Magico A3 vs. Joseph Audio Perspective vs. Spendor D9

LOL, again sciencecop? This didn’t go terribly well for you last time you tried hanging on to an indefensible claim against evidence to the contrary, concerning specific speakers with which you apparently had no experience. (Remember your trying to help defend that ludicrous claim that Harbeth’s only produced "50% resolution"?)

(I'm editing this because I just saw that sciencecop has said he DID hear the JA speakers.  Which I'm glad to hear...even though I admit to being a bit skeptical about his claims).



It turns out those WITH EXPERIENCE listening to the JA speakers can report back what they actually sound like, and your hypothesis that they won’t sound clean remains unvalidated. Subjective testing for the AUDIBLE nature of the design - User and Reviewer reports - provide evidence against your claim.


I’ve heard them. Your speculation about their sound is wrong.


That goes for John Atkinson who, I’m betting has vastly more experience than you do in having extensive listening time with many different speaker designs, measuring them, and correlating measurements to their audible effects. He listened to them, measured them, and DID NOT hear the problems you claim. Rather, his subjective report supports my, and many other people’s, experience with the JA speakers sound.

In Stereophile, Atkinson pointed out that any cone break up modes were "well suppressed" by the crossover. He also wrote in the measurement section:

"The Perspective’s cumulative spectral-decay plot (fig.9) is superbly clean, with the first breakup mode of the woofers’ cones, indicated by the cursor position, well suppressed. "

When he wrote of the sound his descriptions included: (with the first amp) "very clean and articulate," (He emphasized VERY).

Also:

"The Joseph speakers’ midrange clarity and lack of coloration, along with their well-controlled dispersion, was very sympathetic to recordings of the human voice."

And this is echoed over and over in reviews (and show reports) of the Joseph Audio sound as particularly "quiet/clean." Anyone who has heard both the Perspectives and the JA Pulsars knows they have the same essential "house sound" with the Perspectives adding more base.But that JA achieves a midrange purity is a theme one finds over and over again by people WHO HAVE SPENT TIME listening to the brand.


As Steven Stone wrote in his JA Pulsar review in The Absolute Sound:

The first thing I noticed about the Pulsars was their midrange purity and lack of grain.

And:

Of all the Pulsar’s sonic attributes, the one that impressed me the most was the high level of discernability. What I mean by discernability is, how easy is it to listen into the mix and pick out exactly what parts you want to concentrate on? The higher the level of discernability, the easier it is to do this. The Pulsars made it easy to recognize the essential banjoness of a banjo on Paul Curreri’s “Once Up Upon a Rooftop” [California Tin Angel Records]. Even when a harmonica is added to the mix, it’s easy to tell where the banjo stops and the harmonica starts.

Michael Fremer wrote of the Pulsars:

"the picture was clear and clean from top to bottom of the audioband, producing a highly resolved, three-dimensional, pinpoint placement of images against a velvet-black backdrop."

And:

"The Pulsar’s high-frequency performance was sweet yet fast and airy, and minus even the slightest hint of edge, etch, or glare. In fact, the Pulsar was among the least mechanical-sounding speakers I’ve ever heard, regardless of price"

Herb Reichert of Stereophile also commented on these particular aspects of the JA sound.

As did the review in Soundstage.

And user and show reports declare over and over impressions of a clean, clear, timbrally convincing and gorgeous midrange from the JA Pulsar and Perspective speakers.


Now, either you recognize that people who have actually heard the design report they are clean and clear, or it seems you’ll have to resort to something like "Well, then, all those listeners had crappy hearing or perception!" Aside from being a mere bald assertion without evidence, that would be an obvious attempt at hanging on to a hypothesis (that X had subjectively detrimental effects) in SPITE of evidence to the contrary (where many discerning listeners did not find this problem audible, and no one has in fact reported otherwise).


And that wouldn’t be terribly reasonable, much less scientific, right?

So sciencecop claims the JA speakers sounded "awful" and not clean. 


Virtually every other discerning listener has found the opposite.

Including Atkinson who I'm sure is far more experienced measuring speakers/correlating them to audible artifacts.

