April 2015 Toole video on sound reproduction

[amirm]

As a lawyer you know you can't throw around "any" in this context. Dr. Toole is one voice among many and all I know of him is this marketing video pushing a very specific Harman product to a very specific market.

Marketing video? Where did you get that from? Here is the description of the publisher:

"CIRMMT is a multi-disciplinary research group interested in interdisciplinary research related to the creation of music in the composer's or performer's mind, the performance of music, its recording and/or transmission, and the reception of music by the listener. It is also interested in the ways in which vision, haptics and touch interact with music and sound. Thanks to YouTube we are able to bring you recordings of various lectures and keynotes, including our Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music. These lectures are designed to allow researchers and artists of international renown in the disciplines covered by CIRMMT to present their work to the public."

He is an invited guest lecturer to McGill University in that talk.

The purpose of M2 and its intended market was also clearly defined by other Harman men in Nyal's video. I haven't seen or heard him mention digital EQ in the context of high quality two channel analog audio systems, have you?

I already quoted him from his book. Why keep saying this? Speakers don't care whether you are feeding them music or movies. Sound reproduction is a constant and nothing about his presentation is specific to movies or home theater.

For the record, I don't claim any special expertise of acoustic sciences and am nothing more than a random casual user of the technology. But I am experienced and knowledgeable enough to know that you can't just drag a point on a graph or push button on a box then claim problem solved showing me a pretty measurement.

In bass frequencies, it is "almost" that simple. In higher frequencies the equation becomes much more complicated. But in bass, what you see is what you get.

And the keyword is "improvement" not "solve." You can't get perfect response in a room with a loudspeaker. It just can't be done. What can be done is make it better, a lot better with the right tools and techniques. DSP is one of those powerful techniques and is able to make substantial improvement.

You know well that at the very least there are other consequences further up and down the frequency range every time you modify that point on that graph.

What consequences?

To sum up, I stand by what I said that digital EQ has no place in a high quality, two channel analog system for music listening.

You can repeat it but unless you can add some substance to it, it is not material information. You need to show why, random peaks and valleys in bass response that is different in every room without EQ is the right truth about audio. If I take the room that the $500K system lives in, and shorten it by 3 feet, the frequency response changes. Which do you say was the audio truth? The longer or the shorter room?

 

[NorthStar]

For the technically inclined, in wishing to learn some about good sound reproduction through good room correction system:

? http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=85631.50

This ^ is page two; there is also page one and page three.

 

[ddk]

We already discussed and are in agreement that from bias and principal point of view, buyers of such systems are not willing to use an EQ.

Not for bias and principle but for very practical reasons affecting sound quality of such systems.

What we are discussing is whether they have a performant system without it. So it matters not in this conversation whether they are or are not willing to put one in. I am saying their system in bass performance will improve if they did, and I believe you are saying it won't. Let's stay on that theme.

We can't! Our primary objectives are different right from the get go. My concern is preserving and reproducing the tonal qualities and retaining the timbre of that analog signal, yours is fixing a bump in the road.

This is what he thinks will happen to him. Let's not confuse assumptions with objective information and express things as facts when they are not. Again we are in agreement that he thinks the EQ will do all of these. Not questioning his assumption there, at least not this very minute . I am here to show that without EQ, he has introduced frequency response and time domain distortions that are massive in scale and can be shown objectively and subjectively to anyone, trained or not that, to detract from good sound. If you look up the definition of decimation of tone and timbre in the dictionary, you would get what the room does to your bass response. So that argument is my favor, not his.

Agreed, the room has a huge impact but the digital conversions change everything that matters to me and other Steves, that's truly non-negotiable !

What quality is that? Here is the measurements of the Alexia woofer in stereophile:

Yes I can see some general character but does this graph tell you anything about the actual sound quality of this speaker in different with random systems?

He is listening to bass that while integrated with the rest of speakers to best abilities of Wilson, has been stomped on like an elephant walking on an ant in his room. It almost, almost doesn't matter what that woofer is producing under 100 Hz. The room takes that response and twists that like there is no tomorrow. If he thinks this is "quality" bass, someone needs to sit him down and show him a system with proper DSP processing and then he will know the meaning of the word. What he is hearing now is different shades of bad relative to what he could have.

I haven't been to his place but I'll take your word about his room. We're not arguing the effects of room on the system and that there's no benefit in further tuning, our debate is the methodology. In this case, i.e. digital EQ, won't eradicate all problems and in the process will introduce other non-negotiable issues.

Put his Wilson's outside in an open field, connect a commercial amp to it so that it can pump 2000+ watts into it, and then you know what good bass sounds like in those speakers. The modes vanish there and bass becomes tight, absolutely clean with zero overhang, and lets the rest of the notes get through the clutter that is normally created when you stick that speaker in a room.

Easier to just put Steve and his chair in the yard and let him listen through the window , you'll prove the same result.

