[HN Gopher] History of the Nautilus loudspeaker
___________________________________________________________________
History of the Nautilus loudspeaker
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 170 points
Date : 2021-06-02 05:56 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bowerswilkins.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bowerswilkins.com)
| te_chris wrote:
| I haven't listened to the Nautilus but I have listened to the B&W
| 800 (RRP PS23500) speakers and they really have to be experienced
| to be belived. I was listening in a studio environment that had
| just installed them, as an upgrade from the already very nice
| Quested setup they had. When we switched to the 800's the effect
| was profound. The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless
| soundstage where noises just happened within it, rather than
| relative to the L/R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It
| was incredible.
|
| I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music.
| These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever
| worth anything" bucket list.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I demo'd the 800 D3 at a hifi shop and was very impressed. What
| impressed me most was that it sounded utterly effortless like
| they were utterly effortless. They were powered by a pair of
| 1KW monoblocks and every peak in the music was reproduced
| without a hint of strain even at concert levels.
|
| I will say that there was a _lot_ of treble. Stereophile 's
| measurements (which I did not see until after the demo, so
| please don't think they colored my impressions!) show some big
| 5dB humps in the upper treble which I would say correlates to
| what I was hearing.
| https://www.stereophile.com/content/bampw-800-diamond-loudsp...
|
| I think this boosted treble is generally a part of B&W's secret
| sauce across their product range. I really believe their
| speakers are tailored for middle-aged and elderly guys with
| some degree of high frequency hearing loss. Makes sense; those
| are the guys with enough cash to blow on speakers like these.
|
| I am one of those guys (well, the hearing part... not the cash
| part) but I prefer maybe 2-3dB of boosted treble and not a
| full-on tweeter assault. =)
| te_chris wrote:
| Could've also been that they were new. I've got B&W 606's and
| at first I really didn't like the treble, but they mellowed
| nicely.
| stinos wrote:
| _The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless soundstage
| where noises just happened within it, rather than relative to
| the L /R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It was
| incredible._
|
| This make me curious about this whole situation: speaker change
| equals physical location change, would that have played a part
| in it? Because what you describe here is exactly what (at least
| for me) is the effect of proper speaker placement vs suboptimal
| placement. I.e. this 'you don't hear the speakers anymore,
| instead it sounds like you're sitting in the sound' effect.
| Which definitely isn't there if placement is off, no matter how
| good speakers are. Then again, I'm not really an audio engineer
| so maybe you're talking about a different level of soundstage..
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| You can DIY high-end speakers, saving thousands. Sounds weird,
| but its true. Here is one example that is popular, there are
| others: http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=3212
| JohnBooty wrote:
| This is true.
|
| I'm going to make a vast oversimplification here, but a rule
| of thumb is that a lot of the well-regarded DIY kits on the
| market compare well with retail speakers that cost 2-3X as
| much. Some examples:
|
| https://www.parts-express.com/speaker-components/speaker-
| sub...
|
| https://www.diysoundgroup.com/home-audio-speaker-
| kits/home-a...
|
| https://meniscusaudio.com/product-category/speaker-kits/
|
| etc.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| What kind of bugs me is that there really aren't any kits
| and very few DIY designs that match the kind of speakers I
| really miss, at least not ones focused on home audio.
|
| Those speakers being the old-school big boxes with 12-15"
| woofers, sometimes multiple and usually 3-way designs,
| sometimes 4-way. Large, heavy, imposing and punchy, big
| speakers for big music. I know modern speaker drivers have
| come a long way, but you just can't get that from 6" or 8"
| drivers in the same way.
|
| DIY PA speaker designs do provide some of this, but I'll
| have to tweak the aesthetics more in a "living room-
| friendly" direction, because nobody seems to want big beefy
| speakers anymore.
| analog31 wrote:
| This has always seemed interesting. Bill Fitzmaurice has
| made a career of developing horn-loaded systems, which
| are tricky to design.
|
| https://billfitzmaurice.info/David.html
|
| There's a series of PA cab designs called fEarFul, that
| incorporate the newer 12" and 15" woofers from Eminence.
| You might have to dig around to locate the actual design
| data, but I do know that the designs were carefully
| tweaked and are stoopid loud.
|
| In my own case, I worked out what SPL I actually need for
| my listening tastes, and chose a suitable woofer by
| keeping an eye on the close-outs at Parts Express. The
| drawback is that my designs are irreproducible because
| the parts are sold out. But they're also not worth
| publishing. The benefit is that the prices are often
| pretty compelling.
|
| Lower specs also reduce the requirements for the tweeter
| and any other components such as crossover.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Interesting, I had the impression the DIY scene is not
| considering the WAF as much as the mainstream market. But
| I agree on kits, if you don't have a workshop its hard to
| built most designs. Don Highend has designed a few larger
| ones too, eg http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=5291
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| That's still only a 6.5" woofer, my bookshelf speakers
| have 6.5" woofers :-)
|
| I consider a 10" woofer to be the smallest size for a
| speaker to be considered large, and 12" or 15" is
| preferred.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Alright, maybe this 4-way with a 12" will interest you:
| http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=4005
|
| But I agree that PA plans are a viable alternative can be
| Hifi, too.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Now _that_ looks like a speaker for me :-)
|
| If my dad was still alive, that would have been a perfect
| project for us to jump into and spend countless weekends
| working on. For now I'll have to wait until I have my own
| workshop to build a set of beasts like that.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| And this is a conservative estimate, its more like 10-20x
| as much. Huge parts of the budget for high-end gear is
| marketing.
| bwang29 wrote:
| I used to work in boutique audio retail. One of the big
| challenges of the business is how big and heavy good speakers
| are. In the old days we would need to crate the speaker to
| customers' house for audition as every room has a different
| acoustic, and try a few different speakers with more crates with
| a upfront fee/credit to purchase, but it doesn't happen nearly as
| often anymore. Showrooms nowadays also mostly do not have the
| right environment and setup for the speakers to perform well as
| they were before. In fact most people do not have an opportunity
| to listen to half decent audio from a heavy passive speaker and
| the type of sound they could make relative to homepods is
| becoming more of a myth now. And the direct implication of this
| is speaker makers need to make more profit per sale and the price
| increase for Klipsch Heresy and Forte for each revision is
| bananas. There are still software company making solutions to
| emulate speaker sounds before a purchase calibrated to common
| headphone models, I don't know how they function but every
| customer who'd tried one of those would walk away for almost
| certainty as it sounds crappy.
| ninjaoxygen wrote:
| I work in high-end AV. Perceptually, in a good space, those
| fantastic speakers often do not make the sound people associate
| with "loud", no distortion, no top end becoming hissy, just the
| concert-level bass to clue you in to how loud it is. People who
| have paid a lot for their system want that "wow" factor that
| immediately makes anyone think it's loud. The other issue is
| that different listening material definitely needs different
| amplifier and processor settings - there is no setting that
| "just works". We find many customers do not wish to get engage
| with those settings these days.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| On the topic of speakers here, does anyone here feel like the
| Cinema does not offer the audio experience advertised? I've
| been to old cinemas and brand new cinemas with Dolby Atmos
| yet in each of them the audio is just absolute ass. Is this
| just my local cinemas or is this a common experience?
|
| You'd think that a cinema would know how to tune their
| speaker set up correctly. Yet even at a brand new cinema the
| audio is just blown out in loud scenes. Like they've got the
| speakers turned up too high.
| bayindirh wrote:
| As an audiophile (without the madness), I can understand you.
| On the other hand, with a pair of good speakers and a nice
| amplifier with bass, mid & treble knobs, you can almost dial
| the tone which's best for a genre.
|
| A 2x10 band eq is better, but I prefer to listen pure-flat
| instead. In my setup, only vinyl needs loudness + tone
| circuits, the rest is happy with pure flat.
|
| Of course music and sound is a subjective taste, but 90% of
| the road can be traveled with just basic, but good components
| IMHO.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| but 90% of the road can be traveled with just
| basic, but good components IMHO.
|
| Amen. No expert here but I've been in the hobby for a while
| and have demo'd some high end stuff at audio shows.
|
| I strongly believe a really good "90% of the way there"
| system can be put together for well under $500 retail, or
| even less if going DIY or used.
| zadler wrote:
| Curious to know what you would recommend sub $500.
| growt wrote:
| Can you give an example of such a <$500 system? I'm
| genuinely curious.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Mine is a bit more expensive, since I bought the speakers
| new (I had somewhat specific demands), but everything
| else was second-hand.
|
| I've got a pair of Monitor Audio Bronze 2s, a Denon
| AVR-1911 receiver and two Dali SWA 12 subwoofers.
|
| As I wrote above, I bought the speakers new, because I
| wanted relatively large bookshelf speakers with front
| ports and living room-friendly looks, and nothing
| presented itself second-hand. With a bit of patience, you
| should be able to find a solid pair of speakers in mint
| condition for $2-300, no problem.
|
| The receiver has 90W per channel (for real, no tricks),
| Audyssey room correction and was just $80 second hand
| from a guy who had upgraded to a 4K-capable receiver. I
| have it hooked up to my TV and so on, but at that price I
| would be perfectly happy just using it as a stereo amp,
| since it has good power, digital inputs, room correction
| and bass management for subwoofers.
