No I think it is good to spell this out. I can image a smart software subroutine that detects whether a multiply is a power of 2 and do a shift instead of a multiply, but probably not worth it in today's power DAWs.
Jan
Actually, Heyser wrote a review in Audio about the Klipschorn that was absolutely gushing in praise.
Or it could be that a lot of what is assumed about power supplies is incomplete or incorrect. Once properly observed and measured things do become clearer. However I have seen much more misinformation than correct.
So do i
Just adding a question: "What do we want to reproduce ?"
I would like a really transparent system, if there is such a beast....
Personally I use a valve set up through some OBs (home built) and did have a SS set-up with Kef 104-2s (and tried other commercial speakers over the years), and years ago I did have access to ATC SM100's. So in some way all my systems have been flawed to and extent as they are not totally neutral....
I fully concur with you. I should have clarified. 'Understood' means that clever people have worked it all out, books are written and guidelines available for anyone who is interested. For example take any spectrum analyser made in the last 20 years and try and pick up its internal PSU switching frequency. Test equipment manufacturers and other disciplines outside of hi-end audio know all this stuff. But within audio there is a lot of misinformation and belief involved. And understood !=easy
Sorry if that was misinterpreted I'm only familiar with Dick's papers where some (unnamed horns) had poor time domain behavior.
BTW I can't stand K horns myself.
Now that was a long time ago and if memory serves, the review was more in praise of how it sounded in spite of it’s measurements.
This may well be one to the things which set Dick on the search for the Grail, a way to tie features in we measure to “what it sounds like”.
In this case, what one saw in the measurements did not convey how it sounds. A loudspeakers directivity is invisible on axis and so two speakers might have an identical frequency response at 1 meter but entirely diffent responses at the LP, the K horns had directivity and so what one measured at the LP is much closer to the 1 meter response than a less directive system would be. That is because the more directive system has a larger direct field where the direct sound is significantly louder than the later reflected sound.
If one ever saw the pina measurements (the response curve if measured next to ones ear drum), one sees a myriad of notches and combs and changes in response shape all a function of source location. We hear none of that as “flaws” as they appear on he screen, we have lived with them all our lives and know of nothing else so we hear those things as flaws but instead “where the source is”.
Want to find a faithful reproducer?
Play music through a speaker and listen to it through a measurement grade microphone and good closed back headphones , JUST doing that, removes a big part of the problem, your 3D hearing system that ignores flaws and forwards data. The mono headphone presentation samples sound from one point in space, bypassing your stereo processor that “creates” the image of a single point from two sets of complex inputs.
Do this and you will find not only are your speakers warts much more pronounced but because the microphone has no directivity, you also hear more of your room problems.
Find a loudspeaker that can survive and be listenable after 3 generations in a generation loss recording this way and you have a faithful loudspeaker, while most sound bad at generation one.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
The reality of the fact is that most horn systems will have that common horn honk sound. What is that, collapse of directivity, most horn designs have that, it is very hard to not have that happen with a two way system. I have moved away from those early two way systems long ago, you just can't overcome that problem with a single horn covering such a wide frequency range.
As Christophe was just saying you have to remember what the original recording was mastered on, that will have a dominant effect on the EQ that was used to make the sound correct in the studio. If you could duplicate that chain you would hear what the engineer intended the sound to be.
So many have been influenced in the past by what came before. I grew up with horn loaded JBL and Altec systems, most ly pro-audio and some of the home systems designed around those pro speaker systems. There was a definite sound to that, a specific type of sound that really most would today say is not natural, that the bass was lacking and there was a definite emphasis around the 60hz point, the normal fs of those early pro audio bass drivers, the 15" speakers that so many wound recognize instantly Today most modern pop music has just shifted that peak lower,, it is the boom that so many of use find so objectionable to listen to, that kid in the car next to you with the door rattling and the boom boom of excess low end totally moving away from neutral sound.
So I can make a perfectly flat speaker and many would hate it, they would just say something was lacking. What do you do, that is the easy part. Tone controls, preferably parametric eq if you have a well designed unit that can bring the music back into balance. The question becomes what balance are you most familiar with and what do you enjoy. Unless we are talking about something like orchestral music or a small ensemble most of today's music really has nothing to do with trying to reproduce correctly the sound of real live instrumentation and vocals, that is only for a few who understand traditional non amplified music and want to reproduce that as accurately as possible. That would leave out 99% of the music produced in a recording studio.
Now can we take a vote on putting Frank in the closet until he start to say something besides the tribble of vagary and nonsense that takes over this thread and many others like a quantum purifier!
As Christophe was just saying you have to remember what the original recording was mastered on, that will have a dominant effect on the EQ that was used to make the sound correct in the studio. If you could duplicate that chain you would hear what the engineer intended the sound to be.
