Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

@taxonomy

Also, I’ll just throw this out there, my wife and I were outside in kind of a pavilion we have with some Dayton outdoor speakers and a chip amp. We were listening and both of us turned to each other and were like "does this sound insanely amazing?" I was checking behind me to see if I had installed extra speakers there or something. It was absolutely amazing. Maybe it was just a nice day and we were outside, but I would put that listening session up against small house money systems I’ve heard.

I’ve had this happen too, once or twice and in my case I’ve tended to put it down to some psychological effect.

I don’t know.

In any case it was actually a bit annoying on one occasion when my brother played back this cheap ferric tape on my NAD tape deck and it sounded way better (image size, transients, dynamics) than my own chrome tape recordings done at home via my LP12 turntable.

Slightly taken aback, I asked my brother to find out more about how this tape had been recorded. It turned out to be a common or garden all in one music centre!

I’m pretty sure now that it wasn’t a psychological trick but back then my audiophile sensibilities couldn’t accept it as anything other than a as yet unknown anomaly.

Reminds me of the old Groucho joke, ’Who you going to believe, me or your own eyes?’

Test your speakers....( not for timbre because it is techno music but test it for imaging and listener envelopment/source width ratio and soundstage)

This techno piece must be heard ALL AROUND you in front/left /right/back simultaneously ... Like a quadraphonic piece almost....😁😊

Headphone like sound but better than headphones but OUT of the head in my two postions: near listening and regular one...the soundscape must bear no relation to the speakers themselves...They dont exist and the soundscape fill the room....

My system is good but of low cost...Vintage well chosen piece thats all ...Dac of low cost but of good design....

The difference comes from basic knowledge of acoustic implemented in my room ....

Audiophile experience is NOT linearly RELATED to money spending sorry for those who never learned it......

Let’s stick with Monitor Audio like the OP has.
It is a different model, but I see:

• Cabinet resonances
• The step function is upside down
• The impulse response is a bit ratty at the onset.
• high distortion at 96dB, which is likely speaker compression.
  • That would affect loud passages which can be 20dB higher than the RMS SPL for say uncompressed classical or jazz recordings listened to even at 75-80 dB.
  • And as we add more distance from the listener to the speaker, this ability to handle higher drive power, gets to be more and more important. 

I can see nothing on the monitor audio web site that would suggest that they have fixed the issues, other than they did mentioned somthing about vibration work at a lab, so maybe the resonances were addressed??

Yeah other speakers at the higher end, have (and have had) low resonances and low compression… so it is not like current state of the art is in this (discontinued model). We would need to see a test of a current model to know for sure.

(And whether that is distressing to the sound, is dependant upon the listener.)
 

The conclusion in ^that link^ Is as follows:

Conclusions
The Silver 100 looks gorgeous and seems to have good engineering behind it to create a good response. It does however have a few small scale flaws. Because their scale was small, it was hard to evaluate their impact and develop correction for it. All else being equal, I rather see a speaker with larger error that are easy to identify and fix.   Such was not the case here. I let you judge its performance then based on data you see as my subjective assessment is weak in this regard.

I am going to give a recommendation to Monitor Audio Silver 100 with the bit of EQ in place. Hopefully we can get our hands on the "G7" version to see if they have made any refinements that mitigate the issues I found.

Cochlea-is there anything new under the sun?

@roxy54 

OK, nobody wants your old full size floorstanders with wide baffles. What's popular now is floorstanders with a tall narrow form factor. These are essentially stand mounts with their own stand built in.