It’s All a Preference
- Thread starter mep
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Soundminded,
Wise decision following a starting comment I also fully endorse.
Although the magazines are not scientific, I suggest you read them, but always with an open and critical mind. One point I found everywhere in reviews and in the net opinions is that the excellence of these speakers only shows in an appropriate system and very carefully positioned. It seems that even technically perfect amplifiers can make them sound nothing special and the choice of the sources (and even cables...) is critical. Good luck with your listening - looking for your opinions soon.
As an example look at this review of the Ultima 2http://www.avguide.com/review/the-revel-salon-ultima-2-loudspeaker
Oh you can be absolutely certain that if I acquire Revel Ultima Salon 1 or 2 I will buy a Crown amplifier to use with them, I'll buy my wires from Home Depot and the Dollar Store like I always do, and I'll be using one of my $30 Toshiba DVD players and my Empire 698 with a Shure V15V MR like I always do too unless and until someone can convince me that there's something wrong with them. I'm not an audiophile in the usual sense. I don't believe most of what I read or hear about audio equipment. A lifetime of advertising hype cured me of that. That's one reason I don't subscribe to the magazines. BTW, from what I could tell of the TAS review, I didn't see a single measurement. In the early days, I recall Stereophile was the same way. You can see I don't take any of those people or any of this seriously. I still want to see those 70 FR measurements and I'd appreciate a measurement of LF THD as a function of Frequency.
BTW, there's a pair of Ultima Salons version 1 on e-bay for $7200 right now.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Revel-Ultim...42?pt=Speakers_Subwoofers&hash=item3cc1535d62
I wonder what the retailers will really ask for version 2 now that it's 4 years old. It's like cruise ships. Everyone wants to go on the newest one so they keep the prices high. A few years later when newer ships arrive the older ones start to be steeply discounted.
I'm afraid science is not the ultimate determining factor of good sound quality. It fails miserably in describing subjective listening nuances that are the fundemental elements of enjoyable listening experiences. YMMV !
The related sciences of acoustics and psychoacoustics are still in a very early stage of development, both are barely a hundred years old. Come back in a century or two and I'm sure you'll find enormous progress will have been made by then and most of our questions will have been satisfactorily answered.
The related sciences of acoustics and psychoacoustics are still in a very early stage of development, both are barely a hundred years old. Come back in a century or two and I'm sure you'll find enormous progress will have been made by then and most of our questions will have been satisfactorily answered.
Try to explain this to those who think that everything was settled 30 years ago and nothing worthwhile noticing is been done in electronics since them.
Try to explain this to those who think that everything was settled 30 years ago and nothing worthwhile noticing is been done in electronics since them.
I have performed my own experiments and reached my own conclusions which are very different from what I read in the area of psychoacoustics. For example, I've come to a very different conclusion about how the direction of sound is detected by the brains of higher and even lower animals. If you want to read a book showing how little is known, read Dr. Oliver Sacks book "Musicophilia." In it he relates a lot of anecdotal evidence for the connection between music, neural activity, and even physiology. He's a neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. There's another book by a doctor at McGill in Montreal, I think his name is Landis but I'm not sure.
Soundminded,
I am changing my advice. No, please do not try the Salon's - you risk to find that the Empire 698 with a Shure V15V MR sounds much better than the $30 Toshiba DVD player! And WBF will win one more anti-science member.
Hello Microstrip
Not only can LEAP weight the individual curves it can also average them 4 different ways. It can also process up to 99 curves as it does this. I forgot that the book clearly defined what the First Reflection curve was processed from. I also saw the weighting you mentioned unfortunately they don’t tell you how the individual curves are weighted. If we knew that then we could use LEAP to do the Sound Power curve as well .
JBL does use LEAP as one of it’s software tools although I have no idea if it’s used to generate the published curves.
Rob
Soundminded,
I am changing my advice. No, please do not try the Salon's - you risk to find that the Empire 698 with a Shure V15V MR sounds much better than the $30 Toshiba DVD player! And WBF will win one more anti-science member.
Say it isn't so microstrip, say it isn't so.
Okay if you won't, I will. I compared a vinyl and CD of Carol Rosenberger playing "Water Music" on a Bosendorfer Imperial on the Delos label. The vinyl had been played only about 2 or 3 times previously and was and still is in pristine condition. They were practically indistinguishable, I really couldn't tell any difference switching between them. BTW, both had far too much reverberation recorded on them. The CD must have been made from the same tape as the vinyl. The nice thing about the CD was that it is a 2 disc set. The other disc is a much better made recording.
