The hobby is great. The current state of the industry, not so much. There are many choices.
Munich show 2023 Hifideluxe and MOC .
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The hobby is great. The current state of the industry, not so much. There are many choices.
[please forgive my poor English]
Bugatti. It is even hosted on Bugatti's website and domain name. To me, it epitomizes what Bonzo75 wrote upwards.
A few years ago, I read in a general weekly English-speaking news magazine (maybe The Economist) an article about high-end hifi. It mentioned a speaker brand which had a Russian oligarch as a prospect. The oligarch liked the biggest model of the brand, but found "it was not expensive enough" (it was meant for his yacht, and the price issue was obviously a matter of...credibility towards his other oligarch friends). The speaker manufacturer made him a custom-pair at the price of €300K, and it was OK then. The speaker brand? Tidal.
Regarding this hypothesis ("i am pretty sure it will harm them"), as Tidal already spoke to the so-called 1%, I am pretty sure as far as I am concerned that the Bugatti project will now introduce Tidal into the 0.1% (but be careful guys, the 0.1% have still bigger yachts).
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I like the WE videos. Has the industry really made that much progress in the past 100 years of speaker design beyond more room friendly designs?
Most certainly in the areas of frequency extension, miniaturisation, lower distortion etc, how much that actually contributes to musical enjoyment is a good question.
Miniaturisation yes, I don't know how lower distortion when they ran the speakers with less than a watt. The lowest micro inflection could be heard. At least in the years I visited, I do not know this time. I have heard the kind of low level shifts in music that let you understand the weight of hand of the performer on the cello or violin, only on Yamamura and the Pnoes.
Regarding extension, they have added tweeters to it. Not sure if they had those now.
Its on the Youtube, 3.5 hour long, the uploader is QUALIO AUDIO , Part 1
There's no replacement for displacement. Same with higher efficiency/sensitivity and low distortion. No small speaker is high end, regardless of price.
I agree with @Taiko Audio and @bonzo75, the only progress made is in materials, downsizing and cosmetics. I really like what Lawrence Dickie has done with the Nautilus and Vivid Giya's cabinets tho, but still no high sensitivity systems.
A true high end speaker will always be HUGE and have BIG (yet lightweight, short throw) woofers, that's for sure.
One of the forum users (less active as a poster) who has CH and Goebbel told me that the WE system was his favorite, and he would like tone like that. Another (TZBC) also reported the WE as his favorite, he owned big TADs before, (thankfully) swapped them out for Sigma MAAT (which I really like). These are non-horn users. Into modern current equipment. Justin who reported on WE is into Apogees and SS amps.
The best thing about Munich is it can show the contrast between sh*t fi sound and real/natural/absolute sound pretty easily.
The best thing about Munich is it can show the contrast between sh*t fi sound and real/natural/absolute sound pretty easily.
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I suspect people will be able to hear differences with exposure to such different types of systems. That does not mean they will all share the same preferences. It is one of the enduring mysteries that allow for such different approaches.
The testament will be which designs stand the test of time and remain in demand. Check back in four or ten decades. There are not many that do. It is not just for curiosity or rarity that people return to that WE room year after year.
[please forgive my poor English]
The Western Electric, great excerpt, thanks. Through my Sennheiser plugged into my Thinkpad (yes, I know...), I personally like even more the Beethoven piano sonata featured in the TotalDAC recording, right here
"Joe Roberts did his best to convince audiences that progress in the field of audio reproduction had been less than spectacular by playing a Western Electric 11A theatre horn system from 1924" (Munich High-end 2016, TheEar report)
I'm still waiting for technological breakthroughs in audio, like two Bose-Einstein condensates acting like two pulsating point-sources in front of me (can we get tickets to access that room in Munich HighEnd, year 2435?). In the meantime, and as far as I can modestly judge, "technological breakthroughs" mainly occur into optimizing existing (sometimes old) technologies:
for tweeter: beryllium, diamond-powder proceeded at plasma-temprature, beryllium compression driver, etc
for bass: DSP-corrected cones using accelereometers, Room-EQ correction, etc
But it seems the technology itself they improve, is not always new at all.
Examples:
- present isodynamic ribbon panels are all remotely based on a 1924 Siemens patent (the Blatthaller, Deutche Reichspatent 410114, ribbon loudspeaker, patented in 1924 by Edwin Gerlach of Siemens & Halske; more details and pics, in Deutsch)
- Apogee then optimized the principle, with its own patent.
