Talk but not walk?

Your almost there dbp24. 5 or 6 more years and you might be to the point of adding me to your list, lol. It’s tough isn’t it when you have this idea of someone in your head and your finding out they aren’t what you thought :) You’ll get there we all do.

I want to ask you guys something and I don’t want you to answer with audiophile-isms.

Instead of thinking about acoustics in such general terms why don’t you get more specific? The cool thing about acoustical, mechanical and electrical is how they are all part of each other. HEA has tried to make cookie cutters to make things easier to sell but in doing so they fail to cover the variables. Let me give you a few examples.

In 1989 when I designed and built my testing facility we did several different structures with the same measurements so we could study the surface effect among many other topics. The first rooms were built on the same slab inches apart from each other. Same construction materials and even the drywall screw patterns were the same, and using the same tension per screw. We measured the rooms to try to get them as close as possible from a starting point.

As a point of reference I used long time pals at Audio-Technica to do my anechoic measuring at their place in Akron Ohio in exchange for them visiting my tunes, plus 2 of them owned speakers I made for them. (nice to have friends) We tested many different variables in the audio chain and quickly came to the conclusion that at best testing is a snap shot approach to a continuum. This was nothing new as I came to the same conclusions in Atlanta in the early 80’s and further back in Miami and Europe in the 70’s. Audio is not a tape measurer and the more you experience audio the more you want to throw out the rule book and cut to the listening chase.

back to the 2 rooms

When we did surfaces testing in the two rooms we chose, there are a few things we did that might help you guys understand some variables.

1) when changing paint types the rooms performed differently

2) when changing temps and or humidity different sound

3) adding objects to the room, different again

4) different flooring, different sound

5) how long the signal played, different

6) changing the wall surface type (dry wall to wood to plaster) all different

7) diffusion, different

8) trapping, different

9) dampening, different

10) tuning, different

The list goes on, but lets get to speaker placement.

With any of the changes above (except for tuning) we found there was no two speaker locations that were the same. With any change, such as hard wood to carpet, the speakers’ locations changed. Even different brands of carpet and padding required speaker placement changes. We found that any and all speaker placement suggestions by the manufacturers to be completely off. We even went to the manufacturers facilities and found the recommended placements were not accurate.

In the case of panel speakers, the difference in setup in a plaster walled house and drywalled house are completely different. We also found there is no such thing as "first wall reflection", the way the audio folks describe it. Rooms are mostly made up of Pressure Zones not Reflecting Points. Reflecting points usually stay within a paralleled echo pattern. Remember when I introduced the clap test.

there’s more

mg

Hi bdp24, sorry! You’ve probably noticed by my writing I have a mild form of dyslexia. I use to enjoy having a ghost writer, then when I started my own forum and he passed away I was like, sorry folks! My writing skills make me laugh when I read back through but it makes for good humor for my friends to have something to tease me about.

Also, I do enjoy reading your posts using your set as a reference point. Terrible player that I am I’ve had a few fairly nice setups and am like a kid being around drummers, their kits and talent.

Your also correct that I’m not so much into diffusers. I’m more of a direction and zoning guy. Even though some folks call my SoundShutters a diffusion type product, it’s more of a wall zoning device. The Areoplanes are another zoning tool that some put in the diffusion camp, but they’re really about organizing the zones and not diffusing them.

Have you ever seen one of my SS walls?

I do work a lot with back waves and even build special SAM walls made to go behind panels.

mg

There was a mastering room I was doing some work on in Nashville. The engineer was remastering some SNL shows and had ordered in some new amps and speakers at the same time I was doing my thing in there. The guys from the speaker company and the mastering engineer were sold on the idea that for true staging there was a certain placement formula that needed to be used. Fine, wasn’t my gig so they did their thing and at the end of the day it sounded horrible. No one liked it, but they were determined to stay on course. A day or two later I asked if I could set things up for the heck of it, and after I got some dirty looks they said go ahead. 2 hours later it was like the SNL cast was walking through the room. Everyone was pretty freaked out and one guy super mad suggesting what I just did couldn’t happen :)

I’ve been through this same thing hundreds, probably thousands, of times in person. Same thing happened when I was a mic tech. The only formula that works is the one you create.

another Nashville example

I was tuning up a drum room and the drummer kept getting mad at me the way I was doing the miking on the kick drum. He got stuck in his head that kick drums don’t have a note but instead are raw pressure. (guess he never met "sugarfoot"). It was a long day and every time we went into the control room you could hear the kick was out of tune throwing off the bass line. Stubborn as he was we ended up retuning the room and kick and mics together. You know how I fixed it. A little thing called a pressure box.