I wasn't really serious about shutting down the thread. I like thread drift, personally. It works just like human conversation.
See if you can hear some Martin Logan Summits while you're listening. And report back.
Tim
See if you can hear some Martin Logan Summits while you're listening. And report back.
Tim
I have been extended a most gracious invitation to hear them at someone's home and I intend to try to take them up on it. I"ve admitted that my prior experience with ML Summit at Harvey Radio in Bridgewater NJ while negative was rather limited and may have led to an inaccurate assessment of their capabilities. However, I spent quite a number of hours listening to a very large Sondlabs electrostatic speaker and I was not particularly impressed with them either. I think they were around $30,000. So I'll keep an open mind. I'm more interested to compare other people's designs to my own and to live music than to each other.
600 MCM copper adequate or should I go to 900 MCM?
How about for interconnects thick ethernet backbone. Should I terminate them directly or use H4000 Vampire taps?
I'm going to start a business mining the copper plumbing from reposessed houses here in the US. then wrapping it in lambswool and terminating with alligator clips made from real, silver plated alligator heads. Audiogon, here I come!
Tim
Tim
Tim ,
Too late. Haven't you got the bad news from the WBF thread about Audiogon?
You are sooooooooo late it isn't even funny. The first time I saw people harvesting scrap copper was in 1980. It probably went on long before that. Abandoned houses are prime targets for scavangers stealing plumbing. Now China is buying up as much copper as they can lay their hands on. Copper has become so expensive that I now usually choose transformers with aluminum windings. Copper is just too expensive. A lot of aluminum wiring is being used too. Not to worry though, these are much harder alloys than the ones they used for house wiring in the 1970s that burned down so many homes.
Let me explain. The "live" tests were done with the listener in the room "in situ" with the speakers. The "binaural" tests were done using binaural recordings of the loudspeakers, played back over earphones. The point of comparing live and binaural recordings of loudspeakers was to test the accuracy of the binaural system for doing controlled listening experiments where we could do instantaneous A/B/C/D comparisons of the same or different loudspeakers in different positions and different room acoustics. It turned out that the positional and room effects played a much greater factor in the results when you could instantaneously compare loudspeakers among different positions or rooms via the magic of the binaural system. In contrast, in the live/insitu tests, the room effects were very, very minimal: this is evidence that we quickly adapt to room acoustics within certain limitations.
The research showed that loudspeaker position and seat position can have a significant acoustical interaction with the room (i.e. from boundary effects, how the speaker couples into room modes). The positional effects can change the loudspeaker preference rating by 10-25%. When I moved from NRC to Harman, we decided to control these positional effects via an automated speaker shuffler. Before that, we had to retest all the speakers in all the positions to balance out any positional effects -- very time consuming.
As long as the speakers are monopoles at low frequencies then the position will be the same for all speakers under test. The Martin Logan Prodigy is a hybrid electrostatic design with a monopole subwoofer like the other dynamic speakers we test. So, at low frequencies where the room dominates what we hear, it was not placed in any disadvantage relative to the other speakers under test.
It was placed far away from the side walls which the manufacturer recommends, and about 3-4 ft from the back wall. The main reason it was rarely poorly is because of its poor spectral balance and multiple resonances apparent in its anechoic measurements (speaker M in this graph). It is also very directional, and its spectral balance changes radically as you move off-axis unlike the other speaker tested. It actually sounds less harsh and bright as you move further off-axis, eventually changing from sounding too bright to too dull. The resonances, however, appear in both the on-axis and off-axis curves, so no matter where you position yourself or the speaker it will sound colored (unless you position yourself well outside the room).
We recently tested a less expensive ML model using over 200 high school/college students from Los Angeles and Japan and it was rated as the least preferred choice. It also received lower scores from listeners sitting closer to its on-axis positions. In my view, a well-designed speaker should have consistently good sound over a wide angle so that it is both room friendly and seat friendly. This way, more of direct and reflected the sound reaching the listener(s) will be higher quality, and the sweet spot for ideal listening is also increased. So far, we've found no seat in our listening room where the ML does not sound colored, and the speaker measurements clearly tell us why.
We generally do all of our tests using single speakers because we've shown evidence that listeners are more sensitive to distortions present in the loudspeakers when auditioning a single source versus multiple sources. If loudspeakers score well in mono they generally score higher in stereo and surround, although the relative rank ordering of the loudspeakers doesn't generally change as you move from mono to stereo. This reference documents some of the evidence we've gathered. Floyd Toole has also written about it in his book and here:
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