Critic's Corner

RE: Steinway Lyngdorf Review

64.252.130.231

This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: Steinway Lyngdorf Review posted by barryb on December 30, 2011 at 13:31:26

I went back and checked the article, and here's a fuller version of what he said:

". . . but cello and bass sections and trombones have a sense of definition and clarity in real life that almost always escapes reproduced sound.

"Everyone has noticed this for a long time and wondered why this clarity and definition is lost and how to get it back."

So I think he was talking about the about the midbass and lower midrange, rather than the entire range of the amplifier. Which correlates with my own experience, in that amplifiers seem to differ in the mids and highs, and at the resonance point of the woofer.

My sense is also that he's right about why this goes to pieces, modal resonances below the Schroeder frequency. I came to that realization because properly set-up dipole woofers have an ability to reproduce that natural bass sound that omnidirectional woofers don't, and yet the performance of the drivers isn't always better -- in fact, it can be significantly worse, with higher levels of harmonic distortion at high levels and many cycles of ringing. But if dipole woofers are parallel to the front wall, they don't excite the vertical and lateral axial modes, and if in a rectangular room you sit the same distance from the rear wall as the speakers are from the front, line source dipole woofers cancel some of the remaining depth axial modes as well. That significantly reduces not just amplitude response aberrations, but time smear, and the instruments start to sound like instruments rather than a smear or blur.

Follow Ups: