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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: The Truth About Speaker Specs posted by SPL on November 16, 2000 at 07:23:50:
Speakers should not have a sound of their own, ideally. They are there to reproduce the original sound. Unfortunately, we have to judge them without a good reference. Many years ago, the AR company set up live versus recorded concerts where the audience (of which I was a member on one occasion) was challenged to tell when the speakers were switched in and the performers stopped playing, and vice versa. Amazingly, you could not tell!!!! Of course, those old AR3s and McIntosh amps were pretty damn good, and they used a great reel-to-reel deck, and they were reproducing solo classical guitar, which is about as easy to reproduce as anything you're going to find. I believe they were able to repeat the feat with some other small acoustic groups. I'm sure they would not have succeeded in replicating an 8 piece jazz band, or even a grand piano. But the point is that you had the reference to compare the speaker to. Nowadays, when we listen to speakers and grade them, we really have to do a lot of guesswork. One passage I like to test speakers on is from the opening track of Blue Nile's CD "Walk Across Rooftops" on Linn's label. There is a repeated descending line played by a plucked electric bass guitar. I own several pairs of speakers and the bass sounds like an acoustic bass on one pair, and like a twangy electric guitar on another pair. I can pretty much zero in on the mid-bass to lower midrange behavior of a speaker by listening to this one track. But I still don't know exactly how it's SPOSED to sound, so I have to guess that it ain't sposed to sound like a regular guitar, and it ain't sposed to sound like a stand-up bass neither, let alone an organ, but beyond that it's a judgement call.
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- It's not the sound that counts. - phenderson 15:47:43 11/16/00 (0)
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