Not sure what those products have to do with integration of a sub. The sub will have its own amplifier and hopefully a DSP for tuning out the room resonances. Siphon off the signal however you like from the two channels and feed it to the sub. Ask our own Steve how he did it (I actually don't know what he has done).

I would set a crossover of 80 Hz so that the Wilsons are not trying to play the bass and then optimize the subs. Watch the distortion go way down as neither the amps or the Wilsons are trying so hard to produce what a sub does in its sleep.

Reason for mentioning his amps was integration issues that will come up when using any old amp in conjunction with his SETs. Best case will be like getting two singers to hold the same note at the same time. Worst case will be like singers of the opposite sex to hold that note. Another question, don't we have to EQ his main speakers along with the subs?

Note that manual version of this process is not easy. Automated versions though, can be remarkably so.

An example of in-between is the Revel Rhythm2 sub: http://www.revelspeakers.com/productdetail/~/product/rhythm2.html

It is a clever design in that it has a built-in DSP that you can program using a PC. But in addition to PEQ filters, it also implements a cross-over so you can feed it the main signal, and it gives you what you need to drive the mains. Yes, this will be another "insulting" solution but again, we are talking about how to get good sound, not what is agreeable to someone with beliefs.

They probably work great in their intended situations, not in any "Steve" system. Its not about personal beliefs, you & I don't share the same idea of good sound, not sure if we even agree what constitutes good music. You're arguing without context, room, music, system and ideals. EQ'ing electronic bass from a digital pop recording is very different from EQ'ing acoustic bass from a quality analog source. Give me the right context.

Come again? Someone has a $500,000 system and has put it in a room that doesn't have space for the gear? Remember, the subs can go anywhere. You can put them in the back, on the side, even in the ceiling! Indeed, in our theater at work, we have a bunch of subs in the ceiling. The subs can be built completely into the walls in custom scenarios if one does not want to see them although some subs like the Revel above are gorgeous to look at.

No different than what he is doing now. The purpose of the subs is not to play louder which of course they can. But to simply decouple of them from the mains so that they can be placement and signal processing optimize. You can opt to have them play lower and louder or not. Sound isolation is an orthogonal topic to this one.

I am sorry but this is just wrong David. If your steering pulls to the left all the time in your car, you need to get it fixed. You can't argue that some roads tilt to the right or left as to cause the car to do the same. You need to build a neutral system, not one with *random* 20 db peaks that are determined by the length and width of the room. If music you buy then doesn't sound good to you, then with DSP you have the world's most flexible tone controls and you can build different profiles that are triggered by automation. You can even play in real-time. None of these tools are available to you without DSP. Nor would having a system with those random peaks help you in anyway.

His money, his prerogative!

To the contrary, its the tilted road, i.e. the room that I want to fix while you're messing with the steering .

This is not theory. Room EQ works and has worked in countless listening tests. Here is one example: http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/Room Equalization/Room Equalization.html

See the control, third from right? Notice how much improvement EQ brought in controlled blind listening tests. Here is what those systems did to the signal:

Across multiple and different music tracks, improvements were heard in bass response due to much smoother and sloping down overall response. These tests are done with B&W 802 speakers so it is biased toward 2-channel crowds and not home theater.

So in summary, yes there is a taboo there that is quite strong in audiophile community. That you don't put anything in the signal path. No disagreement. And I understand the logic of it just the same.

What I am saying is let's open our eyes to the problem that we leave in our systems. Let's understand it. Let's experience it. Then you can make the judgement call of whether you should continue to use the current approach, or one that many of us have adopted which is to embrace modern science and signal processing to improve system response. Let's let the educational part of this sink in for now. And then let's experiment. Yourself before your client. And then your client.

My client & I don't listen to graphs but please invite us to your next Graph Listening gathering so we can learn how its done. Something might sink in then, but not sure by whom.

BTW, I have not told Steve this but one of the items on my TODO list is to bring a DSP to insert in his system and let's see if we can do better. Him being 1,200 miles away from me makes this challenging but I plan to do that one day. I am that confident that it is worth lugging all the gear down there to run the experiment.

Let me know when.

david

 

[ddk]

How did you decide what settings to select on your EQ?

Depends on the context. A couple of times I had my acoustician present and we worked off his measurements. He works with hotels in Vegas and other large amplified live events where he has to EQ anywhere from a few hundred drivers to few thousand. At the same time he has to deal with and resolve delay problems caused by the digital converters. Very difficult to sync the performer's lips with what's heard in the anywhere in room with all that processing going on. Other times, for a HT setup where I actually might use dsp, I'll just let the processor do its thing. What does it matter anyway, when we can't solve the primary issues with digitization?

david

 

[ddk]

Marketing video? Where did you get that from? Here is the description of the publisher:

"CIRMMT is a multi-disciplinary research group interested in interdisciplinary research related to the creation of music in the composer's or performer's mind, the performance of music, its recording and/or transmission, and the reception of music by the listener. It is also interested in the ways in which vision, haptics and touch interact with music and sound. Thanks to YouTube we are able to bring you recordings of various lectures and keynotes, including our Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music. These lectures are designed to allow researchers and artists of international renown in the disciplines covered by CIRMMT to present their work to the public."

