Streaming now as well with a Burmester Musiccenter 151. Absolute great device, but also crazy expensive
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Had for years B&W 801 with Classe CAM 350 Mono`s. Good for that time period, but the massive bass was not quick enough. Now 2 Westend Tube Amps and Gauder DARC 200. Simply perfect and utmost easy to setup. No-brainer for people like me, sitting in my room on different locations and having still always the same excellent sound. Justmy2cents |
My worst experience with Klipschorns was hooked up to the Adcom monoblocs. Just a bad combo, it made me grit teeth, and my ears hurt, not from being loud, but from super harsh treble. Asked for an amp,change, told me come back next weekend, and the weekend after that. Next amp was a Steve McCormack, unsure of model, sounded amazing. Treble was no where near as brutal as the adcom. following weekend was the Carver silver seven monos,Not the ones with the 40 tubes, but the ones with only the meter, and shaped strange. They were also great! |
@whitestix , an interesting post. The original LS50 has been one of the great success stories of the past decade. It will also be interesting to see which well known brands do not make an eventual appearance here. [Unless I've missed it, Tekton and Ohm Walsh's seem to have escaped so far, as have designs which feature ribbon tweeters?]. Maybe that was the OPs intention to draw up a domestic shortlist? He's making a list, he's checking it twice. Anyway I think it's fair to assume that most of us were prepared to experiment with placing and ancillaries before condemning any particular speaker and moving on. Why wouldn't we, considering the usual financial hit that normally comes with that? I've owned 3 different Tannoy models and all have been good at their price points, the MX3, the R3 and the Berkeley's. The only one I would have trouble living with today would be the budget floorstanding MX3s with their obvious treble sting (comparitively speaking + they weren't a horror show - very few are). In hindsight maybe it wasn't that their treble was especially more harsh than the other two. Maybe it was the fact that they were doing quite a lot less elsewhere that drew more attention to what the soft dome tweeter was doing. Ideally we audiophiles want a speaker that does a lot of things really well as otherwise we're likely to become increasingly frustrated with what we perceive is not being done well. This brings the danger of upgrading to something that does this one particular thing better - only for us to later realise it also does quite a few things worse! I suspect more than a few of us have been on this particular roundabout to find we end up back close to where we began. Especially if we were fortunate enough to begin our initial audio journey with a mid or high performance design. |
German Physiks, omni-directional speakers. Can't remember the model, but they retailed for about $20k at the time. An absolute snore of a sound, everywhere and nowhere. The lower bass was acceptable, but that was it. Estelon speakers. Tall, floor standing and very expensive speakers with twin side-firing woofers at the bottom - can't remember the model. Auditioned via Vitus mono amps and a slew of other über-priced gear. Dull, lifeless, flat, and at that price? |
I love that two B&W haters point out that they sound terrible, at least with solid state, specifically Rotel, but good with Pass amps. Yes, it is true B&W's will reproduce the horrible stuff in your electronics that other speakers mask, either with blandness or too much energy directed elsewhere. They reproduce and amplify what ever they are fed, and a lot of electronics are truly horrible. That is why so many speakers either sound bland or overly dynamic in certain frequencies, to hide the horrible electronics in most electronics. I recently had an two extensive listens to current 804's, with current Rotel CD and electronics. At first, I thought my ears were defective.. That is why I returned. If your electroinoc make B&W's harsh, too bright, etc, no matter how much you want to love your particular electronics, it is not the speakers. The simple fact that they sound good with Nelson Pass electronics should have alerted one writer. he might have sounded great if the source were better. I really believe that people dislike B&W's because of the price, and that is totally fair. I have owned one set for 40 years. These replaced some older ones. My "New" ones are twenty now. I also have several sets that were in various rooms of my old houses, before I downsized to one little one. My Maggies and Acoustats came and went while I had these, although the Acoustats did stay for 25years. I have never bought new B&W's, but love people who spend a fortune on them, and sell them for a big loss, to people like me. |
I have to get in the not liking Wilson speakers. I have heard a variety of them, including the $300k big daddies in their current lineup, in several rooms with which I am very familiar. I agree they are accurate, dynamic, and all of the other good words attached, but they just don’t float my boat for more than a few songs. I hear more music through my current speakers. However, I know folks who love their Wilson speakers. I don’t disrespect their choice and will listen with them any day. 🙂 |
