You make two very valid points here.
Once again though, I think I have failed to make my point. A DIYer who uses pro drivers to produce a quality speaker, that speaker should not sound bad at low levels, in fact it should sound near the same at all normal levels.
..and I'm not even sure that was what was being originally discussed
Once again though, I think I have failed to make my point. A DIYer who uses pro drivers to produce a quality speaker, that speaker should not sound bad at low levels, in fact it should sound near the same at all normal levels.
..and I'm not even sure that was what was being originally discussed
Power handling ability alone doesn't guarantee low distortion. I mentioned it only as one possible factor. They would have to be good quality PA speakers to produce good results at any level.
I wouldn't have thought that the resistance of the cables would be significant, since they are straight conductors. A couple of meters of regular figure-8 speaker wire is less than 0.001 ohms.
Ugly but not as ugly as I expected. A dip or peak of 3 dB should not be hugely audible.
What would the size of all of these deviations be likely to be?
I built a system years ago, which I still use, which was basically the one I described earlier: closed box, three-way, first order crossovers. I didn't use ready-made crossover circuit, I designed one from scratch, using the basic filter formulae. I chose crossover points well within the overlaps of the flat regions of the responses of adjacent drivers. I lined up the -3 dB points of adjacent high-pass and low-pass filters as accurately as was possible with the "preferred series" capicator and inductor values and their tolerances, calculating all possible frequency points using these near the desired crossover points, even using combined values of two components in series or parallel.
I didn't have any test equipment beyond a multimeter and a CRO and certainly not an anechoic room. It would be interesting to test them out if I had the means.
LOL. Wouldn't that be true of any speaker?
FWIW, the very best world class home systems I have heard mostly used PA drivers.
There's a lot more than a couple of meters of wire in a typical crossover inductor, you know.
3 peaks and dips in speaker response are huge to me, particularly when they span a wide range of crucial midrange frequencies. Everything from below 1 kHz to 10 kHz is badly screwed up in the simple little LTSpice simulation I showed, and that's neglecting many other factors that tend to make real-life results worse than the simulation.
In the days when rigorously controlled large scale double-blind listening tests were still being conducted by qualified people working for reputable institutions, there was some evidence found that people can detect as little as a 0.3 dB peak, if it's broad and spans a fairly wide range of frequency.
Twenty years ago, when I was listening critically to loudspeakers as part of my job, the speakers I found I liked best turned out to have free-field frequency response errors of around +/- 1 dB over the parts of the audio spectrum where our ears are most sensitive.
The original Mackie HR824 monitors were rated at +/- 1.5 dB from 39 Hz - 20 kHz, a pretty amazing accomplishment, and IIRC we measured it as flatter than that through the crucial mid frequencies.
This measurement required a mic that was much flatter yet; fortunately my then-employer had one, a Bruel & Kjaer measurement mic and accompanying preamp, which was ruler-flat from 4 Hz to 100 kHz (!!!), and which I was told cost several thousand dollars at the time.
Each HR824 speaker had built in electronic EQ which was individually tweaked at the factory to compensate for inevitable manufacturing tolerances in drivers and enclosures, and that's how Mackie managed to achieve such a flat response.
The poor-mans alternative at the time was the Alesis M1 Active near-field monitors, which were equally flat, except for the bottom octave. They didn't reach down as far as the Mackies, and a poorly thought out decision to push bass response as low as possible, and then roll it off abruptly, resulted in boomy and poorly controlled deep bass. Other than that, though, they were very good speakers.
Turning away from high-quality loudspeaker systems, if +/- 3 dB is acceptable to you, then sure, use store-bought crossover networks. You'll get boom-box or car-audio quality, more or less. They're certainly good enough for non-critical listening, and these days I do most of my music listening in my car, on crappy factory speakers, surrounded by road noise, while commuting to and from work.
It would, indeed! This is far and away the biggest hurdle that faces DIY speaker builders. If you can't test what you have, you can't fix what's wrong. And if you can't fix what's wrong, you can bet your boots there will be a lot wrong.
