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In Reply to: RE: Nor I, but... posted by josh358 on November 11, 2021 at 11:02:34
I'm really not conveying a deliberate choice or thinking process. It's just how I've always been impacted by the sound. And I appreciate the fact that many others are not in the same way. I discovered that while I learned a considerable amount about music and audio from valuable mentors, I have different priorities than any of them. And those really haven't changed much over time.
Years ago, I visited a fellow inmate in Ohio during a business trip. My only disappointment was that it was only for an evening. He was quite the fine tuner and had a pair of tweaked Advents (my first "real" speaker as a teenager and what's found in the garage) and some JBL L110s. He played the Advents first and naturally, they sounded very familiar. With his stands and custom cabinets, I noticed better first octave bass than I was accustomed to. When we switched over to the JBLs, I heard a more neutral presentation with better top end extension. But - a big but - their inconsistent directivity created a weird hourglass shaped soundstage I immediately found distracting. It was only after I observed this that he listened further and began to understand what I perceived. He later retired them.
I cannot "un-hear" what I find compromises coherency and thus realism to these ears.
Follow Ups:
I've noticed similar differences in soundstage. In fact, the first planars I'd heard, a pair of KLH-9's that a friend scored when we were in college, blew me away -- I'd never heard much of a soundstage at all! That, and the transparency, is what got me into planars. Even that was never quite right, though -- by today's standards, the driver arrangement on the KLH-9's is clumsy.
I'd never heard much of a soundstage at all!
That's a concept that has many facets. What I find important is for the harmonics of an instrument to sound like it's coming from the same place as the fundamentals. Which is where consistent directivity comes into play.
...the driver arrangement on the KLH-9's is clumsy.
In that regard, I confess a decided preference for truly full range designs. The 9 is an electrostat that runs full range, but is not a full range electrostat as it has multiple frequency specific drivers. Hearing the Dayton-Wrights in '76 introduced me to that distinction. It had eight panels, but they were identical and covered the same range. And mounted in a slight arc to improve dispersion.
I'm still waiting for someone to make a line source version of the ESL-63. It could have an essentially perfect line source dipole pattern, something that short of a speaker the size of the Sound Labs you can only approximate with facets or a curved driver since they remain directional only where the wavelength is short.
Click here for pics.
Interesting! It looks like it's still a point source, though -- a line source has some advantages such as immunity from the ill effects of floor and ceiling reflections (which in a line source just extend the line acoustically).
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