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Re: No claims of omniscience

Hi John

Well it is good to see that it can happen or at least did once haha.
Understand, I am not saying all the problems have been solved by Science or omniscience either, not at all, rather, that much too often, in fact so often high end hifi is snickered at, that bogus products are sold with exotic explanations, which are largely / totally hog wash.

Meanwhile, the now dreaded (in hifi land) measurement technology has continued to march on to the extent that when you look at a real loudspeaker (and heaven forbid you do this at the listening position) your wondering what in the world are you seeing /hearing. Loudspeaker in particular are often so far short of “ideal” that it is hard to find which measured problem is associated with what sound character.
In fact, to the lay person the whole problem with measurements in general is one usually assumes they relate to what you hear when some times they do and sometimes they don’t.
Unless you are familiar with the measurement, you don’t know that.
Measurements are a design aid, provide an answer to the question it asks.
THD is for example is just that the total harmonic power BUT there is no attempt to correlate the frequency, harmonic order and level relative to the fundamental yet that is what / how we hear, NOT THD. Back when Tube amps all had a similar distortion spectra and one was dealing with 20% vs 10% it was more useful as a yard stick.
With SS amplifier nonlinearity centered around zero crossing and with large –fb which pushes the spectra higher up, where it is also potentially more audible, THD is nearly useless as a yard stick.


I have not looked at your publication in a while but as I recall there was a tinge of “anti measurement” there?
What happens when you see something, say a speaker that sounds very good and measures very well?
Scroll half way down on this page.

http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/pdf/danley_tapped.pdf

A speaker with a 100dB 1W/1M sensitivity, that preserves time (and reproduces the input waveshape) nearly as well as a Manger, but has about 1 /100 the distortion at 90dB, radiates as if it were one driver, has constant directivity to a low frequency and can go very loud.
Granted it is not for a living room but hifi for larger numbers of people.
Best,

Tom Danley


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