These days you can easily find measurement software, including some that's free of cost. But a pro-quality calibrated measurement mic is completely out of the question. Affordable alternatives are available, and better than nothing, but have nowhere near the same capabilities. If the measurement mic has, say, +/- 2 dB of ripple in its frequency response, your speakers will inevitably have worse response than that. The old laboratory rule-of-thumb is that your test equipment should have ten times less error than the thing you're trying to measure.
As for an anechoic chamber, even most of the pro-audio companies can no longer afford such a luxury, now that consumer Hi-Fi is virtually dead.
There are some passable alternatives to a proper anechoic chamber, but all of them involve significant compromises. One alternative is to bury the speaker, facing up, front panel flush with the ground, in the centre of a large unobstructed parking lot or perfectly flat lawn. You can get decent half-space frequency measurements with this technique, but only if the birds and cars and police helicopters give you enough quiet time to make meaningful measurements, and the rain stays away, and the sun doesn't melt the glue in your speakers, and the snow doesn't stiffen the driver suspensions!
Sometimes you really need the frequency response into whole-space, not just half-space. The poor-mans anechoic chamber in this case is to dangle your speaker (along with its measurement microphone) as high in the air as you can get it, as far from the ground and all other acoustically reflective surfaces (buildings, etc) as you can get. Time-gate the measurements to cut off the first sound reflection from the nearest hard object (usually the ground), and you can get decent results at mid and high frequencies.
Accurate bass measurements, though, require the speaker to be impractically high, and impractically far from buildings. And you're still at the mercy of weather, and noise from birds, cars, police choppers, passing jetliners, etc. Having your precious measurement mic and preamp dangling high in the air, with a long shielded cable down to your laptop at ground level, is not exactly confidence-inspiring either.
Having seen first-hand how much skill, money, equipment, time, and effort are needed to design a really good speaker system, not to mention the necessity for a panel of people with good ears, and some reference speakers to do A/B comparisons with, and a suitable listening room and A/B switching equipment and speaker turntables, I'm quite certain I cannot create my own speakers that will come anywhere close to the quality of well-designed studio reference monitors.
So I bought a set of near-field studio monitors that were great bang-for-the-buck, combined them with a subwoofer to flesh out the frequencies below 70 Hz or so, and have been content with them for some 15 years or more now. They're definitely not perfect, but they're pretty good.
-Gnobuddy
Generally true of a high Q dip (and depending on the freq peak). High Q being sharp ie occurs over only a narrow frequency range). When the dip is over a large frequency range then 3db will definitely be quite audible! To me even 1db (and possibly less) over a significant range will "mess up" the balance.
Tony.
I do know but you said "as well as the loudspeaker cables running from the amplifier to the loudspeaker." In fact, it's the fact that the wire in the voice coil is much longer and much smaller in gauge than the speaker cable, as well as being in a coil, that I find all of the claims about speaker cables so incredible.
I went further than store-bought crossovers but still, I'm designing them blind, based only on driver specs and crossover formulae. Considering that I spent the same money on each woofer that a portable boom-box would cost, I would still hope that the speakers I built are better.
That was the first thing to cross my mind whenever I thought about testing my own speakers: Forget about the anechoic room - how flat is the mic's response?
What killed it? Video has gone to blue-ray, to HD and now to 4K. Why don't people want good sound with that?
New business concept: Anechoic chamber for hire.
And you roam DIY forums tormenting speaker builders. Seriously though, it's all good information. I always knew that a lot of work and high-quality test equipment was involved at the top end of the market but I never knew how good or bad it actually was at the DIY level. I always thought that if done reasonably well, it had to be better than your typical $1000 pair of floor-standing speakers at the local consumer electronics store.
On the other hand, some of the top-end hi-fi stores, the ones where nobody will speak to you unless you walk in with a golden cane, spruik some very un-technical crap in their online promotional material. I were to quit DIY and just save up the money for lab-designed gear, I wouldn't be sure that, from any given hi-fi store, I am really getting better than what I can make with parts from the electronics store.
