Onhwy61,
No, it's not nonsense. Your dismissal is. First, it's less and less common for audiophiles to actually know what real instruments sound like. More and more people in this hobby are short on or even bereft of significant experience listening to live, unamplified music. But let's assume you're not among them, nor is anyone else on this thread.
No speaker is a perfect reproducer. Hence, psychoacoustically, we allow the suggestion of fidelity by hifi to inform an illusion of fidelity that we infer from what comes out of the speakers. If you have been listening to speakers all your audio life that contain crossovers, multiple drivers with division points in the middle of the major spectrum of music information, and other design attributes that introduce phase incoherence, transient inconsistency, tonal aberrations and confused spatial portrayal, BUT the basic frequency linearity measures and sounds pretty good, then you become conditioned to believe that the suggestion of fidelity that includes these anomalies is acceptable. You might even love the sound, on a comparative basis.
Suddenly, for the first time you hear a speaker that simultaneously either eliminates or sharply reduces inconsistencies of transient behavior up and down the frequency range, phase incoherence, tone-stripping, etc., and it can sound "wrong" while you process a new presentation.
I was at HE2006, where 95% of the speakers used in systems had all of the problems I mention above. The dynamic behavior was shaped like an hourglass, with pinching as any sound approached the crossover points. Vocals on the vast majority of otherwise reasonably frequency-accurate speakers lacked body relative to the instrument sounds below and higher. You heard the throat and not the body, from singers. The attack and the surface composition of an instrument's notes, but not the tone. Yet many people admired the sounds they were hearing. I just watched in the Zu room. I saw many obviously very experienced audiophiles enter, sit down and listen. It was common to hear some variant of, "Whoa, something different is going on here," and then the listener would sit back and adapt to perhaps the first holistic sound presentation from a loudspeaker -- room problems aside -- in their audio career. And BTW, this happened with some industry professionals who represented other, more expensive and even very good, loudspeakers at the show. People who listened to one cut of an album or less usually didn't get it. Listeners who lingered for a few, usually did.
Look, all of us who own Zu speakers were among those whom used to accept the speaker industry's prevaling notions of quality. We owned a series of speakers that represented the best from those prevailing ideas of fidelity, within our budgets. Maybe along the way we embraced an industry maverick, like Quad ESL, planar speakers or Beveridge. And then one day, we either heard Zu or we made a decision to try it, blind. Almost all of us went through some variation of the initial experience of having to unlearn what we had been conditioned to accept, expect and tolerate from a loudspeaker in order to get music out of it.
The question this raises is, Why is a genuine advance that suggests an audiophile has been looking in the wrong places for good sound so controversial to some people who haven't even heard it, and so smoothly embraced by those who bought, many of whom are highly experienced with hifi? What's the difference between you and me?
Phil
No, it's not nonsense. Your dismissal is. First, it's less and less common for audiophiles to actually know what real instruments sound like. More and more people in this hobby are short on or even bereft of significant experience listening to live, unamplified music. But let's assume you're not among them, nor is anyone else on this thread.
No speaker is a perfect reproducer. Hence, psychoacoustically, we allow the suggestion of fidelity by hifi to inform an illusion of fidelity that we infer from what comes out of the speakers. If you have been listening to speakers all your audio life that contain crossovers, multiple drivers with division points in the middle of the major spectrum of music information, and other design attributes that introduce phase incoherence, transient inconsistency, tonal aberrations and confused spatial portrayal, BUT the basic frequency linearity measures and sounds pretty good, then you become conditioned to believe that the suggestion of fidelity that includes these anomalies is acceptable. You might even love the sound, on a comparative basis.
Suddenly, for the first time you hear a speaker that simultaneously either eliminates or sharply reduces inconsistencies of transient behavior up and down the frequency range, phase incoherence, tone-stripping, etc., and it can sound "wrong" while you process a new presentation.
I was at HE2006, where 95% of the speakers used in systems had all of the problems I mention above. The dynamic behavior was shaped like an hourglass, with pinching as any sound approached the crossover points. Vocals on the vast majority of otherwise reasonably frequency-accurate speakers lacked body relative to the instrument sounds below and higher. You heard the throat and not the body, from singers. The attack and the surface composition of an instrument's notes, but not the tone. Yet many people admired the sounds they were hearing. I just watched in the Zu room. I saw many obviously very experienced audiophiles enter, sit down and listen. It was common to hear some variant of, "Whoa, something different is going on here," and then the listener would sit back and adapt to perhaps the first holistic sound presentation from a loudspeaker -- room problems aside -- in their audio career. And BTW, this happened with some industry professionals who represented other, more expensive and even very good, loudspeakers at the show. People who listened to one cut of an album or less usually didn't get it. Listeners who lingered for a few, usually did.
Look, all of us who own Zu speakers were among those whom used to accept the speaker industry's prevaling notions of quality. We owned a series of speakers that represented the best from those prevailing ideas of fidelity, within our budgets. Maybe along the way we embraced an industry maverick, like Quad ESL, planar speakers or Beveridge. And then one day, we either heard Zu or we made a decision to try it, blind. Almost all of us went through some variation of the initial experience of having to unlearn what we had been conditioned to accept, expect and tolerate from a loudspeaker in order to get music out of it.
The question this raises is, Why is a genuine advance that suggests an audiophile has been looking in the wrong places for good sound so controversial to some people who haven't even heard it, and so smoothly embraced by those who bought, many of whom are highly experienced with hifi? What's the difference between you and me?
Phil
