As usual Opalchip conveys what I'm thinking better than I can convey myself ! LOL
Great post
Great post
Is harmonic accuracy and timbre important at all?
Though at times I needed to keep that loudness button pushed in, while in college I remember the day I realized it sounded much better with it out and the treble and bass controls set flat. The revelation happened on a day when no one was around and I decided to crank it up and find the best setting. |
Stevecham: if you were listening at low volume, you probably were better off leaving the loudness button pushed in. At higher volumes - approaching the "right" level for the recording in question (every recording has one), of course you want to turn it off. I think you need to go back to the posts by Audiokinesis. Take a look at the Earl Geddes articles he recommends. Go to the Linkwitz Labs web site, and read what Siegfried Linkwitz has to say. It may well be that there are more important factors to our perception of audio reproduction than time/phase coherence. I say this while owning a pair of Green Mountain Audio Callistos, and having owned Meadowlarks in the past. I also own active speakers with fourth-order crossovers, which have benefits of their own. There is also the HUGE factor of the implementation. Vandersteen, Meadowlark, Thiel, Green Mountain, Dunlavy all aimed for first order, time/phase coherent crossovers. But their speakers are totally different from one another! Ported, sealed, transmission line, simple crossovers versus highly complex (my god, take a look at a Thiel crossover - what is happening to the electrical signal as it goes through all those passive components???). The signal may pass the triangle test in the lab, and sound not very good in a real room. As an aside, last year after reading all of Hardesty's raves about the Vandersteens, I made the one hour drive to the shop run by his former partner. Heard the 5A's, presumably set up properly, powered by all the gear that Richard Hardesty likes. The resulting sound was muffled, muddied, utterly lacking in life compared either to live music or to the same recordings (NOT compressed crap) played on other systems I've heard. I'm still open to hearing the Vandersteens again - there's no way they can have such a following and sound like that! - but I think most humans would find the sound of other systems closer to "real" rather than what I heard that particular day. On the other hand, the Green Mountain Audio Callistos have tremendous "jump" to them. Anyone who understands that dynamics are part of music, not just flat frequency response, should give these speakers a listen. Flat frequency response, on axis, in an anechoic chamber is not going to guarantee that your bass response, in room, is going to be free of major peaks and nulls - which can wipe out any sense of time/phase coherence when listening. That's why Linkwitz designs his speakers the way he does: to have good, even power response in real rooms, without needing to pile on bass traps and the like, which can end up sucking the life out of the music in other ways. Sorry to run on at the keyboard now, but I can't resist. On the Zu Cable website you can see the rave review their Druid MkIV received from HiFi World magazine in the UK. The photo image of the magazine pages is too fuzzy to read, but the frequency response chart is plain enough. Yeah, those speakers may do away with any crossover nasties, but that response plot is... well, "flat" would not be found anywhere near it. |
Opalchip, Well said. Stevecham, I don't think it is as grim a picture as you paint. Speaker design is necessarily an exercise in compromise. Phase alignement should be critical in producing a speaker that gives accurate timbre. I agree that this is necessarily compromised in many passive speaker designs (meaning that certain instruments may not sound quite right). However dynamic range, sensitivity, bandwidth, frequency linearity to name a few are also important. In achieveing a balance, a speaker designer will compromise in some areas to gain in others. Active speakers, for example, should have much better phase characteristics simply because each driver is paired with active filters including phase adjustment. Therefore active speakers should have a better timbral response....well not necessarily as this link below shows that professionals in a shootout were divided on which speaker they preferred and most found the timbre of the Dunlavys (except in the LF) to be preferred. In the end, classical listeners preferred the Dunlavys and meanwhile "rockers" preferred ATC's. http://bg.mixonline.com/ar/audio_highend_studio_monitor/ Considering that the Dunlavys also use multiple cones for mid range and that this is known to increase phase issues (a design no no), the conclusion seems surprising. Until you realize that the perception of timbre is also closely linked to harmonics, perhaps Dunlavy makes up for phase issues in other ways (harmonics) to eventually score higher than ATC's in the timbre category. So speaker design is all about balance and not a single pursuit of only one or two factors. In the end, two vastly different engineering approaches (ATC vs Dunlavy) have produced two great speakers. ...maybe there is more then one way to skin a cat. |
"...maybe there is more then one way to skin a cat." Yes 4th order crossover by Green Mountain that intentionally present 360 degrees out of phase, yeah that'll fix things. Look, if the speaker demonstrates that wave fronts are leaving the planes of the drivers out of phase and out of time relative to one another, then nothing can be done to correct it before it reaches your ear. This is a matter of timing, and timbre accuracy, regardless of the other so called parameters, cannot be corrected or compensated. If it's damaged, then nothing can correct it. And nothing can be done before it reaches your ears. Nothing. |