Supertwitters continue to be a problem around here. I recommend just ignore them.
Roxy54 on the other hand is some kind of super audiophile. Feel free to keep bugging me. It can take a while sometimes but in the end it usually works. Like I just took some string and duct tape and rubber bands and got the super tweeters lined up with the tweeter tweeters and yes indeed, much to my surprise the incredibly good focus got incredibly gooder-er. Only listened to Linda Ronstadt so far but omg she is so in focus and palpably there now! Before she was centered and solid but kind of diffuse and taller, probably because the supertweeter was on top it was stretching things higher. Just a guess.
They are on the outside right now. The way they are set up it is real easy to fine tune angles and position fore and aft. I will mess around with that a while and then maybe try them on the inside.
This has me thinking this might be one of the reasons people like the Be tweeters so much. They get a lot of the ultra-sonic extension benefits and it is right there not a foot off one way or another. Whatever. This is nice. Thanks and feel free to bug me any time! 😉
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Of course I'm still using them. Haven't yet got around to experimenting with different placement but that is because of being so happy with them right where they are.
We did have one interesting experience recently. A younger audiophile was here and when I played the XLO demagnetizing tracks and it got up into the highest frequencies it was hurting his ears. I couldn't hear a thing, but it was loud to him! I said we can always turn the supertweeters down if needed.
But then playing music he said it was fine. This to me jibes with the science that shows we have a lot of hearing cells devoted to very high ultra-sonic frequencies that are for time and transient information not sine waves. Hearing tests and measurements are all sine waves. Simplistic at best. Human beings don't hear that way and this backs that up. His ears found sine waves painful while the same super tweeter level with music was just fine.
They do improve imaging and the perception of "real" all across the audio band. Really fascinating stuff.
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Extreme low and extreme high frequencies are so completely different, yet similar in the way we don't so much hear as experience them. With really low bass the big surprise is the way it creates the sensation of being in a larger space, even with recordings that seem to have no really low bass. Something like that happens with ultra-sonic frequencies too.
With both there is improvement in what we can definitely hear. Bass really does have a lot more definition. Cymbals really do have more shimmer. But in addition to that is this sense of space. That part it is hard to put a finger on. But it is definitely there.
This can result in some crazy things. When I put Pods under my subs the difference was immediately apparent but had nothing to do with bass! Likewise super tweeters were immediately apparent but again nothing to do with hearing more top end. Indeed it was only when they were turned up "too high" that their impact on extension became apparent. At the level where they exert their influence they are inaudible- at least in the simplistic test tone measuring way we call audible. |
Thank you for the compliment. That is my specialty, and my pleasure, ever since having my eyes opened to a lot of crazy things myself. So nice to know it is appreciated, and you are very welcome.
How important the range is, I would guess depends a lot on the listener. We are really good at localizing midrange and treble. But somewhere up around this frequency range that ability starts fading away. Same thing at the low end, where we start to lose the ability to localize below around 80Hz. So I would think the person who can hear test tones really well all the way out to 20k, for them it may be they need to be either crossed over higher or it would be important for that person that they be closely aligned with the tweeter.
There is evidence for this in that some people have said it is a huge improvement to have the supertweeter very close to the tweeter. While mine are several feet away, and others actually have them pointing backwards or in multiple directions. This would totally be a problem with a normal range tweeter but with supertweeters seems to be different with different people.
Yes a volume control is a must. This is because speakers vary widely in sensitivity. My Moabs at 98dB require quite a bit higher setting to be at the same relative volume as a speaker with only 88dB sensitivity. There are speakers both above 98 and below 88. So for sure the level must be adjustable.
At the same time it is not super critical. I can run mine just about equally well at two different levels that are, I think, 2dB apart. A difference of 2dB would be a big deal with a tweeter or midrange. In this case it is very hard to tell. My hunch is the more the supertweeter overlaps the tweeter and the more extended your hearing is the more this will matter. Just a hunch.
There’s a few have said the Townshend Supertweeter is quite a bit better than some cheaper ones they tried. But there’s also one or two changed speakers and they noticed less difference. So it is entirely possible your neodymium magnet ribbon thing is close enough you might not find it worth the extra. Based on my experience this is kind of a guess not knowing your ribbon thing exactly but I did notice a pretty darn nice improvement adding just one more sub- and that was going from 4 to 5, which is supposed to be less than 3 to 4. So if you’re asking advice that to me is the safer bet, and I am a low hanging fruit kind of guy.
