How about a loudspeaker designed to be placed against a wall. Most loudspeakers seem to be designed to be placed 3-4 feet from the back wall. Even so called 'bookshelf' speakers are usually designed to sit upon stands placed forward in the listening room. I think a lot of us would have an easier time of it if our wives and girlfriends didn't have to contend with loudspeakers placed so far out in a room. -gb- PS: And give us an optional paintable cabinet. |
Start with the most life-like cone material for the mid-range. Then choose the least number of drivers you think you need. Try to keep the crossover out of the midrange frequency. Then go for what you believe is the most hear through cabinet. Compromises, its all about compromises as we wait for the engineering to improve. All speakers are a compromise on reality, some less so. |
Yeah, I have about $1k, perhaps a little more, for the upgrades next year. Self-imposed limit for now. So do I upgrade interconnects, power cord (s) or phono stage? Cannot upgrade anything else for this kind of money except maybe cartridge, that I won’t do without upgrading phono and interconnects first. And I am not going to buy anything new. In fact, I will not ever need anything new except perhaps a dac or whatever else they will come up with and maybe a cartridge, though I could get a used one from a reputable seller. So, looking at it from this angle, I am not interested in future speakers designs at all unless there is something spectacular and relatively affordable. I see a number of $5k - $7k used speakers that would be good enough for me. Most people, even very dedicated ones, don’t have a lot of money for this stuff. Not 99.9% but 90% for sure. |
Over time I've come to better understand what drives this hobby. Stereophile is a better word than audiophile. It's mostly about the stereo for most people. It's similar with watch lovers. It doesn't much matter how well the watch tells time, although it does need to tell time. Exclusivity, talking points, luxurious looks? I'm not sure what it's all about. I've always wanted the best performance for the money. Since I'm like 99.9% of people and don't have infinite funds I have to limit what I'm gonna spend. If I'm gonna spend 10k on a pair of speakers I'd take the ones that have the best performance because they're painted flat black and all the money was spent on the things that influence performance. I understand that manufacturers have to spend on looks to stay in business. I don't criticize them for it. |
Douglas, your post is senseless and offending. Be quiet now, please. Actually Doug has nailed it,you normally get both when and if you decide to step up to true high end.Cabinet design is extremely important,the fit and finish comes with it when you step up..This post is foolish at best,imo. |
Hi randy, I had an extensive "build thread" on AVS for my home theater/2 channel room reno. It's still there but unfortunately all my pictures were hosted on a site that moved from free to paid hosting, and since I didn't pay eventually all the pictures disappeared. There's only one picture (for some reason) at the very beginning of a "room description" thread you can see here: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/29-what-s-your-system-configuration/1259917-rich-s-variable-image-size... The sofa is massive and soaks up a lot, but much of the treatment is hidden in the ceiling, which simply looks like a build-down structure to house lighting, add architectural detail etc. But it's actually using a tensed brown felt fabric treatment stretched across the ceiling of the build-down, which allows a whole lot of absorption to be hidden at strategic areas. Overhead the speaker area it's like a giant bass trap. There's also absorption built invisibly into the wall corner area on either side of the screen. Further, there are various types of curtains, of various thickness, that can be pulled to anywhere on the walls to cut down reflectivity as desired. (For instance, there is a cover for the reflective fire place area). So I can go from a more lively or less lively sounding room, depending on what suits the speaker. The fact that the room is open to the hallway on one side also seems to relieve bass node problems. You can see just part of the ceiling build down at the top of the photo. No one ever recognizes it as room treatment because it just looks like architectural or decor detail (and the rest is hidden). But, to my amazement, one of the most common comments I get, even from non-audio people is "This room sounds good" even when we are just talking in the room. It was a very tough set of criteria to balance in that room and we did quite well all things considered. Cheers! |
