i love metal of all variety, but when listening to metal at home, I tend to prefer fast transients, detail, and refinement.
Listening
to Revocation’s “Greatest is our Sin” right now on a pair of two month
old Sound Lab M645s with the new bass focus panels, and loving it.
The bass isn’t cracking the walls, but I can hear every thing with excellent delineation. The Sound Labs are great for classical and jazz too. BTW if you want them to play bass right, you need a tube amp. The Sound Labs have a high impedance in the bass (30 ohms) and its hard for solid state amps to make power. As a result, a 100 watt tube amp can keep up with a 400 watt solid state amp (and by that I mean it can make the same measured sound pressures) on that speaker. |
I think there is WAY more to a good metal speaker than just being able
to "rock" or shake the walls or whatever. Being loud doesn't mean it
sounds good. Details and dynamics, tight bass, clear smooth highs...
served with a massive helping of metal guitar punch in the gut. I'm
starting to wonder at what price point do you get there.. ?
Sky's the limit! The best metal speaker will also be the best classical, jazz, prog rock or downtempo 90s speaker as well. Again, one of the biggest myths in audio is that speakers somehow are good for one genre as opposed to another. The JBL L100s are trotted out as a good example for 60s and 70s rock, but that is mostly because people that had them and were listening to that kind of music liked them. Speakers are mechanical transducers and don't care a whit about what you put through them as long as you don't burn them up. Earl Root (RIP) pretty much founded the metal scene here in the Twin Cities. His goto speaker was the Snell model B. It went to 22hz and could be driven easily by tube amplifiers to satisfying levels. They were very revealing so it was helpful not to feed them with junk electronics. But all their properties made them good for classical, folk, ethnic, deep trance, techno, prog, jazz, acid jazz, acid folk, dub step, medieval, chamber, death metal, speed metal, hip hop, country AND western, downtempo 80s and a lot more. |
Just so we're clear here, the equipment used to **record** a metal band is a lot different than the gear used to **amplify** a metal band on stage. On stage, its not uncommon for the guitarist to have a fairly low powered tube amp and is relying on the house for the volume apropos at a metal concert. A Shure SM58 might be the microphone used to mic the amp. The '58 is a terrible sounding mic. In the studio, the same amp might be recorded using a Neumann mic, that costs about 100x more than the Shure! Think about that- the recording is going to sound better than the live amplified sound. It will sound a lot more like if the band were playing a personal concert for you in your home. Why mess that up with speakers with the limitations common in PA speakers?? You won't get as much of the power of the drums and cymbals, less of the impact of the bass, and so on. I play in one of the louder bands in the Twin Cities, and we've played on a number of metal bills and in metal clubs: I'm not making this stuff up. We're not metal, but we can easily hold our own with our particular brand of heavy prog space rock... Here is our third album (more cuts can be heard on our Bandcamp page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg0l25nmGuY |
But, typically I find that Rock/Metal guys like myself are looking for a
huge soundstage, and that "live" sound. Maybe not the best imaging.
But damn, it's like being at a concert. Huge soundstage is a sign of a good speaker with good resolution. The idea that a speaker can be 'best' for a certain genre of music is one of the older and more established myths in audio. I had one guy ask me what the best speaker was for downtempo 80s music. Sheesh! How in the heck do you make a speaker favor a certain taste in music?? You can't- the speaker might have certain bumps and dips in its response, but what if the dudes on stage play different notes? Even in metal that tends to happen :) |
I have been doing a lot of research lately in creating my own speakers
with quality parts to meet my musical tastes. Since most speaker
manufactures are aimed at customers that want smaller speakers and the
look of an art piece, I figured I would have to step up and build them
myself. I am very surprised in my research that I haven't found
someone else in this pursuit of the perfect heavy metal, classic rock
speaker and has created their own. @lizzardkingseattle The reason is you can't build a speaker that favors any kind of music. The properties that make a speaker good for metal will also make it good for classical or jazz. FWIW I play both on my system. IMO/IME the speaker you would want is one that is fairly efficient- since there is no good reason to make any amplifier work hard, since that just results in more distortion. You don't want distortion even though the guitar amps are making quite a lot- you just want to get the recording to sound the way it was made. I still have the Classic Audio Loudspeakers I mentioned several years ago in this thread and they excel at metal and any other form of music. They are 98 db, 16 ohms (so easy to drive) and go down to 20Hz. The midrange driver has its first breakup at 35KHz, so it sounds very fast, detailed and very smooth. |
One of my best friends, Earl Root (RIP) pretty well founded the metal scene here in the Twin Cities. He turned me on to a lot of metal, some of it excellently recorded.
One thing that came out in spades is if a speaker is really good at classical music, it will be good with metal too. I use the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-3, which uses dual 15" woofers and a field-coil powered midrange horn with a real beryllium driver (no breakups in the audio passband- its very smooth and fast). It plays metal great- it can shake the building easily. And it plays classical great too- it can shake the building easily. But it plays delicacy as well. Fields of Nephilim never sounded so good. |
Actually if you are on more of a budget, Audiokinesis makes excellent speakers that fulfill the requirements. The Classic Audio Loudspeaker I mentioned retails for about $33,000...
Something you also want to consider is the interface between the amp and speaker! To get best results, it cannot be an assumption that a large solid state amp will drive all loads properly. It will drive some, and others will be better driven by vacuum tube amps. |
Anyone who thinks a speaker that is good a classical can't also be good at metal just has not heard how hard a proper classical LP can be on a system.