I wonder if there is something we could pin to it? Like with car speakers we could say that the harsh environment requires a larger gap that leads to a reduced sensitivity. This is an entirely different kind of example, of course.
I also find PA drivers to sound excellent at low levels (when they are correctly configured to sound good at all levels).
I also find PA drivers to sound excellent at low levels (when they are correctly configured to sound good at all levels
).One can only speculate. But video tends to pull attention away from audio - vision is a more dominant sense. (Surely one of the reasons why most blind musicians are spectacularly good musicians.)
I smell a bankruptcy in the offing.
Tormenting anyone was never my intention, I assure you!
I do try to be pragmatic about DIY. Depending on what one is trying to build, sometimes a DIY build can perform as well (or even better) than a commercial product and cost less at the same time. But not always. Sometimes commercial products are excellent and affordable. Sometimes the commercial product is better than anything we can do with limited DIY tools and measurement capabilities.
So I do DIY plenty of stuff, just not Hi-Fi loudspeaker systems. Most of my posts are on the Instruments and Amps forum, and most of my DIY efforts have been in that general area for many years now. I play guitar, and there is endless room to tinker with audio electronics when electric guitars are involved.
My projects aren't just instrument-electronics related, though. A few months ago, I built an automated pet-feeder around an Arduino microcontroller, and wrote the code to make it work. That project was a mix of mechanical design (dry cat food jams up moving mechanisms like crazy!), carpentry and coding.
There are tons of commercially available automatic pet feeders, but not one that could do what we needed: feed a cat a thimbleful of cat food twenty times a day at spaced intervals (our cat has a medical condition, and can't keep his food down unless fed in this way.)
I build speaker systems too, but for non-critical applications, where my lack of $5000 B&K measurement mics and anechoic chambers won't hamper the result. Guitar cabs, for instance, where the prevailing paradigm since 1940 has been "Slap a 10" or 12" driver in a box of any size and shape, and call it good."
I'm still working at a very slowly evolving project that is somewhere between "assemble" and "build". I glued together a pair of thift-store Sony mini-component Hi-Fi speakers ($3.99 for the pair at a local thift store), added an Ebay-sourced class D power amp, a switching power supply, a cordless tool battery, a $25 guitar reverb pedal, and a little Yamaha MG06x mixer ( Access to this page has been denied. ), to create a small, portable P.A. system with inputs for two microphones and an electric guitar. Ideal for carrying to park or a friends house for a quick and easy music jam. (The pics show an earlier incarnation, for guitar only, before I added the mixer.)
There are commercially available alternatives that are at least vaguely similar, such as this Laney doohicky sold for an eye-wateringly high price of $630 CAD: Laney AH4X4 Portable Battery-Powered PA Speaker with Bluetooth Black | Musician's Friend . My home-brew thingamajigger has cost me about a quarter of that, most of it for the little Yamaha mixer; but I couldn't have built a DIY mixer with the same capabilities for that price.
IMO consumer audio is a mine-field. The affordable stuff is mostly garbage (Polk, Bose, etc), and the "Hi End" stuff may or may not be garbage, while cleaning forcing you to get a second mortgage. Fashion and appearance rule, and audio quality takes a distant third place.
IMO the only place where there's a little more sonic sanity in the loudspeaker industry is from from consumer audio, in the world of pro and semi-pro studio monitors. Even there, there are speakers that are garbage. But there are also speakers whose designers strove to create flat-response, audibly neutral, sonically revealing systems; exactly what you need to accurately mix and master good quality music. And, IMO, exactly what you need to enjoy listening to your music.
It's been twenty years since I was immersed in that world, but back then, the Mackie HR824 set a high bar for sound quality, at somewhere around $1000 each. The Alesis M1 Active came close (except for the deepest bass octave) at less than half the price.
There was lots of competition, at lots of price levels, but as our listening tests and actual measurements showed, you could easily spend two or three times the price only to get worse sound quality.
I agree - in my experience, it's wise to stay far from the Hi-Fi store, where most of your money is spent on appearance and attempts to manipulate your emotions. Consumer audio hasn't been about audio for a long time.
Much better to be in the pro-audio or semi-pro audio worlds, where appearance tends to be low on the priority list, and sonic quality *may* be higher, depending on the manufacturer's philosophy. Visit the place where they sell equipment for music recording studios, not the Hi-Fi store.
I would add, never buy any loudspeaker system for which the manufacturer doesn't provide at least an on-axis anechoic frequency response curve. If they haven't even taken the minimal effort needed to measure and provide one, you can bet the product is technically substandard.
If DIY Hi-Fi speaker systems is where the heart is, my suggestion is, build an active system. Cheap class-D audio amps (gasp! heresy!) or old-fashioned class AB analog chip amps, combined with an active crossover network, will take away many of the worst headaches that plague passive crossover networks. I would stay with analog active crossover networks, which are relatively simple to DIY.
Be wary of DSP crossovers; if you plan to use one, verify that there aren't unacceptably long time-delays between woofer and tweeter outputs.
This can be a real problem if the software engineer didn't think it through, because 44.1 kHz audio has an inherent delay of 22.68 microseconds between every two samples. Woofer and tweeter data may go through different-length digital filters (delays), and audio is usually clocked into and out of an audio buffer, where multiple samples are stored to ensure never running out of data. Even a small 256-sample buffer adds a delay of 5.8 milliseconds, equivalent to mounting woofer and tweeter about six feet (2 metres) apart.
-Gnobuddy
Attachments
I smell a bankruptcy in the offing.
(Maxwell Smart voice: ) How about I just invite you to my house to listen and you can play whatever you want?
Even the big names like Marshall, Fender and Orange?
I've had the same thoughts. The people who produce the music can't afford to fool around. Not that most people who buy it would be playing it through good speakers anyway.
Yes, it often seems like they are just selling expensive furniture for interior decoration. I can see what you mean about the death of hi-fi. Even in the "home theater" era, people will buy whatever looks good in the store.
That's where I'll go if I buy new speakers. This is what my nearest Mackie dealer has: % Search Results - Amber Tech
A hi-fi dealer once laughed when I mentioned I'd like to build a system using active crossovers. He told me that was only for giant stadium PA. Now consumer stores are selling enclosures with only the drivers in them and digital processing in the receivers feeding the drivers their respective frequency bands.
I think it's pretty literal. IMO, it's not that good audio equipment doesn't exist. Rather, it's that virtually nobody cares any longer. Public interest has moved on to something else (most likely, poking at their phones every few minutes.) Therefore, good-sounding audio equipment - speakers in particular - have become somewhat of an endangered species.
Many electronics manufacturers that used to be household names don't even make stereo equipment any longer. Generic chain stores like Montgomery Ward (now defunct), Target (bankrupt in Canada, struggling in the US), and Sears (struggling, in bankruptcy protection) used to sell speakers and amps and receivers, but they don't any longer.
Perhaps more telling, in the last several years, I can't recall having been in a home (other than mine) that contained separate stereo loudspeakers or an amp. Usually there's a TV, with awful built-in 2" or 3" speakers, and that's what the homeowner(s) listen to.
Music? Earbuds plugged into a phone playing MP3 tracks is almost universal. If there is a music enthusiast in the house, maybe there's an overpriced Bluetooth powered speaker, with its own awful 2" or 3" built-in speaker, housed in an enclosure that looks as little like a loudspeaker as possible.
Nobody whom I know currently (in this part of Canada) owns a home theatre system. The ones I saw in Los Angeles homes a decade ago typically featured four satellite speakers in enclosures that were maybe 3" or 3.5" cubes, one "sound bar" that has exactly the wrong design for a centre channel (a horizontal line-array disperses sound vertically, and beams it horizontally, the opposite of what you want), and a "subwoofer" that is about an 8" cube with a 6-inch "woofer" in it.
The little satellite speakers struggle to reproduce anything below maybe 500 Hz, the little subwoofer booms loudly at about 100 Hz, and there is a yawning gap in between the upper frequency limit of the subwoofer, and the lower frequency limit of the satellite speakers. Sound quality is somewhere between mediocre and awful, and the owners probably shelled out $500 USD or more for the privilege.
The head-scratcher for me is that I've heard vintage valve AM radios - built in the 1950s - that sounded better to me. There was nothing above 5 kHz, but at least the bass was rich and warm, and the limited bass extension balanced the limited treble extension, so overall the sonic balance wasn't too bad. Now when I hear someone listen to music from the penny-sized speaker in their phone, all treble and no bass, I don't know how they can stand it.
I've read enough history books to know that fashions come, and fashions go. Home Hi-Fi was fashionable for a while, perhaps from roughly the 1960s through the 1990s. It lasted longer than some other fashions did; North America was absolutely mad about mandolins from roughly the 1880s until about 1915.
-Gnobuddy
If you come from the world of Hi-Fi audio, guitar speakers, and guitar amps, are a trip down Alice's rabbit-hole. None of the rules you're familiar with apply...flat frequency responses sound bad, extended treble response sounds bad, bass response below 83 Hz is utterly useless (that's the lowest note you can get from a guitar in standard tuning), and enormous amounts of distortion - the right kind of distortion - is a good thing.
-Gnobuddy
Smartphones seem to have taken people's sense of spatial awareness altogether. I am continually having to move aside to avoid running into them. Perhaps this is connected to their disinterest in spatial sound and music. Even the dynamics of the music they listen to with earphones has been mostly flattened out. They live in a flat world, approximately 110 mm x 65 mm.
I've noticed. At best, usually, it will be mini 5.1 systems to go with their big TVs. Even the big home-wares and electronics stores rarely have floor-standing speakers. Some who do carry them just have them stacked in boxes along one wall.
If you come from the world of Hi-Fi audio, guitar speakers, and guitar amps, are a trip down Alice's rabbit-hole. None of the rules you're familiar with apply...flat frequency responses sound bad, extended treble response sounds bad, bass response below 83 Hz is utterly useless (that's the lowest note you can get from a guitar in standard tuning), and enormous amounts of distortion - the right kind of distortion - is a good thing.
What about bass guitar amplifiers? The open E fundamental is about 40 Hz. Open B on a five-string is around 30 Hz.
Is getting a good sound for guitar amps just a matter of experimenting and trial-and-error then?
We might both get lynched if we talk about instrument amplifiers for too long on this forum...there's a separate forum for us untouchables!
I dabble a little in bass, and when going into the P.A., I note that both my 4-string and 5-string basses sound better if I turn on the 60-Hz high pass filter in my preamp - clearer, less muddy, and just as deep-sounding. I also note that my 4-string bass sounds crisper and more articulate plugged into my little Acoustic B20 bass guitar amp with its 12" speaker, than it does if I go direct. IMO, a little high-pass filtering actually makes the bass sound less muddy and makes it more audible in the mix.
I've also looked up a few spectrograms of bass guitar signals - most of the time, the strongest Fourier component is the 4th harmonic of the fundamental note! So the 30-Hz low B on a 5-string guitar, when plucked, is mostly spitting out a signal at 120 Hz. And so on, over most of the musically useful range of the instrument, especially the lowest couple of octaves.
This makes sense when you consider that the fretboard occupies more than 3/4 of the length of the string on almost any modern bass (24 frets takes up 3/4 of string length). So the pickups, and the player's fingers or guitar pick, hit the string rather close to its end, and quite far from its middle. This puts energy into upper harmonics rather than the fundamental.
Other than that, I don't know much about bass guitar preamp or speaker design. The speakers are usually designed using Thiele-Small parameters, unlike guitar speakers; the enclosures are usually ported to produce reasonable levels of bass from reasonable-sized enclosures.
But there is little public information on how onboard bass-guitar preamps are "voiced" (EQ). Bass players claim that different-brand preamps and speakers sound very different, which I think implies they must have audible differences in EQ, since there isn't much else to distinguish them.