|
| The subwoofers were ~$200 each second hand, years and
| years ago. I'm sure they're even less expensive now, or
| you can just do without subs.
| dagw wrote:
| Lots and lots of variations. But basically get a $250-350
| pair of speakers for a decent brand (Dali Spektor 1 or 2
| are a good bet) and plug them into a $100-200 second hand
| amp and you've got a great set up. If you don't want to
| go second hand then Yamaha and Sony have some decent amps
| in this price range.
|
| Spend whatever you have left over on a second hand CD
| player or DAC for your phone, depending on what you want
| to use as a source.
| antihero wrote:
| Couple of JBL 306PII active monitors
| sound1 wrote:
| ... with a decent <100$ DAC like Khadas tone board
| bayindirh wrote:
| I also use HifiBerry's AMP2 to drive a pair of old
| Kenwood speakers with a dedicated subwoofer (it's a 2.1
| set out of the box), and boy, that thing's impressive for
| its size.
|
| It has a Burr Brown DAC and a Class D 2x30W amplifier on
| board. It has delicious sound.
| doteka wrote:
| I'm rather happy with my el cheapo Denon receiver (no
| idea about the model but like 220 euro new 5 years ago)
| and a pair of Wharfedale Diamonds 10.1 .
| newdude116 wrote:
| Hm. I have a very old German Tube Amplifier (K+H) from my
| grandfather and some USSR made speakers (Radiotehnika
| Audio - GoldLine 90, 30kg each).
|
| But this system would cost you know 1-2k. But I was lucky
| and bought the speakers for 100 USD not long ago.
| bayindirh wrote:
| High end stuff has no limits, there's always a better
| system in some feature/property. Also, when you start to
| upgrade something, there's chance of endless loops (these
| speakers needs better amps, which shows some defects of
| my DAC, etc.)
|
| So setting a limit, reaching it and leaving it there is
| good IMHO.
|
| I run an entry level HiFi CD player with iPod interface
| through a vintage amplifier to a pair of bookshelf style
| speakers (which are pretty big for their class though).
|
| If my friend is confusing whether his phone is ringing
| because a similar sound is present in the playing track,
| then it's good enough. Similarly, if you're enjoying the
| sound you're getting from your system, you've
| accomplished your goal IMHO.
|
| I'm neither looking for loudness, nor for that _ethereal
| sound_. If I can hear everything in relatively clear
| manner, and I 'm enjoying it, that's it. I'd rather enjoy
| it instead of sweating over smallest details.
|
| For context: I used to play in orchestras.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| A well put-together powerful system with low distortion is
| quite an experience when you really crank the volume. It just
| gets bigger and bigger sounding but not really "loud" (ie.
| distorted), and loud clean sound is just a lot more
| satisfying and less fatiguing.
|
| It's all about headroom, dynamics and being able to move air.
| Audiophiles may laugh, but a speaker like the Cerwin-Vega
| XLS215 one of the best choices you can make for reasonably
| affordable speakers, provided you have the room for them.
| They do look somewhat low-rent, but CV have taken some
| important lessons from PA speakers to heart, so they're
| surprisingly efficient and have large drivers that can
| effortlessly move significant amounts of air. Combine them
| with a powerful amplifier with plenty of headroom and you
| have a setup that can handle serious dynamics with very low
| distortion, better than 99% of concerts I've attended[$?].
|
| For an actual PA speaker that can do much of the same thing,
| the JBL SRX835 is a similar powerhouse, but it has horn-
| loaded midrange and tweeter drivers, for those who prefer
| that sound. They are also effortlessly dynamic and I want a
| pair for my living room, despite the very utilitarian looks.
|
| Unfortunately logistics and space constraints mean bookshelf
| speakers are the only practical setup in this apartment, so I
| picked ones that were as big as I could reasonably get away
| with, and supplement them with two reasonably well-hidden 12"
| subwoofers. I should have never sold my JBL 4410s, I'm sure I
| could have made space for them somehow.
|
| [$?] The best sound quality I have ever heard at a concert
| and honestly better than most home setups, was when Opeth
| played in DR Koncerthuset here in Copenhagen in 2016. The
| sound is _always_ insanely good there, but the combination of
| prog metal, an outrageously well-designed acoustic space, a
| _seriously_ impressive sound system and world-class people
| behind the scenes, elevated everything to a completely new
| level.
|
| It was the cleanest and most pristine amplified sound I have
| ever heard, and what really impressed me was how _clean_ and
| deep the bass reproduction was, with absolutely no distortion
| or wooliness. It is my measuring stick that all other
| concerts are compared to.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That reminds me of an Experience I had once at a former
| colleague. He was a bit of an audiophile, dj/producer and had
| e.g. added more insulation to his living room to not annoy
| the neighbours as much, and built his own speakers and record
| player.
|
| Anyway, something was playing, it was (sounded?) really quiet
| but it was crystal clear at the same time; normally I feel
| like I have to turn the volume up to hear the whole music.
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| Bass distortion is the only big factor. Everybody knows it
| doesn't matter, but it's actually where distortion is the
| easiest to hear. Chinese manufacturers don't know, and do
| care, so even cheap USB speakers blow out of water the
| majority of even much more expensive products.
| DenTheRed wrote:
| Do you have an example of some of these cheap USB speakers
| please?
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| https://a.aliexpress.com/_m0XS3Zr
|
| They are a bit underpowered, rumble with Bluetooth, and
| you need to turn the bass and highs quite a bit down to
| make them sound flat, but I bet that something like 100x
| times more expensive studio speakers will be the cheapest
| setup that matches them in the clarity.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| I have a hard time taking your recommendation seriously,
| unless you have never heard a good set of speakers in
| person.
|
| A pair of JBL 305P MkIIs will absolutely wipe the floor
| with discount speakers like those, with such a huge
| margin, that it's not even remotely fair.
|
| $300 for a pair, certain a _lot_ less than 100x price
| difference.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Not a fan of how these look (subjective) but am generally a
| massive fan of B&W speakers. They are a class apart. Truly
| stunning sounding. You can listen for hours on end with zero
| fatigue. My bro has has pair of bookshelf (CDM1?) hooked up to
| Arcam pre and power amps and the sound is out of this world.
| qiqitori wrote:
| I use Bowers & Wilkins P5 (series 1) headphones after having
| tested every other pair in the shop and found these to sound
| nicest. Really like the sound, but the discoloring is pretty
| bad (I got the white ones).
|
| (Could have something to do with the shop being a somewhat
| noisy environment and these being the only headphones without
| active noise cancelling that still shut out most noise, so
| YMMV.)
| maqp wrote:
| The P5 suffer from a disgusting design flaw: Under the
| magnetically connected ear pads, the headphones have a soft
| fiber-like material that's glued in. The glue will melt and
| leak between the contact points in a few months, which will
| stain white t-shirts etc.:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/W2i0pPa
|
| The importer first claimed they fixed this issue mid-
| production, they did not. I went through FOUR pairs. Every.
| Single. Time. the glue melted.
|
| I wrote to B&W about them having a systematic problem in
| their manufacturing process, they advised me to contact the
| importer for a replacement pair.
|
| Then came the P5 series 2 which the importer said would fix
| it. Finally... Except, it did not.
|
| When I contacted the importer about the problem being still
| present, they flat out refused to replace the headphones, but
| instead offered a discount for PX headphones. I told them I
| would've annulled the purchase like the Finnish law allows
| me, had I been made aware it would never be fixed. I also
| told me I wouldn't pour another cent in B&W products.
|
| Also I found an entire site dedicated to the design flaw in
| the PX, which I alas, can't find now.
|
| To conclude: Do NOT buy B&W headphones / consumer
| loudspeakers. The company does still manufacture high-quality
| high-end loudspeakers, I've been satisfied with the CM1s and
| no complaints after 10 years of use.
| mrkwse wrote:
| To add a contrasting anecdote for balance, the only issue
| I've had with B&W headphones (I've had P5, PX, and now have
| PX7) is that the arm of my PX snapped - probably in part
| due to how I'd cram them into my backpack and that I got
| them early in the product life when they shipped with a
| quilted fabric soft case.
|
| Despite it probably being as much an issue as my care as
| the product packaging, B&W replaced them rapidly without
| complaint and I've had no issues since.
|
| Also the carbon composite construction of the PX7s is one
| of the best I've seen. I tried a pair of AirPods Pro which
| felt premium but were so uncomfortable due to the weight
| and design causing huge pressure on the contact points with
| my head. PX7s feel very solid but don't have the weight
| penalty to go with it.
| mrlambchop wrote:
| A long time ago when I had younger ears, I heard these at an
| audio show in London, in a "sound proof room" and I will never
| forget the experience. I was working for TagMclaren at the time,
| having just left dCS Audio and I thought I had heard a lot of
| high end speakers by then, but these blew my socks off and left a
| lasting impression.
|
| I half believe it was the presentation - dramatic, but also
| extremely clever choice of SACD source content with some theatre
| thrown in for good measure. However, that 12 minutes in a room in
| conference hall in London with the Nautilus speakers was
| something I will never forget for a "this is what money buys you"
| experience. Warm, huge dynamic range, concert hall experience -
| comfy chair and dim lights helped as well :)
|
| At Tag, we built the "tag mclaren speakers f1" that had a lot of
| elements I feel borrowed from the B&W industrial design (but made
| F1 grade) - I used these daily for several years, but was never
| able to convince myself they were as good as that one time
| experience.