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Yes. The dumbest thing you can do in designing a sports car is put all the mass behind the rear axle. Well dumber I guess would be in front of the front axle, which SAAB I think it was actually tried. What a joke. But behind the rear axle is a total nonstarter. No one would ever do that. Unless you are Porsche, and then with brilliant engineering it winds up being the best performance car, ever. It all comes down to the details. Always. |
Fascinating paper. It would appear the CD standard was fatally flawed from the beginning by the measuring and testing methods used to set the standard. Instead of playing music they tested bits of sounds. This is similar to the way RMS watts have been used to create a false impression of power, IM and THD to create false impressions of distortion, dB and microphones to create false impressions of tone. On and on.
People will argue but we have the facts to back that up, at least in this case. I look forward to the paper that proves all watts are not created equal. |
Townshend has several customers running multiple sets of super tweeters. Some are running them out of phase, some have them pointed backwards. Far as I know these are all 2ch systems. When it comes to what is sufficient seems to me this is no different than anything else. 500hp is sufficient to some, while others want 750.
If you can find someone here who knows, great. If not I would call and ask John Hannant. He works for Townshend, sure. But he has never been anything but on the level with me, and strikes me as a bona fide audiophile and knows a lot about how this stuff works in practice from tons of feedback over the years.
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The only one I have heard anyone say is better costs a lot more and is not made any more anyway. |
Good question. Never tried anything else. I do know there are a couple people who tried cheaper ones that weren’t as good. So quality does count for something even here. I have no idea what it is we are hearing or why it works at all with CD. Only know it does. Now with my turntable the sound is really something. Which is the bigger improvement CD or LP? Don’t ask. Who knows. They are so different. All I know is they both got a lot better, and in the same ways. This paper has a pretty good discussion of what is going on. http://www.townshendaudio.com/PDF/The-world-beyond-20kHz.pdf The most important thing I think is there are about 15k hair cells in the ear that sense sound, but only about 3k of them respond to the 20-20k range we call "audible". That leaves 12k that respond to sounds we cannot hear. Four times as many, for something we cannot hear seems a bit odd to me. Another great example of how what we can measure falls so far short of what we can hear. Anyone who tries supertweeters will know in an instant we certainly can hear these ultra-sonic inaudible frequencies. The question is not whether we can or not. We can. The question is how? That is one for psychoacousticians. Me, I am an audiophile. If it works, if it makes my system sound better, I just do it. You probably are right, inaudible frequencies get in there and interact with audible ones. Would it be nice to know why, sure. But ultimately? Long as it works that is good enough for me. |
jay mark, Good to hear. Thanks.
roxy54, Soon as I get a chance. You would not believe the list of things to do that one is on. Unbearable heat did not help. |
Have not had time to experiment. Too many other things keep getting in the way. Right now it is 100+ degree heat! But talking with John Hannant, they do not seem to be particularly sensitive to location. They have customers using them pointed backwards, using multiple tweeters (up to 3 per speaker!) and some even running them out of phase.
This all sounds super zany until you stop and think about the physiology of human hearing. In the Cliff Notes version we have three different but somewhat overlapping systems. One for very low frequencies is really good only for volume, and not even all that good at that, it hardly registers until the volume gets fairly loud. (Which is why the Loudness switch was invented.) One for midrange is incredibly sensitive, able to localize with high precision, fine tuned to such subtle details we can tell a violin from a viola, distinguish a million different human voices, etc. (Which is why the midrange is so important, why speakers must be positioned precisely, etc.) Yet a third system registers ultrasonics- frequencies too high to register as distinct discrete sounds. We literally cannot hear them. Yet the majority of cells in the ear canal are designed to detect them!
As if all that weren't cool enough, the best part is we have something that combines all the inputs from these disparate systems into one solid and dimensional mental map of our world!
