Home General Asylum

General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

Beautiful Truth

All audio components have compromises, even SOTA equipment.

Within the criteria for absolute accuracy (truth), there is some wiggle room for tweaking and adjustments toward beauty.

As an example, it is quite a feat to achieve a multi-way loudspeaker frequency response to within +/- 1 dB across a given bandwidth, this is considered a VERY flat response. But within that +/- 1 dB, is room to wiggle, to tweak the response one way or another.

Let's say that on one speaker, the woofer is slightly higher in level than the tweeter, still within plus or minus 1 dB, but the woofer is about 1/2 dB "hot" compared to the tweeter being about 1/2 dB "weak".

The overall tonal flavor of this system will be on the "warm" side of absolute neutrality. On SS based systems, notorious for a cold and/or analytical sound, this would provide a very nice deviation from "absolute neutrality". However, this same speaker system, voiced the opposite way, with the woofer 1/2 dB "weak", and the tweeter 1/2 dB "hot", would sound very clear and defined on a typical tube based system. For a variation on this theme, substitute vinyl for tubes, and CDP/DVDP for SS, similar kind of reaction.

Of course, there are those who will claim that the speaker should be balanced with the woofer and tweeter at the same overall level, none of this 1/2 dB up or down business, in the interests of "truth".

This begs the question: which truth? The truth of a flat frequency response? This ignores other factors such as the distortion each driver has, and how it affects the tonal balance due to the higher order distortion products causing the sound to become brighter sounding, or even harsh.

In this case, the tweaking becomes even more subtle and tailored to the situation, and using my loudspeaker example, the bottom range of the tweeter can be made slightly "weak", and the top range of the woofer as well. This would tend to compensate somewhat for the distortion in each driver, allowing the overall tonal balance to come out sounding neutral or totally flat, despite the non-flat-as-it-could-be FR.

Which one is more truthful, the totally flat loudspeaker that sounds bright and a bit brash, or the tonally flat sounding loudspeaker that measures not as flat, but still within a very tight tolerance?

None of the parts within the components we have to work with are perfect, none of the processes in audio are perfect, they ALL have problems, distortions, deviations from absolute accuracy.

In my opinion, the art of audio design is blending all those less than perfect parts into an as truthful as possible whole, while not ignoring the beauty; this is what separates the mediocre from the finest.


Jon Risch


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.