He is an invited guest lecturer to McGill University in that talk.


I already quoted him from his book. Why keep saying this? Speakers don't care whether you are feeding them music or movies. Sound reproduction is a constant and nothing about his presentation is specific to movies or home theater.


In bass frequencies, it is "almost" that simple. In higher frequencies the equation becomes much more complicated. But in bass, what you see is what you get.

And the keyword is "improvement" not "solve." You can't get perfect response in a room with a loudspeaker. It just can't be done. What can be done is make it better, a lot better with the right tools and techniques. DSP is one of those powerful techniques and is able to make substantial improvement.


What consequences?


You can repeat it but unless you can add some substance to it, it is not material information. You need to show why, random peaks and valleys in bass response that is different in every room without EQ is the right truth about audio. If I take the room that the $500K system lives in, and shorten it by 3 feet, the frequency response changes. Which do you say was the audio truth? The longer or the shorter room?

You're spinning it Amir. Not arguing room effects and the need to address them, its the how, specifically digitization of the analog signal.

Speakers don't know what they're getting fed but content and context matters a lot when it comes to how you solve the problem. I'll be the first to use DSP when dealing with movies and HT. Who gives a crap about tone of some canned digitized explosion effect or car door thump. Nor do I care much if the system is primarily used for electronic pop, by all means, EQ away! I have to find another solution when dealing with analog and specifically un-amplified acoustic Jazz and Classical recordings.

Examples you quoted from his book where out of context and totally unsuitable and impractical for my use. And there was no mention of consequences of digitization, digital signal was a granted.

My experience is very different from yours, bass frequencies have always been the most difficult to deal with properly and I've never heard digital eq resolve the issue to my satisfaction or any of my clients in the past 25 years. Regardless of who we brought to do the job. Digital EQ is only one tool we can improve the sound in other ways too. The right tool for the right job!

Material substance? What do you need? While you're at it please present some material substance that good measurements equal good sound and that digitization absolutely has no effect on tone, timbre and spacial cues.

What? Distinguished venues are never used for self promotion are they? Dr. Toole spent over an hour talking about Harman, THEIR way of measuring speakers, THEIR idea of the ideal speaker response derived from a limited polling data derived from THEIR controlled and unique test environment. Then he tops it off by mentioning THEIR M2 and how it outperforms the competition (without defining it of course) at 10 times the price, then casually shows poor measurements of unspecified expensive speakers while exalting those of THEIR fantastic M2. If that's not masterful marketing then I don't know what is for you. After all, what better place than "Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music"for self promotion ?

david

 

[esldude]

You're spinning it Amir. Not arguing room effects and the need to address them, its the how, specifically digitization of the analog signal.

Speakers don't know what they're getting fed but content and context matters a lot when it comes to how you solve the problem. I'll be the first to use DSP when dealing with movies and HT. Who gives a crap about tone of some canned digitized explosion effect or car door thump. Nor do I care much if the system is primarily used for electronic pop, by all means, EQ away! I have to find another solution when dealing with analog and specifically un-amplified acoustic Jazz and Classical recordings.

Examples you quoted from his book where out of context and totally unsuitable and impractical for my use. And there was no mention of consequences of digitization, digital signal was a granted.

My experience is very different from yours, bass frequencies have always been the most difficult to deal with properly and I've never heard digital eq resolve the issue to my satisfaction or any of my clients in the past 25 years. Regardless of who we brought to do the job. Digital EQ is only one tool we can improve the sound in other ways too. The right tool for the right job!

Material substance? What do you need? While you're at it please present some material substance that good measurements equal good sound and that digitization absolutely has no effect on tone, timbre and spacial cues.

What? Distinguished venues are never used for self promotion are they? Dr. Toole spent over an hour talking about Harman, THEIR way of measuring speakers, THEIR idea of the ideal speaker response derived from a limited polling data derived from THEIR controlled and unique test environment. Then he tops it off by mentioning THEIR M2 and how it outperforms the competition (without defining it of course) at 10 times the price, then casually shows poor measurements of unspecified expensive speakers while exalting those of THEIR fantastic M2. If that's not masterful marketing then I don't know what is for you. After all, what better place than "Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music"for self promotion ?

david

Thou do'st protest too much, methinks. Your bluster is insufficient cover for your deficient position on this.

 

[ddk]

Thou do'st protest too much, methinks. Your bluster is insufficient cover for your deficient position on this.

Thank you dude, contribute to the topic if you can.

david

 

[esldude]

Thank you dude, contribute to the topic if you can.

david

I can, and I will.

