoustical rolloff steepness the setup uses?
Do you also actually check and indeed EQ the stop bands (both) to be equal for the midranges? How far from f0 / f1 did you do this?
//
Do you also actually check and indeed EQ the stop bands (both) to be equal for the midranges? How far from f0 / f1 did you do this?
//
so you compare active speakers to motorcars and passive to horses.
ill take the horse: gives me more time to look at the nuance of the landscape, smell the fresh air 😛
but seriously, dsp/eq with a dac eliminate the possibility to have bit perfect signal, create phase problems. wouldnt it be better to have drivers that need minimal eq that and using passive network?
many passive two way dont need no eq to sound better at all
As soon as you manipulate a signal in any way, you are not bit perfect anymore - independant of where you are doing it (digital or analog domain). No speaker will ever give out a sound-pressure signal that is an exact copy of the digital info fed to the DAC.
Digital signal processing can be made fully transparent, although it comes at a price.
The advantage of advanced filtering (i.e. more than just simple lowpass ant highpass filters, be they analog active/passive or digital) is the fact that you can use drivers that excel in their intended frequency range but that are a little hard to tame outside of their normal working range (like ceramic and metal cones for instance).
And there are no phase issues with DSP crossovers if done right - the contrary is the case if done well.
Nothing against well-behaved drives and speakers that are built with these of course.
Regards
Charles
Last edited:
@phase_accurate and youknowyou
I think you'll need both to prove all that is *audible*...
Remember: we're talking here about a bunch of humans who struggle to spot half octave missing. Between only 2 drivers to chose from. With the mind laser-focused on said exercise. In a very quiet room. And no alcool 😉
I think you'll need both to prove all that is *audible*...
Remember: we're talking here about a bunch of humans who struggle to spot half octave missing. Between only 2 drivers to chose from. With the mind laser-focused on said exercise. In a very quiet room. And no alcool 😉
(bold mine)
Maybe this is the problem why this extreme difference was not detected? Overfocussing and 'test stress' is known to skew results.
Maybe the results are accurate and frequency response is easily dealt with as a variable. It is supported by other tests. We need to focus on other differentiators like directivity, diffraction, rise time, energy storage and decay etc.
Just for the little story...
The Voxativ AC-1.6 i'm using right now in the test was from my home speakers.
I have only the left side midrange in my system now, and for the last few weeks. For obvious reasons, my speakers are completely out of balance and my system should be turned off, as any audiophile would do.
But, hey, it started with me, facing the unbearable silence, one night. I started to listen some music. With my mind completely un-audiophiled and a bit annoyed by the state of my system.
Weeks later, i listen music all day, watch TV series like i always did, and couldn't care less.
Even worse: i listened to some tunes the other day and i was like ''wow, the low-mid/bass is really tight on that one!''... And then i though ''oh damn, yeah it's because i have a *smiling FR* now''
Bottomline, i believe it would be counter-intuitive to make a test with ''casual listening'' of any sort. I believe the laser-focused mindset is the very best way to find any differences, if there is any. In fact, i believe these hypothetical differences would lose ground in any long-term-real-life-domestic-usage, where the laser-focused-audiophile-mindset is not there most of the time, except maybe when we invite buddies to group-laser-focus. 😉
This is a bit lateral but speaks to factors other than frequency response, driver quality et al being highly significant. Many years ago I had the opportunity to listen to a Celestial SL6 and a Celestial SL600 back to back. The SL6 and SL600 both used the same drive units (including the copper dome tweeter) and the same crossover spec. The only difference was the SL600 had a trick Aerolam cabinet, Aerolam being an aerospace aluminium honeycomb.
Heres the thing, the SL600 sounded completely different to the SL6. These were production items, not show horses tuned to exaggerate differences and I don't think Celestial ever stooped to such shenanigans, and representative of normal production tolerances. The differences were not slight and attributed to the aerolam cabinet 'releasing' stored energy quickly. With everything but the cabinet materials staying the same you might have expected a minimal difference to the sound. What you got was an easily perceived increase in speed,clarity and drive. I think JonBocani's results are entirely credible and as I noted earlier are backed by other tests on the significance of fr EQ.
Burnt
Heres the thing, the SL600 sounded completely different to the SL6. These were production items, not show horses tuned to exaggerate differences and I don't think Celestial ever stooped to such shenanigans, and representative of normal production tolerances. The differences were not slight and attributed to the aerolam cabinet 'releasing' stored energy quickly. With everything but the cabinet materials staying the same you might have expected a minimal difference to the sound. What you got was an easily perceived increase in speed,clarity and drive. I think JonBocani's results are entirely credible and as I noted earlier are backed by other tests on the significance of fr EQ.
Burnt
Seems flawed here too. Headphones can have orders of magnitude more distortion than the best tweeters.
Just because i want to avoid too much time-wasting-tests, i'd like to take a short-cut and go directly to the highest differences potential: the project to mimic a complete audio system, then ABX in twin rooms.
That is what i'm really interested right now.
That is what i'm really interested right now.
FYI: my theory is: we can mimic the overall sound results of a complete commercial 'Boutique' sound system.... with some cheap parts + DIY, mostly because of the use of DSP/EQ.
If my theory is confirmed, then we can move on and search in the debris of the collapsed audiophile market to find what broke first. ;-)
If my theory is confirmed, then we can move on and search in the debris of the collapsed audiophile market to find what broke first. ;-)
The easiest way to confirm your theory is replacing one side of the high end commercial speaker units with cheap ones and apply EQ, then perform mono blind test.
Please do it, we are all very curious about the result. 🙂
There are several proberties that will distinguish a particular driver. Frequency response is the primary and most easy to identify.
Once you EQ away the the frequency response differences, you're left with polar response, distortion spectrum and such as the identifying characteristics. While polar response as such is audible, the parameters of the test rules that out, so you're left with distortion spectrum as the main identifier. I don't think the human sense apparatus is really capable of reliably distinguishing this in an ABX test, unless you're running the driver well out of its comfort zone...
Johan-Kr
Once you EQ away the the frequency response differences, you're left with polar response, distortion spectrum and such as the identifying characteristics. While polar response as such is audible, the parameters of the test rules that out, so you're left with distortion spectrum as the main identifier. I don't think the human sense apparatus is really capable of reliably distinguishing this in an ABX test, unless you're running the driver well out of its comfort zone...
Johan-Kr