It’s All a Preference

[Robh3606]

As far as I can read in page 379 of the book "Sound reproduction" they have different weighting. But I do not have the time to go to to the original paper to understand exactly how it is done.

Thanks

Damn my copies at work . I went to the original papers as well and the measurements and environment are not the same. I think he was testing in a room not an anecholic chamber he also was not doing the spinarama thing. Not sure if the weighting would be the same under those circumstances. Just have to wait to tomorrow.

Rob

 

[Robh3606]

As Roger would say , The term "wide sweet spot is an oxymoron". Whatever altruism we may feel for our fellow audiophiles sitting on the couch with us,notwithstanding. I have sat bobsled style listenig to the Wilson Alexandria and the Sandersoundsytem 10c. Consider this:

Hello Gregadd

Roger as in Green Mountain Audio??

We do need to pay careful attention to graphs as we can manipulate them like suqeezing an accordian in and out. Squeeze it together and we can make them appear like a compilation of peaks and jagged edges. Pull it out and it appears smooth and flat!

OK they can be manipulated by changing the scales, but what does this have to do with the posted response graphs?? These have the same scales so the comparison is a valid one.

 

[rbbert]

Roger as in Roger Sanders

 

[microstrip]

I have access to the paper so if there is something you want me to look up, I can. For now, here is a graph related to the topic at hand, showing that preference for speakers is position dependent. But based on this test, it does not serve to reverse the order of preference in "live" tests. The top graph would be what you would be experiencing either in Harman tests or the ones you would do:

Amir,

Thanks, but I can not conclude anything from a single figure - I have to say that I even do not know for sure what means (a) Live test (b) Binaural test - in this case. I have to see, even briefly , the whole paper. Anyway my point is that I can not find any evidence that the M speakers was listened in appropriate conditions, as my experience is that dipoles are very critical to position and a good position for a box speaker is never a good position for a dipole. Could you tell me , so I will be sure once for all, if the tests of speaker M were carried in mono and with a single speaker?

 

[microstrip]

(...) Well Larry Greenhill liked it. He said it was the best speaker he ever had in his listening room....until something like a Salon 3 comes out. C'mon Mr. Voecks, let's get crackin'. This is four years old. What have you doen for us lately?

Curious. At that time my idea is that the review was subjectively disappointing, boring and unfair. Bass tones, organ music, Itunes, more bass strokes , didn't produce as much air and soundstage depth, timbral qualities of piano. Comparisons were only carried with the old model. So little was said that John Atkinson had to complement it later.

Harman should have been much more pleased with the enthusiastic and properly carried subjective review that the Salons 2's got from Robert Harley at The Absolute Sound.
http://www.avguide.com/review/revel-ultima-salon2-loudspeaker

 

[mep]

Amir,

Thanks, but I can not conclude anything from a single figure - I have to say that I even do not know for sure what means (a) Live test (b) Binaural test - in this case. I have to see, even briefly , the whole paper. Anyway my point is that I can not find any evidence that the M speakers was listened in appropriate conditions, as my experience is that dipoles are very critical to position and a good position for a box speaker is never a good position for a dipole. Could you tell me once for all if the tests of speaker M were carried in mono?

From what I understand, all Harman speakers tests are purely done in mono.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Semaaantics is fun.

Revel speakers are at the pinnacle of sound reproduction. Their extremely low distortion provides a superbly enjoyable musical experience. Designed using objective double-blind studies, and with components manufactured in house, they perform as beautifully in your home as they do in our showroom. We usually have a number of Revel speakers on display including the superlative Salon 2, and the small but incredible M22 bookshelf.

Emphasis added

Semantics can be fun, Greg, but we're not discussing semantics. What you quoted above is marketing. What you quoted before, that I responded to, was not.

Tim

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

From what I understand, all Harman speakers tests are purely done in mono.

I'm sure Harman tests there speakers in stereo, but yes, these blind comparison tests of frequency response are conducted in mono.

Tim

 

[mep]

I'm sure Harman tests there speakers in stereo, but yes, these blind comparison tests of frequency response are conducted in mono.