This is why five subs spread around at random are able to produce impeccably precise bass. Why the two main speakers must be positioned with extreme precision. And why super tweeters we can't hear not only work, but improve even very low bass. |
What I thought. Townshend and the one you tried are different, but it sounds like they produce the same or very similar effects. Whenever this happens- different implementation, same result - I always take this as confirmation we are on the right track. In this case, the track is telling us frequencies too high to be heard as such nevertheless somehow affect the character of sounds at much lower frequencies.
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they add some extra body/weight across the frequency range. Yes, and strange indeed something so high in frequency has this effect. Did you also notice improvement in a sense of depth or envelopment? |
No idea. Never heard it. If looks are a priority it wins, easily. Costs a lot more, but maybe not if you cut a deal? |
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Whatever limit there is, it has to be well above 20k. Probably above 40k and maybe twice that. This article explains why. http://www.townshendaudio.com/PDF/The-world-beyond-20kHz.pdfPart of the story is even though we don't hear such high frequencies as such, we do have specialized cells within the ear canal that do detect and respond to them. Instead of hearing it as a distinct tone it seems this is used to tell us information about the source and character of the sound. It makes sense because if a dry twig snaps or a leaf crumbles and you can tell from the sound it was a tiger and not a mouse, well the one you can eat but the other can eat you and so if you are not a pretty good audiophile hey you, out of the gene pool! Ideally you want to know this even without having to think about it. I have seen studies showing the response to seeing a snake is so fast it cannot possibly have time to travel up the neurons all the way to the Neo-cortex and back, the reflex had to have been triggered further down like in the brain stem. Down to where you literally do not even have time to think. So like that. |
I got glare only when running them too high level. At the right level not only is there no glare, but the sound is even more liquid than without them. That is only with CD. Real keen to hear with analog when my bearing gets back next week. |
The effect in terms of the resulting sound is similar. The Supertweeters lean more to improved presence and drive, Schumann more to the smooth liquid side. Both improve imaging and depth. But the similarities end with the way they work. Supertweeters are acoustic, SG electromagnetic spectrum. But, yeah. The same only different, as the French would say. |
They don't really "blend" in the sense of a normal tweeter, because the output from these is almost entirely too high to hear. They use a switch with 5 levels. The first two are I think 4dB increments, the top three are 2dB. Something like that.
So you don't hear it as a tweeter, and none of the normal effects one would expect actually happen. Imaging, for example. Normally one would expect it to be ruined by adding a tweeter so far apart. If the output was in the tweeter band it almost certainly would. But in this case the output is so high it is not heard as a discrete source, not heard at all even, and so imaging actually improves.
There is a point where if I turn them up too much certain things take on a harsh character. Cymbals go from ringing and sizzling to grating. There's a sense of more air and presence but also this harsh edge. Moabs at 98dB are pretty sensitive speakers, but Townshend makes them to go with horns, some horns can go to 104dB, so it makes sense the Level 3 mine are at is about right.
Even though they don't blend in terms of tone, there is still some work to do getting them down closer to tweeter level where they will probably integrate better. Hard to imagine the imaging getting even better, but we will see! |
Thanks, that is precisely the issue! Andrewkelley just PMd me with his succinct review and analysis of his newly setup DBA: "Holy F---n F--k. This is awesome." He has a fine career in reviewing ahead I can see. The point is this (DBA) is another one where people measuring the wrong thing keep thinking they can get there with EQ. Inevitably they are able to believe this only until they actually experience the DBA. Then, well read his review again. I keep coming back to this article. http://www.townshendaudio.com/PDF/The-world-beyond-20kHz.pdf There are some fascinating parallels here that I am trying to figure out. For example, doing a DBA has taught me that really low bass is mono. Yet at the same time it is with a DBA highly localized. How? Low bass is really just volume, with no location. Higher frequencies are highly localized. The only thing I can think of is our brains seamlessly integrate the two without our being aware of it. Anyone who has experienced bass in my system, probably any system with a DBA, will experience it as seamlessly integrated into the holographic sound stage. It is all but impossible to fight the illusion of bass being stereo. It isn't. But it sure seems like it is. We need better measurement. Until we get it, the ears have it. |
antigrunge2-
The germaine issue here is that old geezers can‘t hear above 12 kHz if
they are lucky to even get that far. Yet they can tell when a
supertweeter with a 15kHz cutoff is present and the effects are wholly
beneficial. Go figure what to measure for starters.
