@richardbrand I know a bunch of very smart people with terrible ideas, my brother, a PhD in aquatic acoustics from MIT being one of them. It is hard to imagine how such a smart guy can be so stupid. Anyway, the Sound Labs ESL is a full range speaker 8 feet tall with a cross section that is 45 degrees of a circle. Dipole ESLs beam like crazy and emulate a line source perfectly. It does not matter where the propagation starts. What is very neat is the image solidifies about 10 feet behind the speaker which people, non audiophiles in particular, are always amazed at. The house is an open concept design, I designed it. The rear of the media room is open to the rest of the house in a very fractured way like a big defuser. The nearest solid wall is 75 feet away. There is no modal behavior in the room at all. You still have barrier effect, the bass gets louder at the side walls. The subwoofer array ends at the side walls forming a line source from zero to 100 Hz. The side walls are 16 feet apart. The line source behavior ends at about 200 Hz and they turn into one big point source. By then they are 48 dB down and well out of the picture. The subwoofers are perfectly time and phase aligned with the ESLs. This is done by measurement and digital delay and correction.
The Shure V15 V with a Jico SAS/B stylus VS The Soundsmith Hyperion MR and Lyra Atlas SL
On a sentimental lark I purchased two Shure V15 V bodies and one SAS/B stylus. I was always a realistic about the Shure's potential. Was comparing it to $10k+ cartridges fair? Absolutely. The Shure was considered to be one of the best cartridges of the day. Why not compare it to a few of the best we have today?
The Shure has always been considered to be unfailingly neutral. Famous recording engineers have said it sounded most like their master tapes. I do not have an original stylus for the Shure and I can not say that the Jico performs as well.
My initial evaluation was quite positive. It worked wonderfully well in the Shroder CB. With a light mounting plate and small counterbalance weight a resonance point of 8 hz was easily achieved. There was nothing blatantly wrong with the sound. There was no mistracking at 1.2 grams. You can see pictures of all these styluses here https://imgur.com/gallery/stylus-photomicrographs-51n5VF9
After listening to a bunch of favorite evaluation records my impression was that the Shure sounded on the thin side, lacking in the utmost dynamic impact with just a touch of harshness. I listened to the Shure only for four weeks as my MC phono stage had taken a trip back to the factory. I was using the MM phono stage in the DEQX Pre 8, designed by Dynavector. I have used it with a step up transformer and know it performs well. I got my MC stage back last week and cycled through my other cartridges then back to the Shure. The Soundsmith and Lyra are much more alike than different. I could easily not be able to tell which one was playing. The Lyra is the slightest touch darker. The Shure is a great value....for $480 in today's money, but it can not hold a candle to the other cartridges. They are more dynamic, smoother and quieter. They are more like my high resolution digital files. Whether or not they are $10,000 better is a personal issue. Did the DEQX's phono stage contribute to this lopsided result? Only to a small degree if any. I do have two Shure bodies and they both sound exactly the same. The Shure may have done better with a stock stylus. I do not think the age of the bodies contributes to this result at all.
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- 197 posts total
- 197 posts total