- so did Alsyvox, Clarisys (patent?), Diptyque, etc.
- 100% beryllium-based compression drivers in this system, custom-designed by Be Yamamura for a happy classical music lover from Italy (report by Mono&Stereo - I wish I'd been there!).
(Sorry for the digression)
Peter, everyone is the same. I got the exposure first in 2014, I was a skeptic too when someone told me to go visit this room and I saw this monstrosities. That was my first time to Munich. Luckily this group of guys just told me to go there, they did not tell me these were 100 year old speakers, else I might have been negatively biased.
Next year, Bill joined me, and that time he was big focal Krell owner, looking for big cones, loving Techdas there etc. He was initially not sure how to react but then fell in love with the WE. So, lack of exposure and bias is a natural thing. No one actually grew up with WE. Not even our fathers. It was before their time. So, like Beethoven or Bach, you can be biased against old music as a teenager, wanting to focus on the current pop but for me those who do get exposure and shift show a clear manner of adapting to new experiences.
When someone here says this is nostalgia, and it was old, I only see an inability to learn, an inability to understand the nuance of why people flock to classical music starting 800 years ago, Western electric from 100 years ago, rock from 60s and 70s, recordings from a certain era called the golden era, and some equipment from the modern era. Unless (shock), those eras were the respective bests for those things. TV series, for example, have been amazing recently, movies not so much. And we can understand why this is happening, there is a certain set of factors, a change in customer pattern, that drives talent towards one sector.
Take recordings for example. It was a very short era, where label by label, equipment, engineers etc aligned to produce that gloriousness. But to understand this, one needs to get into a lot of detail, understand labels, lacquer.mother/stamper/engineer/performances etc. It is much easier for one to say modern recordings are better because hey, I cannot bother doing this research, and am much more comfortable passing this off as nostalgia and aligning it to my understanding of progress on laptops and computers. That person is just looking to get a word in, be lazy, not do research, try to paint things black and white as old = outdated and new & expensive = progress. He is therefore the teenager focusing on pop music, not willing to investigate the complexity of classical. I therefore respect the people who once they get exposure are willing to appreciate it. The WE, for example, is by no means a speaker for someone's home, but teaches a lot about how poor today's gear is, and how a lot of today's gear is not even attempting to produce music.
Look, if the audience wants junk food, industry will give junk food. If the audience wants salads and is health conscious, the likes of KFC will close down and healthy options will open up, and healthy salads have got way more tastier than they were before. Hence my point that as long as we have clueless customers who use the wrong "sounds" to audition, and look at prices, expensive KFC is what they will get. Right now there is a trend of expensive coffee in London, and not necessarily the best coffee. I don't blame reviewers or manufacturers...only the customers. If they progressively trained themselves on recordings, music, and exposed themselves to gear, instead of progressively increasing expenditure on their components, they would have progressed on audio sonics, and manufacturers would have to make things to suit those tastes, and price would get more competitive as more people would come in.
How is this true when there are such divergent camps at a place like WBF, and the show reactions to specific rooms vary so much?
This particular Beethoven piano sonata (which is a personal reference for me) sounds great on the big WE (via my ear pods)! Great scale and realism and lack of horn coloration (in contrast to the huge ESD horns for example).
If you look at the divergent camps, first, take out the people you argue against who have not experienced the gear they are discussing. There is a lot of noise from armchair debaters.
If you find people who have experienced the same gear, they often align on sonic attribute agreement...though might not be on preference. If you put too people in the same room to compare Lyra and Koetsu, they will all hear the Lyra more extended than the Koetsu...whether they prefer it more or not is different.
In the people who do not prefer the same things, check for if they are auditioning similar music/pressings.
Regarding my comment on everyone is the same while that might have been hyperbolic, the amount of people appreciating WE at Munich, if you see the size of the room and the amount of people in there and chat to them, is huge. It is by a far majority the favorite room at Munich of the people who go to that room - it always is the most packed. The only time I remember a room more packed was when Magico Ultimates came in for only one year and were giving only a half hour slot...everyone was rushing to book and squeeze into a half hour slot...but largely, the turnout and room fill was always largest at WE and people loving it. And these were not guys previously exposed to it. Given this is an old horn, it shows lack of bias, as compared to say appreciating a current day horn or cone.
There are people who do not visit the room at all, or see the old metal horn and walk out, because an old horn to them cannot be good.
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