| teknopaul wrote:
| I am a firm believer that you can get too hi-fi. Listening on
| B&W cans as we speak and they are undeniably hi-fi but not what
| you call meaty for drum & bass. There is no such thing as the
| sound of an electric guitar; the pick-ups amp and choice of
| speaker and cab are what makes it rock. Ortofon recently made
| this mistake with a full new range of carts and needles with
| higher range, volume and spec all round. Nobody likes them with
| their existing records because they don't sound "fat". Maybe
| new records will be produced that presume new needles but I
| ain't sure that any of this is progress over hitting your
| favourite tree trunk with your favourite stick. I have
| different speakers for different music, until B&W give these
| cabs out free to the yoot in Brixton there aint gonna be any
| good music to play one them. They will always be adequate
| speakers for the fabulously rich.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Excellent points... almost no hi-fi no matter how high end
| actually captures what instruments in the room sound like
| since instruments just don't act the same way.
|
| The recordings themselves don't capture a lot of that
| information or have it mastered out, so the loudspeakers can
| never put it back in.
|
| The soundboard of a piano or the top of an acoustic
| instrument for example just don't work like a loud speaker.
| Drums pack a ridiculous punch in the room that speakers
| rarely capture. Guitar amps do all kinds of strange things in
| the room due to purposely designed in imperfections that are
| often missing in the recordings.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I started building speakers some years back, using high-end
| drivers and rather esoteric ... topologies: Voigt pipes, back-
| loaded horns, etc.
|
| My takeaway from the several years as a hobbyist building and
| listening to these: full-range was the one commonality that
| made all the difference in the world. The two-way, three-way
| speakers I grew up with were crap for "sound stage" (never mind
| the loss in efficiency with all the crossovers).
|
| A pair of good quality full-range drivers will sound like you
| are wearing headphones when you are not. Throw in a sub for the
| bottom end that "full" range drivers cannot carry -- possibly
| add super-tweeters for the extra brilliance of a cymbal crash.
|
| Fortunately low frequencies are not "spatial" since our ears
| are not physically very far apart so the sub does not step all
| over the phase information coming from the full-range. Super-
| tweeters are so far up in the audio spectrum that there is
| little competition with the full-range drivers in that regard
| either.
|
| There really was not much reason, to my ears, to spend any
| additional energy or money on speakers at that point.
| tcmb wrote:
| I'm surprised there's no mention of the cochlea in this
| article... I always assumed the design was inspired by it. Surely
| there's some analogy in how the human ear breaks down frequencies
| in the cochlea and how a speaker produces them in a similar
| shape?
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Surely there's some analogy in how the human ear breaks down
| frequencies in the cochlea and how a speaker produces them in a
| similar shape?
|
| A false analogy, at best. The sound is produced entirely by the
| speaker, which sits at the front of the speaker; the "nautilus"
| shape is simply a resonant chamber.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > the "nautilus" shape is simply a resonant chamber.
|
| From what I've read, it's the opposite of a resonant chamber,
| it's filled with wool to absorb any sound which could be
| reflected from enclosure. It's special shape ensures that
| each frequency emitted by driver is absorbed at different
| place to ensure no harmonics, THE only sound emitted from
| this speaker is made by front of membrane.
| askvictor wrote:
| Not necessarily; it's the (inverse) horn shape that is
| important here (see the higher-frequency speakers), and the
| woofer would simply be too long to be practical without
| coiling.
| vstrien wrote:
| It makes me wonder, in an age of 3D printing.. has anyone ever
| tried to re-produce these things?
| senbarryobama wrote:
| I recently made my own speaker box and it seemed shockingly
| easily. Are there a 3000% markup on these objects?
| mixedbit wrote:
| Perhaps the primary goal of Nautilus as a product is to sell
| other B&W speakers. It is so extraordinary and easy to remember
| that it can be the reason for people to choose a pair of normal
| looking and affordable speakers from B&W. Nautilus was for sure
| how I have first encountered B&W.
| stef25 wrote:
| A bit like the Bugatti Veyron. When it first came out it was
| explained that several companies had been trying to build this
| mythical car (1000HP, 400Km/h, trying to stick F1-like
| performance in an easy to drive "consumer" car) and all failed.
|
| Then VW decided they'd buy the brand and do whatever it takes
| to make it work, result being that it's sold at a loss. Even at
| a million bucks. According to Wikipedia the production cost is
| 5 million and "Volkswagen designed the car merely as a
| technical exercise"
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's a show of engineering prowess. It's like Nikon's
| f0.95/50mm lens. Almost perfect, but impractical for most.
|
| Moreover, these kind of show pieces allow technology creep to
| lower levels, allowing the know-how to practically improve
| other products down the road. I think it's necessary to have
| products like these.
| ants_a wrote:
| A similar product could be produced reasonably cost
| effectively with injection molded plastics and doing the unit
| adapted crossover in digital domain. I think it has not been
| done because the story of it being painstakingly manually
| crafter, the tower of monoblock amplifiers needed and even
| the high price itself are the allure of this kind of product.
| Just like the selling point of a high end wristwatch is not
| about its capability to accurately tell time.
|
| Another important part is that the speaker itself is only a
| part of the overall acoustic system, the room that it is
| placed within forming the other part, equally capable of
| changing the sound. Very few people have the luxury of
| designing the listening room with as much consideration for
| acoustic performance as the speakers have.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The thing is, even the performance comes close, injection
| molded plastics won't have the same characteristics of the
| tuned fiberglass body with the tuned filling material.
|
| Also, to be able to create the same crossovers in the
| digital domain, you'd have to go pretty high end again,
| because, passing through a single DAC at the end of the
| chain is not same as a DAC -> ADC -> Crossover -> DAC chain
| at the end of the day.
|
| All in all, you'll come pretty close but you won't be able
| to create the exact same device at the end. Also, some
| stuff's (like good drivers built in small numbers) price
| doesn't come down that easily.
|
| Yes, dedication and tuning of a special room with 8x 500W
| mono amplifiers requires a hefty sum and these speakers are
| may not be expensive when all the price is factored in, but
| throwing in modern plastics and a couple of DSPs cannot
| replicate all that, all the time.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Commonly called a halo product, like the Audi R8, Mac Pro /
| Display XDR, Tiffany'a gigantic diamonds etc.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I get redirected to
| https://www.bowerswilkins.com/net/blog/products/history-of-n...
| and the redirect hijacks my back button.
|
| Maybe this link is more ergonomic to other users as well.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Did the same to me on Firefox Android.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| For me the link works fine, I haven't noticed troubles, but
| anyway thanks :-)
| em500 wrote:
| Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers
| were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c't magazine in
| 2000[1]. Conclusion:
|
| > In plain language, this means that our musically trained test
| listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at
| 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality
| samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the
| original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for
| all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD
| just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.
|
| This article made me (1) never worry about "lossy audio encoding"
| again and (2) ignore everyone starting about "better equipment"
| wrt compressed audio.
|
| Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801
| in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in
| the listening test.
|
| [1] https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0
| voldacar wrote:
| I got to hear the sennheiser orpheus a few years ago. Honestly
| it was kind of underwhelming.
|
| It is a very physically beautiful headphone but in terms of
| sound, it's kind of warm with a slight haze and indistinctness
| in the treble. That might be pleasant for some people, but I
| think any modern electrostat like the L700 or SR009 would
| outperform it significantly if you put them side by side. I
| assume its value is due mostly to its rarity.
| vatican_banker wrote:
| My honest and unscientific opinion is that the difference _is_
| discernible but the listener needs to know what to hear for.
| Also, the reproduction quality is impacted by several factors
| like room, equipment, and recording quality (not just speaker
| quality).
|
| [Anecdotal] One example of the difference between MP3 and
| lossless: the "image" [1] on 256kbps MP3s is worse compared to
| the the original uncompressed, lossless, versions (but the
| listening room must be appropriately prepared to reproduce a
| good image).
|
| This is a highly subjective topic. IMO we'll never reach full
| agreement. Personally, I listen MP3 while on-the-go and
| lossless music at home.
|
| Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two
| interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:
|
| > twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
|
| > It's true that the data we collected does not support
| watertight conclusions, but they do provide interesting
| insights.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_imaging
| em500 wrote:
| > Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two
| interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:
|
| >> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
|
| It's a mistake to apply vanilla statistical thinking here.
| The 12 participants were not randomly drawn from the German
| population, they were extremely skewed towards
| enthusiasts/professionals: audio engineers, an owner of an
| actual Nautilus 801, someone who worked on MP3/AAC at
| Fraunhofer IIS, someone who works preparing masters for
| Deutsche Gramophon. If these are the people who have enormous
| difficulty distinguishing 256kbps MP3 from the CD original,
| I'm certainly not going to worry that _I_ am going to miss
| out on anything with 256kbps MP3.
|
| If 12 Grand Slam participants tell me they can't tell the
| difference between a standard $100 and a $1000 high end
| tennis racket, I'm not going to delude myself into thinking
| that it's going to make any difference for me.
