A Question of Right and Wrong.

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Nick
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#61 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Nick »

Why do I find musicians don't seem to mind very much what they listen to music on?
Well, a simple answer may be because most people don't mind very much, so why would musicians be any different.
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#62 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Ali Tait »

It would be interesting to know what the difference is between most people and "us" - what is it drives us to do what we do with regard to hi fi.
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#63 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by andrew Ivimey »

Neat.

Good, by which I mean, ' I agree'.

and Ali, well - it's just something that people do.
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#64 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Dr Bunsen Honeydew »

I find when all the usual muddying of the thread has taken place, and all the ad hominem and personal comments have been used, it is useful to go back to the original question.

A Question of Right and Wrong.
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Post by Cressy Snr » Thu Apr 06, 2017 8:28 pm

pre65 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:38 pm

There is no right or wrong in speakers.

Oh I'm afraid there is.
************************************************************************************

The question should be *is there a *musical* right and wrong with speakers. To answer that you have to ask what is music (too you). Music is tonality and timing. How we perceive it is through our three energy centres. Physical, Intellectual, and Emotional. Physical makes us want to move and dance, and I see as primeval. Intellectual makes us think about the music, its structure, to follow a score, too conduct. Emotional is pretty self explanatory.

So how do complex speaker destroy that. Well they tend to try to create correct tonality at the expense of timing. Where as simple speakers tend to sacrifice a degree of tonality for the timing.

So which is right, for the intellectual neither really matter but they tend toward complexity and tonality (basic precept of BBC design in the LS3/5a period i.e. Harwood and Hughes). For the physical response it has to be simplicity and timing, does you body move on it own, you don't have to make it. Emotionally again is timing as without it and the musical *relationship between musicians the emotions die, apart from irritation. We should all know when it is right because you feel it, can't explain it (like love) but you know it is there. This can be killed by too big a tonality anomalies that lead to so much irritation in turns everything else off, so there are limits.

In this equation THE ONLY IMPORTANT EQUATION, for which there is no computer programs for, there is obviously individuality, but we are all human (I think but a couple here give me doubts) so there is bound to be a broad consensus. If we, as with the energies, move to it, think about it, and love (or hate) it - feel the little hairs rise - the tingle of pleasure, that is what music is because that is what it does to us - nothing else matters.
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#65 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

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Dr Bunsen Honeydew wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:08 am But are you listening to and for music or are you listening to a thing!
Oh the music of course. That's the aim and the measure of success in the speaker is how much it 'gets out of the way' of the music. When the music flows out into the room with energy and colour.

Your above posting more or less sums up my own thoughts about what the system should do and why I got into this. Now, on tonality I just want to add that I think there are two aspects to this which are often to some extent in conflict as you say. There's the 'flat response' bit, getting the lumps & bumps out of the amplitude response, which gives some degree of 'correctness' to instruments and voices so they are not too disturbing or annoying or we alter the 'mix' in the sense of altering the relationship between the musical components. Then there's the one I call 'Tonal gamut' as analogous to 'colour gamut' in photography , which is how colourful the sound is - particularly ( but not exclusively ) important to the midrange. This is referred to as 'absolute tone' by Romy the Cat. This is the one that depends crucially on your choice of driver and how you equalise it - and as you say is very much linked to dynamics , & which comes from keeping phase shifts as low as possible across the whole audio band. This is the one you can't sort out by applying DSP and smoothing out some bumps in amplitude.
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#66 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Daniel Quinn »

Now we are getting somewhere :D
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#67 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Daniel Quinn wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:25 pm Now we are getting somewhere :D
Yes we are aren't we. This is what I was praying would happen and I hope it continues without sarcastic interjections and non-constructive wind-ups.

I think the Doc and Mark have it down spot-on. If we take the Doc's argument about too much simplicity causing the whole thing to break down because of too much tonal irritation vs the notionally correct tonality of the BBC designs, losing the timing. We can apply it perfectly to our small band of enthusiasts that first met on the World Audio Design forum and later on, face to face at the first Eggborough meet.

Then, it was all full range drivers and crossovers were the spawn of the devil. Colin's "one driver, pure music" slogan was his signature for years. But this purism started to evaporate, first with 15 inch bass helpers in open baffles, then the addition of super tweeters at the tops of said baffles. Why?

