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Two GREAT Loudspeakers: One sounds "Wrong," One sounds "Right..."

24.112.128.78

Posted by Rich H on September 18, 2001 at 08:57:40

I'd like to share yet another baffling audio experience. I figure many of you can probably relate to it.

About a year ago I was in a high-end audio store (very nice place, well staffed, with some excellent demo rooms). I sat down to listen to a loudspeaker that had a truly impressive design criteria, fabulous measurements (among them: very flat frequency response, on and off axis, extremely low driver distortion) designed by one of the most knowledgeable teams one could hope for from a company.

On went a recording of Faure's "Requiem" (natch). The sound was everything promised from the hype: expansive, coherent, stunningly smooth throughout the midrange, clean from top to bottom and most of all an incredibly low "noise floor" (for lack of better word), giving the presentation an ease (lack of grit and grain) and clarity that was truly amazing. Must be those new ultra-low distortion drivers. It seemed as effortless to listen into the recording as it does in life at a concert.

But...if it sounded so real in so many ways, why was I not quite connecting to the music? I love the Requiem, but it wasn't grabbing me...something not quite right. Yet the presentation was otherwise so complete I couldn't put my finger on it. Every time I encounter a speaker this impressive and I'm not moved by the music I first start to blame myself - it's not the sound system, it's me: this sounds so good but I'm not in the right mood, I just can't relax today to enjoy music. Those kind of rationilizations.

More music: Jobim's "Girl From Ipanema," and other tracks featuring guitars. Then it started to dawn on me. I'm very sensitive to timbre and tonality - a high-end speaker has to sound, on some level, "right" with instruments in order for me to completely submerge in the experience. I play acoustic guitar, including fooling around on various models, classical and otherwise. I closed my eyes and performed my "rightness" test - Does that guitar on this recording sound like I could walk over, pick it up and play it myself?
Then it clicked. No. The guitar coming from these speakers did not actually sound like any real guitar I've encountered. Something about the tonality and quality was "off." The guitar sounded colder, whiter, slightly electronic and drained of the the organic quality found in real instruments - this was a guitar from a twilight zone episode, where you wake up to find that everyone looks that same, but there's something not quite right, something different....

Or was it just me?

Sitting near these mega-speakers was a pair of Dunlavy SM-1 monitors.
Hmmm. "Do you mind if we play these tracks through the Dunlavy speakers?" - "Sure, no problem."

Viola. There it was: organic sound. The vocalists sounded human. The guitar sounded like it was made out of all the right materials - wood, gut strings (or metal strings, depending on the guitar). I closed my eyes and listening to the Jobim track and it took no stretching of my imagination to feel like this was guitar that could be passed around the room for others to play. My mind said "aaahhh, this is more like it" and I felt compelled to drink in the music. Switching between the Dunlavy and the mega-speakers confirmed this effect, like switching between a tv whose picture was too blue, to one with properly balanced colors.

This kind of experience leaves me baffled. The mega-speaker, like the Dunlavy speaker, had fabulous measurements - very flat response, especially off-axis. The room was excellent - well dampened, lots of room for the speakers to "breathe." But one sounded "wrong" to my ears and the other sounded "right." Without hearing each speaker directly compared to real instruments I could never truly say which was right. However, I regularly compare real instruments to their reproduced counterparts on speakers that pass through my home, and almost always the ones that sounded "right" before the test also sound most accurate during the tests.

This is not to imply that *my* "right" is the same as, or better than, someone else's "right" sound. But these experiences remind me that there are subtleties buried in the measured performance of well engineered loudspeakers that still have an important impact on the sound. Frankly, I just don't know what the heck they are, and it's extremely hard to find out because asking anyone who builds loudspeakers inevitably results in a partisan view of which design criteria changes the sound from "wrong" to "right."

Any thoughts or comments? On the technical side: on a well designed product, what do you believe can go subtly wrong in a speaker to make it sound "off?" And on the consumer side: Do my fellow inmates have any reliable personal criteria for finding the "right" sound in a speaker?

Rich H.

**PS, I didn't mention the name of the mega-speaker because it's not the point of this post to bash that company, or denigrate a product anyone on this board owns - it was a fabulous product. And this isn't
a "plug" for Dunlavy. There just happened to be Dunlavy speakers sitting in the room as well. While I do think that Dunlavy speakers are some of the more tonally accurate speakers out there, there are quite a few speakers that I would also have chosen as sounding "right" in comparison with the mega-speaker.

***PPS. One difference in the design between the Dunlavy speaker and the mega-speaker was phase/time coherence. The Dunlavy speakers are a "pulse coherent" design, while the mega speaker was not, being a high-order crossover design. Could phase/time coherence have contributed to the percieved "rightness" of the sound? The jury is still out on that one for me, and I sure wouldn't jump to conclusions based just on this demo. But, hey, who knows....?

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