Michael Green once said that if your system and room were done right you would rarely need to touch volume control. This sounds good to me. Michael tunes studios and concert halls, at least he used to. Another question is do we want to somehow correct the not so good recording or have it as it is? I am much closer to the latter but not fully. |
I've done it all before. I built a ton of bass traps and combined with some digital eq I had the bass response +-1 decibel in my concrete basement. It had been +-15 at least. I wouldn't go through that again. Getting the bass to have a perfect frequency response caused more problems than it solved in my opinion. I had to make big cuts at the worst resonance frequencies and this killed transients and just didn't sound right IMO. The ideal amount of absorption is subjective and depends on what you're listening to. If studio recordings that are very damped you'd want less absorption than if you're listening to live recordings where you want to hear the live atmosphere as it was rather than the sound of your room over top of it. Unless that's not what you want, it's about personal preference to a great degree. |
inna, I wasn’t being mean. Notice I was making a joke, and then asking you to explain further how you listen. I agree imaging isn’t everything (it’s down my list of priorities, though I like it). But obviously it’s usual for audiophiles - e.g. those who inhabit a forum like this - to sit and listen critically to music. It’s almost the feature that defines people in this hobby. A careful placement of speakers relative to the room and listening position is also how one realizes the potential of most loudspeakers, timbrally as well. So when someone says he doesn’t often sit down and listen that suggests you listen to them as background music and that seems rather unusual given the context of a forum like this. I in no way begrudge your listening habits. After all, I spend plenty of time listening to just the speakers on my iphone and actually enjoy it. But I wouldn’t spend lots of money on a 2 channel system if I weren’t regularly paying real attention to it, which usually involves sitting in the room with the speakers. |
Just a general bit of added gab: They don’t call them ’inferior desecrators’ for nothing. Very close to 100% of inferior desecrators and even architects do not take acoustics into account in their designs and finished product. If they do, they do with with a minimal concern or they do it with rubber stamp textbook knowledge applied, which is just as disastrous, maybe more -depends. I’ve witnessed this form of a disaster many many dozens of times, when I go into a job as an attached extra mind and eyes, when Taras is brought in to deal with their disasters. Usually it’s a fight to the death to hold onto the appearance of the space to be as original and unperturbed as possible, and to spend zero dollars on an acoustical fix. That zero cost acoustical fixes have to be completely invisible. Two impossible requirements that even on their own are impossible. The next step is they don’t know what they are dealing with so they think that textbook acoustic formulas can apply to the issue and try to tell the acoustician what they are doing and what it will cost. The connected problem is that they’ve ~spent all their money~and don’t have any left over to fix the acoustical nightmare. They project this frustration and mess upon the acoustician they’ve brought in. The arguments are fighting about 4 types of ignorant ’city hall’ (declarative people who won’t back down in any way), all at the same time. Everyone involved is angry about the problem, angry that they don’t understand it, angry about the potential costs and angry that their work is going to be disturbed. The solution person is attacked from multiple directions before they even walk through the door. Out there, in the architectural and home design world in North America (on the mega to minor install level), this scenario plays out probably a few dozen times per day. Like Plumbers and dentists, acoustician is one of the most thankless specialized jobs that exist. And notably more obscure. Regardless, due to the specialty being in-house, so to speak, every time we're involved directly in the set up and implementation the given room at a show, we tend to get best of show either in print, by award, or by word of mouth. I think we missed that..maybe once? if ever? |
jon, My living room (in which we put our nice furniture and decor) was good sounding even before I remodeled it with an acoustician. It had an asymmetrical layout with bay windows, a wide opening to a hallway, and a good ratio of furniture and live to dead acoustics. Whether it was speaker designers, or sound mixers, or fellow audiophiles, all of them were amazed by the sound I got in my room. After the remodel, it’s even easier to get great sound. And the room treatments are all hidden, built in to the structure of the room in a way that no one ever suspects to be room treatment. It’s completely "clean" looking of room treatment in that sense (I hate the look of room treatments). And I bet my room is sonically better than plenty of people spending far more on speakers, placed in rooms which are aesthetically challenged looking. It’s just not true to say if aesthetics are important "the sound will never be great." That’s what industrial design, a care for style, and ingenuity are all about. |
