|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
76.168.13.138
these speakers have been in my bedroom unused for about ten or more years. i usually listen to the spendor s3/5s or MMGs, had a pair of bs22 (way better than they should be for the money), and now i drag the RIIs out and lo and behold, imaging and soundspace, nice flat/smooth freq response.
they will be there for quite a while, they ARE big and bulky but that isn't the reason. MUSIC!
...regards...tr
Follow Ups:
To All:
I remember the personally abusive nature of I.M. Fried firsthand;
That said, I also remember a number of demonstrations of some of his
better speakers when they were being sold in shops. They could have
quite a musical quality to them, as well as sounding basically "right".
Despite whatever was going on in Fried's head otherwise, he did seem to
be able to produce some fine sounding speakers. I have a pair of the
later C series satellites that are much tweaked and updated - they still
sound quite good in comparison with current products I have heard.
DRS
Interesting 40 year old design using a modified KEF Concerto kit(B139, B110, T27) in a variovent type enclosure(stuffed port like the Dynaco A25) giving better damping than the KEF bass reflex box. The difference between the R and RII was a modified crossover with lower crossover point(200 Hz) which KEF designed for Bud. The RII was much improved over the R.
The R was the design used by IMF as an excuse to get rid of Bud calling it a cheap design that would smear the IMF name. But in reality Bud made it so he's have a product to sell, knowing British IMF was looking to oust him.
As has the LP I heard on them, the London Phase 4 Stereo Antal Dorati Dvorak New World.
The boxed-set CD reissue of which carries its age rather well.
John
I think this came up before but I'm pretty sure the R3 was a completely different speaker from the R2. Other than both being 3 ways the box(though also a 'line tunnel') was different as were the drivers and thus also the crossover(much slower slopes and series design on the R3 I believe).
But all of Bud's designs did have a sense of dynamic rightness probably due to his love and extensive experience with live classical music(everything else wasn't real music as far as Bud was concerned).
> ...[Bud Fried's]s love and extensive experience with live classical music
> (everything else wasn't real music as far as Bud was concerned).
Bud was not the most tolerant of people. The last time I talked to him, at
a Chicago CES in the early 1990s, he threw me out of his dem room because I
had not got my bachelor's degree from an Ivy-League school. (I am a
University of London graduate.)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
...I'd have said something, anything, to him that might make him frown, and when he evicted me I'd have hit him with my own verifiable Ivy degree.
served that stuffed shirt genius right.
...regards...tr
I'm surprised he threw you out. I'm not surprised he was rude if you said something he disagreed with. If there were 3 god ways to do something, Bud would pick one an decide the other 2 were useless. He actually believed the Ivy League education idea. They educated you. Almost everyone else trained you. I guess because we were friends he tolerated my Lehigh University degree.
He was the same way about music. There was only classical music. All else was trivial. I recall when I brought over English Folk music, he use the term tinkle music to describe it.
In spite of this we were friends for decades. He taught e a lot because while he limited his audio paths I believe he always picked ones with many virtues. And I miss our conversations and meetings a lot.
> I'm surprised he threw you out.Me too. Even with my "red-brick university" education, I was still the
editor of the largest-circulation, English-language audio magazine. But
he was deadly serious about only Ivy-League graduates being able to
audition his speakers. A case of early dementia turning a passion into an
obsession, I feel.Bud was also the reason we have what we call in-house the "Bud Fried Rule":
that we will review what we are sent even if the manufacturer decides
subsequently to modify it, that while we will accept new or upgraded
samples, we will report on our overall experience of the product. This is
because in a late 1980s review, Bud bombarded us with several iterations
of one of his speakers, each slightly different from the one before. See
footnote 1 at the link below.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Edits: 07/20/15
By the time Bud was pulling rank over the claimed benefits of an Ivy League education, the Ivy League, which, by the way, dates its existence as a league for amateur athletics all the way back to the mid-1950s, had decisively abandoned the idea of a liberal-arts education that all educated people should hold in common, and had embraced a combination of trying to change society (Ira Magaziner, Hillary Clinton's healtcare reform guru, was the author of Brown University's "New Curriculum") and pure navel-gazing identity politics.
A long strange trip, seeing as most of the Colonial Colleges were founded for the education of Protestant clergymen.
Ironically enough, at the same time Irving Fried was blowing hard over the illusory greatness of a Harvard education, "lesser" schools such as Providence College were shaking off their vocational orientations and embracing Core Curriculum ideas, while the Great Books curricula gathered not only adherents but new adopters, such as Thomas More College in New Hampshire.
Mr. Fried knew that he could not ding me for having graduated from Brown, so nearly every time we spoke he spoke down about Vanderbilt Law School.
He wasted so much time and energy on what had turned into naked class prejudice that I eventually tuned him out. There's a lot more musical creativity and elemental musicianship in "A Love Supreme" than there is in the usual regional-orchesta run-through of a Beethoven symphony. IMHO.
JM
JM
Agreed. But luckily I had a comfortable relationship with him. I understood the good and the bad and concentrated on the good. Besides because of Bud I got to meet Percy Wilson and Gordon Holt who I became good friends with.
I had A25s back in the 70s and also stacked A25s. They were all tight and detailed in the lows but never imaged well due to the tweeter being inverted in phase. I opened up the top with added dome tweets above 10kHz. The RIIs changed all that.
There is MUCH more to the story but it's not relevant to this thread.
...regards...tr
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: