It’s All a Preference

[Soundminded]

Rob and Tim beat me to the punch . The whole purpose of this exercise with 70 point measurement and math to compute the target is to predict how a speaker sounds in a room. You saw in my graph that as I changed the position of the mic, it did NOT change the mid to high frequencies that much. This means the speaker timbre was highly room independent.

And as Rob points out, once you have a well behaved speaker, then you have a shot at using EQ to modify its sound. Because the speaker direct and indirect response are similar, both are modified as you wish. Whereas if the tonal change is coming from the fact that direct and indirect sounds are different, no EQ up stream of the speaker can fix that.


Exactly. So if the two are the same per above, then you get around this issue above transition frequency. Below transition frequency the room dominates and techniques for that involve other means that the speaker itself.


The LEDE (Live End, Dead End) concept as you may know came about from speakers that had poor off-axis response. So folks blocked the reflections as much as they could. The purposes of a speaker with great off-axis response or one that doesn't let much go off-axis is to do away with this requirement.

Research shows that we actually like reflected sounds from the sides. I will cover this in a future article, post. But the conventional wisdom that you must absorb first reflections is not correct.


What is the alternative? Not asking them? Isn't the ultimate goal to play something and enjoy it? If I enjoy one speaker more than another, shouldn't I get the one that I enjoy more?

Yes, this is a broken system where we do not capture the recording room and hence, can't know when we have duplicated it. This doesn't mean we throw our hand up in the air and pick on some other basis. The ultimate test is when I listen to a piece of music, which sounds better to me. We pick equipment this way all the time. Why not speakers?

Mind you, I had a hard time with this too until I sat through the tests and it then it all made sense.


I don't agree fully if you mean listening to a lot of live music. You can do that as much as you like but you never know what the James Taylor song that I listened to in blind tests was supposed to sound like. The judgement then is based on what we think is "good sound." I gave the example of amp distortion. In high amounts we can tell it is bad by itself. We need not have a reference point at all. I could play an instrument that you have never heard and you can still tell me it is distorted.

Nothing about this hobby at the end of the day is to recreate the live event but to do justice to the music as delivered to us. There, having good frequency response should be at the top of the list. Relying on a dead room to get rid of reflections should not be it.


Harman has tested different groups of people with such experience and without. The theme is the same in all as far as what sound we like. What varies between groups is how bad we rate something that is bad. And how accurately we score. http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2008/12/loudspeaker-preferences-of-trained.html

"To study this question, the author conducted a large study (see reference 1) that compared the loudspeaker preferences of 300+ untrained and trained listeners.... An important conclusion from this study is that the loudspeaker preferences of trained listeners can be safely extrapolated to the tastes of consumers having little or no formal listener training."

So while this is a comparison between trained and untrained listeners, we see that the core preferences are remain even in large scale tests. Look at how speaker "M" did worse than others no matter which group of listeners scored it. Ditto for speaker B.

A lot to respond to here.

"The whole purpose of this exercise with 70 point measurement and math to compute the target is to predict how a speaker sounds in a room."

This would depend on the coefficient of absorption at different frequencies for the room, specifically as they are related to the directions where early reflections will occur. There's still no engineered mechanism to adjust for it in different rooms. Therefore the ultimate balance would be highly room dependent at least above the transition frequency of 200 hz as one of the previous graphs showed.

"Because the speaker direct and indirect response are similar..."

Here we strongly disagree. For example, look at the on and off axis FR of a typical 1" dome tweeter. On and off axis output below 10 khz are similar. By 15 khz 30 to 45 degrees off axis the output has dropped 10 to 15 db while the on axis output remains flat. That means the sound reaching the room boundary in the front half of the room at 10 khz may be similar to the 1khz arrival but there will be almost no sound reaching it at 15 khz. Then there is the difference in reflectance of the materials of the room boundary at different frequencies such that even if the arrival at the boundary were flat at 15 khz, the reflection wouldn't be, it would typically be attenuated compared to lower frequencies. Compare that to a real musical instrument. Walk around a street musician or a piano at a piano bar. The tone doesn't change appreciably in practically any direction. There are exceptions, being behind the propped up lid of a grand piano will attenuate high frequencies in that direction. (Beranek reported that he heard Brahms second piano concerto in Berlin where there's a hall with the performers in the center. He claimed from his seat in this unfortunate position behind the propped up lid he heard nothing above 2 khz.) This differential spectral reflection alone is sufficient to distort the tone of reproduced acoustic musical instruments badly since reflections play a significant role in what's heard in the listening room.

"Isn't the ultimate goal to play something and enjoy it?"

Not for me. I'm not an audiophile in the usual sense of the word as you and others probably understand it. Duplicating the exact sound I heard is an intellectual challenge for me, a test of my technical skills. That's why I design my own systems to my own paradigms. They aren't like others. If enjoyment were the only goal, I'd stick mostly to live music and would have settled a long time ago for sound reproducing systems with far less accuracy than I feel I've arrived at. I have not been driven by the need or desire to acquire the fruits of other people's ideas for a very long time.

"This doesn't mean we throw our hand up in the air and pick on some other basis."

There are two choices as I see it. Hit your head harder and harder against the same brick wall with the same ideas and find that the wall will no longer budge or start over again from square one and rethink the entire idea. That's what I have done. I love all kinds of puzzles. If one interests me, the harder it is, the more determined I am to solve it.

"I don't agree fully if you mean listening to a lot of live music. You can do that as much as you like but you never know what the James Taylor song that I listened to in blind tests was supposed to sound like."

That's true. Never having heard him live I really don't know what his voice actually sounds like. I can only guess based on the range of human voices I have heard. None I've heard are chesty or highly sibilant. Nor are they hollow or muffled. However I think I know what all of the musical instruments in a symphony orchestra sound like. I've tried to study the difference between the sounds of different kinds of pianos and different violins. Students bring violins and violas they are considering purchasing and we listen to them and try to decide what we like and don't like about their sound. Being as analytical as we can be about real instruments gives us a basis to compare the sound of recordings of other similar instruments. We don't always agree.

"Harman has tested different groups of people with such experience and without"

What kind of experience and training? If accuracy matters then there has to be a frame of reference of what accuracy means. If there isn't, then one is as good as another and it becomes strictly a matter of preference. This is what I concluded from Tooles line of investigation, he was looking for what the market liked best that would make the most money for Sidney.

 

[Gregadd]

Still don't get it. There seems to be a denial of the harmon findings. Simply put (hope I have it right enough) 'The majority of listeners prefer smooth Fr on and off axis'.

Please cite your scientifc poll for that conclusion. Please define the demographics, size opf the sample group and other factors. I think you meant to say the majority of listenres, participating in the Harmon test, made thier decisions on FR, hence the tern majority and not unnanamity. Again no speaker is perfect and trade offs most be made. Those trade offs are often atrrtibutble to price and genre of speaker drivers.

How can that be denied?? Unless of course they are lying, misrepresenting or deliberately being deceitful.

I never doubted the test or its' rtesult. It's the interpretation I have trouble with. Being influenced is not lying. Nor is being wrong.

Given that audio 101 should be about reproducing what was recorded, how then does such a finding fly in the face of that?

We have discussed this ad nauseum. Are uyou saying i am unable to find any recording that sound like real instrumentts?

Would anyone disagree with the following...'most listeners prefer amplifiers that accurately reproduce the signal in'??

That's a red herring. I repeat again I want the sound of real music. or as close as I can get given the the state of technology and my abilty to pay. Please don't make that tired argument about hall ambience.

Why does there suddenly become a switch as soon as we hit speakers?? I don't get it. Sure, there is ALWAYS room for personal preferences, from wherever the differences come, but surely shirley we have a minimum starting point??

Transducers are generally the most colored device in the playback chaion.

We are talking hi end systems here are we not?

Yes. Whatever that means .

Whilst I am more than happy to include other factors such as time (as amir well knows haha) I also completely accept that smooth FR is needed, and that that could very well be the single most important.

Again no device is perfect and we are talking about balance.

Never?? You mean you don't upgrade?? If someone upgrades, do they listen and audition first? If so then how is that not an a/b?

My choices have been remarkably consisitent. I'll never say never. I think everyone knows what I mean. The kind of A/B testing done in the Harmon test or most stereo showrooms. On occaision I have had my standard replaced.

HOW, exactly, did they disagree with amir and the other testers???? As a laywer, would you not expect a more rigorous argument in court?

By selecting other speakers. This is a hobby not a trial. There is usualyy scant scientyific testimony in a trial.

You mean they sat there, listened blind and still preferred the ML's??? Or just that they bought them in the first place. If the latter, how can you say they disagreed with amir if they have never done the test?

If tthey choose the ML after having heard a speaker comparable to Harman products. Hence my question which no one answered-Are the Harmobn products under test unique.
Uh if ML is frequency deficient, if some selected ML over other speakers that were FR superior obviuosly other factors contributed to thier selection and were more important than FR.

I have asked this a few times, apart from mep (I think, apologies without going back and checking) no-one has expressed any interest in doing this demo. From your postings I am pretty certain you too have no interest (fine as far as it goes), but why then are you (and others) here arguing the topic??


No interest in testing the hypothesis, yet completely happy to deny it. Seriously you guys, how is it different in tenor than the creationists??

IF you had done the test (or at least 'wished' you could) then ok, we might be able to see that you are happy to discuss...but no interest along with complete denial ('well, because you see')..not much of an argument is it.

This is a tiresome argument that gets us no where. You made this same argument when we were arguing about ABX.

It is however an excellent window into the intent and mindset.

I mentioned Dave Moulton (an excellent place for a few nights browsing as mentioned by others too). Here is an interesting thought, sort of. It takes bravery to write that episode.

Bravery you ask?! Yeah, stupid I know, but think about it. It means he has to admit a few things. His ears WERE fooled, he CAN be fooled, and he admitted it.

To me and a few others here, not that brave (silly word when you think about it)...yet it is the very essence of an audiophile. Their ears are paramount, what they hear is gospel, in some cases it is the framework upon which they hang their audiophile identity, it is what gives them any altitude they think they possess in audio land.

Tell me Terry, of what would I be afraid? I have no monetary or academic interest.

Imagine a mag reviewer admitting their ears may not be as good as they make out. Well, that would be the instant end of them eh......(at least they think so)

They frequently admit they could be wrong. It's just they find no more certainty in measurements.

So yeah, stupid word and all, it takes bravery to write of an experience like moultons.

sad[/

QUOTE]

 

[Gregadd]

I guess I bow to AMIRs scientific knowledge: Hopefully we can talk a little about Time domaiin errors and why iI beelive they are more bothersome to me than FR. Ideally we hope we could do both perfectly.
Loudspeaker phase accuracy and musical timing
A speaker designer looks at a too-often ignored aspect of loudspeaker design.

By Roy Johnson, loudspeaker designer, Green Mountain Audio, Inc.




By time and tone do we perceive music. Over time, tones develop and change to create and resolve the tensions of music. Changes across time carry the information of music. We rely on timing to unravel the acoustic world around us, subconsciously and continuously. A complex wave is a unique structure formed from many individual elements. When their relative timing is changed, so is the information we decode.

Now for the bad news: All loudspeakers distort the timing between high and low sounds, regardless of how they operate. They differ by how much delay and where in the frequency range it is imposed. Many of the impressions that speakers make, such as 'boxy,' 'shrill,' 'spitty,' or 'forward,' are caused by the unique time delay that each imparts into various portions of the musical spectrum.

Bell Labs first analyzed this phenomenon in the late 1920's when designing and installing sound systems for movie theaters. Their conclusion? Time-delay distortion was indeed audible and should be minimized as much as possible. Yet, designers often add time delays as unavoidable by-products of engineering decisions. Many of them believe that 'small' timing errors are not really audible.

However, if you experience a speaker without these added timing problems, you'll quickly come to understand how sensitive we are to timing information. [Emphassis supplied]Some obvious examples would be the micro-moment occupied by the pause between two phrases, or the subtle shaping of a note as it begins and ends. Each lies at the heart of the emotion of music. Since we all hear and appreciate these very tiny events, how can we say that distorting their timing by a factor of 10 or more will not change the sound? Here's what we (and others) have found over the years:

Time-delay, or phase distortion, hides the small things that help to define reality. [Emphasis supplied]We have a nearly subconscious response to the sounds that mouths make while opening and closing, the precise timing between the hands on a string instrument and between all four limbs on the piano, organ, or drum kit. Timing is inherent in the interplay of breath control and fingering on a wind instrument.

As events are smeared in time, it is the echoes of these sounds which appear first -- the smaller sounds that delineate the size of an instrument or location of the artist.

Time delays move things around in space -- from front to rear and back again. Instruments and voices 'slide' back and forth, often times faster than they could ever do in real life, if they could have (or should have) even moved at all.

Phase distortion causes the timbre of an instrument to change -- the unique voice or texture created by its harmonic structure.

The attack and decay of a note become fractured. Voices lisp, strings irritate, basses become 'boxy,' speakers can be difficult to position 'just right.'

The causes and cures for time-delay distortion are well known. Perhaps the designer does not understand how this distortion can overwhelm subtle inflections. After all, these are the nuances that distinguish the best musicians, and how does one know if they are even there in the recording?

While these subtleties are as important to music as brushstrokes are to a painting, we ignore the shortcomings in loudspeakers to enjoy the music, just as we can be happy with a photographic substitute for a painting. However, a speaker that minimizes phase distortion is simply more musical, dynamic, and transparent -- it is more realistic.









Some background
Over the last 70 years, improvements to loudspeakers have come from two independent lines of research: Mechanics and psycho-acoustics. Physicists and electrical engineers first made large gains in performance when they transformed a speaker's mechanical characteristics into its electric-circuit equivalents, an area where the math is better developed. A solution was then translated back into mechanical terms to create a new suspension or type of enclosure to modify the shape of a cone or magnetic field.






http://www.greenmountainaudio.com/s...peaker-phase-accuracy-and-musical-timing.html

 

[amirm]

A lot to respond to here.

"The whole purpose of this exercise with 70 point measurement and math to compute the target is to predict how a speaker sounds in a room."

This would depend on the coefficient of absorption at different frequencies for the room, specifically as they are related to the directions where early reflections will occur.

If you are saying what I think you are saying, it is absolutely true that you can screw up the sound of a good speaker with poor acoustic treatment. Here is a simulation for 1 inch absorber:

As we see, it absorbs the reflections above 2K but below, it drops quickly to no absorption. The result is that you have now filtered that reflection and with it, messed up the timbre of the overall sound you hear.

But that need not be the case. As I mentioned, side reflections can be a good thing and if you do need to treat the walls, you can use thicker material.

There's still no engineered mechanism to adjust for it in different rooms.

How is that any better for a speaker with poor off-axis response? But yes, it is all a system. You start with good speakers and then proceed to what to do about the room.

Therefore the ultimate balance would be highly room dependent at least above the transition frequency of 200 hz as one of the previous graphs showed.

It really is not that dependent. Yes, it is not zero effect but most of what happens there is in control of the speaker.

"Because the speaker direct and indirect response are similar..."

Here we strongly disagree. For example, look at the on and off axis FR of a typical 1" dome tweeter. On and off axis output below 10 khz are similar. By 15 khz 30 to 45 degrees off axis the output has dropped 10 to 15 db while the on axis output remains flat. That means the sound reaching the room boundary in the front half of the room at 10 khz may be similar to the 1khz arrival but there will be almost no sound reaching it at 15 khz.

I meant that in the context of Harman speakers, not just a driver by itself. Here are the specs for one of theirs:

Listening Window Response (on axis): ±1.0dB from 65Hz to 18kHz
First Reflections Response (off-axis): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 17kHz
In-Room Response (Predicted): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 18kHz

Clearly a lot is reaching the listener at 15 Khz. If you mean front and back walls, yes, if you go behind the speaker it doesn't have the same response. So if you need, you can put absorbers there.

Then there is the difference in reflectance of the materials of the room boundary at different frequencies such that even if the arrival at the boundary were flat at 15 khz, the reflection wouldn't be, it would typically be attenuated compared to lower frequencies. Compare that to a real musical instrument. Walk around a street musician or a piano at a piano bar. The tone doesn't change appreciably in practically any direction.

If you measured it, it would change a lot! The reason for that lack of change is that our brain quickly adapts and starts to ignore some of the changes. I will talk more about this when we get into acoustic treatment.

"Isn't the ultimate goal to play something and enjoy it?"

Not for me. I'm not an audiophile in the usual sense of the word as you and others probably understand it. Duplicating the exact sound I heard is an intellectual challenge for me, a test of my technical skills.

How do you duplicate a document without its original? I think you think you are doing that but such an endeavour has no answer.

That's why I design my own systems to my own paradigms. They aren't like others. If enjoyment were the only goal, I'd stick mostly to live music and would have settled a long time ago for sound reproducing systems with far less accuracy than I feel I've arrived at. I have not been driven by the need or desire to acquire the fruits of other people's ideas for a very long time.

Yet if I put you in the hot seat in that blind test, 9 out of 10 chance you would pick the speaker with the smoothest frequency response over others. And I dare say, over your own speakers if they lack the same .

"This doesn't mean we throw our hand up in the air and pick on some other basis."

There are two choices as I see it. Hit your head harder and harder against the same brick wall with the same ideas and find that the wall will no longer budge or start over again from square one and rethink the entire idea. That's what I have done. I love all kinds of puzzles. If one interests me, the harder it is, the more determined I am to solve it.

I am all for a hard puzzle that has an answer. What you seek has no answer. I ask again: what is the true sound of the guitar or the vocals in the James Taylor track that was used in the harman listening test? On what basis would you evaluate it if it is not as I said?

"I don't agree fully if you mean listening to a lot of live music. You can do that as much as you like but you never know what the James Taylor song that I listened to in blind tests was supposed to sound like."

That's true. Never having heard him live I really don't know what his voice actually sounds like. I can only guess based on the range of human voices I have heard. None I've heard are chesty or highly sibilant. Nor are they hollow or muffled. However I think I know what all of the musical instruments in a symphony orchestra sound like. I've tried to study the difference between the sounds of different kinds of pianos and different violins. Students bring violins and violas they are considering purchasing and we listen to them and try to decide what we like and don't like about their sound. Being as analytical as we can be about real instruments gives us a basis to compare the sound of recordings of other similar instruments. We don't always agree.

And that is the type of analysis that everyone who sits through a blind test does! You hear a sound, you imagine if it is right or not and vote appropriately.

Now if the results pointed to some odd set of measurements and design techniques, we could question it. But here, what it points to is what we as audio people always say is the truth: not manipulating the waveform that comes out of our sources. On what basis do we want to say we deviate from that yet we are searching for better truth?

"Harman has tested different groups of people with such experience and without"

What kind of experience and training?

Both types were presented: expert listeners who are trained and casual listeners. They have tested young people and old. They have tested audiophiles and not. They have tested stereo salespeople and magazine reviewers. As I post in the Sean Olive report, the results essentially point to the same set of conclusions. From his paper:

"The conclusions from this study are summarized in the
following.

1) The loudspeaker preferences of trained listeners were
generally the same as those measured using a group of
nominally untrained listeners composed of audio retailers,
marketing and sales people, audio reviewers, and college
students.
[...]
4) There were clear correlations between listeners’
loudspeaker preferences and a set of acoustic anechoic
measurements. The most preferred loudspeakers had the
smoothest, flattest, and most extended frequency
responses maintained uniformly off axis."

If accuracy matters then there has to be a frame of reference of what accuracy means. If there isn't, then one is as good as another and it becomes strictly a matter of preference. This is what I concluded from Tooles line of investigation, he was looking for what the market liked best that would make the most money for Sidney.

If it were just pure "preference" in the way you mean, then the results would never converge as it did. Nor would it correlate with what we all consider to be audio goodness with respect to measurements.

If expert listeners and magazine reviewers alike say they like the same thing when all other bias is taken away who else would we want to build speakers for?

 

[Soundminded]

If you are saying what I think you are saying, it is absolutely true that you can screw up the sound of a good speaker with poor acoustic treatment. Here is a simulation for 1 inch absorber:

As we see, it absorbs the reflections above 2K but below, it drops quickly to no absorption. The result is that you have now filtered that reflection and with it, messed up the timbre of the overall sound you hear.

But that need not be the case. As I mentioned, side reflections can be a good thing and if you do need to treat the walls, you can use thicker material.


How is that any better for a speaker with poor off-axis response? But yes, it is all a system. You start with good speakers and then proceed to what to do about the room.


It really is not that dependent. Yes, it is not zero effect but most of what happens there is in control of the speaker.


I meant that in the context of Harman speakers, not just a driver by itself. Here are the specs for one of theirs:

Listening Window Response (on axis): ±1.0dB from 65Hz to 18kHz
First Reflections Response (off-axis): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 17kHz
In-Room Response (Predicted): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 18kHz

Clearly a lot is reaching the listener at 15 Khz. If you mean front and back walls, yes, if you go behind the speaker it doesn't have the same response. So if you need, you can put absorbers there.


If you measured it, it would change a lot! The reason for that lack of change is that our brain quickly adapts and starts to ignore some of the changes. I will talk more about this when we get into acoustic treatment.


How do you duplicate a document without its original? I think you think you are doing that but such an endeavour has no answer.


Yet if I put you in the hot seat in that blind test, 9 out of 10 chance you would pick the speaker with the smoothest frequency response over others. And I dare say, over your own speakers if they lack the same .


I am all for a hard puzzle that has an answer. What you seek has no answer. I ask again: what is the true sound of the guitar or the vocals in the James Taylor track that was used in the harman listening test? On what basis would you evaluate it if it is not as I said?


And that is the type of analysis that everyone who sits through a blind test does! You hear a sound, you imagine if it is right or not and vote appropriately.

Now if the results pointed to some odd set of measurements and design techniques, we could question it. But here, what it points to is what we as audio people always say is the truth: not manipulating the waveform that comes out of our sources. On what basis do we want to say we deviate from that yet we are searching for better truth?


Both types were presented: expert listeners who are trained and casual listeners. They have tested young people and old. They have tested audiophiles and not. They have tested stereo salespeople and magazine reviewers. As I post in the Sean Olive report, the results essentially point to the same set of conclusions. From his paper:

"The conclusions from this study are summarized in the
following.

1) The loudspeaker preferences of trained listeners were
generally the same as those measured using a group of
nominally untrained listeners composed of audio retailers,
marketing and sales people, audio reviewers, and college
students.
[...]
4) There were clear correlations between listeners’
loudspeaker preferences and a set of acoustic anechoic
measurements. The most preferred loudspeakers had the
smoothest, flattest, and most extended frequency
responses maintained uniformly off axis."


If it were just pure "preference" in the way you mean, then the results would never converge as it did. Nor would it correlate with what we all consider to be audio goodness with respect to measurements.

If expert listeners and magazine reviewers alike say they like the same thing when all other bias is taken away who else would we want to build speakers for?

Whew, this is going to take some time to respond to.

"Here is a simulation for 1 inch absorber:"

What is it for 1/2" sheetrock? That's far more typical. What about for a drape over a window? Probably not nearly so nice. But if the top octave is beamed straight at the listener while lower octaves are far less directional than it won't matter, the reflected early arriving sounds from the front and sides will have little or no content in the top octave and will sound distorted. That's the result of my own experiments.

"But yes, it is all a system. You start with good speakers and then proceed to what to do about the room."

There's usually very little you can do about the room. If you live with someone else it's their home too and if you try to turn a living room into an acoustics laboratory you may have to choose between domestic tranquility and your idea of the perfect listening room. But even if you live alone and can do as you please, short of buiding an anechoic chamber, the most horrible place to listen to anything even if it's ideal for performing certain types of measurements, you will have room interactions. The only option, deal with it, engineer the equipment to accomodate the room and not the other way around. How? Good question. The only one who really tried failed even if he made a billion dollar a year privately owned company starting with it.

"It really is not that dependent"

Live room, dead room, not that dependent? Here we disagree again. Take your speakers into an unfinished basement where bare concrete or cinder block walls are the reflecting surfaces and see how it sounds. Then take them outside where there are no reflective surfaces. These are extreme cases. Most rooms lie somewhere in between but it does matter. In a 14 X 14 room I put a throw rug on a linoleum floor and it took me two days to get the system approximately back to where it had been without it.

"First Reflections Response (off-axis): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 17kHz
In-Room Response (Predicted): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 18kHz"

At what angle? In what room? I guarantee that it wasn't done with a single forward firing tweeter. Yet that is how the overwhelming majority of speakers on the market are configured. When Toole retired and his Revel Salon Ultima was redesigned, that's how it was configured too.

"How do you duplicate a document without its original? I think you think you are doing that but such an endeavour has no answer."

You can't. But music heard at different venues can be remembered to have characteristics that you'd expect from an accurate recording/playback system that reproductions by the current technology lacks. Like reverberation that surrounds you in a good venue like a symphony orchestra heard in Boston Symphony Hall or a pipe organ concert heard in a cathedral, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir heard at the Tabernacle. You don't get that from the best of todays technology and no amount of imagining or pretending can alter that fact.

"Yet if I put you in the hot seat in that blind test, 9 out of 10 chance you would pick the speaker with the smoothest frequency response over others."

I think that would depend on the recording. My experience with recordings and especially CDs is that their spectral balance is all over the map. If I choose the recordings and you choose the speakers and room, I can decide by my selection which speakers will sound awful compared to the others. Since there is no standard for making recordings, then the one you call a "good recording" is entirely arbitrary and depends usually on which one makes the speaker you like best sound most the way you want to hear it.

"What you seek has no answer. I ask again: what is the true sound of the guitar or the vocals in the James Taylor track that was used in the harman listening test? On what basis would you evaluate it if it is not as I said?"

Only in a laboratory with far more advanced technology than we have today is an exact duplicate possible. However, the basis for evaluation is the resemblance of memories of similar types of music heard live. I don't care whether you heard it two years ago or two seconds ago, the comparison is based strictly on memory because music is an event heard in time and you cannot superimpose the original and the ostensible duplicate to determine where the experiental differences lie. Unfortunately the mathematical models are not yet sufficient to devise a measurement method that is entirely and sufficiently descriptive either.

"not manipulating the waveform that comes out of our sources. On what basis do we want to say we deviate from that yet we are searching for better truth?

The microphones that picked up that waveform captured it from inches to a foot or two away from the source. It's like saying you are going to reconstruct the image of a horse having taken close up photos of the ears, eyes, feet, and tail. Not only doesn't it represent the horse, dimensions are missing. The sound that landed on the microphone was a vector field. The electrical signal is a scalar. When its turned back into sound by the speakers it becomes a vector field again. And that field is so far different from not only what the audience heard but from what landed on the microphone it's .....it's.....it's.......expletive deleted!

Okay, let me pose a question. On a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 means anyone with normal hearing brought into a room blindfolded would know almost immediately almost every time he was hearing a recording and 100 means that an experienced concert goer would be fooled practically every time where do you think the best the current technology has to offer lies? My estimate is at or near 0.

 

[amirm]

Whew, this is going to take some time to respond to.

"Here is a simulation for 1 inch absorber:"

What is it for 1/2" sheetrock? That's far more typical.

As I noted, reflective walls are actually beneficial to a the type of speaker response Harman is advocating. It is only the poor performing speakers with lousy off-axis response who are going to suffer there. From Dr. Toole:

"About the only negative that can be raised against early lateral reflections is that
they will mercilessly reveal loudspeakers that have poor off-axis frequency
response. Over the years there have been lots of these, including some prime
examples in the studio monitor category. The best solution in these instances is
to absorb the off-axis misbehavior. This, in fact, became a bit of a fashion in the
“dead end” control rooms of a couple of decades ago. But, why start with bad
loudspeakers to begin with?"

So get good speakers and you can leave that lovely wall in your living room bare!

What about for a drape over a window? Probably not nearly so nice.

Actually if you get drape that is made of thick material like cotton then it can be surprisingly good as an absorber. Here is one measurement:

We see that it acts like a nice broadband absorber which is what want. If you have sheers though, it will likely filter out the tweeter only and that won't be so good. Ultimately, a good speaker does not mean you can bury it underground and it still sounds hifi.

But if the top octave is beamed straight at the listener while lower octaves are far less directional than it won't matter, the reflected early arriving sounds from the front and sides will have little or no content in the top octave and will sound distorted. That's the result of my own experiments.

Controlled directivity is a fine approach too.

"But yes, it is all a system. You start with good speakers and then proceed to what to do about the room."

There's usually very little you can do about the room. If you live with someone else it's their home too and if you try to turn a living room into an acoustics laboratory you may have to choose between domestic tranquility and your idea of the perfect listening room.

It is a myth propagated by Internet forums and a few acoustic people who hang around them that you need to "treat" your living room with fiberglass and such. Nature furnishings in the room can do a very good job of making the room proper as a listening environment. I will have a lot more to say on this too in the future . But for a taste of that, see my point above related to curtain choice and how it acts like a proper absorber. Or read my low frequency optimization article where you can optimize your response -- where the room has the highest impact -- without using one bit of acoustic products!

But even if you live alone and can do as you please, short of buiding an anechoic chamber, the most horrible place to listen to anything even if it's ideal for performing certain types of measurements, you will have room interactions. The only option, deal with it, engineer the equipment to accomodate the room and not the other way around. How? Good question. The only one who really tried failed even if he made a billion dollar a year privately owned company starting with it.

Well, I am here to tell you that a well behaved speaker will solve the room acoustics in a well furnished room above the transition frequency. And it is not just me saying it. 30 years of research and countless data points says it.

"It really is not that dependent"

Live room, dead room, not that dependent? Here we disagree again. Take your speakers into an unfinished basement where bare concrete or cinder block walls are the reflecting surfaces and see how it sounds.

An empty room is not an appropriate space. You need to get your reverberation time at 500 Hz down to about .4 to .5 seconds. Fortunately, large scale research of 600 homes shows that our living rooms fall in this area naturally. So listen there, not in your empty basement .

Then take them outside where there are no reflective surfaces. These are extreme cases.

No argument. They sound bad there too even though they are more "accurate" that way.

"First Reflections Response (off-axis): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 17kHz
In-Room Response (Predicted): ±0.5dB from 70Hz to 18kHz"

At what angle? In what room? I guarantee that it wasn't done with a single forward firing tweeter.

Measurements were made in anechoic chamber. The prediction is based on their modeling of early and late reflections.

"Yet if I put you in the hot seat in that blind test, 9 out of 10 chance you would pick the speaker with the smoothest frequency response over others."

I think that would depend on the recording. My experience with recordings and especially CDs is that their spectral balance is all over the map. If I choose the recordings and you choose the speakers and room, I can decide by my selection which speakers will sound awful compared to the others. Since there is no standard for making recordings, then the one you call a "good recording" is entirely arbitrary and depends usually on which one makes the speaker you like best sound most the way you want to hear it.

And that is the problem with your approach . Using proper science to design speakers you get far more consistency. If you are seeing such content dependent performance, it means that the frequency response is uneven. Think of a dip of 5 db at 2.5 Khz. If you play something with lots of energy in that band, you will hear it. If you don't, much less so. It is the law of probabilities. This is why "low Q" dips, i.e. when the dip is wide, is more audible. There is more chance of music falling in that bucket. Good technology has fewer corner cases.