| newdude116 wrote:
| This magazine did a test with mp3 https://www.heise.de/ct/a
| rtikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html
|
| The only one who was significantly able to tell if
| something was mp3 encoded or not, was a guy with a hearing
| damage who loved punk music. In fact, mp3 was developed for
| persons with normal hearing. So it is well possible that he
| was able to tell differences where other people were unable
| to.
| em500 wrote:
| That's the original German version of the article which
| was translated in my hydrogenaudio link.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Maybe the punk music had more to do with it. Sounds like
| the guy was keying off of subtleties of sonority and
| emotive quality which are a lot more fragile to digital
| processing.
|
| It's quite easy to overprocess a digital audio file and
| wind up with something that is pristine as far as
| frequency response, but flat and 'pod people' like as far
| as emotive cues and intensity. Aliasing and cumulative
| losses to word length issues have a lot to do with it.
|
| It's VERY easy to make digital stuff accurately represent
| frequencies like 2 Hz or 35kHz that our ears don't hear.
| It's a lot harder to make the digital stuff perform in
| the midrange when our perception can go, inconsistently
| and irregularly, waaaay beyond what we're used to
| thinking of as the limits.
| oriolid wrote:
| I did some personal experiments back in the day when hard
| disks were expensive and found that the compression
| artefacts show up first in distorted guitars and cymbals,
| then brass instruments and everything else survives much
| lower bit rates. So that could explain why the punk rock
| fan hears the compression problems first.
|
| By the way, the lossy compression algorithms don't try to
| produce exact frequency response but to leave out stuff
| that humans wouldn't hear anyway and compress the rest.
| vatican_banker wrote:
| > It's a mistake to apply vanilla statistical thinking
| here. The 12 participants [...] were extremely skewed
| towards enthusiasts/professionals
|
| It is still undetermined if having 12 highly-skilled
| professionals in the experiment is enough to have a
| conclusive experiment.
|
| Also, this subject is so difficult to get right that the
| authors of the article themselves hedged by saying that
| experiment "does not support watertight conclusions".
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| A good way to determine the point of transparency of lossy
| encoding for yourself, is to ABX test on your own equipment,
| with files you've converted yourself. A good way to do this
| is with Foobar2000's ABX plugin, which lets you compare back
| and forth and on whole tracks or short snippets if you want.
|
| In my experience, headphones always yield the best results,
| and surprisingly it doesn't matter if I use the stock earbuds
| from my phone or a nice set of AKG over-ear headphones. It's
| not a matter of absolute sound quality, just the fact that
| you cut out room interactions and get the sound straight to
| your ears makes a big difference.
|
| MP3 has some built-in flaws that no encoder can completely
| cover up, short sharp sounds like castanets really expose the
| pre-echo, harpsichord shows similar issues. It also has a
| tendency to make cymbals sound "washy" or "underwater", which
| all lossy codecs do to some degree, but MP3 is especially
| bad.
|
| Still, at 192kbps I have to really focus to hear it in normal
| listening, but it's more or less always there even at 320kbps
| in problem tracks, if I really focus in on short sections. It
| just sounds subtly "off". But I hope no one actually listens
| to music like that, in short repeated sub-1 second sections
| to narrow in on a specific castanet snap ;-)
|
| As for more modern codecs like Opus and AAC, it's generally
| completely transparent for me at 128kbps, and that's with a
| bit of playing it safe, I'm pretty sure I could drop Opus
| down to 96kbps. Modern codecs are really impressive.
|
| I keep my music library in FLAC, both because I _know_ it 's
| CD quality and because it's an archive. I want to be able to
| convert the tracks to any new codec that may come along, if I
| need to.
|
| My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap :-)
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap
|
| That's around 3/4 the amount of music I carry on my iPhone
| :-)
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| I don't collect music just to collect it, I only keep
| artists and albums around that I really like, or if it's
| something special and hard to find. Everything else is on
| YouTube or whatever for the rare occasion I need to
| listen to Metallica or AC/DC or something.
| motohagiography wrote:
| > It also has a tendency to make cymbals sound "washy" or
| "underwater", which all lossy codecs do to some degree, but
| MP3 is especially bad.
|
| Thank you for confirming this! I record my analog synths
| that I play through headphones off an old mixing board,
| however when it comes through my ADC->iPad, stuff seems to
| get lost and I spend time adjusting the mix and ADSR for
| recording. Have been seriously mulling a reel to reel, but
| many others have had the same idea and the market prices
| are astronomical.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| It's not inherent to straight uncompressed PCM audio,
| it's strictly an artifact of lossy compression. A reel-
| to-reel tape deck will be noisier and extremely
| cumbersome compared to proper digital recording.
|
| Recording should be done at 96kHz 24-bit or higher, to
| not have to meticulously optimize recording levels and to
| allow room for mixing and effects, without raising the
| noise floor to noticable levels.
|
| Convert to normal CD quality as the last step before
| distribution.
| em500 wrote:
| > I keep my music library in FLAC, both because I know it's
| CD quality and because it's an archive. I want to be able
| to convert the tracks to any new codec that may come along,
| if I need to.
|
| I understand the sentiment. But the reality is, if the re-
| encoding is not likely going to happen within the next 10
| years, your hearing will probably have deteriorated so much
| that you probably won't hear the difference anymore anyway
| (assuming you can hear a difference today, which is a big
| assumption).
| smichel17 wrote:
| I got the start of my music collection from my parents
| (as .wav's, or rather, I helped rip the cds). I intend to
| do the same. So it's not just one but _several_ decades
| we 're talking about.
| willtim wrote:
| Agree with everything you say, but I would also add that the
| interactions with compression and other lossy signal
| processing that is frequently performed is not well studied.
| For example, when using Bluetooth headphones, it is likely
| that the music will be equalised/normalised, resampled to
| 48Khz (for mixing) and then re-encoded to a bluetooth codec
| e.g. LDAC. It is much safer to start with FLAC, if you cannot
| avoid such a signal chain.
| brnt wrote:
| Note that the quality of MP3 encoders has changed significantly
| since 2000, and differed significantly between encoders at the
| time. (Does anyone not use LAME these days?)
| bayindirh wrote:
| After a certain point, lossy compression doesn't create any
| perceptible loss in audio quality as long as the rip is done
| well (with a good encoder, etc.), and you don't know every part
| of the piece in question.
|
| e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if
| you've listened the piece live or performed it inside an
| orchestra. However, that's a pretty edge case. There are always
| differences if you know where to look for, otherwise it's
| pretty insignificant.
| stinos wrote:
| _e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if
| you 've listened the piece live or performed it inside an
| orchestra_
|
| Can you explain this a bit more? How is having heard a piece
| live, which by definition means a unique performance, going
| to affect whether or not you can pick out whether the
| recording of (likely) a different performance has been put
| through lossy compression? Or do you mean a recording of that
| same live performance?
|
| I mean I'm used to subtle differences coming and going
| depending on room/speakers/crappy compression, but only
| because I use the same source as reference (say, the same
| CD). Using a live performance as reference sounds strange,
| because there I would be able to here one of the musicians
| doing something different, but difference isn't there on
| another recording so not usable as cue for hearing
| differences in sound reproduction.
| bayindirh wrote:
| In classical music, the performance is of course unique,
| but the piece is not. What I mean is, even if the
| arrangement has changed for a particular piece, the
| underlying score, the foundation is same.
|
| As you know, classical music is layered. It can be scaled
| for different sized orchestras, which can be akin to
| tessellation in graphics. You can add more nuanced scores
| or details if your orchestra has enough members. Of course
| this has a limit, which is the full score written by the
| original composer. Similarly, you can remove some layers or
| simplify the piece if you're smaller orchestra without
| compromising the piece.
|
| What I tried to say is, if you've listened the piece from
| or performed with a relatively big orchestra, you'll know
| that which instrument shall be there, where the small
| optional triplets are, how the piece should sound or
| where's that little oboe shall come in, where the little
| cymbal adds that little crash, or how the harmonics affect
| each other and create that atmosphere.
|
| So, you'll notice something is missing or off or not as it
| should be especially in the high end. Classical music has a
| lot of perceptual tricks under its sleeves to create a
| specific ambiance and sense of space and most of this lays
| in the higher end of the spectrum, and they get shaved off
| first with lossy compression.
|
| Hope this helps, because it's something more felt than can
| be said with words, how you can't really hear the double
| bass but feel how it's there. It's that kind of perception.
|
| Edit: Just wanted to add that one musician's or orchestra's
| specific style of course will be different, but a good
| orchestra is very faithful to the original score of the
| piece. Even if an orchestra is playing a little fast or
| more aggressive, or a simplified version, base
| instrumentation and atmosphere is the same (as long as the
| orchestra is not doing Metallica S&M style _play the right
| thing with wrong instruments_ kind of deliberate
| arrangement).
|
| Another extreme example would be the band Pink Martini.
| They have an on-stage audio magic which allows them live
| with the exact sound of their studio recordings, albeit
| live. It's surreal to experience.
| stinos wrote:
| I sort of get what you're hinting at, but I still think
| it might be inaccurate; to me your reasoning come over
| like 'played live there's detail X and Y, when listening
| those details might be vague or don't come out properly,
| so that might be lossy compression at work' (please
| correct me if I'm wrong). Thing is: just poor microphone
| placement or poor recording equipent or poor mastering
| can have those effects as well, no?
