If the goal is to reproduce the live event, then every single sensory trigger must be reproduced exactly. Any arguments about that?
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Live vs. Reproduced?
- Thread starter DaveyF
- Start date
from what I can recall there was not too much data in your thread, IIRC certainly no pictures. More of a philsophical overview, but then again I will re-read it.
I really am at a loss to know what to say. You seem so sure of your stance, I can only think you are still pulling our leg and I am falling into your trap by even responding.
In any case, you think the improvement gained by driving the bass by a seperate amp is because it lessens the load on the AMP that is doing the mid and treble??? Nothing to do with taking away the bass from the mid and treble drivers???
Man...there is no easy way to say this other than you don't really know what you are talking about.
In any case, the limitations of using three inch full range drivers are not soley due to lack of bass area (tho that is a huge part of it, one that you diminish severely) but what about intrinsic tonality??? I have found 'audiophiles' seem to put a huge stock on 'it has to be tonally correct', well fair enough, I don't have anything against that per se.
BUT, I can tell you (without even needing to look at a FR) that there is no way a three inch full range driver can be described as tonally pure. It will be all over the shop, I'd be surprised if it fell within a plus or minus ten db window.
Anyway, it is good sometimes to get an idea of where someone is coming from.
thanks.
Is this all you've been going on about? The ability of small details to come through clearly out of a dense wall of sound? Why didn't you say so long ago, Frank? I could recommend any number of over-powered active monitor speakers that would accomplish this without a single tweak, freeing up much more time for you to listen to music while your soldering iron languishes idly in the toolbox.
This too. Piece of cake. Turn it down a bit, you just move back a few rows (with the benefit of not increasing the % of reflected sound). Until the Fletcher-Munson effect kicks in anyway.
Actually, you do have a couple of things going on with those 3" full-range drivers that could result in some of the stuff you're hearing -- 1) They're the right size for "full-range" drivers or, more accurately, for mid-range drivers that will do pretty well at reaching up into tweeter territory, while rolling off early enough to eliminate much opportunity for harshness 2) No crossover. All the tweaking? You're either fixing what was a poorly designed system in the first place or, more likely, hearing what you expect to hear. But you can turn it up to full volume without harshness? Man, that takes some serious expectations...
Tim
Without harshness, Tim, without harshness. Remember, that is what the Truth and Tonality dialectic was all about: Robert said it was easy to find/put together a system giving you oodles of detail, the trick is to have it also sound musical. I've listened to dozens and dozens of very expensive systems at dealers and people's homes, and the one area where they inevitably fail, over and over again, is that they are not "musical", a shorthand for saying they distort. Put on the right recording, yes, sounds very impressive; put on a "difficult" recording, they are execrable!
Exactly, and to terryj, if you check my Gallery posts, there is a photo there of the gear, note subwoofer, note the HT receiver is smart enough to not send the bass signal to the full range unit, so the little fellow is not stressed at all ...
This is where most people seem to have a problem with what I'm saying, and is the nub of what I am saying here! I will repeat: "In my experience, the reason most systems fail to convince is because they can't go loud enough without generating too much distortion." Hence your system will fail to sound real, because what you call harshness, what I call distortion, starts becoming obvious as you up the volume. I have repeated this point over and over and over again, and it is still not sinking in!
So, I will say it for the 999th time: your speakers are not the problem, the problem is that the electronics are stressed as you wind up the volume, plus the inherent distortion due to a myriad of weaknesses are magnified as you increase the level, that's why systems just sound loud, not real, at high volumes! Why do I say what to most people is an obviously ridiculous thing? Because I have played around with gear for nearly 30 years, and everytime I had a problem where someone could say, "it's too much for the speakers", it never was, it was always an electronics issue.
Sorry, Tim, that's just the way it is, and I'm afraid I couldn't live with your setup because you're certainly implying that it distorts as you increase the volume ...
Frank
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Uh Frank, how did you *fix* the distortion from that Phillips mini-system-home-theater-in-a-box? The distortion figures of the little Phillips system have to be an order of magnitude greater than the distortion of the amps built into Tim's speakers.
Thanks, Mark, for bringing that up. I have not yet added a third installment to my rundown in the Gallery forum, where I will go through the various items I dealt with, but a quick summary is as follows.
As you and most audio enthusiasts are well aware, published distortion in of themselves mean almost nothing. To go to extremes, Steve's and Jack's Lamm amps have worse declared distortion figures than what the specs state for the power IC's in my unit, and of course Jadis was notorious for years for terrible distortion measurements. I'm sure Tim's are better in the spec's numbers, but the key is when and the type of distortion that occurs. Tube amps do extremely well in the listening stakes because at the point significantly lower than their maximum output the distortion is quite low and audibly very benign.
So, on first listen to the Philips, typical HT sound, very scratchy and no sparkle. First step is to fix the appalling connectors, stupid spring clips for speakers wires. Simplest solution: hardwire through, which includes inside the speakers, which use the tiny spade connectors. Inside the speakers use damping material to stabilise the wires and also the sides which were smartly molded in nicely curves. So now the power amp is hard wired to the drivers.
The next big problem is the power supply, this is where most of the work needed to be done. All the effort focused in delivering very clean voltage rails to the chips while preventing glitches on the mains in from getting through, using a variety of techniques. At this point the system was delivering good, clean sound with plenty of grunt.
The most long winded task, which is ongoing, is stopping outside interference contaminating the sound. A lot of playing with filtering of the mains in between the wall plug and going into the cabinet. At the moment the setup will give excellent sound if there's nothing in the house injecting rubbish, but I still haven't got it to reject everything.
In other words, nothing has been done to change the intrinsic components of the machine to improve their capability, I have just given the parts within the best possible chance to perform at their best. And it does the trick ...
Frank
thanks. I must have missed it last time?? (or maybe not logged in, sometimes you cannot see pics that way)
Is this it??
Hmm, again I think this is an elaborate joke which you keep expanding upon.
FWIW I am now happy with my initial (unsighted) estimate of the FR...
Now, that last thing I want to do is stomp on someones preference...I accept that the system pictured could very well be the most exciting, exquisite and appropriate system for your ears, I accept that possibility fully.
But that is a far far cry from extrapolating your preference for such a dinky system and saying it holds some sort of universal applicability.
I think I would last a few seconds if this were presented as some sort of 'true' or faithful' system. I could happily live with it streaming music as I surf, which is exactly what I am doing this second.
All power to you if you enjoy it. But to say for one second this is capable of sounding like a live performance of anything?
The atrocious FR alone would rule it out of being capable of reproducing a single voice, let alone a symphony orchestra.
Your reasoning is specious at best. You seem to lay emphasis on playing a certain volume without distortion., Ok, then we turn it up till just before it distorts and bingo, per you, capable of playing live music.
What about frequency aberrations??? Not sure what definition of distortion you are using, but per MY book 'any departure from accuracy/truth' etc qualifies as distortion. Your Fr alone rules it out as being 'distortionless'. Per that definition yours are distorting no matter WHAT volume you are playing it at, loud or soft.
And, let me tell you, the electronics are NOT the weak point of your system
You seem to stress quite a bit 'in your (long) experience'...maybe you should get out just that tad bit more??
As I stress, if you enjoy it that is totally and completely fine, no judgement at all.
steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Frank, let me confirm one thing I thought I heard you say: Did you say you could turn your system up to full volume without distortion?
Tim
Tim
Yep
I have stated many times that FR is not relevant to the capability of a system to sound live. And Tim has beautifully confirmed this by posting FR's of 2 very highly regarded headphones. The variation between the 2 curves is enormous, probably by about 20dB in some areas; yet people swear by them ...
Yes, this is distortion but it is linear; non-linear distortion is the big culprit, which I have stressed several times. So whenever I say distortion just stick the word "non-linear" in front of it.
Also, note that I have said that the goal is to play at maximum volume without apparent non-linear distortion, which is what this unit can now do. Depending on the recording this is around the clipping point of the amps. At one stage with a highly compressed current pop offering the amps shut down, they have internal temperature sensors and protection circuitry which cried uncle in this case, but the unit wasn't distorting at the time. On another DIY gainclone I had the protection circuitry cut in while playing a Melba CD, sustained vocal notes again were cooking the amp
I come from completely the other direction. I have an extremely high regard for speaker drivers, early on I was quite astonished how capable they were if you gave them half a chance. Main problem with my HT units is that the suspension has to be warmed up every time to get good results, if I hit them with very high level treble for an hour or so this usually does the trick.
Frank
Yes, that is totally correct. As I just mentioned, with very heavily compressed material the amps have and probably will often shut down because the internal protection circuitry is saving the IC amp from cooking itself. But I have had the last movement of Beethoven's 9th at max with no problems.