At the bare minimum, and I do mean the bare mid-fi minimum, which doesn't change even with million dollar systems. At the minimum, DSP, in the below 500 hz region can knock down peaks in the low end. That improves mud, heavy resolution destroying bass, and other things. It can do so with a very minimal impact otherwise. If you say it isn't so, it merely shows me you aren't competent or are using preconceptions to judge without having tried it. Dropping peaks in smaller rooms improves things with few downsides. It simply does. Physics isn't to be trifled with.

Then there is the issue of such a small room and half a million spent on a playback system. Sorry, do you have the option of $300k on the system and $200k on a bigger space? Your space is a severe, and real physical bottleneck. Your client isn't well served by your advise so far. Just coincidentally my own listening room is within less than a foot in every dimension and has 3 doors/openings in the 4 corners. You apparently haven't actually been there and heard it, and I have heard a very similar sized system.

Now there are some fairly simple and nearly cost free ways to trial some of things that have been suggested to you. Can you learn from that and at least give it a go or do your preconceptions prevent the possibility altogether?

 

[ddk]

I can, and I will.

At the bare minimum, and I do mean the bare mid-fi minimum, which doesn't change even with million dollar systems. At the minimum, DSP, in the below 500 hz region can knock down peaks in the low end. That improves mud, heavy resolution destroying bass, and other things. It can do so with a very minimal impact otherwise. If you say it isn't so, it merely shows me you aren't competent or are using preconceptions to judge without having tried it. Dropping peaks in smaller rooms improves things with few downsides. It simply does. Physics isn't to be trifled with.

Then there is the issue of such a small room and half a million spent on a playback system. Sorry, do you have the option of $300k on the system and $200k on a bigger space? Your space is a severe, and real physical bottleneck. Your client isn't well served by your advise so far. Just coincidentally my own listening room is within less than a foot in every dimension and has 3 doors/openings in the 4 corners. You apparently haven't actually been there and heard it, and I have heard a very similar sized system.

Now there are some fairly simple and nearly cost free ways to trial some of things that have been suggested to you. Can you learn from that and at least give it a go or do your preconceptions prevent the possibility altogether?

Dude, you're too concerned with me, stay on topic! People I deal with aren't idiots nor newcomers to high end audio. They know exactly what they want and who to work with, the rest is only conjecture on your part. There are two different technologies here that many including myself don't find complimentary. We use both but when there's a choice we prefer one over the other, live with it. We don't do measurements or offer acoustics in house, we access the job and hire people who do this professionally, a couple with serious track records when the budget is available.

david

PS I have experience, not preconceptions!

 

[amirm]

Not for bias and principle but for very practical reasons affecting sound quality of such systems.

It is their belief that it can impact the quality. Most have not even tried it so clearly they lack personal data to base the opinion on. They have simply formed an opinion as you seem to have that it must have an impact on timbre, etc. that you mentioned. So that is clearly a belief since it is only based on what someone else has said and what makes sense to their gut.

And for those who say they have tried it, they seem to have no objective data to put forward as this conversation has shown.

As I said, I understand the fear and angst. I mean if swapping two cables can make the sound different, then surely it "computes" that any processing in the middle must also make a difference. Nothing can be scarier than every audio sample getting transformed.

The question is what to do with this fear. Letting it lead one to doing nothing is problematic. Very problematic. As I explained and importantly, showed data point after data point, the system as is without this technology has severe distortions in the very things you said folks value: timbre and tonal quality. There is not one person on the planet that can show that a 10 dB peak in your system at 40 Hz and 7 dB in another person's system at 55 Hz, and 12 dB at 72 Hz in yet another expensive system is all in the service of producing the real deal. All of these variations are audible and measurements 100% predict their audibility. I can take a flat system and boost these frequencies and I guarantee you will a) hear them and b) would have an impossible time telling me that we should have these random peaks inserted in every system at a different frequency in the search for high fidelity.

So if we are going by data and logic, this remains a fear and one that is keeping people from getting the best sound in their system. It just is and no amount of insisting otherwise changes the strong facts to the contrary.

We can't! Our primary objectives are different right from the get go. My concern is preserving and reproducing the tonal qualities and retaining the timbre of that analog signal, yours is fixing a bump in the road.

You are not retaining a darn thing when you have made massive transformations of the sound in your room. Take your identical system and put it in 10 different rooms and it will have 10 different sounds in bass frequencies. The physics mandates these transformations. Yet you insist that you have preserved something? What have you preserved when in every instantiation it is different?

Are you telling me that the bass I hear from Wilson speakers is the same if I survey four different systems members have here? I sure hope you are not.

And what nuance do you think that bass has? Bass performance is not about nuances to make those arguments. Bass has huge distortions it brings to the party. You have to take care of those even if there are some tiny nuances we worship in high-end audio. You brought up Steve. Steve has subwoofers to compliment his Wilsons. Is it your opinion that he has screwed up bass response because he didn't let his Wilsons create that sound?

