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In Reply to: RE: That clears up a lot! posted by EBradMeyer on September 21, 2007 at 20:37:38
"Professional studios rarely use electrostatic loudspeakers because they won't play loud enough and are not sufficiently reliable for professional use."
Sorry but how loud is "loud enough" and how reliable is "sufficiently reliable for professional use"?? I have three pairs of Acoustats, the oldest of which is more than 20 years old and all are capable of nearly 115db with sufficiently powerful amplification. They can play at levels over 100db all day long and simply don't die. No need to refoam a woofer or worry about a burned voice coil. Now I know that there are SOME electrostats that are fragile but the truth is that not all are that way or is it an inherent trait of them being an electrostatic speaker.
This brings up another question though, why exactly is it necessary for a professional studio to listen to music at such elevated levels?? Is it to hear all the details in the recording?? If so then the speakers they are using are not good and they would be better served using something with a high resolution so that they can listen at more reasonable levels and still get all the information they require.
Philips once used to use Audiostatic loudspeakers for mastering their classical recordings and they made some very fine sounding recordings during this period.
"We conducted that test with the same rigor as the others; levels of the two signals were matched within 0.1 dB at 1 kHz"
Why not with a broadband source like pink noise?? I have done level matched preamp tests and I found using pink noise to set the SPL level for each preamp (within 0.3db on my test) worked quite nicely and would perhaps give less bias if one or the other source is somehow not uniform and 1Khz gives a significantly different level between test units.
Follow Ups:
Okay, okay. I should have known better than to cast aspersions on ESLs around here.
Yes, many of them can play loud enough for me, but a peak level of 115 dB SPL at the monitoring chair does not, I'm afraid, come close to many people's requirements (nor is that level sustainable by any ESL I know down into the chest-pounding dance-club bass range; YMMV). Sometimes it's necessary to reveal how much skin there is in a kick-drum sound to a room full of noisy, pharmaceutically impaired musicians.
You say no one should need levels like this. You may also say they do much hearing damage, especially to the poor mixing engineers who are in there all day. If you said those things I would agree, but it wouldn't change the nature of the market.
You asked about level matching with pink noise. It's necessary to do this to less than 0.1 dB, which is much harder with a time-variant source. The pitfall you cite with non-flat devices certainly exists. But, partly because it's fast, easy and repeatable, my tendency has always been to use 1 kHz and let the rest of the spectrum do what it will. If the device is non-flat by more than a couple of tenths of a dB over a couple of octaves or more, you're gonna hear it whatever you decide about the level match. That was very true for my power amp test from 1991, as you can see from the graphs. It's at http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/651/the-ampspeaker-interface.html
-- E. Brad
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