You can pretty a good sounding room up a bit but room treatments are inherently homely. It's all subjective anyway but anything dealing with sound absorption/diffusion is going to have to have quite a bit of surface area to be effective and will have to be placed where it works effectively. Neither of these things are conducive to good looks. If looks, decor are a priority the sound will suffer. I don't believe there's any way around it. |
I agree with Prof. Everything must be designed; a speaker does not design itself. And a physically beautiful speaker can also be a superb sounding speaker - and this applies to electronics, cabling, etc. When it comes to speakers, fit and finish go a long way; and the ability to customize the finished surface (wood, paint, color, etc) is a bonus. For example, my Zu Def 4s are available in an almost unlimited combination of finishes. The only problem is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I find that this especially applies to electronics. |
If aesthetics are important then the sound will never be great. That’s simply not the case. First, I’ve had numerous speakers I think were aesthetically beautiful that sounded great. Further, the more expensive speakers tend to be the more beautifully built speakers with even more attention to finish and style. As is the case with most high performance luxury items. Many of the Tidal speakers, for instance, are among the most beautifully made, and are also in the top sphere of performance. (And I also happen to like the aesthetics of the MBL speakers, which produce some of the most amazing sound I’ve ever heard). Right now I have Thiel 2.7 speakers in ebony and they are among the most beautiful speakers I’ve ever seen, and they sound superb. So do my bigger 3.7s. A friend of mine reviews audio gear and often has crazy expensive gear and cabling. His set up is more of a "reviewer" set up in terms of aesthetics - equipment all around. I prefer most equipment to be out of sight, except the speakers, hence all my cabling is mostly hidden, source gear in another room. Yet my system usually sounds more impressive than his, because I put my money into my speakers (and not cables) and especially because I had the room professionally designed for good acoustics, with a high priority for aesthetics so you don’t see the treatments. There is nothing about high end audio that bars beautiful industrial design as part of the process. And there’s quite a bit of it in the high end. |
Yeah. Besides, by definition speakers cannot look too good in a usual sense. Or electronics really. Well, some might like Rowland's shiny boxes or Absolare leather wraped cases. Not me. I like the look of Focal Utopia, some Kharmas, and Lansches with their plasma tweeter that also happens to sound great are fine too. Gryphon amps look good, Ypsilon is not bad. Big Wavacs, oh hell, look great. Kondo sucks. Lamm fine. Pass weird. But in any case, unless it is extraordinarily bizarre I don't care, and even if it is I will listen of course. People here often kind of complain about their wives in relation to aesthetics of the gear. I understand. Most wives can be convinced by the performance, I believe. |
If aesthetics are important then the sound will never be great. I have no problem with people who want to listen to good looking speakers in a good looking room but if that's what you want you don't need to care too much about electronics. You don't need to care about cables at all. Get some good speakers that don't do anything too wrong, sit back and enjoy. |
There's a lack of choice in the omni and coaxial schools of speaker design right now. You know the types of speakers which can address a large sweet spot. We don't all want to sit still listening and if we do time is precious. Plenty of room out there for 'activity accomodating' speakers which are ambivalent to the listeners moving around the room, standing up, sitting on the floor, etc. There are enough multi-system audiophiles out there to account for selling speakers with a different use case vs simple preferences. I can't be the only one using a single driver speaker because my listening room doubles as many other things and I appreciate the point source behavior. My music however doesn't play well with the limited bandwidth. |
@inna, "So, what kind of questions should I ask a speaker designer to see if he has a good idea of crossovers and their implementation?" How comfortable do you feel with the different strategies / topologies that exist? @douglas_schroeder , "As a reviewer my advice to manufacturers; ignore 99% of this thread and carry on." Kudos for holding on to the crown for routinely submitting the most pompous and condescending posts any participant! |