 

[amirm]

You're spinning it Amir. Not arguing room effects and the need to address them, its the how, specifically digitization of the analog signal.

If that is your goal, then you need to be in my corner, not yours. Without DSP, it is incredibly hard to tame the room resonances in sizes of the rooms we use in home listening spaces. You can try to put massive amounts of acoustic products I showed earlier in the thread in the case of our theater at work and you still can have 5 to 10 dB of variations. Indeed it takes a heroic effort to get the proverbial +-3 dB or 6 dB of variation with treatment alone. Yet we know that differences as low as 0.5 dB are audible as I explained earlier (see http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/AudibilityofSmallDistortions.html).

It is because of this reason that top acoustic designers that create million dollar+ rooms use DSP as a mandatory step to getting the best sound. If they could do away with it, they would.

Step back to reality of less than perfectly designed room and DSP becomes absolutely mandatory. I have seen people cover their entire room with "bass traps" and still have massive peaks left.

And here is the danger in resorting to acoustic products: to get sufficient absorption with typical resistive products (read fiberglass), you wind up with so many of them in the room that you create a totally dead room. Acoustic products of this type are non-discriminative and not only will also absorb higher frequencies but do so in non-uniform manner! Expert acousticians have other mechanism but they are beyond the abilities of most DIY people to deploy. DSP on the other hand, can make massive correction without any of these side effects.

Speakers don't know what they're getting fed but content and context matters a lot when it comes to how you solve the problem. I'll be the first to use DSP when dealing with movies and HT. Who gives a crap about tone of some canned digitized explosion effect or car door thump. Nor do I care much if the system is primarily used for electronic pop, by all means, EQ away! I have to find another solution when dealing with analog and specifically un-amplified acoustic Jazz and Classical recordings.

We are back to that fear again. I can't offer anything to move you from that unless you give me specifics of what your Jazz or Classical music is better off without DSP, but just dandy with all the distortions that you say you were happy to get rid of in other scenarios. Somehow you think the wrong timbre, overhang of bass, muddier sound are all unimportant compared to some nebulous benefit you think you have preserved without them.

 

[amirm]

Examples you quoted from his book where out of context and totally unsuitable and impractical for my use.

Feel free to demonstrate why what I quoted is out of context. You said that he made no references to EQ, and I showed you that he did indeed in countless places in his book. If there is a new objection, let's hear that so that I can address it. Meanwhile, Dr. Toole's research in this area goes way back to when he was in the Canadian National Research Council (non-profit government research center to advance audio industry in Canada). Here is an AES paper from 1993:

And the conclusion of this 70+ page paper full of analysis and listening tests:

And there was no mention of consequences of digitization, digital signal was a granted.

Ask Dr. Toole about such consequences in person and he will laugh at you in the context of what it corrects. So I would not continue to think he is on your side in any manner or shape. These are gross distortions whose correction have far more profound improvements than any penalty of digitizing.

As I said, I hear the cry of analog purity. I have no solution for you other than building a massive room and hiring the best acoustician you can to reduce the problem. Don't even think about doing it in a cramped apartment. Your transition frequencies will now go up to 300-400 Hz meaning you have variations coming out of your ear.

My experience is very different from yours, bass frequencies have always been the most difficult to deal with properly and I've never heard digital eq resolve the issue to my satisfaction or any of my clients in the past 25 years. Regardless of who we brought to do the job. Digital EQ is only one tool we can improve the sound in other ways too. The right tool for the right job!

I don't know what you want us to do with this assertion. There is no objective data put forward that we can discuss. You are not saying what system was used, how it was evaluated, no independent references, etc. I could have bragged about my years of experience to convince you but I have not because it only matters what I can demonstrate. And right now, you have not demonstrated how a clearly wrong in-room frequency response that varies from room to room with identical system is the right approach to getting audio truth.

As I have explained, EQ is a powerful tool that is almost, almost mandatory in any home listening space to get proper sound in bass frequencies. You have to have lived in that exception of huge room and exceptionally treated spaces to think they are not a critical component of any system that aims for "high fidelity."

Material substance? What do you need? While you're at it please present some material substance that good measurements equal good sound and that digitization absolutely has no effect on tone, timbre and spacial cues.

How did you get those spacial cues in bass frequencies? They are not directional for one thing. And the timbre and tonal quality without DSP is massively wrong. You can't simultaneously care and not care about that aspect of the sound. Are you saying that having a 15 db variation in your bass response has less material impact to the sound in bass than A/D and D/A trip?

