Some thoughts on ASR and the reviews
I’ve briefly taken a look at some online reviews for budget Tekton speakers from ASR and Youtube. Both are based on Klippel quasi-anechoic measurements to achieve "in-room" simulations.
As an amateur speaker designer, and lover of graphs and data I have some thoughts. I mostly hope this helps the entire A’gon community get a little more perspective into how a speaker builder would think about the data.
Of course, I’ve only skimmed the data I’ve seen, I’m no expert, and have no eyes or ears on actual Tekton speakers. Please take this as purely an academic exercise based on limited and incomplete knowledge.
1. Speaker pricing.
One ASR review spends an amazing amount of time and effort analyzing the ~$800 US Tekton M-Lore. That price compares very favorably with a full Seas A26 kit from Madisound, around $1,700. I mean, not sure these inexpensive speakers deserve quite the nit-picking done here.
2. Measuring mid-woofers is hard.
The standard practice for analyzing speakers is called "quasi-anechoic." That is, we pretend to do so in a room free of reflections or boundaries. You do this with very close measurements (within 1/2") of the components, blended together. There are a couple of ways this can be incomplete though.
a - Midwoofers measure much worse this way than in a truly anechoic room. The 7" Scanspeak Revelators are good examples of this. The close mic response is deceptively bad but the 1m in-room measurements smooth out a lot of problems. If you took the close-mic measurements (as seen in the spec sheet) as correct you’d make the wrong crossover.
b - Baffle step - As popularized and researched by the late, great Jeff Bagby, the effects of the baffle on the output need to be included in any whole speaker/room simulation, which of course also means the speaker should have this built in when it is not a near-wall speaker. I don’t know enough about the Klippel simulation, but if this is not included you’ll get a bass-lite expereinced compared to real life. The effects of baffle compensation is to have more bass, but an overall lower sensitivity rating.
For both of those reasons, an actual in-room measurement is critical to assessing actual speaker behavior. We may not all have the same room, but this is a great way to see the actual mid-woofer response as well as the effects of any baffle step compensation.
Looking at the quasi anechoic measurements done by ASR and Erin it _seems_ that these speakers are not compensated, which may be OK if close-wall placement is expected.
In either event, you really want to see the actual in-room response, not just the simulated response before passing judgement. If I had to critique based strictly on the measurements and simulations, I’d 100% wonder if a better design wouldn’t be to trade sensitivity for more bass, and the in-room response would tell me that.
3. Crossover point and dispersion
One of the most important choices a speaker designer has is picking the -3 or -6 dB point for the high and low pass filters. A lot of things have to be balanced and traded off, including cost of crossover parts.
Both of the reviews, above, seem to imply a crossover point that is too high for a smooth transition from the woofer to the tweeters. No speaker can avoid rolling off the treble as you go off-axis, but the best at this do so very evenly. This gives the best off-axis performance and offers up great imaging and wide sweet spots. You’d think this was a budget speaker problem, but it is not. Look at reviews for B&W’s D series speakers, and many Focal models as examples of expensive, well received speakers that don’t excel at this.
Speakers which DO typically excel here include Revel and Magico. This is by no means a story that you should buy Revel because B&W sucks, at all. Buy what you like. I’m just pointing out that this limited dispersion problem is not at all unique to Tekton. And in fact many other Tekton speakers don’t suffer this particular set of challenges.
In the case of the M-Lore, the tweeter has really amazingly good dynamic range. If I was the designer I’d definitely want to ask if I could lower the crossover 1 kHz, which would give up a little power handling but improve the off-axis response. One big reason not to is crossover costs. I may have to add more parts to flatten the tweeter response well enough to extend it's useful range. In other words, a higher crossover point may hide tweeter deficiencies. Again, Tekton is NOT alone if they did this calculus.
I’ve probably made a lot of omissions here, but I hope this helps readers think about speaker performance and costs in a more complete manner. The listening tests always matter more than the measurements, so finding reviewers with trustworthy ears is really more important than taste-makers who let the tools, which may not be properly used, judge the experience.
There was a post that mentioned me which I think was removed. Hard to tell since this thread is scrolling by so fast. Yes, this thread has gone far off topic so I'm no longer following it, but OTOH, the energy and points people want to make related to ASR seem to have a lot of interest and energy so I'm not getting in the way of them. When the last person leaves please check the toilet isn't running and the lights are off. Thanks. |
He is no such authority. Here’s a recent example of PS Audio moving on track to post all AP measurements for all their products (Schiit Audio was the first to do this after battling this lousy creature). The sooner all these companies start providing this information to the masses, the sooner this lousy creature sitting in its garage with a AP kit will be forced into irrelevance, forced to crawl back under its rock.
Moral of the story is....If you don’t come out swinging as the expert of what you are and what you produce, any lousy creature sitting in its garage will claim to be the expert of you. PS Audio is learning it the hard way.
P.S. While it’s real nice of McGowan to offer the questioner a job, the questioner is a business owner himself with a lot more employees to take care of than PS Audio. Hence, he can’t be working for PS Audio! 😁
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In simple word for those who will not read about acoustics and the articles above quoted...
We cannot as Amir has done, discarded the "distortion" levels of a tube amplifier as pure noise in all case when we spoke about any tube amplifiers.And we cannot put all S.S. design as better . This is simplistic.
Why ?
The concept of timbre in acoustics is not an unwanted "color" added to a graph of frequencies and duration which ask to be eliminated .
It is a fundamental concept in acoustics that we do not yet fully understand especially when using acoustic theories that are not rooted in the natural context of hearing.
Eliminating distortion in gear design is necessary but the better the design the better he do not interfere with human hearing conditions about "timbre" quality experience and the better he makes the "timbre" perception a qualitative experience.This cannot be predicted as Amir claim only by measuring few specs of the design. Van Maanen has wrote article about distortion and about the physical and acoustics conditions necessary to satisfy the Fourier conditions for the human ears in gear design .
For this any audio design must satisfy the conditions which are described in fundamental psychoacoustics : our ears/brain decode sound using a symmetry breaking mechanism working in his own time domain in a non linear way. it is working in such a way that our ears/brain beat the Fourier uncertainty principle limits about the acoustic amount of processing information. it is the source of our human hyperacuity. ( which symmetry breaking express our evolutive trained biases toward natural sounds perception )
All the articles I have used demonstrate this. Amir ignores this and persists in declaring, contrary to common sense and science, that his measurements and they alone are sufficient to predict sound quality.
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https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/images/docs/AmplifierIssues.pdf
Why do amplifiers sound different? By Hans Van Maanen
«Power amplifiers are an essential part in the sound reproduction chain. And although semiconductor amplifiers have been around for over 60 years, there is still a lot of development going on. Nowadays, the distortion figures of high-end power amplifiers are very impressive (e.g. < 0.001% harmonic distortion) and easily outshine those of microphones and loudspeakers. Yet, when it comes to listening, differences are noticed between amplifiers and their distortions can be heard in spite of the use of loudspeakers with much higher distortion figures. In this note I will discuss some aspects which play a role in this –at first sight incomprehensible- phenomenon, albeit that I will address a part of the puzzle, not all noticeable differences can be explained by the points I will bring up, partly Therefore, I welcome contributions of others as “two know more than one”, as an age-old Dutch expression says. ............................................... for the rest of the article go to the adress above |