Unfortunately the mathematical models are not yet sufficient to devise a measurement method that is entirely and sufficiently descriptive either.

Yet we have that very thing, presented over and over again at AES and ASA and put in practice behind many products.

"not manipulating the waveform that comes out of our sources. On what basis do we want to say we deviate from that yet we are searching for better truth?

The microphones that picked up that waveform captured it from inches to a foot or two away from the source.

That is not the source I was talking about. I am talking about the source in your home: CD player, LP, etc. That is the only reference we have. And messing with its frequency response cannot be a good thing.

Okay, let me pose a question. On a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 means anyone with normal hearing brought into a room blindfolded would know almost immediately almost every time he was hearing a recording and 100 means that an experienced concert goer would be fooled practically every time where do you think the best the current technology has to offer lies? My estimate is at or near 0.

It would be my answer too and hence the reason we don't want to keep talking about live and our memory of it. It has nothing to do with the conversation. We start with the same source -- a CD or LP -- and then we compare speakers behind a screen. We hear large differences. No squinting necessary. No nervousness to take away small differences. We hear clearly audible changes. Then we have to decide as we must in our chosen hobby. Which is best? Then you answer. That is what should count if most others answer the same.

Of note, I have taken the Harman test twice. The first time I gave the JBL better scores 2/3 times. In one of 3, I barely gave the B&W better score. In the second test, I gave the JBL better scores across the board. If there was any doubt in my mind about these things being random, it went away the second time around. Yes, there was that one vote for B&W. So it is not perfect. But is hell of a lot more perfect than other theories . In my view that is....

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

As I noted, reflective walls are actually beneficial to a the type of speaker response Harman is advocating. It is only the poor performing speakers with lousy off-axis response who are going to suffer there. From Dr. Toole:

"About the only negative that can be raised against early lateral reflections is that
they will mercilessly reveal loudspeakers that have poor off-axis frequency
response. Over the years there have been lots of these, including some prime
examples in the studio monitor category. The best solution in these instances is
to absorb the off-axis misbehavior. This, in fact, became a bit of a fashion in the
“dead end” control rooms of a couple of decades ago. But, why start with bad
loudspeakers to begin with?"

So get good speakers and you can leave that lovely wall in your living room bare!


Actually if you get drape that is made of thick material like cotton then it can be surprisingly good as an absorber. Here is one measurement:

We see that it acts like a nice broadband absorber which is what want. If you have sheers though, it will likely filter out the tweeter only and that won't be so good. Ultimately, a good speaker does not mean you can bury it underground and it still sounds hifi.


Controlled directivity is a fine approach too.


It is a myth propagated by Internet forums and a few acoustic people who hang around them that you need to "treat" your living room with fiberglass and such. Nature furnishings in the room can do a very good job of making the room proper as a listening environment. I will have a lot more to say on this too in the future . But for a taste of that, see my point above related to curtain choice and how it acts like a proper absorber. Or read my low frequency optimization article where you can optimize your response -- where the room has the highest impact -- without using one bit of acoustic products!


Well, I am here to tell you that a well behaved speaker will solve the room acoustics in a well furnished room above the transition frequency. And it is not just me saying it. 30 years of research and countless data points says it.


An empty room is not an appropriate space. You need to get your reverberation time at 500 Hz down to about .4 to .5 seconds. Fortunately, large scale research of 600 homes shows that our living rooms fall in this area naturally. So listen there, not in your empty basement .


No argument. They sound bad there too even though they are more "accurate" that way.


Measurements were made in anechoic chamber. The prediction is based on their modeling of early and late reflections.


And that is the problem with your approach . Using proper science to design speakers you get far more consistency. If you are seeing such content dependent performance, it means that the frequency response is uneven. Think of a dip of 5 db at 2.5 Khz. If you play something with lots of energy in that band, you will hear it. If you don't, much less so. It is the law of probabilities. This is why "low Q" dips, i.e. when the dip is wide, is more audible. There is more chance of music falling in that bucket. Good technology has fewer corner cases.


Yet we have that very thing, presented over and over again at AES and ASA and put in practice behind many products.


That is not the source I was talking about. I am talking about the source in your home: CD player, LP, etc. That is the only reference we have. And messing with its frequency response cannot be a good thing.


It would be my answer too and hence the reason we don't want to keep talking about live and our memory of it. It has nothing to do with the conversation. We start with the same source -- a CD or LP -- and then we compare speakers behind a screen. We hear large differences. No squinting necessary. No nervousness to take away small differences. We hear clearly audible changes. Then we have to decide as we must in our chosen hobby. Which is best? Then you answer. That is what should count if most others answer the same.

Of note, I have taken the Harman test twice. The first time I gave the JBL better scores 2/3 times. In one of 3, I barely gave the B&W better score. In the second test, I gave the JBL better scores across the board. If there was any doubt in my mind about these things being random, it went away the second time around. Yes, there was that one vote for B&W. So it is not perfect. But is hell of a lot more perfect than other theories . In my view that is....

I guess I missed the original story, Amir. Are these trips to Harman recent? Because you speak like a man fresh from an epiphany. Congratulations.

Tim

 

[Soundminded]

Me; "Unfortunately the mathematical models are not yet sufficient to devise a measurement method that is entirely and sufficiently descriptive either."
Amir: "Yet we have that very thing, presented over and over again at AES and ASA and put in practice behind many products."

I know it will eventually come but I don't think quite yet. The model that will need much further development is called Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD.) Acoustic fields are fluidic fields, the operational fluid being air. CFD has been developed for an entirely different application and includes both fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. It applies to among other things the performance of air conditioning systems, the fluid dynamic aspect relating to the air flow analagous to a DC generated fluid field and its distribution in various spaces including ductwork, plenums, equipment racks, and rooms. (The model is often used with multiple sources to simulate not only normal performace but adequate performace when any one of the multiple units fails.) This program was considered even for its purpose less than wholly reliable 4 years ago, I don't know how far it's come since. At that time the best software cost over $100,000. The model would have to be modified to incorporate field excitation at all frequencies across the audible spectrum and take into account the acoustic coefficient of absorption of all reflective surfaces as a function of frequency. (In the past I was a member of both AES and ASA.)

