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General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: BBC speakers have "...personalities within the overall personality." ?

This is my favorite audio subject. I’ve gone on about it too often and will likely continue to do so because I find its issues fascinating and believe them probably unresolvable. The subject probably fascinates less those who understand the science that lies behind it.

I think these speakers, considered loosely as a family, have the same general priorities. Clarity, subtlety, delicacy -- the achievement of which seems to reduce overall fullness and weight. Their designers feel that since no one appears able to retrieve both aspects of live sound equally well, this is the one that matters most. The other side feels, with equally good reason, that in order to achieve a persuasive sense of the scale and avoirdupois of live music through a domestic loudspeaker, a bit of this clarity has to be sacrificed.

The differences between these camps can result in radical differences or fairly subtle ones, depending on how strong the belief of a designer is in his point of view on the matter. The differences among the speakers within the family have to do mainly with the presence or absence of a bit of what I called “charm” and some others often call liquidity. Spendors tend to be more charming than the others, Harbeths somewhat less so, some of the others I know less well (Sterlings, etc) even less, approaching at the extreme a trace of dryness. I expect this has a great deal to do with choice of materials in the bass drivers (bextrene, polypropylene, “radical,” paper, etc., though also probably response curves.

Those who don’t like these speakers call them relatively thin sounding, yinny, buttoned down, precious, diplomatic, pedagogical; those who do like them call them accurate to source, neutral. I have lived happily with some of these speakers and with some of the ‘other camp.’ If I spend a couple of weeks with what I consider to the best of one or the other, I ‘get’ them and they affect how the other sounds to me.

I don’t think one of these approaches or sets of priorities is right, the other wrong; but I do think the differences are important. There are very smart designers on both sides.


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  Kimber Kable  


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