Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]
[ Alert Moderator ]

Re: I'm just not sure about one thing

You just told me that the “auditory equivalent” of transparency “is the feeling that there is nothing between you and the original sound.” There is nothing objective in that definition and it says really nothing about the equipment or its performance but about feelings.

I also fail to see that I have denied anything in your observations. Hearing a barking dog seems off hand a fairly unambiguous thing. I do wonder about your explanations, though. Here is one of the things you said about your methodology: “I think about the why and then think about which pieces are most likely to affect that.” You still don’t know technically why the barking dog is heard in one case and not another. What on earth is that wire doing? You don’t really know and that’s why I call it a black box methodology, although perhaps “plug and play” would be more appropriate. Plug and play is suitable for some types of problems, of course, like troubleshooting by a process of elimination.

"Dynamic" seems to mean different things to different people. There's one fellow here who touts his speakers, which have a hump in the upper bass to lower midrange area, who then regards some other speakers which are capable of pretty high output in that area as undynamic. Parenthetically, I think a driver is much more likely to heat up on steady signals than short transients--in the old Audio magazine, they tested some speakers up to over 10,000 watts in the tweeter range--which they surely could not stand continuously.

As for resolution, well, I’ve read high end reviews for quite some years and I am aware of some of the kinds of things that are said. Just because an amplifier isn’t suitable for driving a very difficult load such as that of the Apogee Scintilla doesn’t mean it’s deficient for driving lots of other speakers. But I’ve seen reviewers try to extrapolate from the performance into a very difficult speaker load.

But let’s stick to the barking dog. I wonder just how far down that barking dog is? It would be interesting to measure for that could raise some interesting possibilities. I could conceive of scenarios having nothing to do with cables. You compared two expensive cables—how about some 12 or 14 gauge speaker cable from the hardware store? Would the barking dog still be audible?

As I understand it, you propose that dynamic drivers have enough resistance to moving that they are likely to muck up low level signals. Now, that at least is a testable hypothesis and perhaps you should test it. It should be measurable. If you want anecdotes, I can turn the Quad preamp down to its lowest level and I still get a lot of detail and stereo spread--actually with any of the main speakers I have had: the old Kef 104s, the Quad ESL-63s, the PSB Stratus Minis, and the Paradigm Signature S2s—that old Quad 606 is very clean at low levels. I don’t have the CD with the barking dog in the background so I can’t test this (I might not even be interested in the music).

I do wonder how a speaker can maintain the same audible character at extremely low levels without something happening to counter Fletcher-Munson effects. The Quad ESL-63, for example, isn’t linear in the bass at higher levels, that is, it starts limiting itself in the bass at more than moderate levels. So we get more relative bass at lower levels. The Kef 104 or 104aB is quite robust in the bass and laid back in the upper midrange, and it also played very nicely at very low levels.


____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  K&K Audio / Lundahl Transformers   [ K&K Audio / Lundahl Transformers Forum ]

Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
You can not post to an archived thread.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]