As for guitar-amps, I don't think there has been much evolution for decades. Leonidas Fender found the recipe for what guitarists call "clean tones" in the 1960s, maybe a bit earlier. Jim Marshall and his tech copied the Fender Bassman, then tweaked and evolved the design to create signature classic-rock sounds of the late '60s and '70s. In the 1980s the gain and distortion levels got cranked up until guitars started to sound like power tools grinding on the proverbial tin roof.
And since then, for nearly four decades, most developmental effort seems to have gone into re-creating vintage valve amp designs, or trying to make semiconductors sound like valves (vacuum tubes), or adding on useful features like direct-out jacks and speaker attenuators. I don't think there has been much by way of new or improved sounds, really. But that's just my opinion.
-Gnobuddy
I recently bought an Orange Crush Bass 25 to learn bass guitar with. I think it has an 8" driver and it's ported. It's not earth-shaking but it has a nice sound.
Does this mean I don't need a subwoofer to listen to rock music?
If they know the sound they want, I guess they don't need accurate test equipment.
Semiconductor circuits can be made which emulate the valve characteristic. I wouldn't have thought that would be a big deal.
I like what a subwoofer adds to rock music, and it does add something. Maybe keyboards and drums that reach below bass guitar frequencies; maybe bass guitar itself, cleverly recorded and EQ'd and mixed, can use more of that bottom octave without turning to mud, as it does in a live music situation.
Which characteristic would that be? Triode? Pentode? At which bias condition? With which load impedance?
Both triodes and pentodes produce a variety of nonlinear effects, varying with all the above factors. Unipolar grid current flow through interstage coupling capacitors causes dynamic shifts in DC bias that vary with guitar signal level and frequency, causing time-varying transfer characteristics and distortions.
All of this mostly unresearched and undocumented stuff seems to contribute to the sound of a good valve guitar amp.(Though Carvin once made a line of solid-state guitar amps that included carefully emulated dynamic duty-cycle modulation of the output waveform.)
Also, IMO analogue SS valve emulations tend to go abruptly from too-clean to too-distorted as signal level increases, ruining the smoothly progressive distortion characteristics that allow expressive electric guitar playing.
These seem to be some of the reasons why most solid-state emulations have ended up sounding boring and buzzy, or harsh and unvarying, lacking the subtlety you get from a good valve guitar amp.
I thought the same thing at one time. I was quite wrong!
The facts: thousands of attempts have been made over at least six decades, after transistors became widely available circa 1960. Most have been total failures, a few found brief niche success, none actually replaced valve guitar amps for long in the hands of top-notch pro guitarists in blues, rock, pop, and other similar types of music.
I've made a fair number of stabs at the problem myself, trying everything from piecewise-linear diode/resistor feedback networks around op-amps to clever tricks with JFETs and MOSFET logic inverters biased into quasi-linear operation. All of them did something vaguely valvey, but none came close to completely emulating a good tube amp.
That's not to say you won't be the first one to succeed, but the odds are heavily against you.
There have been successes in recent years, but not with analogue circuits. Only with powerful digital signal processing, using secret and proprietary algorithms that have been refined over at least the last thirty years (that's when crappy-sounding early DSP modelling amps started to be marketed by the likes of Line 6), and taking advantage of the constantly increasing performance of digital chips over the years.
A few years ago, the AmpliFIRE products from Atomic Amps were some of the first convincing tube-amp simulations I ever heard (to my ears, obviously.) More recently, the Boss Katana 50 and 100 have set the standard for affordable solid-state guitar amps that sound (very much) like really good tube amps in many situations.
We are now far from Hi-Fi loudspeaker systems, and if this thread is to continue in this vein, it should be in the Instruments & Amps forum.
-Gnobuddy
It's harder than I thought. I guess the best thing is give up trying to make transistors act like valves and put up with the extra weight of the output transformer and less compact head units. Or do the best you can with inherent transistor characteristics.
