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In Reply to: RE: Speaker Measurements posted by stehno on October 29, 2017 at 13:06:00:
> > There's little to no value, except for readers who have even less knowledge than the one performing the measurements. < <
Actually I disagree (with this part, at least), quite strongly. I have gotten a lot of value from my ability to interpret the raw data from John's measurements. Many of his explanations are relatively close to accurate, and therefore helpful to many. And some of them are way off base, and only serves to highlight how much misinformation exists in the industry, as nobody else has seen fit to complain about them.
I am constantly astonished by the fact that I designed the first loudspeaker in the world that operated pistonically throughout the entire audio band. And here we are, over 30 years later and the only company that does this across their entire product range is Vivid Acoustics. Laurence Dickie, formerly of B&W made the next pistonic speaker, the original 4-way Nautilus that looked like a snail's shell, about 6 years after my Ascent Mk II and Eclipse designs. All of LD's 3-way Vivids get it right, and I'm pretty sure the 3 way stand-mount does too. Maybe the 2-way stand-mount, but I'd need more details to be certain.
Other than that there is only the TAD Ref 1 and CR-1, possibly some of their less expensive designs, and the Vandy Model 7. Unless you are listening to one of the above-listed speakers, you are listening through a mess or resonances that color the sound horribly, and in different ways - depending on the frequency range of the resonances and the characteristics of those resonances. And people wonder why there is such a diversity of opinion on electronics! They are almost all using horribly flawed transducer to make judgments based upon totally false premises.
Many of the modern KEF speakers get closer to pistonic operation than almost any other brand. But they still have strong resonances that suppressed no more than -10dB from the desired signal. But that is far better than 99% of speakers wherein there are multiple octaves of contiguous frequency ranges that are just a series of damped resonances, creating horrible time smear, and coloring the sound quality dramatically, sometimes making some frequency ranges murky and veiled, sometimes making other frequency ranges hashy and edgy - the list of flaw is too long to enumuerate.
Yet that does not diminish the role of electronics in the mix. I find this quote from JA's previously-linked review of the Levinson 20/26 pre/amp combo to match mine:
"There must have been something about the Levinsons that was proving addictive. There was. It was their sound-or rather, their lack of any particular sound. Whatever loudspeaker Larry tried with them, though still imposing its own signature on the sound, the 20.5s seemed capable of producing a sound that always remained true to the needs of the music. In fact, during a listening session at Larry's that featured the humongous-and horrifyingly poor-Altec BIAS 500s, I joshed that even the poorest pair of speakers we could lay our hands on would still sound at least acceptable when driven by the Levinsons. Accordingly, we set up a pair of single-unit squawk boxes that had accompanied a "vertical boombox" that Larry had bought for his daughter Rachel. (Yes, he does love her, but she had wanted something identical to the systems that her friends owned-"Not hi-fi separates, please, Dad" was the instruction. Larry almost complied: he felt that replacing the truly appalling supplied speakers with the surprisingly musical Boston Acoustics A40s would still conform to the letter of Rachel's requirements.) We set the squawkers up and connected them to the Levinsons.
"Well, they were still dreadful: rather than a continuous frequency response, the sound consisted of a series of isolated resonant peaks with nothing in between. Yet...they weren't as unlistenable as we'd expected. You could even hear flashes of music."
He also published an excellent article by Keith Howard of Hi-Fi News on measuring speakers that had answered some of my long-held questions (see link below). Unfortunately the promised follow-up article never came. I don't know if that was because of JA - much more likely his greedy corporate overlords...
Unfortunately even though it exists on the TEN website, I don't know if there is any way to find it from the menu. There used to be a menu called "Features" that had a sub-menu for "Thought Pieces" (or something similar). Currently the only way I've been able to find it is with an external search engine.
Of course the great stuff came from when Larry still owned the magazine and it was fun. The longer everyone at Stereophile has had to work for corporate overlords whose only interest is "How much profit can I make from your work?", the more things have gone steadily (and predictably) downhill.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Speaker Measurements - Charles Hansen 10/29/1721:47:48 10/29/17 (0)
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