What determines "believability of the reproduction illusion"
- Thread starter jkeny
- Start date
more than enough for a Wilson Grand Slamm whose only 2ohm dip is around 16hz-20hz as i recall.
Yes, great post, morricab - it was far more than 2C worth.
Indeed you are correct about the difference between natural & synthetic sound. What is often forgotten is that we aren't born with our fully developed senses - we are born with the sense mechanisms but they are tabla rasa & build what we consider fully developed senses by exposure to & experience of the natural world. It's like speech - we aren't born with speech but the mechanisms to make all the sounds necessary for speech. Now how do we learn to produce grammatically correct sentences? We aren't taught grammar before we can create correctly formed sentences - we learn this from our exposure to the world of speech that is happening all around us as children. I suspect that we start by emulating the sound patterns of speech that we have heard & as a result begin to develop what "sounds" right & what doesn't - the beginnings of understanding grammar or how grammatically correct sentences are formed.
When we understand this - that our perceptions are all formed by exposure to the world, we begin to understand that "believability of the reproduced illusion" is about the reproduced sound following this auditory model of the real world (that we have all developed) as closely as possible. And that this is not black & white - it's believable or not - this is by degree, the more believability happens because we don't perceive any unnatural sounds or sound patterns in the reproduced audio.
As you said, we are pre-eminent pattern-matching processing machines - to me this is our fundamental strength & probably the one we use in more ways than we realise. I mentioned before some research that showed, for certain types of sounds (sound textures), summary statistics best represent how we differentiate between these sounds - a good example of the possible pattern matching functions of auditory processing. What they did in this research was to extract the statistical features of sound textures (rain, stream, bubbles, fire, etc) then took white noise & filtered & applied the statistics to it to synthesise new sounds. They then tested these new sounds to see if they were perceived as a variation of rain, stream, bubbles, etc. The correlation is pretty good in most instances.
Indeed you are correct about the difference between natural & synthetic sound. What is often forgotten is that we aren't born with our fully developed senses - we are born with the sense mechanisms but they are tabla rasa & build what we consider fully developed senses by exposure to & experience of the natural world. It's like speech - we aren't born with speech but the mechanisms to make all the sounds necessary for speech. Now how do we learn to produce grammatically correct sentences? We aren't taught grammar before we can create correctly formed sentences - we learn this from our exposure to the world of speech that is happening all around us as children. I suspect that we start by emulating the sound patterns of speech that we have heard & as a result begin to develop what "sounds" right & what doesn't - the beginnings of understanding grammar or how grammatically correct sentences are formed.
When we understand this - that our perceptions are all formed by exposure to the world, we begin to understand that "believability of the reproduced illusion" is about the reproduced sound following this auditory model of the real world (that we have all developed) as closely as possible. And that this is not black & white - it's believable or not - this is by degree, the more believability happens because we don't perceive any unnatural sounds or sound patterns in the reproduced audio.
As you said, we are pre-eminent pattern-matching processing machines - to me this is our fundamental strength & probably the one we use in more ways than we realise. I mentioned before some research that showed, for certain types of sounds (sound textures), summary statistics best represent how we differentiate between these sounds - a good example of the possible pattern matching functions of auditory processing. What they did in this research was to extract the statistical features of sound textures (rain, stream, bubbles, fire, etc) then took white noise & filtered & applied the statistics to it to synthesise new sounds. They then tested these new sounds to see if they were perceived as a variation of rain, stream, bubbles, etc. The correlation is pretty good in most instances.
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Actually, if you check Stereophile's measurements, the lowest in the bass is 4.6 ohms at 80Hz and at 24Hz is 5 ohms. The lowest overall is 3.2 ohms at 20Khz. Most of the time it is above 6 ohms and is nearly as flat as an Apogee ribbon in terms of impedance! A SET amp should have no problem at all with this speaker...even the phase angles are pretty mild. It is a lot different than the Watt/Puppy, which had some tough impedance loads at some frequencies.
That plus the high sensitivity makes this a speaker that is easy to control for a SET. Also, the bass loading is relatively well damped for a vented design so driver control from a damping POV is also not much of an issue.
Since these speakers are likely to be used in a large room though less than 18 watts (Lamm ML2) is probably not advisable for loud music.
Speakers look awesome but supposedly those big Jadis amps are not their best sounding...give me a Jadis Defy 7...now that sounds good!
Given my relatively heavy exposure to NAT amps and my extensive exposure to KR amps I would have to say that I think overall the KR amps are better sounding. That is not to say that NAT amps are poor sounding...quite the contrary they are very nice amps with a good overall sound but KR does a number of things better. Soundstaging and imaging, bass and overall tonal balance for example. Also there is something in the gestalt (as HP used to say) of KR that is more realistic, probably something in the pattern of harmonics they make, which is quite monotonic compared to most other SETs.