It's like the valve amplifier is part of the instrument for amplified guitars. Perhaps the thing to do with transistor amplifiers and effects is use what inherent features of transistors there are to produce different yet equally pleasant sounds.
I guess digital simulations can do whatever you want them to.
Yes. Will somebody move this discussion there? Is it a forum on this same site?
I think that's the conclusion many of have ended up with. Even the loudspeaker is part of the instrument - it contributes quite a lot of EQ, typically a slow treble rise of as much as 10 dB by 3.5 kHz, followed by an abrupt downward plunge that helps to suppress harsh-sounding high frequencies from distorted guitar.
In principle, yes. In practice, not always!
There used to be an insider joke that goes something like this: a software research scientist works on solving yesterday's computational problems with tomorrow's computing hardware, while a production software engineer has to solve tomorrow's problems with yesterday's hardware.
For most of their thirty-year history, hardware digital sims universally sounded awful to me, buzzy, monotonous, unpleasant, harsh, and lifeless. The computing power available in an affordable DSP chip was limited, and I think the software algorithms for emulating valve amps were also inadequate. I think many fell into the trap of believing that all you had to do was make a rigidly unvarying nonlinear transfer function, and all would be well. But it wasn't.
Better results were starting to be possible with software guitar amp sims running on an actual personal computer, rather than a little DSP chip in a $350 guitar pedal. So evidently having vastly bigger processing power available did make a difference.
For me, the hardware sims finally began to change just two or three years ago, when I first heard video demonstrations of the (fairly expensive) Atomic Amps AmpliFIRE products. Then the Boss Katana line came along, at half or a third of the price of the Atomic Amps stuff, and blew everyone else completely out of the water with the mix of sound quality, price, and features.
The spray from that epic explosion hasn't settled yet, as for the last couple of years the Katana line has outsold every similar product by a vast margin, and all the other manufacturers must be tearing their hair out trying to make a product that will claw back some sales for them.
Indeed: https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/instruments-and-amps/
You could start your own thread there, if you wanted to.
I'm told (and there is evidence in old posts and threads) that there was a lot more interest in unique and creative DIY guitar amps on that forum several years ago, before I was a member here. When I joined the forum was more repair oriented ("How can I fix my buzzing FlapJack 455 amplifier?"), and that trend, sadly, seems to be continuing, along with a progressive decline in the rate at which new threads are created.
I'm saddened, but not totally surprised. People tend to be at their creative peak in their twenties, and there are few twenty-somethings interested in electronics nowadays.
-Gnobuddy
I forgot about processing power limitations. However, I was thinking more of an amplifier unit that emulates a valve circuit rather than just an effects pedal, which would have space for a more sophisticated digital processor.
Perhaps big companies aren't so stable as we tend to assume. One technical advance is all it takes to fold a whole industry and create a new giant.
Although I have been more interested in hi-fi audio, guitar amps are an interesting topic as well. The electronic and acoustic side of amplified instruments makes it interesting. It's a reversal of hi-fi audio: Instead of trying to make an amplifier which acts like a "straight wire with gain", the qualities of the devices are being creatively exploited.
I am surprised. In Australia, there are several popular, electronics hobby magazines. Today, they are oriented toward coding as well as mechanics and construction in addition to electronics. The projects combine the three fields to make working devices of all kinds. A few are more oriented to school-age kids, at a more basic level, but with some good basic technical instruction. It seems to be all the rage. Trading on the "geek cool" wave to some extent but also moving with the coming AI industry.
No doubt you have already made some attempts to stir interest in the creative DIY in that forum? I'd be interested in joining it to pursue that side of audio.
I didn't express myself very well, but that is exactly what I was talking about. For a long time, manufacturers have been selling guitar processors intended to be placed on the floor, with foot-operated "stomp switches", in housings bigger than a traditional analogue guitar effects box, and using DSP to emulate valve circuitry, often an entire guitar amplifier plus a chain of guitar effects. Boss, Digitech, Line 6, Zoom, and a variety of other companies have sold products like this. In North America they're often referred to as multi-effects pedals, even though many include valve amp simulation and not just effects simulation.
