Do speakers have "soul"?

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speaking of car speakers my ford has 5x7s and they sound fantastic as they are. They are simple car factory paper cone speakers with whizzer cones but they still sound great and the imaging and treble is fantastic even in mono.

Its just the size of the cone really and the position of the speaker, a larger cone will give you a much better image. From personal opinion.

From trolling through thousands of pages on ebay I can tell you that some cars such as hatchbacks have 4" in the front but they are down at the floor and some will have 5" and some cars will have 6.5" but they will also be down on the floor. The only two cars that I have ever heard good audio come from have had the speakers up near where the vents are. Its all about position really so in the ford where it has two 5x7's up at ear height the sound sure is going to be better than any other car.

It has nothing to do with the soul of speakers. Unless you are referring to the acoustic baffle/dampening foam which is typically behind car stereo speakers.

PS: I don't know how this thread got so off track. Don't look at me it wasn't my fault.
 
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Disabled Account
Joined 2017
complexity is distracting. That is why cassette tapes are so popular. high frequencies get boring after a while.

Some days I just want to listen to music made by a cassette player, I don't want to reproduce the stadium or studio effect when I'm driving or when I'm reading the news on my computer, its too distracting to have that much detail, so the only alternative is to reduce the sound quality.

The upside to this is that you can turn the volume up louder and listen to the midrange a lot more and if your tweeters are too bright it won't matter because the cassette cannot reproduce those frequencies anyway, you can just keep on turning it up.

That is the same effect that you get when you listen to a band play through an amplifier thats sitting on the stage, its an open baffle "full range" loud speaker which I guarantee you that full range status does not include frequencies above 11kHz. Walla, now you know why live recordings sound so good, because you're not being distracted by the higher frequencies that a guitar or microphone picks up.

That is about as close as you are going to get to a loudspeaker having soul. Its faithfully reproducing the sound effects that are produced by a human being and not the sound effects produced by the reflections in the room, or in the case of an acoustic guitar the warm reverberation that is caused by soundwaves bouncing around inside of the guitar. Midrange/midbass is just simulating what a person would sound like if they were singing in front of you but just at a louder volume, a faithful reproduction of a human being singing.

Now where the lack of higher frequencies makes cassette tape sound so good is in the fact that if I walk up to a person and look at them face to face I usually cannot hear their clothes moving, unless they are wearing leather or polyester. I don't want that sort of sound to be amplified by 100dB so the higher frequencies can be left out thank you. So a lack of higher frequencies can be a good thing.

Take an opera house for example, no microphones and no loudspeakers, just the air and the objects surrounding the stage, now remove those objects surrounding the stage and all of the acoustic properties of the air in the room and those objects and you will get about the same frequency response of a cassette tape or "full range" loudspeaker singing from an open baffle loudspeaker. So you don't need higher frequencies to enjoy music, you just need a human being singing a song from Wham. You need a pulse on the other end of the line.

The op should redefine his parameters of what he means by a speaker having "soul" because a loudspeaker is an inanimate object and inanimate objects do not have souls. Even human beings do not have souls as far as I am aware.

However the OP was a BMW owner and more than likely what he is mistaking for "soul" of one car and a lack of "soul" in another is most likely just either DSP playing tricks with his head or really good sound dampening material in the BMW. Compression can play tricks with your mind maaan.

It sounds to me like the OP has found the best sound system available for him, if it can convince his mind and give him a religious experience from reproduced music then all the power to him and his audio system, fooling the human mind into believing that the sounds that it hears are real are exactly why we are all audiophiles. If only we could all attain such good sounding sound systems.
 
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