So many have been influenced in the past by what came before. I grew up with horn loaded JBL and Altec systems, most ly pro-audio and some of the home systems designed around those pro speaker systems. There was a definite sound to that, a specific type of sound that really most would today say is not natural, that the bass was lacking and there was a definite emphasis around the 60hz point, the normal fs of those early pro audio bass drivers, the 15" speakers that so many wound recognize instantly Today most modern pop music has just shifted that peak lower,, it is the boom that so many of use find so objectionable to listen to, that kid in the car next to you with the door rattling and the boom boom of excess low end totally moving away from neutral sound.
So I can make a perfectly flat speaker and many would hate it, they would just say something was lacking. What do you do, that is the easy part. Tone controls, preferably parametric eq if you have a well designed unit that can bring the music back into balance. The question becomes what balance are you most familiar with and what do you enjoy. Unless we are talking about something like orchestral music or a small ensemble most of today's music really has nothing to do with trying to reproduce correctly the sound of real live instrumentation and vocals, that is only for a few who understand traditional non amplified music and want to reproduce that as accurately as possible. That would leave out 99% of the music produced in a recording studio.
Now can we take a vote on putting Frank in the closet until he start to say something besides the tribble of vagary and nonsense that takes over this thread and many others like a quantum purifier!
I used to love em back in '79. Except when I built two using MDF. Those suckers were heavy.
jn
Who is Frank?
Just as there are artifacts you miss in sound systems without training, in the visual field you just might not want to train yourself to see some things.
Regarding the Klipschorn:
Both Richard Heyser and I owned a single K-horn in the late '60's. We were both good friends with Paul Klipsch, but both Richard and I wanted more. Klipsch was always saying that the ear is essentially 'phase deaf'
and he always thought that the k-horn did enough for everybody.
When Richard gave his first paper at the AES implying that time delays of 2ms or so between drivers might be heard, Paul Klipsch got up and protested. I was there!
Still, I got another K-horn and used the pair, off and on for another 10 years.
If Richard Heyser had presented his material to many here, at the time, you would have attacked the implications of Richard's paper, just like Paul Klipsch did.
For certain kinds of music, like large orchestras, a single K-horn is exceptional.
BUT single human voice can be compromised, especially if you actually know what the singer sounds like live.
Both Richard and I finally gave up K-horns for a more 'accurate' product in the time domain.
Both Richard Heyser and I owned a single K-horn in the late '60's. We were both good friends with Paul Klipsch, but both Richard and I wanted more. Klipsch was always saying that the ear is essentially 'phase deaf'
and he always thought that the k-horn did enough for everybody.
When Richard gave his first paper at the AES implying that time delays of 2ms or so between drivers might be heard, Paul Klipsch got up and protested. I was there!
Still, I got another K-horn and used the pair, off and on for another 10 years.
If Richard Heyser had presented his material to many here, at the time, you would have attacked the implications of Richard's paper, just like Paul Klipsch did.
For certain kinds of music, like large orchestras, a single K-horn is exceptional.
BUT single human voice can be compromised, especially if you actually know what the singer sounds like live.
Both Richard and I finally gave up K-horns for a more 'accurate' product in the time domain.
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In France, we had an humorist named Coluche. He made a sketch about TV detergents advertisements. You know, whiter than white and so. Complaining how painful it was to tie a knot at all his clothes before washing them, wondering about the detergent witch was washing the clothes then washing the water to prevent the wash water to go dirt the clothes back...
So funny that the companies of detergents were obliged to stop all their campaigns of b.sh. for a while. Their commercials had never been the same after this ;-)
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Bringing time alignment or phase accuracy into the discussion would make many speakers look pretty bad once the xo networks are considered. You have those who push for nothing above a first order network, those who chose a second order and either invert one side or not and then those who would use a third order and finally those who would use a fourth order in phase and those who want to go with as high an order filter as possible to create a brick wall effect. All of these change so much of how a speaker sounds, it is not just the speaker you are listening to but the network. Passive networks are messy, yes with careful design and knowing the devices inherent roll-offs and real impedance values at the crossover points is all a part of this design analysis. Add in a reflex port or leave the box sealed, also another issue to determine. Leaving out all the previous electronics, pre-amp, amp and any other sources, the picture is not a very pretty one when designing a great sounding speaker. Electronic cross-overs are a great solution but then you can't just sell a box of speakers without a network in isolation, you have to make it part of the system.
crossover orders
I know some low-order advocates who moreover believe that they can hear high-order crossovers. One said that he could hear the network in a Revel loudspeaker as if it were a bunch of pistons firing.
But low-order is not without difficulties. Besides the significant energy sent to some of the drivers at frequencies where it will mostly generate heat, in particular the larger-area transducers like the woofer will have an intricate and usually undesirable radiation pattern that will screw up the off-axis response. If cone materials are sufficiently stiff but still adequately low mass, one can push this a bit. In an attempt to get truly broadband performance out of a single driver then issues arise about various species of IM distortion, and here some good method of extracting absolute positional information can be used to predistort the drive signal and back out the IM.
I've found driver and loudspeaker designers tending to resist positional transduction approaches.
I know some low-order advocates who moreover believe that they can hear high-order crossovers. One said that he could hear the network in a Revel loudspeaker as if it were a bunch of pistons firing.