What? Distinguished venues are never used for self promotion are they? Dr. Toole spent over an hour talking about Harman, THEIR way of measuring speakers, THEIR idea of the ideal speaker response derived from a limited polling data derived from THEIR controlled and unique test environment. Then he tops it off by mentioning THEIR M2 and how it outperforms the competition (without defining it of course) at 10 times the price, then casually shows poor measurements of unspecified expensive speakers while exalting those of THEIR fantastic M2. If that's not masterful marketing then I don't know what is for you. After all, what better place than "Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music"for self promotion ?

david

Then you don't know I am afraid. The man that is. As I showed above, almost all of his teachings date back to decades he spent at the NRC. Harman hired him and he brought that influence to the company. Over dead bodies of many designers by the way. Years and years later, the rest of the company started to believe the mountain of data and now everything from a $200 in-wall speaker to $20,000 JBL active monitors use the same science. That he is proud and familiar with those products as to put them forward as examples doesn't make him a corrupt marketing person. It makes him a real human being with opinions and feelings for companies and products that validate his lifetime of work.

Is he biased? Sure. Is he biased as to be corrupt? No way. The #1 speaker they show to do good in many of their blind listening tests is an Infinity speaker you can buy for $300 on Amazon. You think that is good for a company that sells $24,000 Revel speakers? I think not. How about the fact the he says get a few cheap subs and some bookshelf speakers for great sound? You don't think that is negative for Harman's Mark Levinson brand? Of course it is. The man says what he says because ultimately he is a research scientist and he values his reputation more than being a marketing guy.

Now maybe in your response you tell us where we can find this Mother Teresa of audio who has the wealth of knowledge and credentials that Dr. Toole has, with none of the commercial bias. Until then, Dr. Toole comes closest to an unbiased luminary in this space. Whether you believe it or not is not important. What is important is that his peers do. And this is what they have bestowed upon him:

AES Gold Medal Award
Audio Engineering Society
October 2013
The GOLD MEDAL AWARD, given in recognition of outstanding achievements, sustained over a period of years, in the field of audio engineering, was presented to:
FLOYD TOOLE in recognition for outstanding contributions to theory, practice, and international standards in the area of subjective and objective evaluation of loudspeakers in rooms.
Additional Honors & Awards
Audio Engineering Society Fellowship Award: 1986
Audio Engineering Society Publications Awards: 1988 and 1990
Audio Engineering Society Silver Medal Award: 1996
Acoustical Society of America Fellowship Award: 2002
CEDIA Lifetime Achievement Award: 2008
CEDIA Fellowship Award 2011
Past President Audio Engineering Society
Beryllium Driver Award for Lifetime Achievement - ALMA The International Loudspeaker Association 2011


Who should we believe instead? Come on, tell us. I am all ears. Until then, please forgive me for having checked and double checked his work through literally hundreds of other research papers and authors and designers in all manner of competing companies who would not dare to oppose him because they know he is on the side of right. You can disagree with what he is saying but you need to come with a lot more ammunition that him being a marketing person. He couldn't be farther from that.

 

[ddk]

Amir, let me first thank you for the taking the time to continue these exchanges, there's always something to learn and I specially enjoy the banter and sarcasm!

I agree with you 100% regarding the impact of the room and the sound. I'll even go as far as saying that in a way its probably the most important. Maybe our disagreement is partly communication and some because we don't enough about the other's experience and starting point. In all my 30+ years of high end audio I've come across only two rooms with really good acoustics and the experience was transformative. Visually there was nothing special them, they were just a room in a house. One was a basement den in a modern home, the other was the living room in an old house out in Long Island. System in Missouri was the Trio, some CJ phono, Lamm L2, Lamm ML2 and some tt which I don't recall, the room was more or less dampened with furniture, carpeting and very solid construction, I only spent maybe an hour moving the speakers and fine tuning the table. The Long Island house was completely different, I went there to buy some LPs, I think it was around 2002 - 2003. His system was a Garrard 301 from the 60's in one of those sprung period plinths, a SME 3012 and a mono Ortofon type A or type C and an early McIntosh mono pre. The rest of the system was in the adjacent living room, a pair of solid state Bozak amps from early 70's which I'd never seen before. He had DIY tweeter and midrange array, all Bozak and 12 what I think were 8" inch woofers in piece of plywood stuck in front of his fireplace. Talk about preconceptions, I only wanted to hear a couple of the records that I didn't recognize. Through the archway between the rooms I'm looking at this old gentleman in his late 70's, record in hand, waddle over to his rickety system followed by a loud thump as he dropped the needle and a few seconds later came the MUSIC! I tried to focus on the system to understand what was going on but physically and emotionally I couldn't get past the music. I spent another couple hours there and from time to time he'd stand up in the middle the room, pick up his clarinet and play along with the music. That's when the penny dropped for me and realized what I wanted out of music system. There was nothing in common between the two but the musical experience was exactly the same. Both spaces also had a very natural, smooth and expansive low frequency response where everything else built upon, specially the scale and sense of realism. Most of the time I have to fight the rooms and pick my compromise to achieve the final goal, which is experiencing and connection to the music in a natural way beyond a system which can be very impressive. I'm already familiar with the gear and know its can do but its the room and mainly the low frequency response that poses the challenge to achieving the end goal. A couple of times the rooms where so bad that I had to actively biamp and EQ (not digital!) the speakers to get closer to target. I'm telling you all this so you know that I get what mean about the importance of getting the bass right. What I don't know is if you experienced it in a space naturally?

