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Something of a rant.
--Ze'ev
Follow Ups:
My buddy picked up a little 3 inch cube speaker from Costco for $40. It's crazy decent. At background to modestly loud levels, it's more than adequate and it's bluetooth and plays from his iPhone.
-Rod
Amazing!
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" - Michael McClure
Digital Signal Processing
Brings to mind Meridian that had digitally driven loudspeakers.
Home Theater is into room correction, isn't it? If they haven't made inroads yet to music reproduction, we can quit holding our breath for IT driven audiophilia ;-)
particularly regarding the contribution IT could make to the technology and the cost. A lot of speaker and driver makers spend a lot of $ on modelling and testing now.
Making real time adjustments to phase, timing, etc. so that large areas of a room hear a unified event has been in a lot of speaker designers wish lists for along time (AR played with this decades ago), but making speakers with such properties commercially affordable is the real problem. IT advances like cell phones, laptops etc. are reasonably priced only because the development cost can be spread over many millions of units. Most people really don't care that much about the ultimate sound quality, leaving a much smaller group of people to spread this cost over.
The actual transducers, including 'stats or the Manger he mentions, that do a better job in areas he cares about are expensive to make and will continue to be so. Omnis made by the likes Ohm, German Physics, Duevel and MBL claim good square wave performance and certainly fill the room, but they are hardly "affordable" for the masses, and I don't see any way to make them so. Other approaches, such as Danley's, take a creative approach to these problems, but are also expensive and hard to fit into home decor. Add to that the digital correction he seems to be recommending for them adds a lot more $, particularly with such a small market for this kind of improvement.
I guess it is possible to imagine cheap drivers that have massive correction applied to bring them into line, but imagining a structure to contain them that would blanket the listening area and be of acceptable size and shape is a problem. He does concede that low frequencies require large air movements, hence the difficulties of making a full range quasi-point source.
Edits: 07/02/14
"With this in mind, most speaker designers incorrectly argue that time accuracy is never necessary in a loudspeaker. They are simply not aware that time accuracy is vital when the ear is working in the time domain. Their expertise lies in making coffins for monkeys. "
Really?
"One of the few transducers that exhibits a good step response – and consequent realistic reproduction of percussion – is the electrostatic loudspeaker. Unfortunately, for good performance, these must be large and sited well away from walls and this is not appropriate for many domestic circumstances."
Well, I will agree with him on this. :)
"I think it is interesting to contrast the small IT device with considerably larger audiophile speaker systems. IT devices generally make a clean job of the bandwidth that can be realised by filtering out the frequencies that cannot be reproduced to avoid distortion.'
Huh? So, if we cannot accurately reproduce the top and bottom octaves with a small device, let's just filter 'em out. Yep, that'll work to create a lifelike image!
~!
The Mind has No Firewall~ U.S. Army War College.
...never heard a state-of-the-art loudspeaker contender, like say the Wilson
Alexandria XLF.
When the computer nerd's references are MP3s, earbuds and bookshelf speakers, it is easy to come to erroneous conclusions and bash audiophiles.
none of which are exactly new.
MP3s SUCK at preserving waveforms. Who woulda guessed?
MANY speaker designers over the years have pursued the "holy grail" of time/phase coherent output, with the consequent ability to yield a near-perfect step/impulse response and not utterly mangle a square wave (or, by implication, ANY wave).
The most successful designs in this regard have utilized single broadrange drivers (the article favorably mentions Quad ESLs and Manger drivers), OR time-aligned multi-driver arrays with TRUE first order crossovers.
The latter approach (exemplified by Vandersteen, Thiel, Meadowlark, Dunlavy, and a very few others) requires extremely wide-range drivers with unfiltered responses extending flat at least two octaves beyond crossover frequency, impedance-leveling circuits (Zobels and/or conjugate filters across the drivers) and (often) response-shaping circuits in series, and a sloped or stepped baffle to align the acoustic centers of the drivers front-to-back. Such crossovers wind up being anything but "simple," and the vertical listening (measuring) axis remains EXTREMELY narrow. Move your head (or microphone) up or down a couple of centimeters, the time alignment goes to hell, and they sound and measure just like any other decent speakers.
It's highly doubtful that most of us could hear the difference anyway, without extensive ear training. For those who can, the pictured accessory may be just the thing to maintain correct listening height.
Fwiw, the Synergy horn approach both allows higher order passive crossovers but by passes the “all pass” phase response of filters higher than first order.
In addition (being less than ¼ wl apart) the different drivers add coherently into one new radiation, the polar patterns show a single source (no pattern of lobes and nulls) and on some Synergy horns the phase response is that of a single crossover less driver and so the net result is the opposite of the head vise effect.
With separate sources (most multi-way loudspeakers), that “flat phase / gd “ condition can be achieved with DSP, but only in one physical location and the sources continue to radiate a pattern of lobes and nulls (an interference pattern).
is a quote from the article. I stopped reading it after that.
ET
True. The bottleneck was the loudspeaker before the Compact Disc.
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