| bayindirh wrote:
| In my comments, I assume that the recording and mastering
| is done indeed properly. If you can't carry the
| orchestra's sound to the playback medium, everything is
| already moot to begin with.
|
| The thing I'm looking is musical dynamics rather than
| details itself, but it's equally lost with poor recording
| and mastering as you say, since they're also captured by
| the microphones. The thing I'm trying to explain was they
| are not "finer details" like "oh! I hear the bow of that
| player", but a bigger feeling that the orchestra creates
| by playing together, and that effect is independent from
| individual instruments, most of the time.
|
| It's a somewhat difficult concept to put into words and
| explain. It's more about feeling the music and decoding
| the brain, and I think it needs some experience. Being
| unable to translate this into words makes me sad, because
| it carries music to another dimension IMHO.
| stinos wrote:
| _It 's a somewhat difficult concept to put into words and
| explain_
|
| Don't worry I understand what you mean wrt dynamics etc,
| it's just that I'd never thought of linking it to lossy
| compression, because there are so many other things which
| make it hard to reproduce that live sound.
| drw85 wrote:
| But that still had nothing to do with comparing lossy vs
| lossless, or am I misunderstanding you?
|
| How does a live performance that you hear with your ears
| at a specific place in a room help you pick out missing
| parts in a different recording, played by different
| people in a different place, recorded with multiple mics
| and then mixed and mastered?
| bayindirh wrote:
| It has, but in a different w.r.t comparing different
| sound systems with the same recording. Let me try to
| explain. You might know some of the following, sorry if
| it's a re-explanation.
|
| In a proper concert hall, sound is expected to be
| homogenous, so you should be able listen to the orchestra
| equally well, with the same sound balance (or mix)
| regardless of the place you sit. Similarly, recordings
| are done from suspended or positioned (and ideally tuned)
| mics, so you can capture the orchestra as someone sitting
| in the audience. At least this is how our performances
| were recorded.
|
| The mastering is then done to match the recorded sound to
| the hall's sound, and balance any imperfections or clean
| the orchestra's inner talk between pieces (yes, we
| communicate a lot :D ).
|
| When you listen an orchestra live, you will have a
| lossless blueprint of the piece in your mind (track by
| track if you can separate the instruments). If you can
| get a recording of the same performance, you can compare
| it with the live performance. That's absolutely correct.
|
| But if you listen to a recording of a different orchestra
| playing the same piece, the arrangement and
| instrumentation will be same (you may have 8 violins
| instead of 12 but, violins won't be changed by violas
| most of the time). So, the atmosphere of the piece will
| be the same. Assuming the recording is done by competent
| folks, the spectrum would be the same (~20Hz -> ~20Khz
| roughly).
|
| After some point, even if you're listening to a different
| orchestra, you can start to point to the things that
| should be there. It's very hard to describe, but every
| instrument has a base sound and details on top of it (you
| can tell they're all trumpets, but different brands or
| models. Similarly you can tell they're double basses but
| they're different in some ways). That base sound starts
| to erode too when you have a lossy compression, and in
| turn it affects the sound of the piece, regardless of the
| finer details (which are mostly affected by resins, bows,
| styles, etc.).
|
| It's a "these two instruments shouldn't interact like
| this in this piece. Something is missing!" kind of
| feeling. This missing part is either something at the
| high or low end, almost an harmonic. It's not noticeable
| unless you're looking for it, but it's there.
|
| That difference can be clearly heard by re-encoding a
| FLAC as a high bitrate MP3 and taking their differences.
| It's a hiss-like sound by contains a lot of the said
| harmonics and you can almost listen to the piece just by
| listening to it. Someone did that and published the
| differences, but it was some years ago. I'm not sure I
| can replicate or find the article. That article took
| differences of the exact same recording but, it can be
| applied by your brain to different recordings after some
| time.
|
| Hope I've succeeded to clarify it somewhat. It's
| something very hard to describe by words. Please ask more
| questions if you want to. :) I'd be happy to try more.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It seems plausible to me. I assume that when you are
| doing a comparison, you are comparing a single source to
| a memory (does anyone do comparisons by playing two
| synchronized sources together, possibly into different
| ears?) In that case, I can well imagine that listening to
| multiple live performances primes one's mind to remember
| clearly how a given presentation sounded, and to pick out
| small differences, precisely because live performances
| are all slightly different. I would further imagine that
| performing a piece, and particularly practicing with the
| rest of the orchestra or conducting a practice, further
| enhances one's ability to notice and characterize small
| differences.
|
| Of course, this might be utter nonsense, and I will bow
| to bayindirh's judgement on that!
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't disagree with the fact that you perceive more in
| a live performance -- after all there's a wealth of
| spatial information that you don't get in stereo.
|
| But that has absolutely nothing to do with compression.
| All that would matter is whether you're missing the
| "nuance" or "layers" that are there on an _uncompressed
| CD_ , but that you would perceive to be gone in MP3.
|
| I've performed and listened to a ton of classical music
| in my life, and I've never heard a difference in what
| you're talking about between CD's and MP3's. It doesn't
| really make any sense in terms of how MP3 compression
| works, either -- the compression artifacts it introduces
| are pretty orthogonal to nuance in classical music. at
| 128+ kbps
|
| It sounds to me like you're describing the difference
| between a live concert and an _uncompressed_ stereo
| recording, no matter how well it was mastered.
| vnorilo wrote:
| I believe Fraunhofver did a pretty rigorous scientific test
| that established the CD transparency quality to be around
| 256kbps mp3. I don't dispute or doubt that.
|
| However, obvious encoding artifacts abound on Spotify. Do I
| have a superhuman hearing?
|
| Probably not. My hypothesis is that not everyone authors lossy
| files as meticulously as Fraunhofver. Also, the performance of
| mp3 depends on a highly linear and faithful reproduction _after
| decoding_. Mp3 is painfully obvious on crappy, processed-to-
| hell speaker systems like the iMac.
|
| I think the real question is, why bother with lossy codecs?
| FLAC streams are lightweight by today's standards, and it's
| just so much simpler.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Mp3 is painfully obvious on crappy, processed-to-hell
| speaker systems like the iMac._
|
| I didn't know that was the case. Do you know why that somehow
| accentuates MP3 artifacts? It's not obvious to me why it
| would, since all the processing iMac speakers might perform
| is high-quality (no recompression involved). I mean,
| obviously the iMac isn't going to _improve_ the MP3, it just
| tries to improve the speakers. But why would that make
| artifacts _more_ noticeable?
|
| If anything, don't "crappy" speakers _hide_ MP3 artifacts,
| because they 're not good enough to expose them?
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Spotify doesn't use MP3, though. So if you're hearing
| MP3-specific artifacts (pre-echo, washy "underwater"
| cymbals), those are probably the result of bad mastering or
| perhaps using MP3-encoded samples in some tracks. I hear this
| on some lossless tracks I have, unfortunately if the source
| material is flawed, there's nothing you can do.
|
| Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, except the lowest bitrate on mobile,
| which is HE-ACCv2, and on Chromecast/similar devices, which
| get AAC (because they can't natively decode Ogg Vorbis).
|
| It is a significantly better codec than MP3, and doesn't
| suffer from the pre-echo, washy cymbals and badly-encoded
| high frequencies. At least not until you severely decrease
| the bitrate.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| Honestly, these days drives are so large compared to even FLAC
| that it's not worth worrying about if an MP3 would be just as
| good, IMHO.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I'm quite certain I can't tell the difference between flac
| and mp3 v0, but I keep all the music I care about in flac. I
| don't know what lossy formats will have mainstream support in
| 10-20 years, but I know I will be able to transcode flac to
| them.
| teknopaul wrote:
| mp3 is often better, it removes close frequencies that your
| ears can't hear baring tricks like very slow phase shifts.
| Speakers and amps are asked to do less work, so they often
| sound better, particularly at high volume. The same applies
| to the air the sound travels through and your ear drum and
| bio-pickups. You can often tell the difference, but its
| arguable if before or after mp3 processing is and improvement
| or destructive in terms of psychoacoustics. I often see djs
| who swear by wavs without knowing how the pitch and tempo
| adjust algo work in the equipment they are using. I.e. Top of
| the range pioneer Cdj decks run Busybox Linux and ffmpeg
| louwrentius wrote:
| If you ever want a pair of decent speakers for next to nothing,
| look up high(er)-end models from 10+ years ago and buy them
| second-hand.
|
| I have a pair of B&W 683s, not even that fancy or anything but
| they are more than good enough for my 40+ year old ears.
| ben7799 wrote:
| My father has had a pair of B&W 7xx loudspeakers for almost 30
| years now.
|
| Once you get something like that there's no reason to ever look
| at anything else again unless you've got issues.
|
| I've spent a ton of time listening to them. They're really
| amazing.
|
| Funny thing is he spent so much money he never could figure out
| what to do about home theater when that became a fad. Now Home
| theater is pretty much gone but his setup is still fantastic
| for music.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I can relate to that: my 85 year old aunt has Magnat speakers
| from the early eighties and they sound amazing to this day.
|
| Never have I owned a surround set, I really don't care about
| that.