Sad to see Roy Johnson trashed on this thread as I had and loved both pairs of speaker from him, the models of which I now forget. A couple of our fellow posters all muck up each and every thread on this forum. Of the 20 or so speakers I have had over the past 45 years, I enjoyed them all very much. Except the KEF LS50's, which were awful sounding in the month I had them and were hard to drive with my Plinius 175 wpc SS amp. Go figure. Honestly, if I hit the Lotto and moved to a home with a large living room, I'd have a pair of KEF Blades in a heartbeat. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A compendium of my speakers: List of my speakers from 1973 to 2021: Rectilinear III Highboys (outstanding speakers!) AR bookshelves JBL L100 (like the cause of my hearing loss these days) Electro-Voice Sentry 100's Spica TC 40's and TC 50's (unparalleled imaging, but the drivers were easily overdriven to failure) JSE Infinite Slope 3's (early Jeff Joseph's creations) Goetz MS3 Towers (I had them for 20 years, made by a boutique designer in Atlanta) KEF LS50 (My least-liked speakers among the bunch, shrill sonically and hard to drive) Von Schweikert V22 Usher BE-718 Totem Hawks (huge LF response) SVS Black Towers Klipsch Cornwalls (modded to Cornscala's) Tyler Acoustic's Linbrooks (fantastic speakers, but they completely overloaded my smallish room) Joseph Audio RM25XL ( should have never sold these) Dynaco A10, A 25, A35 (when recapped, a pure vintage sound with a great midrange) KLH Model 5, 6, 21 and 28? (the Model 5 speakers are truly legendary when recapped) Blumenstein Orca's Green Mountain Audio Rio and Eos HX GR Research LGK ELAC Debut B6 Dali Zensor 1 and 3's (both outstanding monitors) Linkwitz Lxmini's (if you have never heard them, you ought to. However with the need of a 4-channel amp, they rendered my cadre of 2-channel amps unusable) Spatial Audio M4 Triode Masters (tremendous speakers, not at all fussy about placement) Revel M22 Gallo Strada’s (wonderful little orbs of musicality in my bedroom system) Buchardt S400 ( unbelievably revealing monitors) |
I honestly think one can make almost any speaker work well in his room with proper set up, system matching and acoustic treatments. If I was disappointed in the performance of several reputable speakers in my room, I might well blame the room instead of the speakers.I am glad to be not the only one with this opinion.... My best to you.... |
I am amazed at how many people actually bought and paid for so many speakers they didn’t like, some posters had that experience with several. My first thought was they didn’t do their homework or didn’t do a proper job of auditioning or both. The expectation that a speaker will perform in one’s own room (with his own electronics) in the same way as in a dealer’s showroom is recipe for disappointment. I honestly think one can make almost any speaker (that one liked the basic signature of) work well in his room with proper set up, system matching and acoustic treatments. If I was disappointed in the performance of several reputable speakers in my room, I might well blame the room instead of the speakers. |
I feel the same way about B&W speakers as
@millercarbon
feels about Wilson.That is, over rated, over priced & under perform. I also had an aquaintance who had an outstanding Wilson set up .... at least on paper. $25G dollar Wilsons, Bryston 4B-SST amp, Sim Moon deck, & Nordost wire. To save space lets just say after blowing all that doe his system sounded .... dry. Price maybe an indicator where to start, but it's not the "be all", "end all" in the final analysis. As for using YouTube as a listening reference for any piece of Hi-Fi ..... that's just blayton ignorence. Get down to a dealer and listen - PERIOD. |
Worst combo I've had-- Cerwin Vegas with Crown Amps--so bad totally unlistenable . Almost as bad but never would buy. Latest B+W 800 series-- like razors in the ears. Von Schweikerts-- just dull. Magicos- sounds like designed by and for a computer-hear them with Halcro Amps and rush for Root Canal for relief Any ESL-yes sadly been there many times-bit of heaven and hell they all fail at some time--got sick of saying a Prayer every time I turned them on. The great pity as they can perform superbly --when running Caveat Emptor T |
ProAc are wonderful. Their true ribbon tweeter is sublime. Harbeths are easy to listen to but can be a bit boring, but certainly listenable. BTW the ML and a few others use the Heil AMT ( Air Motion Transformer) I’ve always found it a bit bright. Raidho are nice. Magico but very revealing and need the right everything to get them to sing. |
I'm struck that this thread exploded in all the tedious controversy & name-calling so many threads do. WTF? It's a pretty straightforward topic by OP. Here's my answer: -- in the mid-'80s when Infinity was coming on like gangbusters, I bought one of their cheaper floorstanders w/planar tweeter & a 10" polypropylene woofer. Not only was this thing brighter than hell, but that woofer audibly "bounced" like a medicine ball hitting a trampoline. Awful speakers -- and a couple years ago, in the dying twilight of my attempts to use powered monitors for music. I got a pair of Yamaha HS7 powered monitors modded by ZenPro. I burned them in faithfully, then put them in the desktop system where they sounded like ass immediately & forever. I didn't last 2 days--yanked 'em out & put back in whatever I had previously. No amount of money paid is worth sonic suffering after... |