Ralph makes an excellent point in suggesting the amp/speaker interaction be given high priority by speaker designers, and in particular I echo his vote for fairly high impedances and benign curves. Likewise imo the speaker/room interaction deserves high priority in most cases. I’d go so far as to say amp + speaker + room = a system within a system. Duke |
...close your eyes, sit back and enjoy Vandersteen speakers....then open your eyes and feast on the perfect build and finish of them (I have 5A's with their Kowazinga finish.. I had a furniture repair person come to refinish an end table....walked to the speakers and remarked how beautiful they are) |
Designers are already building what the market wants. Small,easy to house,sell,ship,make profits off Chinese manufactured bookshelf or tower designs all near identical to one another. Sure a few options exist outside of this but the majority are like I mentioned more similar in design to toasters than art. Audiophiles are so used to this appearance and similarity of design that anything to far outside of the norm will not get much market traction. Its just the way humanity rolls we crave the familiar change is scary. Most all buyers want 2-2.5 way designs mostly with dome and 6 inch woofer or woofers in wood veneer cabinets some may go AMT or ribbon tweeters. |
My 2 cents: Keep the impedance and phase angles reasonable. The last thing you want to do is make **any** amplifier work hard, as to do so makes more distortion and it will most likely be audible as harshness and loss of detail. As an example, many speaker designers put dual woofers in parallel, creating a 4 ohm load in the bass. The problem is that most of the energy in music is in the woofers, so most of the distortion the amp is going to make is going to be the result of how hard it has to work to drive the woofers. A simple way to make any speaker with any amp sound more transparent and smoother is to simply raise the impedance. You can see the implications of this in the specs of any amplifier, tube, solid state or class D. A second beef is that many speaker companies equate sensitivity and efficiency as the same thing when they are a bit different. It would be better if both specs were stated. |
Ha, the first thing that came to my mind was almost the opposite of the OP’s view. My first impulse is to say build better looking speakers!!!!! Aesthetics are important to me, speakers are a form of furniture - I will be placing them in a room whose aesthetics I care about and I’ll be staring at the speakers for long periods of time listening. I know quite a number of audiophiles don’t care so much about aesthetics and frankly, their listening rooms show it; like I’m looking at a frat-guy’s place with every bit of equipment and wire spilled all over in view and little care for the looks of the room. (Though there are also some absolutely beautiful set ups in the virtual systems pictures as well). Overall I think the aesthetics of speaker design has upped it’s game over the years. That said, some of the design aesthetics are still what an engineer with no design experience would think of as "cool." This being an audiophile site it goes without saying that we want great sound. So obviously I’m not inclined to say "give me worse sound." But few things to me are more wonderful than a gorgeous lookingspeaker that sounds beautiful. |
Loudspeaker design is done in the physical world, so it’s a set of balanced out trade offs, like most other endeavors. No single magic bullet of knowledge, just a set of skills and lore and raw talent ---applied to a problem that is in front of the given person. Billions of set of individually crafted hearing mechanisms and ear/brains, with vague commonality between them, thus the thousands of speakers which are considered ’excellent’ or ’bad’. No mystery with the more correct question in hand to see it for what it is. The idea of a single best speaker is just the ’body politic’ trying to assert itself and socialize behaviour patterns so the clan can keep itself safe, over the long term -- from the lions in the tall grass. Ie, the big loudspeaker on the cover the glossy magazine is the end point in generalization of social/cultural function, the masses standardizing themselves into a set pattern for the benefit of the whole or the benefit of the given ’leadership’ of the clan. The evidential trail or markers/indicators of human physiology and psychology. Individualism is exactly that: individualism. And everyone’s got themselves some of that. We are lucky if we can find a way to maximize audio qualities for one customer, or even ourselves, never mind all or any given group consensus. |