|
| The 683 were bought for the same price in euros I paid for my
| (not so great) 202i bookshelves 25 years ago in Dutch
| Guilders. Felt great.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| I am a big fan of B&W speakers. Cool to see this article. Someday
| hope to get some 803s.
| holri wrote:
| Best high-end audio for at home:
|
| https://www.boesendorfer.com/en/pianos/disklavier-edition
|
| If you do not have the time and talent to play it yourself, you
| can listen to Horowitz or others playing live in your home on a
| real piano.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The real deal is certainly unbeatable, but even then you could
| have the best concert grand installed in your house and it
| would still not sound nearly as good as the one sitting in the
| middle of a massive concert hall expressly designed for this
| purpose.
|
| I would have to wonder if a high quality recording of a piano
| in a proper setting would be more compelling to certain
| listeners than a live performance in a less ideal location.
|
| I have an upright piano at home that I play on occasion, but I
| much prefer how the full-size concert grands sound in the big
| concert halls. I certainly enjoy the act of reproducing music
| with my own hands more than listening to someone else do it,
| but from a purely acoustic standpoint there are tradeoffs.
| holri wrote:
| My Bosendorfer grand piano sounds much better than my B&W
| loudspeakers with high end project amplifier in the same
| living room. It is not even comparable.
| amelius wrote:
| Reminds me of the Henry Ford quote: "If I had asked people what
| they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
| blipmusic wrote:
| :-)
|
| Also see Glenn Gould's Goldberg variations:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/arts/music/12conn.html
| https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/archives/yamaha-disklavier-and-
| zenph-restore-goulds-1955-igoldberg-variations
| https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-13701/
| electrograv wrote:
| I am surprised there aren't more mentions here of
| AudioScienceReview.com
|
| For anyone interested in buying speakers (or other audio
| products), it's a fantastic resource and an _essential_ one to
| avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and
| underperforming products; sadly, the high fidelity speaker space
| is crowded with such products (many of which are borderline
| scams), using a ton of pseudoscientific marketing babble to push
| products ranging from "snake-oil" bunk, to mediocre garbage that
| still costs the price of an exotic car for no good reason.
|
| If you're curious to cut through the garbage, and learn how to
| achieve the best sound quality for the best price with a no-
| nonsense approach, AudioScienceReview is the place to go. They
| have the highest quality objective measurements on many speakers
| (that goes _far beyond_ frequency response, before you brush it
| off thinking that's what I'm talking about) and tutorials on the
| well-established science of what makes a speaker sound better
| than others, and how we design and evaluate this.
|
| It turns out you can get sound quality ~90% as good as it gets
| for just a few hundred dollars, and ~95% as good as it gets for a
| few thousand dollars (obviously just rough numbers here). Beware
| of speakers sold for exorbitant prices and exotic visual designs
| that tout how they are built, rather than what measured
| performance they achieve objectively.
|
| B&W speakers are not bad, and I enjoyed mine very much when I had
| them. But there exist _far better speakers at a fraction of the
| cost,_ and this includes their high end (like the Nautilus).
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Can you list the far better speakers?
| electrograv wrote:
| The "Speaker Rankings" tab here is useful: https://www.audios
| ciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe...
|
| Otherwise, let me know your price range and size constraints,
| and I'll refer you to the best engineered (with subjective
| impressions that back it up) speaker you can get. Note that
| generally to get good bass response you need larger speakers
| due to the laws of physics, but more exotic construction can
| push these boundaries, albeit at the expense of greater cost
| and electrical power demands.
|
| If you want to know what is objectively far better (and
| subjectively according to most, as the science predicts),
| look to the Revel F328Be, Genelec 8351B + Genelec W371A, Kii
| Three + BXT, Dutch and Dutch 8C. These are _very expensive_ ,
| but even in the worst case they are half the price of the B&W
| Nautilus and perform far better according to what the state-
| of-the-art science tells us. And subjectively, this is easily
| confirmed.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Thank you! I hadn't seen that rankings tab.
| exhilaration wrote:
| That's a great link, thanks! For any other cheapskates out
| there, here are their highest rated speakers under $250: ht
| tps://public.tableau.com/shared/T2YR3HZ25?:toolbar=n&:disp.
| ..
| siavosh wrote:
| I'm totally ignorant in this area, what would you recommend
| for general use speakers for a living room that can be
| sync'd to an iPhone or TV for <=$2k? Thank you.
| electrograv wrote:
| For speakers, I'd recommend a pair of Revel M106 (or
| M105) for ~$1500 new (on sale price, which you can
| negotiate with dealers usually) plus a ~$500 AVR or
| integrated amplifier capable of wifi music streaming and
| HDMI ARC support for TV connectivity, like a Sonos Amp or
| any of Denon's AVR products (more on this below).
|
| ( ASR measurements + review of the Revel M106: https://ww
| w.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... )
|
| There are possibly better quality speakers to pick from
| in this price range (e.g. Genelec 8330A, however this
| trades off some bass power which you probably don't want
| unless you have a subwoofer), but to connect these to
| your TV _and_ streaming music simultaneously requires a
| more expensive AVR (Audio Video Receiver) that supports
| unamplified audio outputs, costing around $1K (e.g. Denon
| AVR-X3700H). It's ironic because the Genelec 8330A have
| built-in amplification and digital inputs but don't
| accept power-amplified signals, which is significantly
| more advanced in many ways, yet this advanced nature
| makes it _harder_ to integrate with TVs and streaming
| audio simultaneously simply because most AVR products for
| TV-speaker integration are geared towards "passive" style
| speakers like the Revel's for complex and historical
| reasons. (For some strange reason buying an AVR that
| allows you to bypass its amplifiers via preamp outputs
| ends up costing more than AVRs where the amplifiers are
| always on.)
|
| So for best connectivity in this price range, I'd
| recommend the Revel M106 along with a Sonos Amp. The
| Sonos software experience is by far the best at
| seamlessly and automatically transitioning between wifi
| streaming music and TV use modes, works natively with
| Spotify and almost every other music app, as well as
| having a good app of its own.
|
| However the Sonos Amp (and Sonos Port product which
| produces unamplified outputs, but for some strange reason
| omits the HDMI audio input the Amp has, unfortunately, so
| doesn't integrate with a TV well) both lack the ability
| to calibrate bass to your room, which is very important
| if you plan to upgrade to speakers and/or subwoofers with
| deep bass, where EQ calibration to the room's resonant
| frequencies is essential for best results.
|
| If you want to be a little more future-proof and feature
| rich, and also be open to multichannel home theater in
| the future, a modern Denon AVR receiver with Audessy room
| calibration capability and "HEOS" Music streaming is also
| really good, but it gets complex as there are a lot of
| choices and depends on how "future proof" you want to be.
| And they tend to be fairly bulky.
|
| Note that I'm assuming you want to be able to use the
| same pair of speakers for _both_ TV output, and for music
| streaming when the TV is off. This significantly
| complicates the electronics, and few products get the
| user experience here right. If you're willing to manually
| use a remote or buttons to switch modes, or dedicate the
| speakers to either exclusively streaming music
| (controllable from your phone of course), OR TV audio
| output (which via Spotify TV app can sometimes be
| sufficient for music too), then much simpler and cheaper
| options are available.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret
| things.
|
| One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio
| is that the experience is very much subjective. That people's
| tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience
| differ wildly.
|
| That while a loudspeaker pair or headphone may measure or
| perform objectively well, it may not pair up well with your
| particular taste, or with your music.
|
| As an example Sennheiser's HD800 is a well regarded high end
| headphone that does particularly well with the fine details of
| orchestral music, but lacks the low end punch required for Hip-
| Hop or other styles of bass heavy music, and it's elevated
| treble can make the heavily distorted guitar of Black Metal
| incredibly grating on the ear.
|
| Of course everyone is different. If you know the equipment you
| like, and how it's sound signature translates to graphs you can
| use the measurements and commentary on ASR to discover other
| equipment knowing how it differs within that context.
| electrograv wrote:
| This trope that 'the best audio product for you is a highly
| subjective personal choice' _directly contradicts decades of
| well-established science,_ and is a long-standing myth that
| _plagues_ this industry -- and not coincidentally, serves to
| sell a ton of over-expensive garbage to under-educated (by
| design, via marketing bunk) consumers.
|
| If you read ASR's materials on headphone science and the
| HD800S review in particular, it will become entirely clear
| why it sounds the way it does, and what you need to do to EQ
| it to fix its tonal character issues out of the box.
|
| I own the HD800S and if it wasn't for the scientifically
| derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I
| would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons
| exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing
| their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound
| signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for
| metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound.
|
| I should add though that headphones are definitely more
| subjective than speakers. This is because we are shoving a
| speaker 1 inch from our ears and hoping it will sound like
| the music is in the room around us instead of actually shoved
| right up against our ear -- and the way this sounds actually
| does differ from person to person due to different ear canal
| geometry!
|
| This limitation is _not_ the case for speakers, though! The
| consensus science shows that for speakers, an "objective
| best" does exist (such that the objective "best" has
| extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of
| people), whereas for headphones this number is not as high
| (though I don't know that number off the top of my head).
|
| And you know what's great about ASR? They explain all this!
| All you need to do is read their resources and understand
| what the science does and does not help with.