Part two is my reservation regarding digital. It has nothing to do with any kind of unjustified bias or prejudgement. I jumped in from day 1, only never gave up on analog. I was in the loop from early digital. I lived in London in the early 80's and visited Meridian several times with my friends from Graham hifi when they were doing all their A/B testing with digital. I got the first Philips & Merdian CD players, messed around with tube ones from CAL, then onto the Barclay transport and the STAX X1t. Then added the Levinson 31 & 30 DAC & transport. Had the Burmeister and DCS stuff, messed around with all the clock and up sampling nonsense. Same time I came across CEC and Weiss, became their US distributor for several years until I decided to wind down my audio interests. Along the way I have experimented with all types of digital cables from many, many companies. I'm friendly with David Chesky, been to his recording sessions, later to the mastering of that session in his studio, heard the final hi-res mix and got the down sampled CD. My other mentor and friend, George Walker, pulitzer winning composer and concert pianist. I was in his house many times, know his piano, room and playing very well. I was there when he recorded himself on his digital Nagra tape recorder, listened to the recording through the same electronics that I own and Kharma speakers that I was distributing at the time. I heard the mixes that came back for his approval and again have the final CD. On top of that George is an avid audiophile we spent many days listening to our systems and fine tuning them. There are important nuances that the listener is totally unaware of until pointed out by someone like George and what he knows is in his recordings. I'm not new to digital, my feelings about it come from deep understanding and lots or direct experience. More or less my system is exactly the same as it was in 2001, same brand. I own it as well as sell and install it, the only change is when I moved up the food chain when Lamm came out with their statement products. So I have my long term reference system as a constant. I'm still in the loop, heard many of the latest and greatest. My turntables were chosen the same way, hands on with many different ones and most of them high end and very expensive. I kept these not because they look pretty or cost a lot, I know exactly what they're capable of and what they can do that others can't. I don't know anyone else who can claim the same amount of long term direct experience on both sides of the fence and at the ultra high end of it. I have a brain, can analyze and come to my own independent conclusions. There's no point in badgering me and insisting that something is good and I should get that, when I do. The delta between the best digital I heard and own vs my turntables is just too wide. People who've been here ecstatic with my digital and its musicality until they hear one of the tables, then they get it! An no, with digital recordings there's no advantage to the vinyl over the CD, if anything its often the other way around.

You ask for substantive support, you offer graphs, mathematical theories and writings of others. My substance is my experience and knowledge in the field and look at those graphs, models and articles differently from someone with other skill sets.

Beyond that video I know nothing else about Dr. Toole. I have no admiration or disrespect for the man and my marketing comment wasn't derogatory, I was actually impressed how well he did it but not the content of the speech. Neither the speech or the excerpts of the book that you posted are contradictory or complimentary to what I'm saying here. He talked about a product that he was involved in designing, probably excellent for its intended purpose and I read some bits from his book online. He talks and writes about ways to deal with things, I never said that he's lying, wrong or opposed to what he does in theory or at commercial level. Only that what he's focused on isn't for me, that's my crime? Beyond that I don't know what he really does at Harman or if he built anything in his life that I care about. So for now my interest in the man and his ideas remain very limited, sorry. But I do know about JBL speakers and someone else there. I have/had almost all their original top speakers since the 50's, long before Harman. I own/owned another 9 pairs of JBL speakers since Harman mostly top end 43xx series, their Everest and the K2. A few years I had to call the company about refurbishing the woofers in my M9500 and was passed on to Greg Timbers. Up to that point I had no idea who he was, only after our conversation I found out that he actually designed the M9500 and every other JBL speaker that I had. He's been there since 1972 and has designed and built all of their best known studio monitors along their best at the time K2 series. He does something very different than Dr. Toole and has other ideas of his own for the perfect speaker, and a long history of excellence to back it up. I happen to know more about Timbers and enjoy is work, that's all.

Here's a short video of JBL history, enjoy!

david
PS

Who should we believe instead? Come on, tell us. I am all ears.

Digital tech can do many things but you should believe me when I say that I don't care for and have little use for digital EQ!

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Amir, man, it's digital. You can't run analog through digital. It doesn't matter how much good it might do. Digital has kooties. They'll get all over the analog and booger up it's mysterious perfection, no matter what the current measurements say. There's some other measurement we haven't discovered yet that is going to reveal analog's kooties like germs under a microscope. Dude, I can't believe you're an engineer and you don't get that.