Can high frequency dispersion be wide and be bad also? Yes as I discovered 4 years ago. Experimenting with multidirectional tweeter arrays I discovered at least to my own satisfaction what gave Snell type AII and AIII their peculiar characteristic treble sound. It was excessive lateral reflections in the range of about 6 to 8 khz. In the original speakers this effect was created by affixing a small piece of polyurethane to the center of the tweeter dome. I asked Peter Snell's mother about this at the 1987 Stereophile show in NYC (she was there demonstrating the then new AIII shortly after Peter Snell's death.) She said it was to improve dispersion. It made sense, increase lateral dispersion by restricting on axis dispersion. Only they went too far. I liked the sound of that coloration and listened to it for about a day. Then I zapped it by increasing the LF cutoff frequency and it was gone. I have never had any desire to hear it again or to own that speaker knowing how it works and knowing I could get it back again with just a few circuit changes. I also found it interesting that I rememberd that sound and recognized it immediately even though I hadn't heard it in about 15 years (I knew someone who owned AII and heard it at his home.)

 

[microstrip]

(...) So get good speakers and you can leave that lovely wall in your living room bare! (...)

I hope you have nothing against diffusors!

 

[Soundminded]

Amir; "If you are seeing such content dependent performance, it means that the frequency response is uneven."

So you are saying then that I can take any CD recording from any major recording company and it will sound "good" on what you define as good speakers and other equipment without any further equalization. I think we will not come to an agreement on this point. I see that James Taylor is the "reference" Harman used to convince those who experienced the "training" you got that JBL/Revel speakers were best.

I was lucky enough to attend two live versus recorded demonstrations of AR3 speakers when I was young. One was with a guitarist and one was with a 1905 Nickelodeon. I'm not going to tell you that the speakers were a dead ringer for the live music, they weren't. What was remarkable to me was their similarity. This was especially surprising to me since playing commercial recordings they invariably had a muffled treble I didn't like and I associated as being very inaccurate. I only recently found out on another web site why. For one thing when the midrange and tweeter level controls were at their nominal "dot" positions they were not at their flattest based on lab measurements. For that they both had to be at maximum. The dots were for AR's expectations that many commercial recordings had a deliberate treble boost. But the AR 1" fried egg dome tweeter and later the 3/4" dome used in AR3a were known to have a high end rolloff. Roy Allison who conducted the demonstrations boosted the treble control on his Dynaco PAS3X preamp to compensate. Admittedly the demos were highly contrived and in no way reflected their performance in common use. However they were considered a benchmark in their day and they are on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution.

 

[amirm]

I hope you have nothing against diffusors!

Not at all. They actually help on first reflections. Just make sure they are very thick though. Engineered ones should be about 8 inches deep.

 

[amirm]

Amir; "If you are seeing such content dependent performance, it means that the frequency response is uneven."

So you are saying then that I can take any CD recording from any major recording company and it will sound "good" on what you define as good speakers and other equipment without any further equalization.

No, I was not saying that. I am saying if you like and dislike different speakers based on what you play, then the speaker performance is content dependent and that can't be a good thing. That is very different than saying the speaker will make a bad recording good.

I see that James Taylor is the "reference" Harman used to convince those who experienced the "training" you got that JBL/Revel speakers were best.

No, that is just one of a number of tracks used. Major compression standards are developed mostly based on a handful of audio clips known to be revealing of compression artifacts. That we use them is not an indication of cooking the test. As for training, it goes way beyond just listening to these few tracks. It requires acuity to detect response errors. Some of that software is released to the public: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...Listen-Software-is-Now-Available-For-Download

BTW, I apologize if I am coming across argumentative. I don't mean to fight you on every point.

 

[Soundminded]

No, I was not saying that. I am saying if you like and dislike different speakers based on what you play, then the speaker performance is content dependent and that can't be a good thing. That is very different than saying the speaker will make a bad recording good.


No, that is just one of a number of tracks used. Major compression standards are developed mostly based on a handful of audio clips known to be revealing of compression artifacts. That we use them is not an indication of cooking the test. As for training, it goes way beyond just listening to these few tracks. It requires acuity to detect response errors. Some of that software is released to the public: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...Listen-Software-is-Now-Available-For-Download

BTW, I apologize if I am coming across argumentative. I don't mean to fight you on every point.

Amir, thank you for your responses. I do not see arguing, debating, disagreeing as negative at all. An exchange of ideas even if people don't agree...especially if people don't agree as long as it remains civil is what I enjoy about this type of web site. It wouldn't be a very interesting world if we all agreed on everything. Disagreement is the basis for discussion.

Speaking about disagreement, your posting of the curve showing the coefficient of absorption as a function of frequency is extreme but typical for most materials, that is it increases with increasing frequency. But you also said that the first reflection of one speaker was very flat to 17 khz. I presume this was the reflection from the front wall, the wall behind the speaker and was the result of a rear firing tweeter as would be the case with the original Revel Salon Ultima. (am I right about that?) Do you think this was just an accident or do you think the speaker's output was carefully tailored to that room to give that result? What do you suppose would have happened to the FR of the reflection in a different room with a different wall material and covering (even the type of paint, water based latex most commonly used in US homes versus say oil base paint makes a difference in reflectivity.) Did they say anything about the FR of the lateral reflections from the side walls that come after the first reflection off the front wall? I'm also curious to know what you think about why the rear firing tweeter was removed from the second version of Salon Ultima after Toole retired.

 

[Soundminded]

Amir; "No, I was not saying that. I am saying if you like and dislike different speakers based on what you play, then the speaker performance is content dependent and that can't be a good thing. That is very different than saying the speaker will make a bad recording good."

Amir, I'm completely baffled by this statement. How can speaker performance be content dependent? It has the same frequency response, the same phase response, the same dispersion characteristics no matter what recording is being played. BTW, how do you define a "good recording?"

 

[Soundminded]

Amir: "Major compression standards are developed mostly based on a handful of audio clips known to be revealing of compression artifacts."

Again you have me baffled. My understanding of compression is that it is used principally to overcome the dynamic range limitations of analog recording and transmission media, phonograph records, magnetic tape, radio transmission. Where possible compensating expansion is used at the playback end but to get acceptable results compression and expansion must be carefully calibrated such as the case with Dolby noise reduction. Other systems such as DBX and for those old enough to remember Fairchild Compander that are not calibrated and systems that don't respond quickly enough (creating a pumping sound) are often not acceptable for high fidelity use. Another use is to keep a radio station's broadcast signal fairly constant, typical of pop music stations. I don't see what compression has to do with the current discussion. Please enlighten me.