| Bayart wrote:
| >I own the HD800S and if it wasn't for the scientifically
| derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I
| would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons
| exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing
| their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the
| sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably
| painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly
| balanced sound.
|
| That's why I prefer flat, little coloured gear (IEMs in my
| case) and do minute adjustments in EQ if I _really_ must. I
| 've got enough of a wide range of styles I listen to in any
| given time frame that I would get more bad than good from
| gear with a strong signature. I've been happy with my
| Etymotic ER4.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The consensus science shows that for speakers, an
| "objective best" does exist (such that the objective "best"
| has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of
| people)_
|
| Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of
| your head as examples?
| [deleted]
| electrograv wrote:
| For the absolute best, cost is no object? Genelec 8351B +
| W371A, Revel F328Be, Dutch & Dutch 8C, Kii Three BXT, and
| many others.
|
| But you really don't need to pay this much unless you
| want the absolute best quality AND quantity (capable of
| going _extremely_ loud, which is an engineering challenge
| that requires expensive solutions). You may find the
| "Speaker Attr Comparison" tab here useful to explore the
| price vs performance spectrum: https://www.audiosciencere
| view.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe...
|
| I would recommend learning to read the individual
| reviewed speaker measurements though, since there
| definitely is some information lost when compressing
| these incredibly rich measurements down to a single
| number, and the science still has some room to improve
| since there are some dimensions (e.g. the importance of
| low distortion at high SPL, or beam width) that this
| fairly old aggregate score model does not currently
| incorporate.
|
| There definitely is _some_ subjective taste involved, but
| the important thing is that we can measure these
| dimensions objectively and understand which is subjective
| (and why), and which is _not_ a matter of subjective
| personal taste. We can explore these personal preference
| tradeoffs without completely surrendering to the
| subjective nonsense that 'anything goes'.
|
| For example, it looks like the most subjective factor
| remaining in speakers is the overall beam width --
| whether you want a more directional sound, or a more
| omnidirectional one that fills the room more broadly.
| This topic is at the edge/fringe of the established
| science, but the general consensus here is that the
| objective best would be a multichannel surround sound
| system of medium beam speakers, where you can either
| replay recordings meant for multichannel systems, or for
| traditional stereo recordings at least dynamically select
| how frontal vs surround you want a particular stereo
| recoding to be reproduced (just as you can e.g. easily
| adjust bass boost to taste depending on what you're
| listening to, if it wasn't recorded/mixed the way you
| like). But given that _most_ people want to minimize the
| number and size of speakers in their room, there does
| tend to be a _practical_ challenge of preference here if
| you can only pick one style (wide vs medium vs narrow
| beam) for stereo recordings (which while not an ideal
| format, constitute 99.999% of all music people enjoy).
| fortran77 wrote:
| We have top-line Genelecs in our home theatre (with a
| custom center channel horn for dialog). But most
| "audiophiles" won't like them even though they are as
| accurate a speaker as you can get.
|
| As a 58-year-old, the sound I like when listening to
| music is probably a bit off from "accurate". It's a
| combination of trying to match the sound I grew up
| hearing (which admittedly was colored by the way records
| were mastered in the 70s!) and the fact that my high-end
| hearing isn't what it used to be. I think considerations
| like that are what drive "audiophile" audio.
|
| Plus, when you get to be 50+ and have some money to
| spare, there's a cool factor. A preposterous turntable is
| just like a luxury wrist-watch. You don't buy a $80,000
| watch because it tells better time....
| electrograv wrote:
| If a $80k watch or turntable makes you happy, then that's
| great for you. The reason the science matters here is
| because most people don't necessarily have a ton of money
| to waste, and aren't necessarily trying to recreate a
| historical reproduction of some old records (along with
| all their flaws); most people just want to listen to
| their favorite music and have it sound the best it can
| for a reasonable price. This is where the science has the
| definitive answers, with the potential exception of
| really old recordings with various quirks due to the lack
| of well-established audio recording and reproduction
| science at the time. But digitizing such old works
| involves some creative art in trying to recreate the
| authentic old sound when played on modern speakers, and
| this can be done well (and is done well, in some but not
| all cases).
|
| But for example, there is no magical difference between a
| good studio monitor and good audiophile speakers. The
| differences are well understood and easily measurable.
| Studio monitors are often more neutral and flat, but also
| may tend to have a narrower beam, while audiophile
| speakers often have wider beams and perhaps some
| coloration like bass boost and treble boost or reduction.
|
| What's great about the science is it removes all this
| subjective guesswork. For example, my Genelec 8351B's out
| of the box sound too bright for my tastes. But thankfully
| their built-in DSP allows me not only to calibrate them
| to perfection to my room, but tune the overall sonic
| signature to my preference (a gentle downward slope, for
| a warmer sound). The beauty of good speakers is you can
| do this in software, rather than buying a different pair
| of speakers.
|
| About the only thing you can't tune in software with
| _good_ speakers is the beam width (assuming there are no
| flaws like directivity mismatches, distortion, etc. which
| can never be fixed in DSP). And that's why e.g. my
| Genelec still sound different from my Revel speakers: the
| Genelec are medium width beam, while the Revel are very
| wide.
|
| Depending on the music genre, this matters. I prefer the
| wider beam sound on older music and more traditional
| "audiophile" style music, so for that I tend to prefer
| the Revels. But for newer music, I and almost everyone
| else prefers the Genelec's presentation. It's important
| that this is not some subjectivist mystery: it completely
| makes sense, and through this understanding we are
| empowered to engineer or select the best speaker for the
| job without making it unattainably expensive or
| impossibly convoluted via subjective claims.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I think you missed the perfectly valid critique, that
| sennheiser sub bass roll off very quickly. An eq filter
| won't fix this without distorting sound.
| electrograv wrote:
| I didn't miss it; it's just not valid. (1) The HD800S is
| actually not as highly regarded as you may think on ASR
| because these issues _do_ show up in the measurements and
| are pointed out in the review (did you read it?), but
| also (2) the HD800's issues are indeed very much fixable
| with EQ, and I can confirm this subjectively with _direct
| experience_ with my HD800S.
|
| I hope you're not thinking I'm advocating a crude N-band
| equalizer to broadly boost the bass and reduce the treble
| to fix the HD800's thin-ness and brightness. I'm talking
| about very precise filters that the community has
| optimized mathematically to fit the measured response to
| the ideal Harman target curve: https://www.audiosciencere
| view.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...
|
| There is no reason scientifically to believe this
| wouldn't work, other than the maximum driver excursion
| and distortion limits of the headphones. Fortunately the
| HD800S bass is extremely clean and undistorted, and they
| respond really well here. I've tried this with other
| headphones, and most cheaper headphones do struggle
| greatly, while the HD800S sub-bass is extremely
| impressive, clean, and powerful when EQ'ed in this way.
| And even more importantly, this works wonders to smooth
| out peaks in the treble that sound too harsh to be prior
| to EQ.
|
| Even if it couldn't be fixed with precise EQ though, this
| is still something we can measure objectively via max SPL
| and distortion vs frequency tests. For example, another
| highly regarded headphone is the Focal Clear, and it
| unfortunately has severe bass SPL / driver excursion
| limits that rules it out from being corrected in this
| way.
|
| Of course it's a fair criticism that such expensive
| headphones should require EQ at all! And the HD800S are
| indeed criticized in this way on ASR! Sadly though, it
| seems virtually all headphones do require EQ to sound
| remotely near their maximum possible sound quality
| potential, in terms of their physical capability. I
| personally love the HD800S for a number of reasons, but
| one of them is extreme comfort (which definitely is
| subjective), but I will be the first to admit their sound
| is painful to my ears until corrected with EQ.
| passivate wrote:
| You claim high-end audio is not subjective, but then
| bring up the Harman target. You're defeating your own
| point. As you know, the Harman target is a "mass market"
| pleasing option for average joe's. Its not the be all and
| end all of audio signatures. I am in the "bass head"
| camp, and I loathe it for a lot of the stuff I listen to.
| I'd take a JVC HA-SZ2000 over the HD 800s for my taste.
| electrograv wrote:
| If you re-read my posts, you'll note several things I
| point out or at least allude to, beyond the
| oversimplified characterization of "not subjective":
|
| (1) We have an objective science that disambiguates and
| understands differences that are subjective versus
| universal preferences in speakers (to some reasonable
| threshold of population universality; e.g. maybe you find
| some 0.0000001% population that prefers horrible
| screeching noises added to any audio content, but arguing
| for this as an important dimension of subjective
| variability that we need to incorporate into _hardware_
| is I hope clearly absurd).
|
| (2) The vast majority of subjective variability relates
| to differences in frequency response, which are extremely
| easy and _cheap_ to adjust in software -- no need to
| cycle through many multi-thousand dollar headphones or
| speakers just in hopes of finding one that suits your
| preferred frequency response target.
|
| (3) Almost every kind of imperfection that can't be
| corrected via frequency response tuning (e.g. undistorted
| SPL capability, THD, IMD, off-axis smoothness and
| similarity to on-axis for speakers, power handling and
| dynamic compression, etc.) turns out to be almost
| universally disliked versus when that imperfection does
| not exist.