That suggests sciencop's claims should be treated as the anomoly they are.

And, sciencecop, if in fact your own claims are pitted against opposing subjective reports great many more experienced listeners, it *could be* that you are a particularly discerning golden ear.  But even IF you are a Golden Ear anomoly,  the fact that the overwhelming majority of sonic reports on the speakers do not report the "problem" to be audible and that they perceive very clean sound, suggests that your claim is highly exaggerated.  If we are talking about the audibility of an artifact, sorry, we don't just take a sample of "one," that is, you.  It appears the artifacts are not nearly as audible as you claim.

@soix

You might want to take a gander at this thread to see get a taste of the way sciencecop argues, won't back down from an obviously rash claim, and ignores contrary evidence:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/best-loudspeakers-for-rich-timbre?page=4

That should put his claims here in to "Perspective."

;-)

@prof
I remember the last argument was finished when you folded and ran away, a cowardly thing to do when you run out of empty slogans (or twist my words - did I say that JA sounds "awful"?). You did not need to copy SP review; I can read it myself (read any lousy review lately?). Learn how to look at measurements and understand how loudspeakers work, then we can talk. This is not your high-school debate team, already told you that last time.

I will just caution people to take your advice with a grain of salt. They are mainly a fiction of your imagination.

sciencecop,

Best not to characterize a previous conversation that anyone here can look up. Remember, anyone can click that link and see how that conversation went ;-)

It’s funny you came in to the thread claiming I "keep feeding the forum misleading information" when, in that last thread, I was the one arguing against someone making a clearly misleading claim that the Harbeth SuperHL5 Plus are "low resolution" and only giving 50% resolution.And YOU were the one entering to SUPPORT that guy’s ludicrous claim. (And clearly failing to do so, given the evidence presented against it). And of course you could not point to one iota of actual misinformation in what I’d written.

or twist my words - did I say that JA sounds "awful"?

Uh...you wrote:

but I can definitely tell that a gross breakup at 5K will SOUND AWFUL. Of course I heard JA speakers, and sure enough, it is EXTREMELY AUDIBLE.

(my emphasis)

So... you heard in the JA speakers a break up that SOUNDED AWFUL, was "extremely audible," but it’s unreasonable that I infered that you found the JA sound "awful?"


Should I have inferred from the fact that upon hearing a speaker with an EXTREMELY AUDIBLE artifact that SOUNDED AWFUL...that you actually thought they sounded good, not awful?

I’ll let others decide if I have been "twisting" your words.

As for "misinformation," I had simply been describing my subjective impression of the JA sound - of being clean and clear - and noting that the speakers produce that subjective impression among a great many listeners, including experienced listeners.

YOU are the one who came in and implied that "nasty break up" discredits the subjective evaluations. And yet, virtually all the subjective evaluations one can find...including people adding more comments here...point to the opposite conclusion: that the measured artifact you point do DOES NOT produce a grainy sound, and in fact the speakers sound subjectively clean and clear to most listeners.

If you have a hypothesis that "X" artifact sound grainy or obviously awful....and there is plenty of subjective evaluations pointing to the opposite conclusion, then you need to (if you are at all fair-minded or rational), dial back your claim to fit reality. If that artifact DOES NOT produce the impression of grain or sound "awful" to most listeners, your emphasis of that artifact is OVERBLOWN in terms of it’s audibility to most people.
MOST listeners (if not all I’ve ever seen but you), find the JA sound clean and clear, and THAT tells us more about the audible significance of your claim, as it relates to most listeners, than you are willing to admit.

And I'm sorry, but not knowing anything at all about your experience, I'll take people like JA's information over yours in terms of correlating objective measurements with his subjective reports.  (And, no, lame conspiracy-think won't due to simply dismiss JA as credible; he very often DOES correlate objective artifacts in explaining what he heard in a speaker, as he does in the Perspectives review, both good and bad).

This is not your high-school debate team.
I will just caution people to take your advice with a grain of salt. They are mainly a fiction of your imagination.

Those hollow jabs couldn’t stick the first few times you tried it. I suggest you try induction: learn from experience. ;-)