WOW, came here to add to the TOPIC, but I see it turned into some type of argumentative discussion that the moderator could not seem to 'reel in'. But I would like to add............ Being a Klipschorn owner for 14 years which I enjoyed, I decided to try one of their Reference Premier towers. So, bought the Klipsch flagship RP-280F models. Liked them at first, but after a few months, I realized that the titanium, horn loaded tweeter was a bit too 'forward' to my liking. I bought a quality pair of L-PADS and installed them using the bi-amp inputs to the tweeters. Running the control to it's midpoint really helped. But, after a time, I decided that it was just a bandaid and decided to do a complete departure from horns, cones and domes. So, bought a completely new system. Martin Logan eStats (after a long audition at my local brick and mortar audio dealer), and an amp and preamp of John Curl design. If anything, the electrostats are a bit on the warm side, however, at 91 DB efficient, they have plenty of dynamic range, and in NO WAY do they fatigue the ears. Keep in mind, the cross over is at 380 Hz. so the panel covers a wide range before the bass module comes into play. And the concerns about the blending of the two drivers an issue?, those days are over with the latest models. I DID just add the Dynamo 1600X to add the bottom octave below 35Hz. So, there is my honest story. |
A lot of the speakers that have very fast impulse response sound harsh or bright with less than stellar electronics. Digital is especially tough on those drivers. I have been in the High end sales arena and most of the problems were people putting average electronics on extremely revealing speakers. I also have noted that the popular metal dome tweeters that are maligned used foam internal damping which breaks down and makes them sound horrible when that happens. I have seen 5 yr old tweeters rendered horrid by the foam degradation and anything over 10 yrs old has to be replaced. I shot several videos of the D25 and D26ag tweeters internals being bad. |
Wilson Watt/Puppys. Not musical at all but more of a science experiment to see how much detail one can generate. Tried the Watt 3, 5, etc. Way too analytical like nails on a chalkboard. Various high end solid state and tube amps and cables. Even the lushest CJ gear sounded hard. But my wife loved the looks. And they were an easy sell due to the glowing magazine reviews. PS the Avalon Acurus and Eggleston Andra were similar to Watt just not quite so much of it. Tried many amps large and small, tube and ss and always result was hard and detailed sound, never felt like listening to the music. They delighted the new owner. |
Wow I can’t believe the negative crap I hear. Most of the speakers that were mentioned are pretty darn good.Most people dont know and dont understand that it is the acoustic that create the Sound quality on par and sometimes more than the electronic design.... Very few people has lived a complete transformation of S.Q. coming from speakers embedded in a rightful way in the right acoustical setting.... Simple.... They " magically" attribute sound to the speakers.... 😁 Saying that speakers X is "bright" make no sense most of the times save for very few small bad designed box.... They would better think about the huge impact of the acoustical setting of the room, the vibrations affecting their speakers and the noise floor of the house electrical grid.... |
Starting sixty years ago... the AR3's were pretty good, Bose 901s... were they a joke? My Time Window 3s were nothing much. Went trough all the B&W Models up to 800, they were just ok (although heard the well broken in new 802Ds, pretty good) then all Wilsons. the Watt Puppy 7s could peel paint if needed. My Yvettes with the new tweeters are very good, better than the first Sasha. Speech? You mean like Cohen? Good topic. |
This is a generalized question. It depends greatly on your ears, your room. It depends greatly on what you are feeding into those bright harsh sounding speakers. If you are using aluminum or titanium drivers, horn compression drivers they can seem harsh or bright on the wrong electronics. I found using a tube amplifier smooths out the harshness and instead of being harsh and bright it is detailed and smooth and can listen for hours with no fatigue.. Certain solid state amplifiers will make bright speakers sound harsh it is all how you set your system up. |
For a speaker with sweet treble and no moving mass tweeter check out Lansche Audio. Mat www.jjaudiosolutions.com |
@ kenjit, "I remember hearing some Vivid Audio speakers and whilst their advanced metal drivers had tremendous dynamics (I cant remember hearing any better) they did have an unpleasant sharpness to the treble that could get borderline painful." which model? -------- I didn’t want to mention the exact model because I couldn’t remember for sure. However I did remember posting a summary on here not long afterwards on here. Here it is - from 26.09.2018 Best Loudspeakers for Rich Timbre? After weeks of waiting I finally got to visit The UK Audio Show 2018 (Woodland Grange, UK) at the weekend. They had some impressive speakers there including the curvy, strokeable Vivid Kaya 90 - amazing dynamics, scale, imagery and dare I say it, the merest hint of metallic tinged timbre? https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/best-loudspeakers-for-rich-timbre?page=5 |