Both are really good but IMO KR edges out NAT in the amp arena...now preamps we shall see....I have a NAT PLasma now (it sounds good!) and will be getting KRs little P130 for review. Stay tuned for a big preamp shootout...as well as the mighty Aries Cerat that might sweep all before its path. Personally, I am not sure what to expect except that it will be good but how good will remain to be seen.
Based on a lot of what I read on this forum i think KR is overlooked by a lot of the people on this forum and it's a pity because their amps really do beat out nearly all the rest that I have heard. You heard them at Christoph's, one of those used to be mine (I had three at one time).
Tomorrow I will look for our library old copy of N. Crowhurst "Amplifiers" dated around 1950, just to remember old days. It was one of my preferred references on tubes when I was still a student - I spent long afternoons reading it. The alternative were the NAVY technical courses and surely Wireless World articles. Much later I got the french articles of L'Audiophile - strongly influenced by the japanese audiophile thoughts and subjectivity.
Yes - the Defy 7 sounds great. I have owned it twice - they had shown in the local used market at very tempting prices - and they sounded particularly good with the matching preamplifier, the JPL. Although I borrowed it several times to listen with my Defy 7's unfortunately I never managed to own both at the some time!
The single greatest ingredient (effect) that determines believability of the reproduction illusion is the amount of ambient information that remains audible at the speaker.
For it is the ambient info that determines the recording hall spaces and musical notes traveling and interacting with the recording venue's boundaries, etc that determines more than anything else the level of musicality or believability within a playback system.
And though ambient info is just another word for overall detail / resolution, specifically when the majority of ambient info embedded in a given recording remains audible, then the 1/2 sphere of sound filling the front half of the listening room will easily overshadow perhaps any local listening room's acoustic anomalies, even to the point where the listening room anomalies make no never mind.
Lloyd,
As Morricab already noticed you are misinterpreting Stereophile graphs - the top is impedance modulus and bottom is phase - the opposite of usual. The zero is at line 5 and each division is 2 ohms.
Remember that electrically the Grand Slamm is in the Alexandria family, not the MAXX. This means moderate impedance and high efficiency.
Fortunately, this is just not true - I have had "unbelievable" sound from small speakers so many times, this is a no-brainer. Powerful, intense, gut wrenching impact, big hammering hits from the drums - I've got this happening so often - and then visit a dealer with some mega speakers and try the same tracks, for comparison - and laugh ... p!ss weak, is the my usual reaction ...
I'm sorry, it is the electronics - the major concern is the quality of the power supply, this is why Krell immediately jumped to the top of the heap when they started, they realised that it was essential to get this area working better.
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Amir's case is special, which in one sense proves the point. He spent large amounts of time in his previous role with Microsoft working with people on music data compression algorithms, and trained himself to detect artifacts in the sound from these processes not being "perfect", to a high level. So, when he listens to playback his brain is now automatically hunting for anything not "right", and zeros in on the vinyl noises very intently - conscious activities can end up being automatically activated, and Amir has "handicapped" himself to some degree by this previous activity.
Regarding the discussion of the lack of a "sweet spot" a few pages back:
I guess there could be such a thing as a neurological inability to resolve a stereo image. Deafness in one ear might have the same effect. Some walking around with a finger in one ear seems to indicate there might be something to it.
I guess there could be such a thing as a neurological inability to resolve a stereo image. Deafness in one ear might have the same effect. Some walking around with a finger in one ear seems to indicate there might be something to it.
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I can only agree - this is an excellent piece of writing, that nails many of the key aspects of what one has to do to appease the mind when listening ...morricab, great post!
My lack of a sweet spot is because such is everywhere - the stage of the sound exists completely independently of the speakers, at all times .
This is where fine-tuning is so essential - heard a dealer's setup using all Gryphon, the amp was one of the monsters they do, driving Sasha ... very ordinary, the notes were there, etc - but, no cigar ...
Precisely. That's why I do this weird thing of going up to the speaker driver, and listening with my ear only inches away
- when the system is working correctly I don't sense my ear being bombarded with sound, rather, I hear the acoustic of the recording that's on, just much more loudly than normal!
Ok, but you're not arguing with me, you're disputing simple physics.
A speaker with more Sd (driver surface area) has a better mechanical impedance match with the air, something excursion can't compensate for. Given that the electronics are of the same caliber, the speaker with greater Sd is going to produce far more realistic transients, more believable dynamics... Of course this assumes you're talking about LOUDspeakers that are capable of reproducing the event at the similar SPLs, if not then I care little about the system anyways.
My experience also - its the electronics chain which makes or breaks this. With poor electronics the ambience gets masked, OTOH transparent electronics allows the recorded ambience to shine through gloriously and largely render moot whatever room ambient effects are going on.