A lot of folks in this hobby try to make full range speakers do what a room is telling them not to do. Right around 80hz and down panel speakers (all speakers) start to challenge the rooms walls density. One little move and the speakers will shift upward. You might get your staging just about right and then play another recording and there’s that range shift. People blame it on the recording or start looking for other components or start filling their rooms with traps, instead of realizing the walls in the room are having a conflict with the mechanics of the speakers. Somewhere in that room there is a pressure build up or the opposite keeping the bottom notes from fully forming. Major problem right? Nope, it’s actually an easy fix. You can get a professional Pressure Box made from me, but to take care of the basic problem you can make your own ported pressure box and move it around the room till it activates and restores the pressure in the room to balance.

At the end of the day, don’t get stuck on numbers. Learn how the control pressure. And always remember, your not hearing the speakers, but pressure. Once you start treating your room like a speaker things get a lot easier.

mg

"as it brings to the fore problems of dogma, and the stuff folks just carry around.. preventing them from looking at problems in a fresh way."

I've had clients first starting to tune completely in audiophile stuck world. They were being controlled by home brewed theories this hobby's "experts" wrote up somewhere and became fake facts. Once these same folks started to allow themselves to be their own experts their systems took huge leaps forward.

I have some listeners when they come to one of my places, I just hand them the keys and I enjoy what they come up with and the way that they tune my systems to their sound.

MG

Hi Glupson

With anything it takes a few generations to go from hand adjustments to auto tune. But it's on it's way when listeners are ready. Might not happen in my lifetime but I've already designed the automated tunable room and system. I'm sure I'm not alone in this development. I can't imagine younger minds who have tuned are not already thinking how to incorporate what I have done into the next level. There aren't that many dots to connect when you look at auto-tuning for musical instruments.

With the HEA generation the stalling point was when they took a detour away from adjustability, but as you can see that is quickly being reversed. Sometimes old school doesn't meet new school till an innovation is well into the mainstream. I personally enjoy doing the adjustments by hand much like a musician enjoys playing their instrument, and tuning that instrument to a room and other musical instruments. For HEA though the whole plug & play thing was so heavily pounded into the brains of listeners for so long and with such a cult like loyalty the mere mention of anything variable took away from their climb to the top of the marketing food chain.

Tuning was always going to be the end game when it comes to music and electronics, but when you have a hobby that was so strong with personality types such as the EE generation produced, where numbers are God, you can see where the hold up happened and why. Think about it, we had a whole generation in this hobby who put measurement creating above listening.  Numbers are a tool but they are not a note being interpreted by the human brain and senses.

mg

Hi bdp24

That's wild, we were just talking about Record Plant like 2 days ago, no kidding! That's some memories there!

mg

Hi bdp24

Shows how out of touch I am. I thought they closed up a few years back. They got a bunch of my goodies over in Nashville (same studios right?). I know he had several buildings. My main contact in LA was A&M so after they closed I mostly got calls from private in-home studios but not too many commercial. That area use to be wall to wall recording hot spots. Probably still is, and I know there's a lot of in-home stuff going on.

mg

I’ve been doing some listening evaluating over the past few weeks so didn’t visited here. When I came back it was an interesting thing that I noticed. The ego posturing hadn’t changed a bit. The topics were slightly different but I noticed the personalities of the "talkers" were in the exact same place as when I took my break. Time stood still for these fellas, their agendas hadn’t progressed. The script flip to this is I also noticed the "walkers" had progressed. Some more than others but there were signs of life, a pulse.

The longer you’re here the more you can see the agendas of posters on display. I’m guessing people who read and don’t post are the ones most perceptive. They have no ego at stake in these topics and spins. As for the rest of us there’s more exposed laying on the table.

point and case

I was trolled a day ago fairly obviously and typically I would have just sent in my report and come back to find the post deleted (nice job mods). However sometimes I have that desire to place that internet troll in their place using my wit, facts and a bit of their own medicine. Keep in mind that description is me stroking my own ego in the matter and may not be seen by anyone else the way I viewed my return fire. In fact every time I do fire back there’s that thing in me hoping the Mod will delete not only the troll’s post but as well my follow up firing back. What’s the use of my countersuit if the original has been thrown out of court, in other words. It’s all very interesting looking from the Mods point of view, as well I would suppose the non-posting reader.

My biggest challenge through in the hours, days, weeks and months is time. Because of this I’m usually a yes and no man and move on quickly. When in Agon posting mode though I’m a different type altogether because I am in agenda mode. As I write this for example I’m looking at the top of my screen seeing the flashing of notices of people contacting me by PM. I also know that every few minutes there are emails and other communication building up on my to do lists. Do I get to all of them....lol...would be nice.

trolls

"Talkers" are the definition of internet trolls many times. Their egos are feed by the thought of being noticed or even relevant. They probably do have something to add to the conversation, but what they have gets spun into their need to be negative about something or someone. Insecurity and boredom must play big factors in the mind of those. I question why even show up? And I can see their need to not let things progress.