Designed huh? Ooookay. Human speech is relatively new in our evolution but obviously important but just one aspect of survival of the species as it relates to hearing. W.r.t.. "tone" and emotion most mammals can detect that independent of other information context. It’s not uniquely human."Designed" because language ALWAYS present an"irreducible complexity"on 2 levels... Human language are not reducible to signaling system, human language exist on 2 levels of reality: " real" and "imaginary" in the sense of the complex numbers and these 2 levels are always actual...In signaling system one level is only potential the other actual... When i signal to another animal to go there, i must point the place.... and add a sound... In human language the place continue" to exist" before the pointing and before the sound in the collective memory with the words representing it....It is a mutation of the brain that make human able to transport and convey this another Imaginary reality permanently... Also there is the "poetical" level and the "prosaic" level but i cannot explain it here it will be too long... Suffice to say that language exist on 2 levels at the same time, the brain processing the 2 one into the other at the same time... Also music and language begun together and comes from one another....speech and music are Body act not only mouth act...Language here also work on 2 levels simultaneously: the body and the mouth apparatus...Studies in the genesis of oral tradition demonstrated this fact long ago.... «Timbre is, beyond question, the primary parameter that allows us to discriminate between different vowels, but vowels also have intrinsic pitch, intensity, and duration. There are striking correspondences between the number of vowels and the number of pitches in musical scales across cultures: an upper limit of roughly 12 elements, a lower limit of 2, and a frequency peak at 5–7 elements. Moreover, there is evidence for correspondences between vowels and scales even in specific cultures, e.g., cultures with three vowels tend to have tritonic scales. We report a match between vowel pitch and musical pitch in meaningless syllables of Alpine yodelers, and highlight the relevance of vocal timbre in the music of many non-Western cultures, in which vocal timbre/vowel timbre and musical melody are often intertwined. Studies showing the pivotal role of vowels and their musical qualities in the ontogeny of language and in infant directed speech, will be used as further arguments supporting the hypothesis that music and speech evolved from a common prosodic precursor, where the vowels exhibited both pitch and timbre variations.» https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01581/full The recognition of human sound timbre and speech is more immediate and more faster than any other prepared or artificial sounds....Survival of human group ask for that... «Human listeners seem to have an impressive ability to recognize a wide variety of natural sounds. However, there is surprisingly little quantitative evidence to characterize this fundamental ability. Here the speed and accuracy of musical-sound recognition were measured psychophysically with a rich but acoustically balanced stimulus set. The set comprised recordings of notes from musical instruments and sung vowels. In a first experiment, reaction times were collected for three target categories: voice, percussion, and strings. In a go/no-go task, listeners reacted as quickly as possible to members of a target category while withholding responses to distractors (a diverse set of musical instruments). Results showed near-perfect accuracy and fast reaction times, particularly for voices. In a second experiment, voices were recognized among strings and vice-versa. Again, reaction times to voices were faster. In a third experiment, auditory chimeras were created to retain only spectral or temporal features of the voice. Chimeras were recognized accurately, but not as quickly as natural voices. Altogether, the data suggest rapid and accurate neural mechanisms for musical-sound recognition based on selectivity to complex spectro-temporal signatures of sound sources.» https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.3701865 Then language designed on these 2 levels are uniquely for highly evoluated mammals like human or dolphins probably or other similar bio type in the cosmos ......It is an irreducible complexity working/processing phenomenon, a new stasis in the history of evolution.... Denying that is making appeal to an old static genetic innate paradigm like the Chomskyan one....The genetic code is no more perceived like in the sixties and seventies of the last century.... |
People argue because too many take perceived personal experience as fact. Then they argue that made up fact. I don't hear so much fatiguing speakers though they definitely exist, as much as fatiguing rooms incompatible with audio in general or with a specific speaker, hence why many view some high end speakers as bright. |