As a reviewer my advice to manufacturers; ignore 99% of this thread and carry on. Many of the suggestions show a cheapness, a belief that cheaper is as good or better. This is a beautiful way to dumb down the audiophile experience. At the same time they would have manufacturers build butt ugly speakers. Wow, that's a real sales bonus. :( This site is infested with cheapskates. It shows in so many threads, where the goal is the cheapest component. You'll never attain anything close to SOTA with that attitude. Thank God there are manufacturers who don't work towards the lowest common denominator. We have people who would have a coronary if they were to contemplate spending $5K on any speaker trying to give advice on what speaker manufacturers should do. Uh, NO. Not the way to progress in the industry. Then we have the contingent of people obsessed about appearances. A large number of them are also cheapskates. They completely discount craftsmanship in the industry, as though everyone deserves a butt ugly speaker in their home. Others of you seem ignorant of the fact that likely over 90% of audiophiles do not care about attaining more complex speaker systems. A very small segment of the population wants more complexity in speakers/systems. Frankly, the entire field of studio-like more complex speaker systems imo has not proven to be inherently superior to a great passive setup. Yeah, I have done the comparisons, several times. The fact is that if a speaker manufacturer listened to the input here he/she could tank their business pretty quickly. :( |
"With some designs I see a wall of drivers and with others just two or three. What do they try to accomplish with so many drivers?" See what the designer has to say! I'm sure he has something specific in mind. "I always thought that one driver is a theoretical ideal." Out in the real world, theoreticals are secondary to practicalities. A single driver can work well for some things, not so much for others. |
With some designs I see a wall of drivers and with others just two or three. What do they try to accomplish with so many drivers? I always thought that one driver is a theoretical ideal. Another element is the enclosure. Don't remember the name, I saw speakers by some Dutch company with quite an elaborate enclosure, sort of a labyrith inside the cabinet. Michael Green Audio is another example with his efforts to buld a speaker like an instrument. In fact, he tries to tune entire room to be that 'instrument'. |
"I am always suspicious of speakers with multiple drivers." Can you explain what you mean by this? "Would you say that three is enough even if the room is big and you sometimes play loudly?" I’m not really inclined to single out the number of drivers as something to focus on. I would be more interested in what the designer is trying to do, and how he goes about doing it, which in turn may or may not call for a particular number of drivers. I suppose there is some correlation between number of drivers and how loud a system will go, but the specifics of a given design matter far, far more than any generalities we might make regarding numbers of drivers. Let me give an example of what I mean, pardon me from drawing from my own experience but at least this way it isn’t some arbitrary hypothetical: In my opinion, two worthwhile design goals are, good re-creation of the timbre of instruments, and good dynamic contrast. That’s "what I’m trying to do." The "how" part is, I use driver combinations that a) give me a radiation pattern that is fairly directional and fairly uniform over most of the spectrum; and that b) have about 10 dB of excess thermal power handling capability above whatever in-room peaks we would normally expect. To get more specific, I use prosound drivers, with the high-frequency section employing a constant-directivity waveguide. The woofer crosses over to the waveguide at the frequency where its radiation pattern has narrowed to match that of the waveguide. (A "waveguide", in this context, is a type of horn, designed with pattern control and low coloration as the priorities, rather than acoustic amplification.) The "why" part is, getting the reverberant field to have the same spectral balance as the first-arrival sound supports good timbre; and if the drivers are only seeing about 10% of their rated power on peaks, they will usually have negligible thermal compression, so the dynamic contrast on the recording is preserved. These aren’t the only things I care about of course, but they’re high on the list. How many drivers does it take to do what I just described? In this case it would take two to do it pretty well and four to do it even better, and I’ve been known to use more than that, but what would the number of drivers tell you if you had no idea what they were or what I was trying to do? My point being, it's the SPECIFICS of a given design that matter most. Duke |
