overdamped Eric...
Speaker sensitivity vs SQ
My first thread at AG.
Millercarbon continues to bleat on about the benefits of high sensitivity speakers in not requiring big amplifier watts.
After all, it's true big amplifiers cost big money. If there were no other factors, he would of course be quite right.
So there must be other factors. Why don't all speaker manufacturers build exclusively high sensitivity speakers?
In a simple world it ought to be a no-brainer for them to maximise their sales revenue by appealing to a wider market.
But many don't. And in their specs most are prepared to over-estimate the sensitivity of their speakers, by up to 3-4dB in many cases, in order to encourage purchasers. Why do they do it?
There must be a problem. The one that comes to mind is sound quality. It may be that high sensitivity speakers have inherently poorer sound quality than low sensitivity speakers. It may be they are more difficult to engineer for high SQ. There may be aspects of SQ they don't do well.
So what is it please?
Millercarbon continues to bleat on about the benefits of high sensitivity speakers in not requiring big amplifier watts.
After all, it's true big amplifiers cost big money. If there were no other factors, he would of course be quite right.
So there must be other factors. Why don't all speaker manufacturers build exclusively high sensitivity speakers?
In a simple world it ought to be a no-brainer for them to maximise their sales revenue by appealing to a wider market.
But many don't. And in their specs most are prepared to over-estimate the sensitivity of their speakers, by up to 3-4dB in many cases, in order to encourage purchasers. Why do they do it?
There must be a problem. The one that comes to mind is sound quality. It may be that high sensitivity speakers have inherently poorer sound quality than low sensitivity speakers. It may be they are more difficult to engineer for high SQ. There may be aspects of SQ they don't do well.
So what is it please?
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- 167 posts total
So, this is the part I'm not clear on. You can use DSP to deal with non-linear behavior in a driver which are constant. You measure the output at say 90 db, and at 70 db, and you create transforms which adjust the output accordingly. However, what I know of as thermal compression is not constant. The driver has a thermal history and changes behavior accordingly. That is, as the driver gets hotter it no longer behaves the same way. To compensate for this you would need to have an algorithm which has an accurate thermo-acoustic model for the speaker AND knows the actual voltages applied. That's a great deal of work vs. getting drivers which are thermally stable in their usable range. Best, E |
«audio2design to @tomic601 , that makes no sense at all. Complete non sense, an anechoic chamber ideal is absolute silence measured in Db....Nature is anything except absolute artificially designed "silence" measured in Db.... «Also negating your argument is your room is not the recording studio, or the concert hall, or the church. For the most part you want to negate the impact of the room so that the acoustical cues in the recording are clearly communicated to the ears/brain and you hear what was recorded.»Complete non sense the recording cues from different microphones and different location are RECREATION after trade-off choices from the recording engineer, not PURE reproduction....Then for the most part we want our room to be an helper to facilitate the concrete recreation of our experience of timbre; the information about timbre being partially lost or distorted by virtue of the trade -off choices in the recording process....Our room can compensate and facilitate or impede this natural recreation.... «Removing early/loud reflections via speaker placement, broad band absorbers, and diffusion absolutely will do this. Close late reflections are bad too.»Complete non sense, because first: even world-known acousticians are not in complete agreement about the suppresion or partial use of the early reflections...read this article where Floyd Toole speak positively about using some early reflections but is criticized for that... https://ethanwiner.com/early_reflections.htm It is a fact verified by science that speech recognition is greatly improved with some early reflections... Which one and the timing with late reflections is an acoustical complex problem not to be solved by dogmatical ignorance... https://nrc-publications.canada.ca/eng/view/accepted/?id=dd3c1e7a-8d8d-440e-bbcd-04c69ef20419 «I expect few people have actually heard stereo speakers in an anechoic chamber. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not bad at all, with pin point natural imaging.»Complete non sense... Read what musician think about that in this link: https://www.violinist.com/discussion/archive/23998/ «I expect few people have actually heard stereo speakers in an anechoic chamber. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not bad at all, with pin point natural imaging.Another nonsense here....What is true for some aspect of imaging is NOT true for timbre perception...These phenonema are correlated yes but not reducible ONLY to frequencies accuracy... Sound in an anechoic chamber sound a bit like headphone, said Floyd Toole, the sound is in our head...In nature sound dont live in our head , for our survival we must locate sounds and identify clearly speech articulation....Then the metaphor comparing nature lack of echoing walls and anechoic chamber is bullshit....The level of sound recorded in a silent desert cannot be compared to an anechoic chamber by a margin measured around +30 Db......You dont jump because of your heartbeats in a desert, in an echoic chamber you do.... It is even dangerous to live there more than 45 minutes for many people.... "Recorded music sounds predominantly natural because the echoes are already built in the recording" is non sense because it is not the echoes that are built in in the recording but some information about the original room where the musical instrument were recorded with a lost of information and his inevitable distortion by the inevitable trade-off i spoke about linked to the choices made by the engineer between for example the 4 different kind of microphones he can use and their specific location...Not one microphone can record the same information even at the same location....These choices implicate a distortion in the information recorded about timbre for example... The audiophile room is precisely what can help the recreation of a more natural sound if rightfully designed or acoustically treated, not only to erase some bad timing actions from the walls, but to use and take advantages from some others... It is called positive timing acoustical events...This information coming from our room can help us to recreate the natural timbre of the initial instrument in his living location and compensate in some way for the lost of information or the distorsion of the information coming with the recording process.... I will conclude by saying that the decision to voice or not speakers in an anechoic room is a technical matter in the hand of speakers designer specialist...BUT thinking that an anechoic chamber is good for a musical experience is ridiculous...Designers of speakers can and must ask for EXPERIMENTAL conditions that have NOTHING to do with immediate musical listening conditions and are more linked to the improving process of the limitations of their structural design... Ignorance only can confuse together, digitalisation of sound, acoustical and/or musical information... They are related but are 3 different events or process.... Then pretending that anechoic chamber reveal more information because frequencies perceptions are more "pure" is ignorance clothing in knowledge... It is like pretending that flying ourself in an aerodynamic chamber or a wind tunnel is the more truthful experience for flying... Confusing the resistance of the parts of a plane in a wind tunnel with real flying action and impression, is like pretending that the more" accurate" frequencies perception and imaging in an anechoic chamber "sounded more natural" than in a treated acoustical room using reflection and timing events created for human ears to recreate musical timbre and not only imaging ... Perhaps robot will prefer anechoic chamber....They dont like what seems to them" useless" information, like the "colors" of a stradivarius compared to an ordinary or mediocre violin....Like us humans....😁 |
Another area where attribution is difficult, the dynamic nature of high efficiency systems. Is it that, or is it the controlled dispersion? I'm not saying low compression speakers aren't good. I'm saying that some of what we may attribute to "fast" or high impact speakers is really just better room integration. Amazing how you can take a slow, muddy, small sounding speaker and transform it with the appropriate room treatment, or how a poor room will sound better with tightly controlled speakers like horns, ESL's and open baffle. |
- 167 posts total