I was reading a thread that was on Class D amps and how the industry was changing the last few days and wasn’t paying attention to the amount of trolling that was taking place. To me the thread read fairly sensible, but here were all these posts referring to the same thread as being inflammatory. I obviously was picking and choosing what I wanted the thread to be about and wasn’t getting into the mudslinging therefore didn’t even notice it. What I figured at the end of the day was that someone was walking and someone was talking, maybe a little of both.

anyway time to go respond to my flashing lights

mg

Hi hombre

I have heard the sound you are talking about since the late 70's with audio equipment and have found it not to be digital but field related. Meaning the materials being used in the components interacting with the audio signal and the fields.

"So Elizabeth, do you consider your pair of 20.7’s (though I own a pair of Tympani T-IVa, I’m envious) a musical instrument? Conversely, is a piano, guitar, bass, or drumset a loudspeaker? ;-)"

Here’s is what I believe. I believe we all have an opportunity to grow closer together or further apart from each other. None of us are going to change what is. We are either going to continue to open our minds up or we will go through life thinking it is the next person that is the one with the closed mind even though we know our ego is resisting being as open as it can.

That’s the truth about talking and walking. The truth sits there and is always available if we choose to take up our walking stick and discovering it. We get stuck looking and listening to each other and it doesn’t take much for that to be our excuse not to take the next steps in learning. Once we get past that we start learning together and off of each other instead of thinking we have the answer exclusively.

In regards to the variables and tuning, it’s nothing we should be even debating and once we get past the debating (talk) we will find ourselves in a new hobby of discovery. Discovery is the act of moving past assumptions. Discovery doesn’t have an ego to let go of that’s something we own ourselves. Something the variables have taught me is, I will always be the student. I might master a few things but I will never stop discovering more.

Michael Green

of course Maggies are musical instruments

Hi Elizabeth

Thanks for visiting! I would love it if you ended up making TuneLand an extended home, I hope you know you are always welcome!

I wish I had more time than I do, there’s so much to cover and for this hobby (the playback end) tuning has barely been touched, even though it has been around for many years.

"IT is like a dimensional shift. Gee, All I wanted was to dampen out EVERYTHING. And here is this guy writing how that is just wrong. WHAT???"

It’s pretty wild isn’t it? And the fact that I showed the reviewing community Tuning some 25 plus years ago, and even though they agreed after experiencing it, they couldn’t pull the trigger on this big of a change.

Geoff said the other day, he doesn’t believe I have looked at any physics books, little does our friend know. I have had my head buried in physics forever to learn more about what I was experiencing. I’ve had to build my own buildings and everything from the actual musical instrument through to just shy of the human ear to find out what was happening. What I discovered was this massive interaction experiment called Earth. We are living inside of a continuum of interaction. We may think we can hold part of it still but then the clock ticks and we realize even a fixed point in time or sound has moved. Dampening in concept is tricky, just like isolation, but the first step to over come are the absolutes. Once we get our heads around the continuum of motion in time we can then start focusing on the Variables, and that brings us to a different place in our hobby and the control over our hobby and hearing.

We want so bad for these systems to be final but they can’t be, we are on a spinning planet, one that is creating charge and being part of a big system of moving parts all themselves creating and exchanging force. Sounds so cosmic, but it’s just the way it is big or small and audio and hearing just happens to be a part of the interaction.

One by one this hobby will turn to variable tuning as the answer to our listening obsessions. The thought that we live in this particular time in this hobby is pretty special. All the rest is as we have been talking about "talking or walking". And how far we wish to go is on no one but ourselves.

:) so happy you have been taking the steps you have. I’m looking forward to learning with you!

MG

Hi Geoff

Are you keeping everyone inline? Hope you have a good thanksgiving!

mg

quote from a low mass tunable system listener from Norway that I received minutes ago

"I'm sitting here smiling as I play music. Incredibly fun to hear how the sound changes with small changes."

Thank You Readers

I've enjoyed watching some of you convert your systems from high mass to low mass this year, from small soundstages to huge and more than anything watching you go from saying "bad recordings" to "I can hear how good they are now". Discovering low mass and Tuning is setting the hobbyist free one by one and more grow interested every day.

The key to all this has been those who decided to explore, and explore more than lip service. Thank you for your emails, facebook visits and PMs.

Someone said to me earlier "good to have you back". Well I'm not back I'm just stopping by to answer the requests and to recruit folks looking and listening for the next personal listening level beyond HEA's over built/over priced dead end.

Long live the Audiophile and long live progress.

Michael Green