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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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In Reply to: I've gotten into arguments with the total anti-bose crowd posted by DavidLD on April 3, 2007 at 04:52:11:
David,Nice post!
I'd like to add a couple of points.
First, AR did do a live Vs recorded demo in Carnegie hall with a full orchestra, and I believe KEF did one in London using their 105 speaker. Recording those performances in a way to achieve that must have been quite a task. The normal procedure was to record the instruments anechoically for playback in the demo.
Second, you forgot the Bose 601, which was much less demanding of open wall space than the 501 or 901 and which had one of it's two 8" mid-woofers mounted to a slanted top surface.
There was a fad back in the late 60's/early 70's to place a full range speaker on it's back against the wall. Julian Hirsch was a proponent of this technique and he mentioned it in a couple of his test articles. My guess would be that it helped ameliorate the beaminess of the tweeters of that era and also gave a "bigger" sound.
Your experience with the church is interesting. With people sitting on the cushions, they would have no acoustical effect. People are quite good absorbers, and it's customary to put fiberglass wedges in the seats to simulate people when asessing the acoustics of a concert hall. Of course, if you don't regularly fill the church, then the cushions would be exposed and the church would have the acoustics of a fuller church. Too bad, the cushions would have been nice for long sermons.
The AR (and other's) live vs recorded demos were interesting. They did show that conventional cone and dome drivers were good enough 40 years ago to accurately reproduce the tonality of instruments. This basically confirmed Bose's research from the early 60's. The fallacy in this, is that it proves nothing about the ability to reproduce a live performance in the home from commercial recordings. This is particularly true in stereo, where formation of a virtual image is a critical part of the process. The live Vs recorded demos were all multi-track mono and imaging was not a part of the process. (a live performance isn't in stereo either, and has no virtual image)
This all gets us back to what a wise person once said (I'm paraphrasing, and I wish I could remember who said it) "Since it is impossible to reproduce a live performance in the home, the best we can do is to achieve the aesthetic equivalent".
The nice part about that philosophical approach is that you are the arbitor of what is the aesthetic equivalent in your home.
Jerry
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Follow Ups
- Re: I've gotten into arguments with the total anti-bose crowd - Bold Eagle 07:27:56 04/03/07 (1)
- Re: I've gotten into arguments with the total anti-bose crowd - pete the bully 21:36:51 04/03/07 (0)
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