Again, the key thing was making the power supply behave itself. A flawed supply will always drag the amp's potential down.
Frank
I just can't let this one go. Of course it's relevant. Live music has a wide-open FR. Chop off any part of the FR, and you have chopped off part of the music which kills any chance for a system to sound live. It would be like trying to duplicate a recipe but leaving out part of the ingredients. It might still taste ok, but it sure won't taste like the original dish. Even if you swear it does, it won't make it so.
Okay, so why do Tim's 2 headphones with hugely different FR's do the job? Of interest, the Philips has some FR fiddle circuitry in the volume IC, normal silly stuff: Digital, Jazz, Classical, settings called that sort of thing, big cuts and boosts all over the place. When the system was in the raw state it was obvious the changes this control made; but when working well it is totally invisible, you can flick through the settings and you can't pick that anything's changed.
Why is this so? I believe because the ear/brain is a pretty smart piece of kit and automatically ignores these changes as not being relevant when the musical message is strong enough, what Gary calls psychoacoustic behaviour...
Frank
Frank-If you can't tell when you switch in the different settings such as Jazz, small club, arena, etc., something is dead wrong. All of them sound so horrendous that for you to say you can't even hear them being switched in is beyond belief. They are either not working and you are still hearing your normal setting or you need to get your ears to an audiologist and find out what's wrong with your hearing and I'm not kidding. It's like turning the lights on in a room and you saying you can't see any more light compared to when the room was dark. It's night and day.
Tim --
Frank --
So...you're running the amps in a cheap home theater in a box flat out, and they're not clipping because you hard-wired the speaker cables to the amps and dealt with noise getting into the power cable? Thanks for the entertainment, Frank.
Tim
Frank --
So...you're running the amps in a cheap home theater in a box flat out, and they're not clipping because you hard-wired the speaker cables to the amps and dealt with noise getting into the power cable? Thanks for the entertainment, Frank.
Tim
Frank, I know it's April fool's day, But
If, for one second, you truly believe that the system in that photo ( or any modification of that system) could reproduce anything close to a 'live symphonic orchestra in a hall'...then all I can say is: I need some of what you are smoking
Not only could that system NOT fool anyone with a pair of ears into thinking they are at a 'live' event, it couldn't even hold a candle to almost any mid-fi system you could care to mention, never mind a high-end system!
I guess this situation is the perfect example of YMMV
No, as you carefully chose to ignore, it's mainly because I modified the functioning of the power supply within the unit, and then because of the system being manufactured as an integrated unit the volume control was not engineered to be able to ridiculously overdrive the power amp section, as is the case with the usual pre and power separates.
As a general thought, it is interesting that there appears to be an absolutely grim determination by many here to convince themselves that I must be totally deluded in what I'm doing. The current paradigm is that it is impossible to achieve realistic sounding playback in the home, and this belief must be defended to the ends of the (flat) earth, against all comers, to the death even. Bit of a shame, really ...
As a final note, fascinating how good old money reared its ugly head again. The audiophile attitude that unless you throw decent amounts of cash at a problem then you haven't got a hope of achieving significant results is again in evidence.
Frank
no, you have a misunderstanding.
at the very least what is being argued is that you cannot achieve a realistic concert experience at concert levels with three inch drivers (plus sub).
ain't gonna happen in this universe.
and regarding the money. bass is expensive. good bass costs more, excellent bass, well you gotta be prepared to open the wallet.
terryj, this thread kicked off because DaveyF was bewailing the fact that you couldn't get the concert experience in one's home. I contradicted him, and in one post went through some rough calculations to point out that in dB terms my system, and in fact most systems, should be to do it.
He himself, in the original post, noted that the volume of the live performance wasn't that great, he used the words "massive dynamics, overall bloom, scope of sound" to describe the experience. And that's a result of hearing a lot of detail without distortion. So, in theory a normal system, and even 3" speakers plus sub, which in real terms is equivalent to two decent 2 way speakers, will do the job. Most of course don't, because of the level of distortion the system overall produces. My point is that the right sort of tweaking eliminates this non-linear distortion, allowing you to get the "big" sound and the concert experience.
Agree you have to spend money for spot on bass, my complaint was the implication that because my HT system was cheap it could never perform. Well, going by the standard of construction and performance of what's available at the moment in the electrical superstores, I reckon if I bought the Philips new right now it would cost well over $1000. A decent level of build quality will cost some money but that's all that's necessary to give you the materials to get a good result from.
Frank
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