Human ears are DESIGNED to identify immediately the human voice TIMBRE in all acoustical settings.. Designed huh? Ooookay. Human speech is relatively new in our evolution but obviously important but just one aspect of survival of the species as it relates to hearing. W.r.t.. "tone" and emotion most mammals can detect that independent of other information context. It's not uniquely human. |
I found all speakers tiresome until I put more effort into the acoustics of my room.Well said and better said than my own posts.... My best to you.... |
B&W P5's. . . which I foolishly pared with Rotel components. Replacing the Rotel integrated with a Creek 5350 helped a little. The speakers might've sounded fine with tube gear. That was the last time I bought any audio gear based on how it sounded in a show-room and the last time I bought speakers with anything other than a soft-dome tweeter. In my home, it proved a very fatiguing system but I sure learned a lot as a result of buying it! |
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Is it not fair to say that, apart from the chest thumping bass that some speakers are able to deliver, that headphones generally do everything better?You know that your audio system is very good when the "timbre" of instrument sound natural and like me when your 7 pairs of headphones, 2 Stax, 1 hybrid, 2 dynamic, 1 magneplanar, did not give you any pleasure anymore because they are inferior to your working speakers...I listened mainly to headphones many years and bought all these headphones because i was not pleased by my speakers to begin with... Why the same speakers please me so much now? My audio system cost is 500 bucks, BUT is NOW rightfully embedded mechanically, electrically and especially acoustically... I read that often, that headphone are better, more detailed; it is not true; in my nearfield listening my speakers beat or are on par with my Stax for details...In regular listening position they trash dynamically and with more timbre naturalness all my headphones with almost the same details....My headphones are retired now for many months definitively....I will never use them again.... 😊 OK apart from electrostatics, which loudspeakers sound most like headphones?Any relatively good speakers well embeddded in the 3 working dimensions will beat most headphone for realism, naturalness and will be on par with details... Save for insanely costly headphone like Raal Sr1 for example.... I answered your post precisely because i read that all over the place 8 years ago, that headphones are most of the times better, and i believed it because i never experienced well embedded speakers before... And i owned dual concentric Tannoy (better than my actual Mission Cyrus that are good) at this time but badly embeddded... Then i go in rush to buy one headphone after the other .... Till the day i learned how to embed my audio system.... I trash my headphones after....😁 That is my story.... P.S. i sold my 2 pairs of Tannoy speakers because i believed this false opinion, i regret it to this day because the Tannoy are better than even my Mission Cyrus...The Mission well embedded make me trash all headphones...I never listen to my Tannoy at all well embeddded alas!... It is a pity.... You can understand now why this saying about headphones make me to react.... |
I generally find that it’s the more ambitious designs that usually draw more attention to their faults than some less ambitious one. For example the speaker on the iPad if within its operating range, is perfectly well balanced and inoffensive. On the other hand I’ve yet to find an audiophile loudspeaker that comes anywhere near to being as well balanced. The Kerr K320s I heard a few years back did most things well. The ribbon tweeter did not draw attention to itself and neither did the box. It wasn’t perfect, and alas the price has shot up quite dramatically. I remember hearing some Vivid Audio speakers and whilst their advanced metal drivers had tremendous dynamics (I cant remember hearing any better) they did have an unpleasant sharpness to the treble that could get borderline painful. Hopefully more recent Vivid designs have tackled that issue. I once read that PSB M4U headphones are said to sound like a good pair of loudspeakers (they certainly didn’t in my experience but that’s another story) but what about the other way around?. Which loudspeakers sound the most like a good/great pair of headphones? No overhang, great dynamics, and seamless treble, quicksilver transients etc. Is it not fair to say that, apart from the chest thumping bass that some speakers are able to deliver, that headphones generally do everything better? I have hardly finished writing this and I can imagine the answer already, electrostatics! OK apart from electrostatics, which loudspeakers sound most like headphones? Do any of them? Or does that question need a separate thread all of its own? |
it is funny to see people get defensive when their brand of speaker is called out to not sound good to other folks synergy and equipment matching is THE critical skill in this pursuit... some speakers innately play brighter and harsher than others... so then if one like what the speakers do otherwise, one finsd the right gear to minimize the deficiencies and accentuate the strengths... like most other pursuits it takes perseverance, knowledge, effort and $ to get it right |