My take is
simply that harmonic overtones, and CD does cover harmonics up to 22kHz,
have a profound impact on the perception of the base notes, the exact
nature of which requires measurements not yet invented.
To
anybody prepared to listen carefully, supertweeters, and particularly on
digital, are a must for advanced audiophile listening. For sure. Listening to Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over) last night, the bass thump at the beginning has such definition it is like you hear and feel every individual oscillation of the note. Then after a couple times a conga drum doubles up on it and it is so clearly two individual drums. Heard this a million times and the tone of the additional drum was there but not to this degree of separation. There is now going on in my system a number of things each of which contributes to unraveling and highlighting the unique individual character of each instrument. They all have their own timbre, that unique set of resonances and harmonics that distinguishes one from another. The supertweeter is another one that somehow teases out even more detail. A must have for advanced audiophile listening, indeed! |
Sorry stereo5, but it is so depressing. There are much worse things than hearing loss at high frequencies. Tinnitus, for example. If all you have is a rolloff at the top end that is actually quite benign. Sure you can't hear certain things but it really doesn't interfere all that much. There is an old audiophile expression, sins of omission are better than sins of commission. A speaker that rolls off - at either end - is better than a speaker that is too bright or boomy. The one that is missing your mind can fill in the blanks but the one that is adding you have no choice but to endure, and this gets tiresome a lot worse and faster.
Similar sort of thing happened with the Supertweeters last night. I turned the level up from 3 to 4, the same effect of improved imaging, greater natural detail, etc only more of it- and now also with more shine and air. Cymbals shimmer more. But now on 4 it occasionally veered a bit into having a harsh edge. Where on 3 it was never like that. In fact on 3 the sound is even more liquid than with them turned off. On 5 forget about it. 4 seemed perfect except every once in a a while, 5 no way. But even though 4 was largely better most of the time than 3, when it was bad it was additive bad. Sins of commission. Much worse than the other.
We will see what happens when they are moved around. Early days. Lots to learn. So many tweaks, so little time.
Oh well, we are getting older, the body is going, but on the other hand maybe we take fewer things for granted and appreciate what we do have more, eh?
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Yes, I know all that stuff. Learned back in my impressionable youth. Since then it has been demoted to stuff nice to know but of little consequence. Really only useful in internet arguments where the person never risks being confronted with reality. My listening room, for example. That is where the Nyquist theorem meets the road, and slides right into the ditch. Along with a lot of other meaty sounding sound bites that turns out in the end to be pure word salad. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 Read the comments. This is where the rubber meets the road. If there was a Great Audio Theorem Graveyard this is it. This is where they all go to die. Not all of them. Tubes, turntables, symmetrical speaker placement, they all thrive, they are going gangbusters. Nyquist, he OD'd on Nyquil. The comb filter died, replaced with the TC brush. Visitors welcome. Encouraged, even. Guaranteed to be an ear-opening experience. |
Still not getting it. Some engineer, or marketer, told you something, the number 44.1 stuck in your head, and now it is still stuck there even after new information comes along that should have you questioning the validity of all you have been told.
Yes I am deliberately being provocative. That is my job. To try and get people to think. For themselves. Not at all easy, but the great thing is it sometimes feels like I have the field all to myself.
No no no I know that is not true. But it sure feels that way. I mean, just look up ^ pure wrote regurgitation, with an insult thrown in for good measure. An insult, for the record, is not an argument. |
It is a tweeter. A passive transducer. All it can do is convert whatever signal is already there into sound. Why would you even think to say, "recover"? |
That is why I can’t wait to hear with my turntable. Digital does indeed have the so-called brick wall cutoff. Yet it does indeed work with digital. Analog has no such restriction. Really looking forward to it. Also look forward to the day more people put as much effort into trying to read and understand as they do trying to not read and understand. Not picking on you, you might well be truly trying to understand. Even though you seem not to have read the linked article, which would answer at least some of your questions. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I am just an exceptionally good reader. The following lines from the paper linked above caught my eye: The inner hair cells clearly relate to the frequency analysis system described above. Only about 3,000 of the 15,000 hair cells on the basilar membrane are involved in transducing frequency information using the outputs of this traveling wave filter. The outer hair cells clearly do something else, but what?
