Are audiophiles wired differently?
- Thread starter caesar
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This puts us at a conundrum Sean. I mean, even within Harman's umbrella, in particular price overlapping models, we've got JBL, Infinity and Revel that while all accurate under common metrics, cater to different groups. What defines each one's "house sound", that which not only draws in new customers but becomes the basis for brand loyalty? Tim mentioned New Coke. It's a perfect example of tampering with a proven and tested formula and the resulting consequences. Personally I really like the Revel sound and if I were Harman's CEO and market testing showed the company wasn't serving a segment that wanted rolled off and humped, I wouldn't tell Kevin to change a thing. I'd buy a company that already had a hold on rolled off and humped. It may even be possible that Harman bought Infinity to reach a market JBL couldn't and set up Revel to do the same. Sound quality aside, for geographic penetration purposes they bought Selenium. One can say that Harman has been doing a Harold, except Harman hasn't been doing it on a product by product basis but by a brand and line basis.
What we do know is that asking questions isn't difficult. What is difficult is asking the right questions.
I often get asked by people what defines the JBL, Infinity or Revel sound? I don't really know the answer to that question, but this is how I typically answer it. (I hope Harman marketing and sales people don't read this forum).
The brands are all aiming at the same essential performance objectives but the choices in technology, form factor, price target, etc take them down a different path towards the end goal: accurate sound reproduction.
With the JBL brand, traditionally the ability to play loud has always been an important parameter, which comes from its professional heritage in theaters,live sound and recording studios. Hence, the use of horns and compression drivers in the more expensive Japanese and JBL Synthesis products. Speakers like the Everest play very loud with very little power compression and distortion. They play really loud! But the horn gives them a higher directivity than a cone and dome loudspeaker like Revel or Infinity. The higher directivity index from a horn loudspeaker will result in different spatial attributed: lower listener envelopment and apparent source width, particularly in a reflective room with a single or stereo speaker. In a surround sound scenario with all speakers playing, I'm not sure these spatial differences are so apparent since the dominant spatial cues are in the recording.
For Revel, accurate frequency response, wide bandwidth and wide dispersion are important goals, which is achieved through an array of cones and domes. In recent years, speakers must have a smaller, narrower footprint, which requires an array of smaller diameter woofers and mids to produce adequate SPL. The fit, finish and style of Revel products has always been such that they must project "high-end" quality. Each individual speaker is measured in production and the cross-over values tweaked so that the speaker falls within 1 dB or so within the standard.
Infinity, has traditionally offered a bridge between lower cost JBL products and higher cost Revel products. Infinity products around 1998-2002 like Intermezzo and Prelude (speakers I both own) offered high performance in a lifestyle package. There were products that sounded and looked great at affordable prices. The Modulus HTIB was a great sounding affordable 5.1 surround system, which I have in my bedroom. Today, the Primus series probably offers the best bang (and sound) for the buck, and I recommend them to audiophiles on beer budgets.
So, I think that while all brands aim towards similar performance, they get there different ways depending on the target audience, and the important they place on ID and acoustic performance parameters like frequency response, max SPL, bass extension, and directivity.
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Tomelex, great point. We as humans have the visual processing taking up a much larger part of the brain than the auditory processing. But we as audiophiles have somehow learned or are wired to enjoy the auditory detail, whereas most of the population gets off just fine watching music videos.
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