 

[Robh3606]

So you are saying then that I can take any CD recording from any major recording company and it will sound "good" on what you define as good speakers and other equipment without any further equalization.

Hello Soundmind

No that's really not it at all. What you will hear is what's on the disk nothing more nothing less. If it's a lousy recording you get to hear it warts and all and on the flip side a good recording sounds really good. I don't know about you but I don't EQ for recordings. What's there is all there is I don't like to embellish and add what's not there.

As I see it a bad speaker will make everything sound somewhat similar due to it's own colorations being added to the mix. A prime example to me are the Bose cubes. It all gets homogenized and looses it's unique sonic signature. The sound stage colapses and the imaging goes right out the window with it.

Rob

 

[Soundminded]

Hello Rob

I haven't heard any speakers I like although I gave up shopping many many years ago and only rarely hear "what's hot" these days. Instead I've redesigned the speakers I already own according to my own ideas. I equalize everything. I like to have as much control over how a recording sounds as I can get. I find it takes a long time and many tries to get the results that I find convincing (I think convincing is a better term than accurate. As Amir points out, accurate may be an impossible goal because we don't know what the original sounded like, it's invariably a guess.) I'm not really an audiophile in the usual sense of the word. I see this as an intellectual challenge. Not only don't I get emotional over any kind of machinery I don't get emotional about music either. But I do enjoy it. I've been listening to both live and recorded music all of my life. I also played the piano and the clarinet when I was young. I was not a very good musician. I've tried to become a good listener though. I wish I could hear those live versus recorded demos I posted about eariler again. I wonder how I'd react to them now, if I'd be nearly as convinced.

 

[terryj]

Hi greg

are we missing each other here???

Please cite your scientifc poll for that conclusion. Please define the demographics, size opf the sample group and other factors. I think you meant to say the majority of listenres, participating in the Harmon test, made thier decisions on FR, hence the tern majority and not unnanamity. Again no speaker is perfect and trade offs most be made. Those trade offs are often atrrtibutble to price and genre of speaker drivers.

Well, you actually quoted it so why do I have to repeat it?? But I will bow to your request (hoping we can engage civilly)...here is what I said "Still don't get it. There seems to be a denial of the harmon findings. Simply put (hope I have it right enough) 'The majority of listeners prefer smooth Fr on and off axis'. ''

Quite clear it was my parahrase of what I thought were harmons conclusions. Luckily soon after Amir posted something so I can directly quote Sean Olive on this very question..The most preferred loudspeakers had the smoothest, flattest, and most extended frequency responses maintained uniformly off axis

Not sure if it is terribly different than my take, but there ya go anyways. Yes, they use (and I have always noted so) the term 'majority' etc etc. In any group of people there is always a Bell curve, so if your argument is that someone could prefer the ML's then yes, of course.

I never doubted the test or its' rtesult. It's the interpretation I have trouble with.

Hmm. The test and result of that test has just been quoted above from Sean..how is it being misinterpreted??

We have discussed this ad nauseum. Are uyou saying i am unable to find any recording that sound like real instrumentts?

As I asked, are we missing each other? It was prob my fault for not being clear, sorry. I was not referring to being able to find a good recording..rather that no matter what recording we have, we should be able to reproduce it. Maybe I just made it muddier, if so forget it, let's not get bogged down in 'you said this and I said that'.

That's a red herring. I repeat again I want the sound of real music. or as close as I can get given the the state of technology and my abilty to pay. Please don't make that tired argument about hall ambience.

Hall ambience?? Crikey, it never even entered my head! Am beginning to wonder just who you are having a conversation with.

It would be completely unacceptable to have an amp with the 'accuracy' of the best speaker available. How that is a red herring or has something to do with hall ambience escapes me.

I think it is implicit in your answer too, if you want to look at it.

Transducers are generally the most colored device in the playback chaion.

Yes of course. Do we want more or less coloured is now the question.

Tell me Terry, of what would I be afraid? I have no monetary or academic interest.

(I think you meant not having any 'published' studies' or somesuch rather than 'not interested'???) I think you may have missed the point. You DO have a vested interest in the subject...it is part and parcel of your audiophile identity (just as mine is).

You have constantly argued against measurements or suchlike, that is a very common trait of audiophiles (trust your ears over measurements always, against any and all 'studies' which run counter, never think that your ears can be fooled by any mechanism whatsoever). All of that is fine, I only mention it to show that you do indeed have stakes in the question, that's all.

In your later post you quoted about 'time' etc. Look, I too have a 'thing' about time! I mentioned earlier that those results ('correct time' ) are audible and desirable...yet make no mistake, they are very much subservient to FR (which also simultaneously makes 'time' icing on the cake and so that mush more desirable! haha).

In that regard, even tho I agree with you totally on the time thing it still does not invalidate the usefulness of FR as a metric to judge preference.

I could have missed it, but can you state explicitly just why you seem against that finding so much?? You did catch my earlier bit about how in a lot of cases poor time will show up on a FR?? But even then, let's argue that FR is completely blind to time. Why are you so strongly 'against' it being a useful metric?

Maybe you own ML's dunno. IF the identities had been kept quiet, is it possible that you would have had fewer problems??

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Terry's this is pretty simple. If the Harman tests were revealing a preference, among trained and untrained listeners, for the expensive, audiophile- endorsed brands like Gregg's Martin Logan's, the vocal subjectivists on this board would be declaring Harman's research a breakthrough. It is wrong, for a hundred unfounded reasons, because it disagrees with them.

Tim

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Hello Rob

I haven't heard any speakers I like although I gave up shopping many many years ago and only rarely hear "what's hot" these days. Instead I've redesigned the speakers I already own according to my own ideas. I equalize everything. I like to have as much control over how a recording sounds as I can get. I find it takes a long time and many tries to get the results that I find convincing (I think convincing is a better term than accurate. As Amir points out, accurate may be an impossible goal because we don't know what the original sounded like, it's invariably a guess.) I'm not really an audiophile in the usual sense of the word. I see this as an intellectual challenge. Not only don't I get emotional over any kind of machinery I don't get emotional about music either. But I do enjoy it. I've been listening to both live and recorded music all of my life. I also played the piano and the clarinet when I was young. I was not a very good musician. I've tried to become a good listener though. I wish I could hear those live versus recorded demos I posted about eariler again. I wonder how I'd react to them now, if I'd be nearly as convinced.

So what kind of speakers do you use, and how have you altered them?

Tim