For me, it was that the speed, timing, phase coherence, of the mainly Fostex full range driver equipped speakers whilst very musical and all that was eventually outweighed by irritation at the squawking and honking of the bloody things. In the context of the Doc's argument, the thing had broken down into irritation despite the excellent boogie factor and out and out musicality of these designs.

James D had been ahead of most of us in that respect and was using a bass helper with a far higher quality full ranger than any Lowther of Fostex unit and the results with Jono's 45 SE amp were wondrously fab.

Slowly but surely crossovered stuff started appearing and boxes with multiple drive units came in, with the sound cleaning up and getting more and more slick, but for me, something had gone. Neither types of speaker were acceptable and I didn't see any way forward.

I remember Colin's place where he said to me that he too thought something had been lost and he wanted to get back to something simple.
My amp was in big trouble at that event and refused to drive anything that was there. Despondent wasn't the word, I can tell you. I felt humiliated, embarrassed and hit the M62 Eastbound that evening with my enthusiasm in the gutter.

On arriving home, I connected my 35W pentode valve amp up to my big Metronomes and music came out. I turned up the wick and the windows started to rattle. I stuck the Claptone remix of Gregory Porter's Liquid Spirit track on and the bass thundered, tight as a gnat' s chuff. Monkey bone was engaged and much grooving ensued.

How could this be right? How could the travesty of a sound I heard from my gear at Colin's be reconciled with the git on down funk and joyous groove I was getting back at home.

That was the day the turning point came for me and daft as it sounds, it was the catalyst that assisted the reaction, that eventually led to what I'm doing now with speakers. It's not wrong.
Last edited by Cressy Snr on Fri Apr 07, 2017 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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#68 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Daniel Quinn »

I am in agreement that :

right or wrong is a worthwhile debate in speaker design and the only useful concept is to be defined in terms of musicality. It is however a very difficult term to define { in words } and is probably best decided by listening . I also think that a consensus can be built as to what defines musicality , but it would by necessity be an aural not oral consensus .

Does it mean other definitions of right or wrong are useless or secondary ? For instance , you could reject musicality as the test of correctness and have an anechoic flat frequency response as the test of right or wrong . Are the test of musicality and flat frequency response or indeed other tests ,mutually exclusive .

If your test of what is right , is musicality , is there only one way to achieve this as described by RD ? Do not get me wrong, I am not saying there is only 1 way to make a speaker , what I am asking is IF and only if , you decide the correct test is "musicality" is there only one way to do it .

My personal opinion is that , probably there is only 1 way to do it , but I do not know as I don't make speakers anymore, I just listen to the ones I made .
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#69 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by andrew Ivimey »

Two or three people may be talking about the same thing. Is this Concensus?

Back in Pre-Eggborough through to Owstons I had a lot of interesting fun with single driver speakers but I always had Tannoys and ESS/Heil designs which I also brought to our events. It was amazing and fascinating to listen to different designs some of which worked for me and some of which didn't. Lowthers were too difficult for me. I wouldn't trade my Subaros (Scott) full stop. They sound very different to e.g. Tannoy HPDs in 90 litre ported cabinets but to me they both really do music. ESS Heils I would not choose to do without but the Devialet Phantoms are less interesting because a) I had nothing to do with their making and b) they really need a (very) big room to shine, they still have a persuasive clarity in the lower frequencies that far belies their size. But they are on in Bedford Towers nearly all the time because I can do the washing up or dance with Anna in the kitchen as I cook.
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#70 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by andrew Ivimey »

Just a quickie DQ. Having spent a lot of time in a couple of as near as dammit anechoic listening rooms I would say that foot tapping musicality (difficult to define I know) is not killed in such.

There is a strange air pressure thing going on that some people find it difficult to adjust to and there is no measure able reverberation so it's unnatural. But one does adjust and one can enjoy music in such finding that I can get foot tapping and have a very interesting listening experience-I feel I have heard more. In an anechoic room I have very much enjoyed e.g. DSOTM but not tried All Along the Watchtower... rats!
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#71 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by shane »

Couple of things to throw into the mix here going back to early days of the flat earth era, around 1976.

