Speakers for vocalists

Quadophile...Female vocalist is a good "test signal", for overall quality and imaging, but a man's voice will root out any tendancy to bass boominess.

Some speakers are definitely better than others for voice. My Maggie 1.6 are pretty good I think, and do a lot of other things well. However, many years ago I had KLH5 and KLH12 speakers that were the best I have ever heard for voice. They were three way, with a pair of very light paper cone midranges, about 3 inches in diameter. When I visited the Smithsonian museum of Science and Industry in Washington DC I noticed that they used KLH5 speakers for the displays which included spoken word audio.

When auditioning speakers, an old trick is to turn off the music and listen to an FM radio station where a man is speaking. The human voice is a "test signal" that we all are familiar with. If voice sounds natural, you probably have a good speaker.

Kkm...Some recordings are like that, but others give pinpoint imaging. It's not the speakers. Maybe you need to fiddle with placement or room treatment, especially the wall behind the speakers.

The point source concept is overrated. Even if the sound source is nearly a point (and voice is the only example of this that I can think of) sound waves propogate away from the source, and by the time they reach 10 or 15 feet what you have is a (nearly) planar wavefront. That's what a planar speaker replicates. The point source lies well behind the speakers themselves.

I have a set of three MG1.6, so my center channel imaging is not an issue. However, I sometimes play 2 channel programs, or multichannel ones where the center channel is not used, and it is impossible to verify that the center speaker is silent without walking up to it and puting an ear to it.

Gregm...Did you know that the human voice has several vocal cords? In other words, not a full range driver :-)

Gregm...Maybe God knew what he was doing when he designed the human voice. Just joking, but it always surprises me how many technical "inventions" have parallels in biology.

I just learned of some further analogies between biological structure and multidriver speaker systems. The little hairs of the inner ear which sense sound vibrations came in three types: long, medium, and short, sensitive to low, mid, and high frequency, respectively. But even more interesting, after the vibrations have been converted to electrical signals and transmitted to the brain via the cochlear nerve, processing of the signal is accomplished in two physically separate areas of the brain, high frequency in one area and low frequency in the other.

Suits_me..."like a Heil". Just one more example of technology mimicking biology.