Speakers and electronics really don't care what the signal is. If they are good at their job they will not be genre-specific. Its really that simple- if a speaker is better at one thing than another, its not a very good speaker.
I have two LPs that can bring most stereos to their knees in no time flat, if realistic volumes are being played. The first is of course Black Sabbath's Paranoid, on the original import white label Vertigo. The sound is astonishing and the bass energy simply saps most systems straightaway. The other LP is The Verdi Requiem, on the RCA Soria series. Play track 2 side 1 at a lifelike level and see if your system can handle the full dynamic range. Most can't.
The speakers I use are the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-3, which are 98 db 1 watt/1 meter and 16 ohms. Its very hard to clip a 60 watt amp on them!! I can literally get the building to shake, as the speakers go down to 20Hz. They are revealing and dynamic.
Metal is often compressed- we've mastered several metal LPs in the last couple of years and I have plenty of metal titles in my collection. Death metal in particular tends to be mostly guitar and I'm sorry but its just not that hard to reproduce. The more challenging recordings are usually not Death Metal- one I love to play at shows is Aesma Deava's second album, the Eros of Frigid Beauty (on Root of All Evil). This is a classical metal form, well recorded and very dynamic. Another title which is more Gothic classical metal is Therion's Vovin, which features choir and a string section in addition to the metal band.
Have fun! |
I get that you don't agree, but you would be wrong, except for that last bit, which I agree 100% because that just happens to be true of most audio systems.
Orchestral material has plenty of sharp transients. Tell you what- find your self a copy of Das Reingold, on Decca or London ('blue back'), conducted by Sir George Solti. Put on side 6 about halfway through and crank it up as hard as your system will take. Make sure you let it play all the way to the end.
When Donner's hammer creates the Rainbow Bridge- its a bit of a transient :) Its also pretty metal. Norse gods- what can be more metal than that? But hang on till the final fanfare! Many systems just can't play this disk at full whack. You need power in the amps and efficiency in the speakers. That's just the way it is, regardless (for the most part) of the music genre. If you want electronia to sound its best with all the bass impact, you need exactly the same thing. I can't get my own band's records to sound right unless I crank them up too. Some music just needs power, without coloration. Metal is nothing special in that regard. |
You named some stuff in my personal collection, and I have Classic Audio Loudspeakers in my living room. They can shake the walls! What's nice about them is that you can play sustained high levels without compression and without straining the amp.
More: In Flames, Skepticism, Therion, Earth, Sunn (and incarnations thereof), Om, Opeth... I don't think anyone would be suggesting that a speaker is good for some metal and not other forms of metal.
Really, all music is composed of combinations of sine waves and transients. Its been shown mathematically that nearly all waveforms can be created by the right combination of sine waves. Its only the human ear/brain system that makes the distinction between various forms of music. The reproducers don't care so long as you stay within their range of linearity. So dynamic range is important, but on this matter metal rarely has the dynamic range of classical, and with peaks of 120 db on stage, classical can be just as loud although usually not at sustained levels.
I'm not sure what you were implying about digitally recorded, but FWIW, when analog technology is used you often get greater dynamic range. This is not because analog as more dynamic range (although it is so close its really not worth arguing about) its because digital recordings tend to have more compression because that is how the industry likes to handle it. Analog is a little more forgiving of overload and so while compression is still likely, its often just not as much.
I run an LP mastering operation and a recording studio BTW, so I see this stuff first-hand. |
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Yes, I know they are a new band. But they sound a lot like Iron Maiden, except for the vocals. IOW, old school.
I'll have to find an LP to really assess the recording quality. We (my band) were working on a mix of the last part of our 3rd album last night. As usual, we made an analog and also a digital recording. After we were satisfied with the mix (funny how it took 2 hours to mix 2 minutes...) we had to listen to the results on both the analog tape and the digital. Try as might, the digital just does not keep up- the analog sounds smoother and its easier to hear all the instruments.
So when I do an assessment I try to find the vinyl. |
Keyboards: Prophet 5, EML101 and Mellotron. |
I bought the Mellotron used about 13 years ago and rebuilt it with a new motor controller, rebuilt the power supplies and replaced a lot of parts in the audio electronics. Right now I think I need to replace the audio input connector from the tape heads. The slightest loose connection and it gets noisy. Mellotrons are still made, the tape sets are still available and the new ones look pretty sweet. You can't play Flight of the Bumblebee on it- it would sound awful! Here's a short teaser from a recent recording session (click on the reel to reel): https://www.facebook.com/pages/Thunderbolt-Pagoda/265544360135369 |
I have a home speaker that will blow away any JBL... for heavy metal... Dual 15" TAD woofers; it uses a JBL horn, although it is driven by a custom built compression driver with powered by a field coil. No alnico here. Later versions of the same speaker have a machined maple horn that has lower distortion. http://classicaudioloudspeakers.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?fs=2&upper=25&content=26On and on... |
^^ It depends on what options are installed. I think the base price is around $12,000/pair, with all the options I think they are about $37,000/pair.
Options are field coil powered woofers (there is an 18" available now), Mundorf caps in the crossover, and a larger diaphragm on the mid driver, which is beryllium with a Kapton surround and has no breakups in the audio passband. |