Tim

I was specifically referring to Harman’s infamous tests they conduct with speakers whooshing around on their pedestal with the trained listeners studiously declaring Harman speakers the winner.

What I find ironic is that I started this thread to talk about how people pick their components based on preference. All of a sudden, the thread morphed into a discussion of how Harman has demonstrated that people have a preference for how they design their speakers. That took on a life of its own in the form of a Harman love fest of their testing/design methodology and how that shows a convergence of opinion on measurements and perceived sound quality. Meanwhile back at the ranch, we have come up with one person on this forum who has replied to my request to know how many on this forum actually own Harman branded speakers. Therefore, I’m not getting the connection between Harman’s testing resulting in people running out and buying their speakers-preference or no preference for their measurements and testing.

 

[terryj]

Therefore, I’m not getting the connection between Harman’s testing resulting in people running out and buying their speakers-preference or no preference for their measurements and testing.

This surprises you??

We are on an audio forum, there is NO common factor possible that can be used to (pre) judge preference. We all know that right?

Audio is mystical, magical, unable to be comprehended nor narrowed down to such base earthly considerations like measurements.

For hecks sake, let's LOOK at the measurements that are causing so much eyebrow rainsing and justifications (like having no resonances, in phase and therefore immune from the evils of the room etc and indeed all other speakers)

Look, FULL of resonances, every sudden peak and dip IS an abrupt phase change. Right smack bang in the middle of our 'sensitive zone'....the magical midrange of the speakers indeed. It is all over the shop, there is *nothing* hi fidelity about it.

So it satifies NONE of the caveats Roger Sanders talks about in the quote given (for completeness, howzabout we compare the measurements of Rogers speakers to speaker M?? Anyone got them?)

But, as we know, there are things science cannot measure, and that the ear is the most exquisite measuring instrument in the known universe.

COMPLETELY impossible that when heard blind against something with even a modicum of better engineering the other might be preferred.....

 

[mep]

And your point is?

 

[amirm]

Could you tell me , so I will be sure once for all, if the tests of speaker M were carried in mono and with a single speaker?

Yes, mono with one speaker.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

But, as we know, there are things science cannot measure, and that the ear is the most exquisite measuring instrument in the known universe.

Close. The subjectivist Audiophile's ear is the most exquisite measuring instrument in the known universe. Musicians barely hear the music at all; they listen past it to the charts, and can barely recognize the tonality of their own instruments. Recording engineers are complete buffoons who appreciate nothing but loud and bright, and whose ham-fisted machinations just stand in the way between the Audiophile's Sentient System and it's ability to transcend the crude world of recording and retrieve the Original Event. Civilians? Deaf. Can't tell the difference between Wilsons and earbuds. Subjectivists? Do they listen at all? No, they stare intently at charts and make comments like "Did you see that amazing guitar solo? There it is...right there."

All of this, unless, of course, they agree with the Audiophile. Even measurements are good when they agree with the audiophile. Then they are redeemed.

Tim

 

[Robh3606]

Roger as in Roger Sanders

Thanks

That's odd considering Dipoles and narrow dispersion?? Granted they do have nulls on the sides but the back radiates as the front. He goes on about the evils of wide dispersion speakers but seems to ignore the backwave of the stat panels??

Am I missing something here??

Rob

 

[Soundminded]

Curious. At that time my idea is that the review was subjectively disappointing, boring and unfair. Bass tones, organ music, Itunes, more bass strokes , didn't produce as much air and soundstage depth, timbral qualities of piano. Comparisons were only carried with the old model. So little was said that John Atkinson had to complement it later.