These were/are intended to connect directly to a flat-response P.A., powered speaker, or in a pinch, an existing guitar amp. In principle, all you'd need for a complete guitar rig is your guitar, one of these boxes, and your powered speaker. The multi-fx box provides a variety of simulations claiming to sound like famous valve guitar amps from the past, along with a variety of simulations claiming to duplicate the various guitar effects pedals you might otherwise have on your pedalboard.
I've bought several over the years, and always ended up disappointed by the sound quality of the emulated valve amplifier(s). The advertising always claimed to deliver something along the lines of "The sounds of one hundred glorious vintage guitar amplifiers in one tiny box!", while early Line 6 products delivered a reality closer to "The sounds of one hundred kazoos in one tiny box!"
Exactly! IMO this is quite typical of what happens when art meets technology: creative artists push the technology past the limits envisioned by the engineer, until the technology breaks, and then the artist creates her most expressive art using the freshly exposed flaws in the technology.
I expect the "engineer" who invented the first paint-brush intended it to produce a smooth, uniform streak of colour. But artists quickly found flaws in the technology - make the paint too dry, and you get streaky and non-uniform marks on the canvas; make it too wet, you create a wash of non-uniform colour; change the type of solvent or the amount of pigment, and you end up with visible brush strokes instead of a smooth wash. And very soon all of these flaws in paintbrush technology became parts of any good painter's repertoire of techniques.
On the guitar amp front, Leonidas Fender knew just enough about electronics to pick up a soldering iron and copy standard Hi-Fi valve circuits out of the back of RCA valve catalogues to create his early guitar amplifiers. The music he favoured - country and surf - was all based around the clean, bright, undistorted sound of the guitar, and that's what he intended his amplifiers to produce. They were based on standard Hi-Fi circuitry of the time, minimally altered to accept guitar signals; Merlin Blencowe (aka "The Valve Wizard") refers to them as "Adequate-Fi", as good a description as any!
Early Fender amplifier "designs" that, quite unintentionally, were easily driven into audible distortion (like the 5E3 tweed Deluxe) were seen as failures, and Leonidas and his tech began tweaking his amplifiers to create the cleanest guitar tones they could conjure up. Copying a tone control design originally engineered for the Williamson Hi-Fi amplifier and raising power supply voltages eventually did the trick, and Fenders "Blackface" amps were born.
Then some artist - likely a blues guitarist - turned up his Fender amp louder than it was ever intended to go, and found out that the sound became distorted. Any audio engineer would immediately have turned the amplifier back down, but our hypothetical artist found that the distorted guitar sound sustained better, allowed for more expressive playing, and caught the listener's attention more than the clean "ping!" of an undistorted guitar note.
Leo either never knew, or never cared, and kept making clean guitar amplifiers; but Jim Marshall and his amp repair tech in the UK stole Leo Fender's Bassman amplifier design to create their first amplifier, noticed the emergence of rock music with its distorted guitar tones in Britian, and began to modify their amplifier designs to distort more easily, rather than to stay clean as loud as possible. Eventually they took this to quite an extreme, with their now-famous "cold clipper" amplifier stage, which is a triode valve biased almost into class B operation, so that it operates almost like a half-wave-rectifier rather than a linear audio amplifier.
The ones I used to buy in the USA in the 1990s all went out of business, one by one.
Many years later, "Make" magazine arrived, and kick-started a renaissance in the oh-so-shocking idea that you could actually make things yourself, rather than buying everything from a shop. "Make" has found a niche audience and still exists today.
While I'm grateful for its existence, I doubt it has captured the attention of more than a tiny fraction of today's youth.
There was a survey a couple of years ago that found the median age of diyAudio members was 55. I bet that number is steadily increasing, too.
That I have, but there are others much more prolific than I have ever been. Like Tubelab_Com (George), an engineer with the creative bent of an artist and the "Who cares if it breaks?" attitude of a punk-rocker, who has done more amazing and improbable things with valves than any normal engineer ever imagined doing.
-Gnobuddy
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