Did you get that? Only a small amount of our hearing comes from these frequency responding cells. We seem to understand their function. The vast majority of cells however, we do not understand their function at all. How is it audiophiles are anything less than fascinated by this??? |
Interesting observation, Ozzy. My previous Talon Khorus looked like a 3 way but they always told me no they are a two-way with a Supertweeter. Thought it was just marketing, bragging about their tweeter going higher. It was a metal dome, not ribbon, so I doubt it went up into the 90kHz region where the Townshend works, where the magic seems to happen. But now I wonder if maybe even though it didn't extend that high it did go high enough to get a little taste, and maybe that is one of the reasons I liked them so much? |
Thanks roxy54, I will be doing the same only suspended on a line from above. This will be a whole lot easier to isolate from vibration which is my ultimate goal once we find the best location.
stereo5, I am not into hearing tests because hearing is passive while listening is very much an intellectual activity. Babies and little kids have wonderful hearing, but we all know they are lousy listeners. This same pattern unfortunately can carry over well into adulthood. Oh well. Not in our cases, eh? My guesstimate is based on the XLO demagnetizing tracks one of which is a sweep tone to 20kHz. While the usual measurebators will protest at this I feel if you are going to do any sort of test at all it makes much more sense to be testing my ability to hear in my system and room, exactly what this does. Since I know the sweep goes to 20kHz and I know when it ends I can make a pretty good guess of what I can hear by when and how fast it fades away to nothing. Which it seems to do around 15kHz. But yeah could be even lower.
In any case it is a crude measure at best. Did anyone read the pdf link above? Do people not find it fascinating there are far more ear cells devoted to transients we cannot hear than frequencies we can? Anyone? Beuller??? |
Townshend shows them placed on top of a speaker that uses the typical speaker design with a tweeter near the top of the cabinet. So placing the Supertweeter on top it is within a few inches of the tweeter. The Moab design has the tweeter in the center of the cabinet, a good 2 feet or more from the top. In this case the closest place is moving the Supertweeter to the side and down to the level of the tweeter. It is kind of strange though when you think about it. All the objections people have, they are all based on the false assumption the darn things can be heard. But it is made clear as can be from the beginning the output range is well above audibility. Here is the exact quote from the OP: How do you even set the level of something you can’t hear? Level 3, good as any. Plug em in. No change. Not the slightest peep out of these things. Clearly something else is going on. http://www.townshendaudio.com/PDF/The-world-beyond-20kHz.pdf |
Roxy54, yes you were among the "everybody keeps telling me", and thanks. Where they are now on top is a good two feet from the center tweeter, so was already wondering about that one and now I know so thanks again. Got a better idea for how to get it there, no wood no stands but would you believe rubber bands? 😳 |
It would be nice for this thread to have a link to your thread with your review so everyone knows what you are talking about. Just tryin' ta help y'all establish some, you know, credibility. |
antigrunge2, you aren’t the only one. There’s so much info and it can only be absorbed so fast. I am a high-probability/low-hanging fruit kind of guy. Try and only go for stuff when it gets to the point where it starts to feel like a sure thing. Because I have learned if I do that then sure enough it turns out well.
The hardest part is people bashing anything they don’t understand. A lot of people are afraid to try something they fear will only expose them to ridicule. Maybe because I am so freaking obsessed with sound quality, or maybe because I am such a wanker, but either way I don’t care. I’m just glad you and the others weren’t afraid to speak up, because then who knows how long until I would have tried?
So for whatever reason supertweeters are another of these things like springs or the Distributed Bass Array that have been around a while and proven to work, yet somehow flying under the radar. Some of this has been known for decades. DBA for example is a good 30 years, and Townshend has been engineering solutions for nearly half a century now. When I heard how good Podiums sound I was stunned. Still am, only now more at the thought of how long they have been around and yet hardly anyone has them.
This is a lot like that. I am working a lot of OT, hardly had time to do anything the other night but hook them up, but they work so well even slapped in with no adjustment the effect is impressive. No fine-tuning, no tweakery, no nothing. Heck they don’t even have any TC on them yet!
Reasonably sure they are set too low, will try some different settings tonight. Last night was so much fun, which considering it was CD is really saying something. And yes petg60, plan on moving them around some too. They are not even on-axis right now.
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