Harman should have been much more pleased with the enthusiastic and properly carried subjective review that the Salons 2's got from Robert Harley at The Absolute Sound.
http://www.avguide.com/review/revel-ultima-salon2-loudspeaker

Well he said some other things too. Here's what JA said and quoting Greenhill;

"With the Ultima Salon2, Revel's design team has taken the conventional concept of a moving-coil box loudspeaker to the limit of what is currently possible. As Larry Greenhill wrote, "a new reference standard in floorstanding loudspeakers." Indeed!—John Atkinson"

I find it impossible to take JA seriously. On another blog site he once told me he sits at a 64 band graphic equalizer and tweaks his recordings to perfection being able to hear and ajust for 0.1 db increments but he would not budge a bass or treble control to improve playback of a recording. Here's more of JA's comments from the same review

"Erick and I were working on the provisional mixes last fall, monitoring with the Revel Salon2s, and it was apparent that for the concert's opener, Curtis Mayfield's "It's All Right," we needed to add some mild equalization to the five vocal tracks in order to compensate for the cardioid mikes not being quite close enough to give the full proximity effect demanded by this kind of music. I dialed in +3dB in the upper bass for each of the vocal tracks and Erick gave a listen.

"Something's not right," he said. "Did you apply the EQ to the second tenors?"

I looked at the settings. Under pressure to work fast, I had applied the EQ to just four of the five vocal tracks. The second tenor track was indeed playing back flat."

So the mikes were too far away so he used equalization to fix it. What kind of recording engineer is that? He needed the mike's proximity effect to get the tone right. Talk about one mistake compensatig for another. Maybe that's the best he could do at that point to cover up his mistake.

Here's my favorite again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5VKvkd7WRc&feature=relmfu

"where does the science end and the silliness begin?"

I think he got it backwards. For audiophiles the question is "where does the silliness end and the science begin?" And for some of them the right answer is that it doesn't.

 

[amirm]

Amir-

Firstly, I respect your contributions to the forum very much as a poster and as a moderator. This isn't a personal jibe.

Thank you .

However, in this thread you have specified that every other speaker you have had in store has not unseated the Revels and that you have participated in Harman studies that lead to listener preferences that make Revels sound better than others.

The test speakers are not just Revels. The ones I heard were the stand-alone JBL speakers which my company does not market or demonstrate.

Your other point is Harman has the money backing it to do superior analysis than other smaller speaker companies.

It is a reality. Hiring researchers to build labs such as the one we are talking about and funding the development of systems and software is expensive. The good news is that Harman then tells the world what they have found so that others can copy them. There is no patent or other barriers here. Anyone can wake up tomorrow and build speakers using these learnings. Indeed, there is a DIY guy on AVS Forum who has been following this research and is now marketing his own speakers.

You are unabashedly a fan of their techniques, studies, and methodology to the point of being "giddy" about it all.

I am a man of science. I am an engineer. Whenever I can cut through the folklore, I love to do that. I have been reading and following this work for a year and half now. You have not hear a peep from me until now. The reason is that it has finally all made sense to me and I am sharing what I have learned. That way, you don't have to go through what I went through which may be next to impossible for many who don't work with Harman as a company.

I am excited that I have finally put the pieces together in a way that make sense. I post in another thread my article on low frequency optimization which has come almost entirely from Harman work. The article just went to print for Widescreen Review magazine. Despite the references to Harman, they had no issues at all with it.

The notion that we need to only discuss science that doesn't connect to any commercial entity is not practical. Or that I should censor what I know if it relates to products my company carries. It is precisely that which got me to spend time in these experiments and not have us just try to interpret words out of papers. Or access to Sean Olive, Dr. Toole, Kevin Voecks, Allan Denatier, etc.

The logical conclusion is that Revels are best and you are a dealer for them because of it. That comes across as a sales pitch to me.

The only way you can conclude that is to believe in the research. If you believe in the research, then it is not sales pitch. If you don't believe in the research, then let's have that conversation.

I just think there is a conflict of interest for you in this thread, despite your efforts to be objective.

And I am doing everything in my power to avoid that. I constantly use the name "Haman" as opposed to Revel. I talk about research that is published at Audio Engineering Society and ASA. Neither one of them is worried about commercial connection and want companies to come and present their data for all to learn. If I post a list of Revel speaker features and said they were great, you would have a point. But that is not remotely what I have done.