|
| (4) Once frequency response balance is factored out
| either via custom EQ or a "mass market" target curve
| (which for headphones is indeed more of a compromise, but
| for speakers is _not_ even remotely a subjective matter,
| since there are _mountains of scientific evidence_ over
| _decades_ proving over and over again that the preferred
| anechoic frequency response for speakers is _flat_ , i.e.
| the mathematically perfect identity function), which
| naturally yields a preferred in-room target curve of a
| smoothly declining slope -- very little (if any)
| subjective variability remains (e.g. bass boost or treble
| tilt to taste is one such example).
|
| (5) To be clear, _some_ subjective variability does
| remain, but it mostly relates to head fit and comfort
| (for headphones), and for speakers is much more nuanced
| and tends to relate to beam width and height differences.
| In both cases, the science is capable of examining these
| precisely, not in some kind of vague or hand-wavy woo woo
| sense. Lastly, there is always some need to make some
| coarse adjustments to bass and treble when listening to
| older recordings or recordings which were mastered to a
| non-neutral reference curve (as they should be, else it
| 's impossible to ever reconstruct what was intended) --
| but this is not so much a matter of listener preference
| as it is correcting for mixing/mastering errors in older
| or lower quality tracks.
| patentatt wrote:
| Then you haven't read ASR much, as there are plenty of
| discussions and references to some well established objective
| criteria that correlate with subjective preferences. It's not
| entirely subjective.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi
| audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That
| people's tastes, wants and desires in music and listening
| experience differ wildly.
|
| We do in fact know how subjective preferences correlate to
| objective measurements. Here's the paper to start with:
| https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794
| js2 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370372
| rodgerd wrote:
| > it's a fantastic resource and an essential one to avoid
| getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming
| product
|
| Yeah, you need to whip off the rose tinted glasses. ASR is a
| step in the right direction, but there are no shortage of
| issues with the quality and consistency of Amir's testing, or
| his ludicrous hyperbole.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm probably in the minority here, but companies: please just
| call it _the_ Nautilus. It 's a product, not a person, and I
| don't care how much time or effort or personality was put into
| your product. I paid money for it, I own it now. It will be
| called "The iPad", not "iPad". It outright annoys me when
| companies try feigning familiarity like that.
| e17 wrote:
| I once got to listen to a pair of these at Abbey Road studio in
| London as a teenager. They blew me away. I was already a
| burgeoning audiophile (working in a branch of Sevenoaks Sound &
| Vision if anyone knows) but these speakers really started a love
| affair with audio.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Ah, Sevenoaks. I got a very good set of separates from them in
| '98 (Arcam, Myryad, and B&W speakers), but I did spend a lot
| more money than I'd originally planned as I was young and
| rather susceptible to hard-sell techniques. Ended up buying
| everything else from Richer, who were dramatically better in
| that regard.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| On one hand I like spare-no-expense halo products like this. They
| are fascinating, at least visually.
|
| On the other hand this is why the hi-fi hobby is dying.
|
| With products like this, we promote the idea that high fidelity
| audio requires all sorts of exotic equipment that few can afford.
|
| The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be
| achieved without spending much money; certainly less than a
| modern game console.
|
| One example would be JBL's excellent entry level studio monitors.
| While they don't play super loud, they measure nearly impeccably
| and sometimes go on sale for as little as $200/pair.
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
| k-mcgrady wrote:
| Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different
| categories and use cases to me. HiFi speakers should fill the
| room. To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be
| positioned well. Just moving a little bit can make a big
| difference in the sound.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different
| categories and use cases to me. .
|
| Studio monitors can potentially be great hifi speakers,
| though generally not the other way around.
| To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be
| positioned well.
|
| Modern studio monitors are often quite the literal opposite
| of this!
|
| Thanks to the waveguide on the JBL 3-series and 7-series
| monitors, you get nearly perfectly constant sound over an
| unbelievably wide 120-degree swath. You won't find anything
| approaching this in the consumer hi-fi market segment. This
| is nearly as true for Genelec studio monitors as well. Check
| the dispersion graphs (the rainbow colored ones) for these
| models:
|
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j.
| ..
|
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j.
| ..
|
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/g.
| ..
|
| Which makes sense given the use case: you might have a few
| people sitting at the mixing desk and you'd like them to be
| hearing the same thing. HiFi speakers
| should fill the room
|
| Depending on the size of the room, studio monitors may or may
| not be able to fulfill this duty well. It does definitely
| tend to be the achilles heel when you try and use studio
| monitors for hifi. I've got JBL 306's crossed over to a pair
| of compact 12" subs in my fairly small music room and and
| they definitely get way louder than I want or need them too.
| k-mcgrady wrote:
| Interesting! I guess it depends on the specific
| speakers/monitors. It's not something I would have
| considered before. I'll have to check out those JBL's.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| I used a pair of Adam A5Xs as my main speakers for a long
| time, and those were perfectly capable of filling my living
| room with sound, as well as being seriously good and accurate
| monitors. Obviously the 5" woofers did struggle a bit with
| bass at high volumes, but so would any hifi speaker with
| similar-sized drivers. Augmenting them with two 12" active
| subs took care of that well enough. Replacing them with the
| larger A7Xs or A8Xs would have been an option as well.
|
| I've since replaced the Adams with a set of Monitor Audio
| Bronze 2s, because I wanted something with a bit more living
| room friendly looks. Finding an AVR with outputs for active
| speakers is surprisingly difficult, so I had to go back to
| passive speakers, and I compensated a bit by getting the
| largest practical model I could fit.
|
| Studio monitors are as varied as any other speaker design.
| There are ones with really small sweet spots and others with
| extremely huge ones, the JBL LSR series is a great example of
| the latter, their horn loaded tweeters have really impressive
| horizontal dispersion.
| bob1029 wrote:
| You can get damn close to the performance of the halo products
| with stuff as humble as Polk Audio floorstanders and some
| Emotiva amps.
|
| Any dumbass with a table saw, glue and a bunch of clamps can
| make speakers that rival the highest end for pennies on the
| dollar. There are lots of online resources for this sort of
| thing.
|
| If you think this hobby is about the most precise listening
| experience (bit rates, conversion, etc), you would be wrong in
| my eyes. It's more about the presence/power you get from a
| system that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients. The
| effective dynamic range in a real world listening room. Having
| your walls rattle a bit when the depth charges explode is an
| _experience_. You don 't get that with sound docks/bars,
| headphones, etc.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| If you think this hobby is about the most precise
| listening experience you would be wrong in my eyes.
| It's more about the presence/power you get from a system
| that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients.
|
| Both things are true and the best systems nail both.
|
| The research done by Floyd Toole and Sean Olive and others
| tells us that all other things being equal, listeners prefer
| speakers that accurately reproduce the input signal.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-
| Lo...
|
| But, I also agree 100% that gobs of power and accurate
| reproduction of those transients is also key to listener
| enjoyment and that this is something that is currently (no
| pun intended) undervalued by the objective audiophile world.
|
| In a modestly sized room one can have their cake and eat it
| too, with regards to studio monitors. My den music room is
| about 200 ft^2 / 19 m^2. In this room I have studio monitors
| crossed over to a pair of subwoofers and it's able to push
| some very satisfying output levels.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > In a modestly sized room
|
| There is the magic part of the whole equation. Everything
| comes down to the room. Small/medium rooms can be easily
| pressurized by reasonable setups. I am currently cursed
| with a gigantic open concept living room, but will be
| moving my gear into a better home very soon.
|
| A lot of people miss the environmental factor. It's the
| biggest one. The various room modes will have the most
| impact on your listening experience. No amount of
| equalization or other DSP hackery can defeat the laws of
| physics.
|
| The best listening environment is in an open field in the
| middle of nowhere, but you need a ridiculous amount of
| power to make that sound really good.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| A lot of people miss the environmental factor. It's
| the biggest one. The various room modes will have
| the most impact on your listening experience. No amount
| of equalization or other DSP hackery can defeat the
| laws of physics.
|
| Objectively, this is true beyond doubt and can be easily
| measured!
|
| Subjectively I think it's perhaps a little more
| complicated since our brains already do a lot of "room
| correction." When we completely remove the room from the
| equation via absorbers etc. we essentially create a
| headphones-like experience which feels a little
| artificial to many people. It's like the music is
| happening inside my head instead of on a stage in front
| of me.
|
| So, I typically don't really worry about room treatment,
| other than rugs and bookcases and furnishings. This is
| personal taste and I won't say you're wrong if you do
| otherwise!
|
| Incidentally it's worth noting the living room of Floyd
| Toole who wrote "the" book on a lot of this stuff.
| https://www.thescreeningroomav.com/single-
| post/2019/03/06/th...
| deltron3030 wrote:
| >On the other hand this is why the hi-fi hobby is dying.
|
| The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it
| has a lot of competition in the entertainment space. That's why
| these days good speakers often part of home theater or computer
| setups, with a screen in between instead of standalone systems
| just for music listening.
|
| >The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be
| achieved without spending much money;
|
| Indeed. But people often buy for social reasons, to boast in
| forum threads or to belong to a circle of elitist in those
| communities, it's also a status game.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it
| has a lot of competition in the entertainment space.
|
| Yeah, this is probably a bigger problem than the perception
| of hifi being strictly a rich man's game thanks to $50K
| flagship speakers.
|
| But, I do think that perception is _one_ of the biggest
| issues.
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