I agree with this one, you just need a couple more of them to reach huge spl potential 😀.
I think audio or food, it is a similar issue...
Bring 2 wines, can you identify in a blind test? If not,
(1) do you think no other people can identify it?
(2) do you think you can't "identify" in the long run, in a sighted condition? Do you think the two wines will be equally satisfying?
Isn't it similar like the audio case? 😎
With audio, imo we deal with more complicated senses. With food, it is simpler. But try to blind test mineral waters, can you pass the test? I have done this so I can tell you that purer water tends to have sweet taste and this is preferred by human. In the long run, you can measure how much water you drink each month, or how much do you like to drink...
Same with audio. You will listen to music more if you enjoy the system more... This is just a clue or phenomenon. Finding out the cause is possible!
I started enjoying and focusing on the music much more after I realized frequency response is king. Jon's conclusions are quite valid and have been supported by similar blind tests performed by others.
I rarely spend more than $20 on a bottle of wine. I like it french and red 🙂
Tip for Costco shoppers: Costco has a ridiculously good selection from the finest wine growing regions at extremely reasonable prices.
I rarely spend more than $20 on a bottle of wine. I like it french and red 🙂
Tip for Costco shoppers: Costco has a ridiculously good selection from the finest wine growing regions at extremely reasonable prices.
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... If after trying to EQ two gorilla males with withe wines in a cage
... then seing yourself in front of a mirror with two pair of balls....
1) maybe this is a Schrödinger result
2) or maybe the experiment was not totally mastered
😛
... then seing yourself in front of a mirror with two pair of balls....
1) maybe this is a Schrödinger result
2) or maybe the experiment was not totally mastered
😛
This is less predictable for the same reason that it is ordinarily excluded from the passband and it is not part of the primary behaviour of a speaker.
CSD aberrations within the pistonic region, such as a spider resonance are simple linear concerns that are relatively easy to correct. They don't involve differences in radiation pattern, there is no tonal tilt to the response, or pseudo tonal variations due to non-linearity.fatmarley said:
And there it goes... wine is a production and is meant to taste different.. Pick up from an amplifier output a same signal for speakers to re-produce. Separate the ways it can mess up the reproduction, each has its audibility parameters. Why over simplify this?
Could the bigger problem actually be the apparent need in current western culture to "pick a pill"? 😉
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I don't think its an east vs west kind of thing - more of a basic limitation of human brain. Our brain is a compromise - it has to process a huge amount of sensory input, analyse it and make decisions, store a lot of information and then be able to retrieve the right piece of information quickly under pressure. And it has to do that with limited energy supply without generating too much heat in a constrained volume with fault-tolerance etc. As a result it can't do it all perfectly and our memories and judgment are automatically tweaked over time by our experiences - our neurons extract statistical weightings from years of our unique sensory input. We hear and remember and judge things differently from each other and we do so imperfectly - reality becomes distorted.
But most of us can readily hear shitty FR from a speaker. Once FR is sorted, the differences may well be subtle.
But most of us can readily hear shitty FR from a speaker. Once FR is sorted, the differences may well be subtle.
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I'm more questioning the need to come to such firmly held conclusions - "knowing" tends to blind us somewhat.
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Well, sometimes you gotta make a decision and move on or you end up going around in circles - sometimes for years 😀
In an audio comparison, the CAUSE of preference and audibility is obvious when the products are not similar. It shifts from obvious to fuzzy when the difference is subtle... (no doubt about it)
When people can NOT differentiate 2 DUTs which have subtle differences, but they can differentiate 2 DUTs which have obvious differences, the cause is usually and mostly: FR... (So FR is king)
Now, let's take a look at a situation where people can not differentiate 2 DUTs which have subtle differences... Assume when they use the products for 3 months they start to dislike one of the products! Assuming that this is caused by the subtle differences, can you guess what the causes are? Do you think it is frequency response? (Or, do you think it is simply a phenomenon of expectation bias?)
Many people mention that they can easily pick speaker difference but cannot pick electronics difference. Why? Because almost all amplifiers have similar frequency response. But also because almost all amplifiers have better distortion than their speaker partners... (But it doesn't mean that all amplifiers sound the same)
Jay, the point is getting frequency response right is 99.99% of the game. The rest as you say is subtle. It is so subtle, in fact, that it is almost the same as your mind playing tricks on you. So, what's the point of chasing it, imagining what it could be, making up reasons and explanations, and chasing an illusion? For me, it is more important to get the 99.99% right, and then just enjoy the music. There is so much enjoyment to be had from listening to music and so much pain to be had from obsessing over equipment.
(That doesn't mean I stop building speakers and amplifiers. It just means I know what to expect.)
It's quite similar to wine actually. It is not the wine but the meal and the people that make the night special. Of course, you don't want to drink bad wine. So pick a good wine and your evening is enjoyable. You don't have to obsesses over it, that would be missing the point.
(That doesn't mean I stop building speakers and amplifiers. It just means I know what to expect.)
It's quite similar to wine actually. It is not the wine but the meal and the people that make the night special. Of course, you don't want to drink bad wine. So pick a good wine and your evening is enjoyable. You don't have to obsesses over it, that would be missing the point.
