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Re: How Can YOU Be Sure About Anything In Audio?

Posted by morricab (S) on January 18, 2007 at 06:46:09

In Reply to: Re: How Can YOU Be Sure About Anything In Audio? posted by kerr on January 18, 2007 at 04:31:42:

First of all I think you are wrong, most audiophiles do not frequently go to live, unamplified concerts. Some do. Those who do often at least have musically pleasing systems if not realistic.

I never said that everyone else was good at translating what they hear live into what gets reproduced at home. Like most things in life it is a skill, acquired with practice and talent, and therefore some are much better at it than others.

A single drive speaker and a planar speaker (at least a full-range electrostat) have at least one thing in common over other kinds of speakers. Coherence. I find this to be a primary ingredient to making a realistic sound image. This is also why Thiel speakers are capable of sounding very realistic. Not many non-planar speakers are capable of approaching live sound. Too colored, too resonant (ie. boxy), too bad at low level resolution, too boomy in the bass etc. etc.

A single driver speaker though is generally disaster at high frequencies thus destroying the illusion of reality. It is also a disaster in the bass again destroying reality. A large electrostatic speaker gets the closest to real in more categories than any other transducer technology, with ribbons right in there (at least as executed by Apogee). That coherence and midrange magic though counts for a lot and makes people forsake a lot of other advantages to have them.

Horns, while getting the low level resoluition and dynamics right, generally make a mess of coherence (making the sound come out disjointed and if you haven't noticed this then you don't hear live unamplified music enough), have terrible frequency response, are colored (from horn resonance) etc. Generally, the negatives outweigh the positives.

Typical, non time coherent conventional speakers have a whole host of problems; lack of coherence (thanks to phase shifts and disparate driver materials), coloration (thanks to drivers and especially the box), bass problems (thanks to the typical vented bass alignment) etc. Most are a complete disaster that sound nothing like live, unamplified music and are only suitable for electronic music or loud rock music where a wall of sound is the goal. Time coherent speakers (like Thiel, Vandersteen, or Green Mountain Audio) generally outperform other conventional speakers as long as they take care about other drawbacks to box speakers (like the box). Some of the very best conventional speakers I know are the Thiel CS 3.6 and 7.2, which are very affordable by today's standards. The Vandersteen 5A is also capabale of a fair dose of realism but the other Vandersteens are too colored.

Electrostatic speakers offer; transparency, good in-room frequency response, low coloration (just some from the driver itself), good tight bass (for some brands), low level resolution and coherence. Some bigger models (like large Acoustats or Soundlabs) make decent dynamics and punch. Negatives are usually not quite as realistic for big dynamic swings (but more realistic for smaller dynamic shifts) and bass for some kinds is not so powerful (thus necessitating a cone woofer). This kind of speaker offers the greatest realism for all kinds of acoustic music because it is generally more accurate overall than the other transducers (ribbons are right there though). Good examples are Acoustat Spectra 2200,

Ribbons offer the same advantages as electrostats with perhaps a bit less low level resolution resolving capabilities (although there is a new Apogee, called the Synergy, which is 95db/watt and is superb at low levels) but perhaps a bit greater macrodynamics. They are also extremely realistic for acoustic music.

Those who really know about sound generally get away from the big bruiser SS amps at some point in their audio evolution because once you get a very high resolution speaker you hear what these amps do wrong. Of course knowing what is right is half the battle. Finding an amp that does it right is the other half and no amp does it perfectly. Amps do not need high damping factors if the speakers themselves are properly damped.

The problem today is that most speakers on the market, which are mostly crap, are way underdamped (ie. using a high Q vented box design) requiring the amplifier to provide the damping for the speaker. Put these amps on a truly neutral speaker with good self-control and the result is overdamped and lifeless sound.

The drawback here is that to make an amp with high damping requires the use of copious quantities of negative feedback, which kills good sound. It ruins the harmonics of music and often dampens dynamics all so that the speaker is not flapping out of control because it was poorly designed in the first place. Interestingly, it IS possible to design a vented speaker with good self-control. If one designs to a critically damped model (so a Q of around 0.7 or less) then a vented design can sound just fine with a low damping factor amp. Wilson Audio X1 is a good example (but it has many negatives as well as plusses).

In the end these positives and negatives have to be weighed against live, unampified music, or the closest proxy, good recordings of live, unamplified music in order to judge how close ones system is to achieving something approaching realistic sound.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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