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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: " If it measures good and sounds bad, -- it is bad" posted by beppe61 on July 23, 2014 at 07:51:00:
Amplification:
Beginning in the 70s, designers of solid state gear went amok with their new "fix-it-all" tool called negative feedback. If a little was good, more was always better. That lowered output impedance (good), lowered measured harmonic distortion (at least with sine waves), but created problems. The top end of the Crown D-150 amp I had as a teenager sounded like sandpaper on top and was closed in.
Hard sounding amps today are pretty rare, but many engineers still lean to heavily IMHO to using high levels of NFB as a crutch. The result is overly cool and thin sound. Perfect example is now defunct Halcro. You felt as though you were listening to the symphony in the tundra. Mind you, I use live unamplified music as my objective. Does that sound like a piano? A cello? A guitar. I don't like overly "warm" or thick sound either. But many current amps that "measure well" don't sound good to me. While I haven't heard every one, I don't like switching amps either. They may be neutral in tonal balance, have great THD specs, but sound lifeless to me and lack the body of the real thing.
Measures good, sounds bad.
Speakers:
All speakers are flawed in some way(s), so value judgements come into play here. On the other hand, I prefer those whose sins are that of omission - my stats can't do 20hz nor can they play 120 db. But that is not something that you always notice. Especially since I never really want to listen that loudly anyway. I'll mention one case of a JBL speaker I heard a couple of years ago. It was a vintage bookshelf monitor that exhibited very neutral and entended response. Upon first listen, it was fine. It wasn't long before I noticed its weird soundstaging. Perhaps it was intended for nearfield listening only, but at a "normal" distance what you heard was the sonic equivalent of a funhouse mirror. The woofer had a consistently wide polar response across its range as did the superlative dome tweeter. Wide soundstage at the top and bottom. The midrange, however, was run at too high a crossover frequency to the tweeter such that it beamed horribly at the transition. Pinched with an instant transition to the wide dispersion of the tweeter. I found listening to it always distracting and synthetic.
Measures good (in some ways), bad in others that always stuck out (to me at least) like a sore thumb. Which is why I'm a full range electrostat fancier. I value coherency and uniform directivity for a speaker's entire response - while somewhat limited in range and ultimate output it may be.
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Follow Ups
- Sure! (longish) - E-Stat 10:15:27 07/23/14 (1)
- RE: Sure! (longish) - beppe61 08:56:50 07/24/14 (0)
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