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........most of us know how powerful the sense of smell can be.Smelling certain aroma's can trigger strong childhood memories of say your grandmothers house, a favorite dish grandma used to make or just trigger memories of childhood.
I surmise the same thing could be said about music. Rememeber the sense of "discovery" that was overwhelming when hearing a now cherished song for the first time?
It certainly brings back floods of memories from school days for me and along with it, growing up in general, BUT could it be that the more accurate a systems portrayal of the "musical message" so to speak, the stronger the connection/memory?
Alot of people proselytize about speakers being "time coherent" or having superior group time delay charactertistics BUT we seldom divert our attention as to how those attributes translate into a more "pleasurable" listening experience.
I for one am NOT convinced that time coherency in a speaker is of utmost importance BUT I will suggest that proper dispersion of all the drivers, as to how they sum off axis and to driver distortion charactersitics, play a bigger role in "suspending disbelief" in having those memories flood back and may I humbly suggest that is all we as audiophiles are seeking?
Questions, comments, concerns and even rebuttals' are encouraged.
Cheers,
Follow Ups:
.........much appreciated gentlemen.Cheers,
RE: time coherency:
> BUT I will suggest that proper dispersion of all the drivers...(etc) ...play a bigger role in "suspending disbelief"For some, that may well be true. For others, it may be something else. There is one particular perfume that reminds me of my first girlfriend when I was a teen many years ago. That scent would probably do nothing for most of the population. It is certainly going to be the same with music. The audio clues that help you imagine "you are there" are not going to be the same precise ones that send me to nirvana.
Ideally the perfect audio system would do "everything" at the 100% level. But in that sense, not even the most expensive system comes anywhere close to that mark. I've often wished I could take one aspect of the sound of one particular speaker and merge it with another quality from a different speaker.
Of course, that is one factor in the dizzying number of equipment manufacturers on the market. You're being transported to the audio netherworld by one system and I could be standing next to you wondering what all the fuss is about since it is missing an audio clue that is more meaningful to me than you.
There are speakers, there are time-aligned speakers, there are speakers with controlled dispersion....and then there are the Beveridge Model 2 and 2-SW.
These are full-range electrostats with direct drive OTL tube amps built in and acoustic lenses in front of the planar drivers. The dispersion is nearly 180 degrees. The cabinet makes the speakers monopolar, so they can be placed on or even recessed within the wall.
The speaker and lens design was developed by Harold Beveridge, an engineer who worked on the early development of radar. His approach was to control sound dispersion in the same way horn antennas control microwave RF dispersion. The sound wave front is coherent and simulates an ideal line source. There are no crossovers for the panels (the subwoofer version uses separate woofer cabinets).
I had the good luck to hear a pair of these speakers in a large room. The source was a CD player and the disc was Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley. I listened with my eyes closed for a few minutes and was transported to the recording venue. When I opened my eyes, I saw the wall of the room where it clearly did not belong in the recording venue. It seemed to be rushing towards me and I had a panic reaction.
I've had a few superb sonic experiences, involving live music, but nothing as unexpected and profound as this unconscious suspension of disbelief at the limbic level.
The speakers have limited SPL due to the laws of physics, and the setup was no where near high-end standards, but the coherent and nearly ideal dispersion overcame all the limitations.
if you liked the sound of the Beveridge speakers you may be interested to know that Roger Modjeski of Music Reference, who once worked for Beveridge, has designed an electrostat speaker that to me exhibited a lot of the traits you described with your experience with the Beveridge. I had the pleasure of listening to these speakers in Roger's home/lab and even though his listening room was less than ideal and his equipment less than high-end (except for the RM-200 amps), the speakers reproduced excellent sound and imaged extremely well. It was definitely a you are there experience.
Somewhere on the web (I'm sure it could be easily found with a Google search) I came across a very careful test of this issue done in a very controlled setting. I think it was a university study. Using the same drivers and crossovers, but with the ability to change time-alignment and phase-coherence as desired, the investigators assembled a panel of listeners. I believe these were not "audiophiles" per se, but people who were experienced with listening to reproduced music. They were not told what was being tested,what was being varied, but simply asked to report how much they liked the sound, how realistic or good it sounded under various test setups. The results were very clear-cut. There was a very strong
preference for the sound when the speakers were either time-aligned or phase-coherent, but they didn't have to be both.
The result was many standard deviations away from chance and highly repeatable. As I recall, they ultimately concluded that the important thing was the smoothness of the frequency responses in the crossover regions that was achieved by the coherence. That was perceived as giving the higher quality sound. However, the fact that a speaker is time-aligned doesn't necessarily mean it will sound better than one that isn't. This is trivially obvious. It's all in the implimentation, and I would expect that one could easily make high quality, non-aligned speakers that would considerably out-perform low-quality, time-aligned speakers.
...ESL 63's at the Boulder Sound Gallery in college that made me an audiophile for life. I liked music before then, but this was an experience on an entirely different level. We know the qualities of those speakers.
The closest to this in my recollections was playing some vinyl of Mozart's "Magic Flute" overture by Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, and my brain re-creating that distinctive scent of the "floor wax/polish" used inside the place.....
The summer I was nineteen I worked construction and I went home for lunch every day and ate hot dogs with onions, while listening to Beethoven's 6th. For years after I smelled and tasted that lunch when ever I heard that symphony. My wife called me Pavlov's hot dog.
Don't know...many songs I heard that had an impact on me as a child or youth were heard on lousy radios and cheap console "stereos". So that impact had little to do with any particular sonic quality, and most likely nothing to do with time coherence other than I was coherent enough to appreciate the song at the time- to appreciate just hearing a well performed, well written tune. I've been listening to music on a pretty intense level since I was very young too. My father was a semi-pro jazz drummer and I grew up listening to lots of music, live and recorded.As I've aged and heard better systems, I can certainly appreciate more the "sonic" effort that went into recording and creating certain songs from me youth, but they don't trigger effects like a certain taste or aroma do, as regards "bringing back memories". I don't listen to music for any sentimental reasons though and find that to be one of the worse reasons for me to listen to music, so perhaps I've built up some sort of tolerence. When I listen to a song I'm in the moment, not in some past moment when I may have first heard it, even if I've heard that song a thousand times before, and there are MANY songs I've heard that often.
Then there is Phoebe Snow's version of "San Francisco Bay Blues" which always reminds me of the Crab Louis, sourdough bread and glass of cold beer I'd have at a restaurant I used to work at while listening to that LP 30+ years ago. Never fails, whenever I hear that song, I can "taste" that meal. Just that one song, nothing else from that LP.
We had a pretty good Marantz tube system at that joint...
You may be on to something that "affects" long time audiophiles though, certain sonic cues that "take you back to that place". I'm just not one of them.
"I always play jazz records backwards, they sound better that way"
-Thomas Edison
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