Articles You Feel Should be Shared

Whatever happened to the quality
of reproduced sound in the home?

Siegfried Linkwitz ALMA Int 2014


Here’s a fascinating 50 year recap by the great man. It’s always interesting to read his views but some of the following have stuck in the memory. For example, without giving too much away, it’s fair to say he didn’t like passive crossovers or ports, and seemed to be quite fond of Magneplanars:

"The typical loudspeaker comes with fundamental flaws, which critical listeners try to correct by room treatment. The solution would be a loudspeaker with spectrally neutral radiation in all directions. Such loudspeakers are extremely rare. In general, the quality of reproduced sound in the home has reached a plateau that is uninspiring to the Apple and Google generation.

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But 3 areas of loudspeaker design remain as hurdles to obtaining the highest quality in sound reproduction:

1 - Vented boxes. They introduce group delay distortion and color the bass.

2 – Passive crossover-equalizers. They decouple the power amplifier from the transducer and give up motion control. They interact with the transducer.

3 – Frequency dependent directivity. Box loudspeakers radiate omnidirectional at low frequencies and beam at high frequencies. They feed more energy at low frequencies into the room’s reverberant field than at high frequencies.

(Why should the off-axis response of the loudspeaker matter? It determines how the room becomes engaged with how the room becomes engaged with the stereo illusion).

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Fundamental Questions:

1 - Can loudspeakers and listening room disappear from auditory perception?
2 - Is there an optimum radiation pattern?
3 - Is there an optimum loudspeaker + listener + room setup?

My answer to all 3 questions is YES!
Provided that we have an appropriate

* Radiation pattern
* Speaker positioning and
* Room acoustics

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’The Magneplanar uses large radiating panels and a long high frequency ribbon is not an acoustically small radiator and therefore has radiation lobes. It makes its interaction with the room difficult to predict. It also suffers in bass volume capability.

Never-the-less it comes close to my ideal loudspeaker concept."
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The article won’t be everyone’s cup of tea as SL didn’t pull his punches, but I think it’s well worth 10 or 15 minutes reading time.

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/ALMA%2714/Sound_quality.htm

Kinda rambling and disorganized, doncha think? I mean he wrote like five thousand words. Yet all he really said was we can't make up with reproduction what wasn't originally captured in the recording. Nor should we try.

Is that even news?


Yeah that was my initial impression,,glad you could sum things up, in short.
All I am trying to acheive in my modificatiosn is cleaning/clearing/defining the sonics. 
This is what is needed most, folks trying this mod vs this mod,,cap A vs cap B, resistor A vs resistor B, tube A vs tube B, and so on,,interconnect A vs interconnect B, etc etc. 
Real time opimnions based on acutal A/B testing. 
This is the purpose of all my YT uploads , all of which are presented here, for anyones curiosity. 
This way they can have some idea of what might /might not work in their idea of acheiving a  Class A high fidelity sound. 
I can tell you the Gold Lion KT88's did not present music as did the Svetlana 6550's. Vocals/some mid FQ's were more realistic in the Svetlana 6550's. 
I believe I read in my researches, another audioplihe mentioned he did not care for the GL KT88's , right off, no need to *burn in**, that was my impression as well, in just less than a minute, i  felt the  voicing for female vocals was not as realistic as the chinese KT88,,The Svetlana 6550 were even more clearer vs the chinese 88's. 

The article won’t be everyone’s cup of tea as SL didn’t pull his punches, but I think it’s well worth 10 or 15 minutes reading time.


Excellent find, , Thank you for bringing us some meat on the bones  opinions froma  legendary expert as is the highly respected Dr Linkwitz.
Section 15,, thats whats most of interest for me.
I love how his opinions line up with some of mine. 
B&W's,,I won't go there,,,, 
Magneplanars,,won't go there. 
Dr Linkwitz mentions the Wilson line as perhaps, the best we can hope for,,,but surely does not go to the point of recommending Wison as *the best*. 
He can't. 
Why?
Besides my prejudice that i hate Wislon speakers as much as I hate many other lines, at least the other highly colored /highly distorted lines are not like the Wilsons. 
The Wilons to me are a ~~joke~~ for a  ideal speaker,, Thet are ~~~ laughable. 
You needa  forlift to move them,,and price tag,, you will need to sell some TESLA stock to buy a  pair. 
For me, the Wilson's do not exist. 
I am very surprised Dr Linkwitz did not mention the fact that SEAS has always made the finest drivers, and their top of line are the most musical drivers made today.. Very surprised. 
I think Linkwitz is more about theory, and lacks a bit of  ~~fidelity~~ in his opinions. How could he fail to mention SEAS at the very last sentence??? 
Anyone?
In my 40 years, no other speaker presents music as does SEAS,,that is under a  rasonable price factor,,I would love to hear Jadis' speakers, vs the SEAS. But then again Jadis' lines have tto be excluded, due to both critical factors
1) weight/size
2) cost
Leaving SEAS all alone as Top Dog

mozartfan,

This is from the LX521 Characteristics & Specifications page:

• Tweeters - SEAS 27TFFNC/G, H1396-04, coated textile dome,
  front and rear of midrange/tweeter baffle
• Upper Midrange - SEAS MU10RB-SL, H1658-04, Curv cone
  42" above floor
• Lower Midrange - SEAS U22REX/P-SL, H1659-08, Curv cone
• Woofer - SEAS L26RO4Y, D1004-04, Aluminum cone
  Push-pull mounted in V-frame baffle of 24"H x 13"W x 15"D

There's a bit more detail of his using SEAS drivers for his most advanced design on the page.

https://www.linkwitzlab.com/LX521/Description.htm

Some more stuff on cables worth bearing in mind if the sneaky cable propaganda ever manages to slip by your critical faculties.

It can happen to anyone. Subliminal programming works, and is all around us.

Some of this targeting is good, and some is not so good. We're all being constantly targetted into overload and then it's not always easy to sort out the truth from fiction. 

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First the infamous article from 2008 by Matt Buchanan.

Audiophile Deathmatch: Monster Cables vs. a Coat Hanger.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger-36315....

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Then a more recent update to see if the notorious Coat Hanger could be defeated by some modern audiophile cables.


Cable myths: reviving the coathanger test by Christian Thomas

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/amp/

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And here’s Audioholics’ founder Gene DellaSala clearing away all those pesky psychological cobwebs for the rest of us in just under 9 minutes.


Are Perceived Audible Differences in Cable Performance Real or Psychological?

https://youtu.be/wrmNvQIl-D8