But low-order is not without difficulties. Besides the significant energy sent to some of the drivers at frequencies where it will mostly generate heat, in particular the larger-area transducers like the woofer will have an intricate and usually undesirable radiation pattern that will screw up the off-axis response. If cone materials are sufficiently stiff but still adequately low mass, one can push this a bit. In an attempt to get truly broadband performance out of a single driver then issues arise about various species of IM distortion, and here some good method of extracting absolute positional information can be used to predistort the drive signal and back out the IM.
I've found driver and loudspeaker designers tending to resist positional transduction approaches.
Hi John
Gosh there are so many questions I would ask Dick if I could, sigh.
Near the end of his life he wrote a number of papers that never got published. In one of them he talked about what a loudspeaker is, a source of sound not only spread out in time (his depth dimension) by crossovers and placement but also a source placement in X and Y as well.
Our electrical signal (if a full range signal from an amplifier) is a single point in time and no spatial dimension of it’s own.
Now a lot of people have done experiments to determine what you can and can’t hear with phase shift.
Often this is done with headphones and the effect generated electronically.
On the other hand with loudspeakers, one usually has at least two sources, each with their own mag&phase and if they are more than ¼ wavelength apart, they radiate as independent sources.
When the two sources are adding, to the degree they add coherently like signals, they cancel each other out if connected reversed phase.
When farther apart and radiating independently and then reversed, the polar pattern changes but the radiate sound. The point is the effect phase shift has between sources is not usually the same as adding signals in headphones.
If you do an ETC (a white spectrum of energy vs time), you always see an arrival from each source separated according to individual path lengths and magnitudes, dispersive in time domain.
Like I said I wish Dick were still around, there is a great deal he wrote about I don’t understand but may have implications. I am a visual thinker and with deep math, I am a bulldozer chasing the butterfly.
John, you’re lucky to have known probably the brightest and most outside the box guy there has ever been in audio.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
Regarding spekers, in all my life I have never encountered a two way any system speaker which sounded just rigth. To me, they all have problems in the 1-5 kHz area, something goes wring there by default, and that's the region where most have the crossover from the mid/bass to the mid/tweeter.
All else being equal, a good 3 way will sound better and clearer, but will also be more expensive by default and harder to get right because of its more complex crossover netowork. The payback is the fact that with a good design and selection of drivers, it is possible to get each one of them working inside their best performance envelopes. I would also treat 2.5 way speakers, like my AR94, the first in the world of the breed, as living proof. The two bass/mid drivers are in fact one strictly bass driver and the other more mid than bass, with usually a simple "XO" consisting of just one inductor which rolls off the bass/bass driver typically in the 100...150 Hz range, allowing the mid/bass driver to go on to the final crossover point from which the tweeter takes over. This setup allows even more modest proportioned acoustic suspension go down lower to well below 50 Hz at its -3 dB cutoff point. And that bass is, as usual with well designed acoustic suspension speakers, is very well damped and controlled, alsmost as if it's unable to become boomy.
All else being equal, a good 3 way will sound better and clearer, but will also be more expensive by default and harder to get right because of its more complex crossover netowork. The payback is the fact that with a good design and selection of drivers, it is possible to get each one of them working inside their best performance envelopes. I would also treat 2.5 way speakers, like my AR94, the first in the world of the breed, as living proof. The two bass/mid drivers are in fact one strictly bass driver and the other more mid than bass, with usually a simple "XO" consisting of just one inductor which rolls off the bass/bass driver typically in the 100...150 Hz range, allowing the mid/bass driver to go on to the final crossover point from which the tweeter takes over. This setup allows even more modest proportioned acoustic suspension go down lower to well below 50 Hz at its -3 dB cutoff point. And that bass is, as usual with well designed acoustic suspension speakers, is very well damped and controlled, alsmost as if it's unable to become boomy.
Brad,
I generally lump those who push for 1st order network are the same people who want to use SE amplifiers and love that sort of colored sound. Allowing a 15" speaker to just rise up as high as it can with a simple 1st order filter is going to create a mess above the overlap of the above device. Simplicity is not always the best choice, generally that may be true but in speaker design that doesn't often hold true with a simple network.
I've made some serious mistakes with networks in the past, once even got an amplifier to oscillate at high levels and took out all the output devices. A Parasound, but not a JC signature model. Didn't help that the amp was hooked up in bridged mode, my mistake, just needed to change the order of the elements, but a learning experience for sure. This was the bandpass section of a three way network, duh!
I generally lump those who push for 1st order network are the same people who want to use SE amplifiers and love that sort of colored sound. Allowing a 15" speaker to just rise up as high as it can with a simple 1st order filter is going to create a mess above the overlap of the above device. Simplicity is not always the best choice, generally that may be true but in speaker design that doesn't often hold true with a simple network.
I've made some serious mistakes with networks in the past, once even got an amplifier to oscillate at high levels and took out all the output devices. A Parasound, but not a JC signature model. Didn't help that the amp was hooked up in bridged mode, my mistake, just needed to change the order of the elements, but a learning experience for sure. This was the bandpass section of a three way network, duh!
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