Amir only wants to answer what he wants to answer. He will defer and ignore anything else and post a bunch of graphs and babble. I perused his site a bit and in one blurb about listening to a Dac on his headphones he marveled at the amazing dynamics! However here he says dynamics don’t exist and ignores the request to answer how that is measured. Nope sorry said dynamics are how loud it can play… musta been blaring his ears out I guess.. Hmm.
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.
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Naturally. There is one of me and many posting audiophile nonsense.
Nope. I answered you with text. That there is no such thing as fast or slow bass, microdynamics, etc. I said that these are made up terms so naturally there is no measurement that matches them. It is like saying some speaker sounds like a Donkey and asking me for a measurement for that!
Yes and I explained to you that this term is short hand for dynamic range and how deep the bass goes. You disagreed and demanded to know if "Cornwall has better Macro dynamics than a Harbeth ." I post if anyone agrees with you and no one did. So you need to argue with the folks here, not me. I have addressed your question and there is nothing else I can tell you.
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Sure looked like you were posting the three other reports to do exactly that.
Then you must also agree with this from Jason: "Having already discovered how some of the hotel's huge rooms tended to overemphasize the lower midrange and upper bass, I have no idea if the over-emphasis and extra resonance I heard in that region reflected the speaker's true character, the speaker's character in the early stages of break-in, room interactions, or a combination of all three. (I expect the latter.) " So he heard extra resonances, and overemphasis of lower midrange and upper bass. Right? The three other show reports posted made zero mention of any faults let alone these. What you quoted from me was this: "Boomy and tuby. But large presentation." "Central vocal image nice; bass still sounded wrong."" Jason said similar thing with "upper bass" having problems. He praised the large presentation which I also mentioned as a positive. By the way, it is a given, per fundamental physics and laws of the Universe that the bass in that room is wrong. It has to do due to wave superposition. All rooms have bass modes ("resonances" as Jason may be saying) that must be corrected. This requires parametric equalization. Without it, it is only a matter of what music you play (that hits on room modes), where you are listening, and your hearing acuity to detect this problem. Above applies to any system regardless of cost. You could have a $10M speaker system and it will still produce the wrong bass because that is a property of the room, not the speaker. Those of you who are spending thousands on speaker wire but don't use DSP, have completely missed the boat on what it takes to have a high-fidelity system. For $100 you could measure your room and apply the correction to get good sound. Instead, you are admiring the cost of your system, not its true fidelity. |
This is trivially explained through measurements. See this measurement form my VMV D1se2 Stereo DAC Review:
When you set the filter to "off," the output level jumps up by some 4 dB. This easily results in better perceived detail, air, etc. This is why it is critical to match levels in such listening test comparisons. Failing that, you want to pay attention to measurements as it not only tells you about higher volume, it also shows that "off" starts to cut off the output starting from just 5 kHz. There is a whopping 4.5 dB droop by the time you get to 20 kHz! If you had matched levels, you would have hopefully heard the much attenuated high frequency response. Granted, some confuse this with "less digital" which it is not. |
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