Our top system in the shop at the time would have been along the lines of a Yamaha CR1000 receiver, Dual 701 turntable with Shure V15 and Gale 401s. One such system we sold to a lady who was a music teacher, and shortly after became conductor of the Plymouth Symphony Orchestra (a position she still holds some 40 years later). She liked the system as an analytical tool, but claimed that as far as enjoying the music was concerned, it was no better than her previous system which was some sort of music centre. If she wanted to enjoy a piece of music at home, far better just to read the score and create the music in your head.
Around about the same time, another bloke came in and listened to the same system. Not bad, he said, but my mate's system plays music much better than that. This dumbfounded us a little. What did he think was coming out of the Gales? Traffic noise? So we packed our system into our trusty Austin A55 van and trundled the whole lot off to Newton Abbott, set it up and off we went. Then we listened to his mates system. I remember this so vividly, I can even remember the catalog number of the album used first (ASD3081, Shostakovich 2nd Piano Concerto, Christina Ortiz). All those things about scales falling from eyes, or Paul on the road to Damascus, they all happened in Newton Abbott that afternoon. The sheer spine-tinglingness of the moment the piano comes in at the beginning of the second movement was something we'd simply never experienced before. We weren't listening to a hifi system, we were listening to Christina pouring out her soul through her fingers. The system in Question? LP12/Grace G707/Supex 900, Naim I-can't-remember-which pre into NAP250s and DahlquistDQ10s.
Now this is puzzling, because I'm very happy to subscribe to Richard and Steve's argument that the less you put in the way, the more music gets through. It makes complete sense to me, but it was those DQ10s that bludgeoned the point into our heads the what we had been listening to before that had nothing to do with music at all, being more just complicated noise. For those not familiar with the DQ10, it's a complete shambles of a loudspeaker. It's a five way device with a 12" bass unit in a sealed box which has sitting on top of it three small open baffles, one holding a 5" cone and a piezo horn supertweeter, the other two holding different size dome tweeters. Behind them sits a crossover the looks like the result of an explosion in Falcon Acoustics' warehouse. How such an insane device can produce music defeats me, but it does, and it does it in spades, so whilst as I say I have a lot it if simpathy with Richard reducing the crossover to a single capacitor, that doesn't seem to tell the whole story.

The other point to make is that most people don't understand what on earth you're talking about when you say a system's not producing music. If course it is, you fool. Can't you hear that guitar? In 1983 at a show in Crewe, we got hold of one of the first Philips CD101s, about a week after CDs were released onto an unsuspecting world. With it was a copy of Love Over Gold. We sat down about 20 people in the room, and first played the album through a TT2, into EAR509s and a pair of Heybrook HB3s. Onto the turntable went Telegraph Road, and as usual heads nodded, feet tapped and everyone enjoyed it. Then the same track on the CD101. We so wanted it to be good, a quantum leap in musical reproduction, but it was dull, flat and boring, lifted only by the power of he kickdrum when we moved onto Private Investigations. Not a head nodded, not a toe twitched, but to a man the audience agreed that it was far superior because there were no clicks or pops, and how brilliant it was. No one noticed how disappointed the two of us were. The music had gone, but no one noticed.

Since I started this epic, the conversation's moved on a bit, but I think it was relevant a couple of pages ago!
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#72 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Wasnt the Dalquist one of those phased array things IIRC?

If so, that's interesting in itself. Phase, phase and more phase eh :wink:

So do we deal with phase, by using simple crossovers and physical placement of drivers to achieve linear phase, or do we use additional phase shifting networks in the crossover, and mount the disparate drivers on a flat front baffle?
Last edited by Cressy Snr on Fri Apr 07, 2017 3:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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#73 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by Dr Bunsen Honeydew »

That is pretty simple it only looks complex because of the number of drivers involved.

Image

Dalquist DQ10 crossover
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#74 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by andrew Ivimey »

Dalquist is not in my book at all.

Your anecdotes are the sort of thing I like to hear about though Shane.....explosion in The Falcon Acoustics warehouse indeed!

& then Dr B's picture post arrived - hmmmm, disappointingly prosaic.
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#75 Re: A Question of Right and Wrong.

Post by shane »

Must say I do remember that crossover being a bit more monstrous. 'Twas a long time ago, but that goes some way to explaining the phenomenon. Yes they were phased array, drivers scattered all over the place. These are they naked:
Image
Last edited by shane on Fri Apr 07, 2017 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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