Speakers as Venues

Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Speakers as Venues

Posted by Bob Neill (D) on November 14, 2014 at 10:12:39

In my earliest days as ‘one of us,’ an audio salesman who was in it mainly for the music and so less the salesman than his boss might have preferred, said to me that he was more critical of amplifiers than speakers. (His preference was the C-J Premier 8’s.) ‘Amplifiers can get it dreadfully wrong,’ I paraphrase him as saying, ‘but all (good) speakers are just different concert halls.’ I take this as being a more radical version of what Anthony Cordesman was getting at when he began to call certain speakers “mid-hall.” A way to get us thinking more about listening to music than about audio physics when we’re confronting gear. Or a version of the dreaded impressionism/subjectivism.

I’ve had that thought in my mind for years from where it emerged recently as I was trying to help a customer get a grasp on why he liked both JMR Orfeos and Tocaro 42's which sounded so different from each other. The customer was from this area (Massachusetts) and so I posed the following:

The Orfeos bring to mind old (1903) upholstered, woody Jordan Hall in Boston, whose acoustics let you hear everything but the everything seems to proceed from a wonderfully beguiling context. The Tocaros sound like relatively new (1968) Amherst College’s Buckley Recital Hall, which is smaller, un-upholstered, and hard-surfaced though acoustically treated, giving instruments a wonderful immediacy and clarity. Jordan Hall is not excessively warm or soft, Buckley is not in the least hard or cold sounding. But Jordan seems to give music a nineteenth century patina, while Buckley gives it a crisp, modern clarity. I love them both.

The customer said, “Yes, I get that. But I love both halls too, so what do I do?”

“Go to both,” I said with a smile.

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Topic - Speakers as Venues - Bob Neill 10:12:39 11/14/14 (19)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Presto 08:44:45 11/17/14 (4)

RE: Speakers as Venues - BigguyinATL 12:02:53 11/17/14 (2)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Inmate51 10:35:54 11/18/14 (1)

RE: Speakers as Venues - BigguyinATL 08:02:46 11/19/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Inmate51 11:19:50 11/17/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - skinzy 12:37:13 11/16/14 (0)

Exactly - genungo 10:58:48 11/15/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Bry 21:11:27 11/14/14 (2)

Excellent! One step further... - BigguyinATL 08:52:27 11/17/14 (0)

Crane's Beach - Frihed89 02:05:01 11/15/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - fantja 10:56:58 11/14/14 (8)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Bob Neill 12:15:39 11/14/14 (7)

You might be a simple-minded idiot... - Inmate51 08:45:07 11/17/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - chocolate_lover9999@yahoo.com 16:08:11 11/14/14 (2)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Plasmatronic 19:19:18 11/15/14 (1)

RE: Speakers as Venues - chocolate_lover9999@yahoo.com 08:55:17 11/16/14 (0)

RE: Speakers as Venues - fantja 14:52:53 11/14/14 (2)

RE: Speakers as Venues - Bob Neill 19:49:43 11/14/14 (1)

RE: Speakers as Venues - fantja 05:06:49 11/15/14 (0)

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