In this thread, I have the most first hand knowledge with the question posed by Mark: do we have preferences? I have sat through blind tests and spoken to probably the only entity that has researched this. If I stop sharing what I know due to worry that you mention, how do we come out ahead? Is it difficult for members like yourself to see past the commercial connection?

If there are NRC studies that you can talk about, it would appear different.

Of course there are. I have noted them. Here they are:

"LISTENING TESTS - TURNING OPINION INTO FACT
by Floyd E. Toole
National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada, K1A OR6.
Presented at 69th Convention of Audio Engineering Society, 1981, Los Angeles

Abstract
Listening tests of many kinds take place regularly in the audio industry. Most
of them lack the necessary psychological and acoustical controls to produce results
that are of real significance, yet the course of audio is regularly influenced by
opinions of this sort. This paper reviews some familiar and some not so familiar
sources of variability in subjective evaluations of sound quality and proposes a
move to standardize certain basic technical factors currently being decided on
arbitrary bases.
....
In loudspeaker tests there should be a visually opaque but acoustically transparent
screen separating the loudspeaker and listener areas. The psychological
pressures of prior knowledge and suspicions are more than most people can ignore.

Does it work?
We believe that it does.
Listeners occasionally leave with bruised egos, having had a personal theory
or product placed into perspective. Others are positively rewarded for their
serious contemplations and hard work. In general, products that measure well, do
well in listening tests. As equipment improves, however, both the measurements and
the listening tests get harder, and we are more often faced with anomalies, especially
in the case of loudspeakers. Such instances serve merely to focus ones attention on
a problem. In time the problem will be solved.

It has been interesting to observe two aspects of test results that inspire
confidence in the method. Firstly, in spite of normal variability in scoring on
individual rounds of a test, the averaged scores within a series of tests can be
closely reproducible over a long period of time."

Does this read like Dr. Floyd getting religion as soon as he started at Harman? Believes me, it pains me to think those boys up in Canada are responsible for anything good other than maple syrup. But it seemed that they beat us at science of speaker testing.

In some respect, you are an extension of Harman in this thread---and no speaker manufacturer would participate in such a thread other than to state or correct misrepresented facts.

The right way to think of me is as a student who just finished getting his degree and has become a TA. I am simply explaining what I have learned, having had major industry luminaries as my teachers.

 

[amirm]

Here is more Dr. Toole research from NRC:
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=5270

Loudspeaker Measurements and Their Relationship to Listener Preferences: Part 2
Author: Toole, Floyd E.
Affiliation: National Research Council, Ottawa, Ont. K1A OR6, Canada+
JAES Volume 34 Issue 5 pp. 323-348; May 1986

"Using the highly reliable subjective ratings from an earlier study, loudspeaker measurements have been examined for systematic relationships to listener preferences. The resuls has been a logical and orderly organization of measurements that can be used to anticipate listener opinion. With the restriction to listeners with near-normal hearing and loudspeakers of the conventional forward-facing configuration, the data offer convincing proof that a reliable ranking of loudspeaker sound quality can be achieved with specific combinations of high-resolution free-field amplitude-response data. Using such data obtained at several orientations it is possible to estimate loudspeaker performance in the listening room. Listening-room and sound-power measurements alone appear to be susceptible to error in that while truly poor loudspeakers can generally be identified, excellence may not be recognized. High-quality stereo reproduction is compatible with those loudspeakers yielding high sound quality; however, there appears to be an inherent trade-off between the illusions of specific image localization and the sense of spatial involvement.

"

Read and look familiar?

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

It's ok, Amir. Thanks for sharing your personal experiences. No one else here had that experience to report. I think you've gone out of your way to remain objective, but I guess the best thing would have been to never mention Harman, Toole or Olive by name, never to identify any of the speakers involved...no, that wouldn't have worked. The studies are easily traceable back to Harman. Once you've got that, R and I are easy to guess. And anyone who can't ID Martin Logans by that description doesn't care. Your efforts toward objectivity would probably still go unnoticed in the inevitable second-guessing. Really, I think the only thing that could have kept great information from evolving into...this, would have been a clear win for the Martin Logans. Just figure out which audiophile brand is most respected by the subjectivists and give it the revel's scores next time, and you'll evolve from Carnival barker to scientist.