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Although difficult to measure, when listening to drivers with very similar FR, power compression becomes a real factor. Light cone, pro drivers accelerometer here.....and now with many pro drivers getting copper in the gap, there's really no need for overpriced hifi over damped junk. My B&C 8Pe21 mids are IMO the finest driver I've ever heard from 300hz-2khz.
Congratulations on the huge effort you put into all this, and on the courage needed to stand behind your experimental results.
I think your point (1) is a relatively recent occurrence. Many decades ago, Bell Labs and other trained researchers put together a huge body of carefully compiled evidence on what we humans can actually hear. Much of that ended up in print, both in research papers, and in books and tables of the time. If it's less than a decibel, most of us won't hear it, most of the time.
Your point (2) was also well established many decades ago. For many decades, in the early days of audio recording and reproduction technology, flat frequency response was the holy grail that so many engineers and researchers struggled to achieve.
Back then, everyone knew frequency response was crucially important to the perceived quality of sound. In the days before Thiele and Small's work on loudspeakers, in the days when it was almost impossible to manufacture a tape head with a sufficiently narrow gap, or a phono stylus with a sufficiently low tip mass, in the days before dome tweeters and modern high-strength magnetic materials existed, deep bass and high treble were literally unattainable at any price. We forget the huge effort that made it so easy for us to have those things so readily available, today.
With the limitations and capabilities of the human hearing system having been pretty well established at least four decades ago, the science was largely a done deal, so most trained research-calibre scientists and engineers left the area of audio reproduction. And, unfortunately for humanity, they void they left behind was increasingly filled by the lunatic fringe, who quickly discarded science and data, and replaced it with subjectivism and superstition.
For instance, I remember reading in old technical books on audio that 1% total harmonic distortion was roughly the threshold of detection when listening to music. Subsequently, as technology improved, in a "why not?" move, that number got revised to "maybe 0.1% is audible in some circumstances".
Yet, nowadays we have people insisting that they can hear the ugly distortion from solid-state amps with 0.0005% THD. 🙄
On your point (3), I was actually involved with an attempt to "turn crappy speakers into good ones with DSP" back in the late 1990s. (Not my idea, the boss told us to do it!)
We could not do what he asked us to, but we did find out how to take good drivers and make them sound really excellent. One part of the solution was carefully tweaking the frequency response, as you say. The other part was carefully controlling diffraction from the enclosure to keep the sound dispersion smooth and even at high frequencies, and, as you say, keeping the drivers away from their mechanical limits (including cone break-up).
I am glad you re-discovered for yourself some of the science from the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, you will probably find that, in the world of audio reproduction, science mostly falls on deaf ears these days.
-Gnobuddy
May be it's a different game for you? I don't know about you, but from looking at member's projects, such as Wesayso with his line-array, it cannot be the same game as yours....
But I agree, for most, flat FR is sufficient.
I think this is where you miss it. I'm talking for the population, not for me. For me, it is not an illusion. There is no trick, imagination or making-up, and I don't need to "chase" it. It's already within my reach!
I'm talking for the population. I mean, for many of the population (you may be included), this is like imagination... But I'm here to tell you that it is very likely that your ears, body or brain can "feel" it and it is not your imagination...
This phenomenon is something that I don't understand. I have friends who like to listen to music. Everyday they have (cheap) headphones on their ears. I don't know precisely why some people can easily enjoy listening to music like that... Is it high expectation or experience with better component that make me so hard to please?? I don't think so...
I know for sure that my ears are so sensitive and easily disturbed by noise and distortion. I have so many experiences showing how I couldn't stand loud sound when almost no other people were complaining... Beside loud sound, distorted speaker (like my kid's cheap Evercoss handphone) and any high frequency devices like pest repellers make me mad...
I think it is some kind of frustration, not obsession... I believe that this is a common problem with audiophiles.
When we experience a good enjoyment, that experience is recorded in our memory... When later we change our system, especially with a more expensive one, we expect that we will have more enjoyment, but it is not always the case. Our brain may reject it because the memory has that recorded experience as a benchmark...
This may lead to frustration... I have experienced this frustration, but after trying to understand the why and how for more than 10 years, now it's different. When I said that NLD was my bottleneck in speaker design, others don't understand (they are still busy with basic things)...
NLD is not a problem for me:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/284371-corner-floor-ceiling-line-array-using-vifa-tc9.html
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/284371-corner-floor-ceiling-line-array-using-vifa-tc9.html
Agree. With many drivers in parallel, the cone movement to achieve a certain SPL is small. This prevents the drivers from producing more NLD.
I don't know if you can hear it or not, such line-array has typical sound... Good or bad is probably a matter of taste...
(1) I think it is the fact that the sound that should come from a single point source now come from a wider space...? It is a different sound with a single large cone driver producing the same frequency. And I prefer the latter.
(2) It is obvious from paralleling output devices in an amplifier, that even tho more transistors give better transconductance and other benefits, the quality of the signal microscopically is "not focused". I believe that this is due to matching issue. I have proven that when the output transistors are matched, the problems disappeared... (but it is very expensive)
With speakers/drivers, situation is more obvious than with transistors. The difference from driver to driver is so huge... This, and probably combined with the difference in distance from ears to each sound sources, make the sound "blurred".
Gnobuddy, thank You for the post. Realism and knowledge of fundamental basics and history is mostly neglected in hifi industry and hobby since '80s. But we are only humans, obviously each generation must re-invent the wheel. And some people just want to walk.