Tim

 

[esldude]

Amir, man, it's digital. You can't run analog through digital. It doesn't matter how much good it might do. Digital has kooties. They'll get all over the analog and booger up it's mysterious perfection, no matter what the current measurements say. There's some other measurement we haven't discovered yet that is going to reveal analog's kooties like germs under a microscope. Dude, I can't believe you're an engineer and you don't get that.

Tim

You forgot to add that the kooties are of a kind that can never be overcome. Improvements may occur, but the basic kootie-quality is always there with no chance of removal. Digital is like bad MoJo. BAD MOJO!

 

[NorthStar]

Digital tech can do many things but you should believe me when I say that I don't care for and have little use for digital EQ!

Hi David,
I would love to go to one of your musical parties; are they in open-space? :b

High regards,
Bob

 

[amirm]

Just to add some more context here, let me refer to a math camp thread I created a couple of years ago on relationship between frequency and time domains: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...Measurements-Understanding-Time-and-Frequency

I won't bore you with details of that long post but here are some key points worth nothing. This is the measurement of a transmission line subwoofer in my listening room, plotted in three dimensions. X and Y are the frequency response but the Z, back to front, is time. So what we see is how the frequency domain changes as time goes by after the initial excitation of the room:

The system plays a single frequency for an instant in time. Yet at some frequencies that ping lasts half a second! This is the "overhang" we talk about when there are room resonances/peaks. Look to the right around 150 Hz and we see almost no lingering effect of the note. As we sweep from low to high frequencies, each note lasts a different amount of time and the variations. Take this sub to another room and this picture changes completely. The peaks move to different frequencies and will have different amplitudes and with them, the time domain stretching of the tones changes correspondingly.

Now let's see what happens when we grab one of these peaks, and pull down its amplitude with a Parametric EQ at 53 Hz:

Not only did we smooth out our frequency response (shown in green now) but we also sharply reduced time domain stretching of the note (ringing). The blue line is the frequency of the filter. We paid for one movie ticket but got to watch two.

We can repeat the exercise with another filter 140 Hz, again highlighted by the cursor line in blue:

Now let's attack a bunch more peaks:

Look at how much better time domain response is now. Gone are all of the overhangs. Subjectively the sound was as I described: transitions become tight, and boominess disappears.

So what we managed to do here is simultaneously get physics, math and subjective listening results to all agree!

 

[esldude]

Just to add some more context here, let me refer to a math camp thread I created a couple of years ago on relationship between frequency and time domains: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...Measurements-Understanding-Time-and-Frequency

I won't bore you with details of that long post but here are some key points worth nothing. This is the measurement of a transmission line subwoofer in my listening room, plotted in three dimensions. X and Y are the frequency response but the Z, back to front, is time. So what we see is how the frequency domain changes as time goes by after the initial excitation of the room:

The system plays a single frequency for an instant in time. Yet at some frequencies that ping lasts half a second! This is the "overhang" we talk about when there are room resonances/peaks. Look to the right around 150 Hz and we see almost no lingering effect of the note. As we sweep from low to high frequencies, each note lasts a different amount of time and the variations. Take this sub to another room and this picture changes completely. The peaks move to different frequencies and will have different amplitudes and with them, the time domain stretching of the tones changes correspondingly.

Now let's see what happens when we grab one of these peaks, and pull down its amplitude with a Parametric EQ at 53 Hz:

Not only did we smooth out our frequency response (shown in green now) but we also sharply reduced time domain stretching of the note (ringing). The blue line is the frequency of the filter. We paid for one movie ticket but got to watch two.

We can repeat the exercise with another filter 140 Hz, again highlighted by the cursor line in blue:

Now let's attack a bunch more peaks:

Look at how much better time domain response is now. Gone are all of the overhangs. Subjectively the sound was as I described: transitions become tight, and boominess disappears.

So what we managed to do here is simultaneously get physics, math and subjective listening results to all agree!

Nowhere is there a graph of timbre. DDK knows only with skill, and experience of sublime analog is timbre possible.

Of course to quote DDK:

While you're at it please present some material substance that good measurements equal good sound and that digitization absolutely has no effect on tone, timbre and spacial cues.

I have to agree with him in regards to your post Amir. The digital EQ you are showing would effect tone, timbre and possibly spacial (sic) cues. It most likely would cause a noticeable improvement to them.

 

[ddk]

Hi David,
I would love to go to one of your musical parties; are they in open-space? :b

High regards,
Bob

Anytime Bob, it's open house and it would be a pleasure!
david

 

[Don Hills]

If someone has $500K to spend on a system, and wished to keep it "unsullied"(*) by digital, I would hope that they would spend a few K to have someone build them an analog parametric equaliser to correct the worst of the bass resonances. It's what we used to use before DSP. As Toole pointed out in the video, speaker/room resonances are minimum phase and can be (more or less) exactly canceled by a suitably shaped filter.

(*) I see what you did there...