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In Reply to: RE: Measurements vs. Reviewers posted by Peter Breuninger on August 19, 2015 at 13:36:22
"The human being himself, to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist."
Goethe, Scientific Studies
Follow Ups:
Did
Turns out that if I change my name I am back to Square One (tee hee) with the Federal Witness Protection Program.
jm
The same thought crossed my mind. But I'd have thought it would have been the other way around, that they insisted you change your name for your own safety. What crime did you witness and testify to, publishing reviews of audio equipment without a license? Were you a participant too? Fess up. My hunch is you did.
Its like time travel , go back too far and well you know ....
Kinda puts him in his time and place and thus not up to date, doesn't it?!That statement even for his time is just about as silly as GBShaw's "Those who can, do, and those who can't, teach."
Superficially intelligent.
Measurements and listening are a pair.
I don't think listening on its own is of any use at all, unless it is informed about what matters and how / why it matters in speaker behaviour. Thus listening without a knowledge of that particular speaker's known behaviour is going to be misleading.
And recordings are an issue, too. No multiple close-mono miked mix-down can do coherent ambience, but our speakers and rooms often can fool us. Such are the only 2-ch recordings that can throe images outside the edges of a speaker pair. Such recordings alter timbre, and thus cannot give us any idea about any speaker's tonal accuracy.
[Perceived timbre is driven by attacks, decays and only lastly by the continuous tone and only where it happens. Noting that percussion, harpsichord, guitar, harp and piano notes do not have continuous tone.]
I don't make decisions about speakers except with recordings I know to have a real stereo base, coincident or near-coincident. Not spaced omni recordings.
Few speaker reviews acknowledge this issue.
Diffraction's deleterious effect on wave-launch behaviour - of most speakers still sold - becomes audible once you've lived with speakers whose diffraction behaviour is smooth.
:-)!
Warmest
Tim Bailey
Skeptical Measurer & Audio Scrounger
Edits: 08/20/15
n
John,
I take this that you agree with me, or you would not have contributed to my post.
Peter B.
Editor AVShowroomsforums, Editor AVShowrooms
I think that measurements have some value but that many measurements are of the "five blind men feeling an elephant" variety. Valid but incomplete.
Therefore it should come as little surprise that I find that the most valuable measurement is the in-room measurement from a listening position.
There's I think a very instructive example in Stereophile's history of measurements by JA, legendary designer Winslow Burhoe's Direct Acoustics Silent Speaker II. In his commentary on the measurements, JA stated "I listened to the Silent Speaker after performing and analyzing the measurements, so my expectations were not very high."
But:
"However, I was pleasantly surprised when I set them up in my room ... Other than the mellow highs, the balance was considerably more neutral and uncolored than I'd expected."
Conclusion:
"[A] very well-balanced design at an affordable price, with a totality of performance that exceeds the sum of its parts. I'm not surprised that John Marks liked it as much as he did."
# # #
I was quite gratified that in-room, through the midrange, the Silent Speaker II's response curve (red trace) to a surprising degree tracked that of JA's reference pair of BBC LS3/5As (blue trace)--another loudspeaker where listening was an important part of the design process.
To sum up, if a loudspeaker's impedance dips below 3 Ohms and at the same place there is a killer phase angle, I think those things are very good to know--but those data points don't really tell us how the speaker sounds. I think that in-room curves are very valuable, but, even to use an example favorable to my position (and to my credibility), I don't think many people really think that in JA's room the Silent Speaker IIs and his LS3/5As sounded identical or even substantially similar.
OK?
jm
Unlike the majority of speakers available today, it is "near-wall specific" and needs to be shoved right up against the wall behind it to sound right. It has essentially no baffle step compensation built in, and relies on reflected sound from the wall behind it to fill out the irregularities in its response. Quasi-anechoic free air measurements for such a speaker are of course nonsense, and totally violate the designer's intent.
And, believe it or not, I heard two pairs back to back out in the room at a Connecticut Audio Society meeting, and: They rocked!
JM
That is a classic example of why you can't judge a speaker based on its near field on-axis pseudo-anechoic response. In the far field, in room, those ugly looking midrange peaks and nulls in the on-axis response are opposed by corresponding dips and flares off-axis so the sum at the listening position is much flatter than the on-axis measurement would suggest.
Conversely, I've seen other designs that measure great on-axis but don't sound neutral because the power response is downward sloping in the upper midrange due to the narrowing dispersion of the midrange driver, followed by a peak in the low treble once the tweeter takes over.
jm
I was rather surprised by John's measurements, because I've measured the pseudo-anechoic response of my own W-B Vertex speakers and they don't look the same. My Vertex are not the flattest I've seen, and I didn't expect they would be given the directly connected mid-woofer, but they look a lot flatter than John's measurements of the Square One. That is surprising to me because I thought both speakers used the same Tactic II driver in roughly the same size enclosure with same/similar porting.
To quote the King of Siam.
jm
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