Personally, if I were mod of the gods, I'd just delete the whining, leave the science, close the thread and pin it up in the hall of fame. YMMV

tim

 

[Soundminded]

It's ok, Amir. Thanks for sharing your personal experiences. No one else here had that experience to report. I think you've gone out of your way to remain objective, but I guess the best thing would have been to never mention Harman, Toole or Olive by name, never to identify any of the speakers involved...no, that wouldn't have worked. The studies are easily traceable back to Harman. Once you've got that, R and I are easy to guess. And anyone who can't ID Martin Logans by that description doesn't care. Your efforts toward objectivity would probably still go unnoticed in the inevitable second-guessing. Really, I think the only thing that could have kept great information from evolving into...this, would have been a clear win for the Martin Logans. Just figure out which audiophile brand is most respected by the subjectivists and give it the revel's scores next time, and you'll evolve from Carnival barker to scientist.

Personally, if I were mod of the gods, I'd just delete the whining, leave the science, close the thread and pin it up in the hall of fame. YMMV

tim

I for one hope this thread stays open as long as any of the participants want to continue. If someone tires of it, well there are a lot more threads to choose from.

I may have been the first one to mention Revel Salon Ultima. Since the topic of Harman Industries and Floyd Toole came up, why not. Ultima 1 seemed to me the sum total of Toole's knowledge, his best effort for his life's work even if I haven't read it or don't necessarily agree with what I know of it. It seems to me Salon Ultima 2 was a further extension of Toole's concepts, a continuation of his work. For the first time in many years my curiousity has been aroused, not only because of the fact that this speaker that got so much praise from the two leading hobbyist magazines has been all but forgotten now that far more expensive and presumably profitable products have arrived on the scene but because in relative terms it is so cheap. So I'm thinking about getting out of my cave and going to hear them to find out what they are like and how Voecks results compare to my own ideas.

There seems to also be contradictions I'm trying to understand. JA's measurements seem to contradict the claims for wide dispersion especially at high frequencies made for this speaker yet the text and everything else that's been written seems to claim otherwise. Looking at the tweeter geometry which for me is an important indicator of how it will perform directionally my guess would have been in line with the measurements. Greenhill and JA wrote glowingly about RSU2's bass response yet TAS was less enthusiastic about it saying it was satisfying but not nearly equal to the Wilson TOTL. TAS asks what is? Well with an 11" and 13" focal driver mounted the way they are I'd guess Teledyne AR9's two 12" drivers would give it a run for its money at almost 1/100th of its price. Audiophiles who are too young or not well enough read to know the reports should be aware that four AR1s using an early version of the same driver and four 150 watt Western Electric amplifiers were taken to Riverside Church in NYC by the NY Audio League (Predecessor to AES) in the mid 1950s and gave an impressive demonstration of their capabilities playing against an Aolean Skinner pipe organ. That's not an easy comparison to get by using faking.

So based on Amir's views, I'm going to seek out a demo and find out for myself what this is really all about. Who knows, I might just wind up buying a pair. At $22,000 list I should be able to afford them if I really want them.

 

[microstrip]

I for one hope this thread stays open as long as any of the participants want to continue. If someone tires of it, well there are a lot more threads to choose from.

(...)

So based on Amir's views, I'm going to seek out a demo and find out for myself what this is really all about. Who knows, I might just wind up buying a pair. At $22,000 list I should be able to afford them if I really want them.

Soundminded,

Wise decision following a starting comment I also fully endorse.

Although the magazines are not scientific, I suggest you read them, but always with an open and critical mind. One point I found everywhere in reviews and in the net opinions is that the excellence of these speakers only shows in an appropriate system and very carefully positioned. It seems that even technically perfect amplifiers can make them sound nothing special and the choice of the sources (and even cables ...) is critical. Good luck with your listening - looking for your opinions soon.

As an example look at this review of the Ultima 2http://www.avguide.com/review/the-revel-salon-ultima-2-loudspeaker