The Absurdity of it All

I was listening to a Milstein recording last night. I swear I heard a rosin particle fall off of his bow and hit the floor. 

Frank

Hearing, or, loss of hearing, I can testify, is indeed real, and, a huge loss of ones god given happeeenissseses...
Proof:
I can’t hear all the girls whistling at me (my hearing was much better in the 60’s, 70’s, a decent run in the 80’s)

perkri...

Try running a 60hz tone through the set up. Sit where you sit and listen to the timber of the bass. Then walk around the room. It will at some point become a droning mess, at other points it will almost vanish.

Very true.  It was eye opening to me when I actually heard cancellations occur as I walked around the room when setting up twin subwoofers. I found that not only location of subs and the location of the sitting position was important but using the phase adjustments made enormous differences. At 60 hz I can flip one switch on one of the subwoofers 180 degrees out of phase and create a null where you can't hear anything. Dead sound occurring at 60hz in my listening position. Move my head 3 feet forward out of the null and bingo there's the sound again. It also has a big impact on the lower 30hz region. Flipping the switch on the phase was like turning on and off the light. Huge differences in timber and output were achieved.

The important lesson is that bass needs to be focused on the seating position and can have negative interaction with the main speakers that can be phase corrected. This is a critical experiment that can yield a huge difference and it's free!!

Mahgister, can you show us a picture of your mechanical equalizer? I am not sure what you mean by "tight pressure zone" comparing it to strings on a violin. Maybe you mean tight tension?

kevn, all you describe are aberrations of frequency response. I can make any female voice sibilant by boosting frequencies between 3 and 5 kHz just 2-3 dB. I can remove sibilance just by dropping the same frequencies 2-3 dB  Frequencies between 3 and 8 kHz are responsible for the "brightness" of the sound. This is frequently and incorrectly associated with detail or lack there of. If I were to give two very different speakers, say a Klipsch Cornwall and a Magneplanar 3.7i the exact same frequency response curve they will still sound very different. Even though their tonality is identical their timbre is not. It is in this domain where the best speakers excel. The problem for loudspeakers is that they have to mimic the timbre of a vast array of instruments that make sounds by a vast array of mechanisms. The speakers that are best at it seem to disappear leaving individual instruments hanging in space, 3 dimensions. I remember vividly the first time I heard a loudspeaker system do this. It was Dick Sequerra's Pyramid Metronome 2+2W+Ti system driven by Threshold electronics. The owner was heavily into jazz. I had him put on Waltz for Debby and a holographic image of the Bill Evans trio appeared in space. I was not even stoned at the time. Needless to say my satisfaction with my own system dropped to all time lows. There was no way I could afford equipment like that at the time but it gave me a target to shoot at. I can count the systems on one hand that reached that level of performance in my experience. 

Mahgister, can you show us a picture of your mechanical equalizer? I am not sure what you mean by "tight pressure zone" comparing it to strings on a violin. Maybe you mean tight tension?

There exist no photography of pressure zones in a room only diagram...

Pick any acoustical article they will show you ...

anyway thanks for your interest....

Any room is not only walls waiting from the waves to bounce back and beign reflected, absorbed or diffused...

Any room is when sound come from the speaker a multiple pressure zones created by the meeting of waves and their resonance...

I say that these pressure zone are tight like strings of a violin because of the speed of sound the waves croos my room near 80 times in one second...

The brain decision threshold treat the incoming frontwaves is 80 millisecond if i remember well...

Then i compared the new pressure zones introduced by 32 fine tuned tubes and pipes to a a violin string optimally tight for producing the right tone....i use my equalizer to modify the equilibrium between the distributed pressure zones and the ratio between the timing of direct and reflected waves...

The metaphor comes from the fact that before my ears qualify the sound quality, the waves had cross my room and ears a great number of times...

A slight modification like the fleeting of a tight string produce a note...A SINGLE STRAW constituting the neck of only one of my 32 tubes or pipes of few inches could destruct completely the sound timbre, or modify radically the soundstage or the listener envelopment.... A single straw has more qualitative audible effect than some upgrade in gear...


That illustrate how powerful acoustical settings are...

They are more details in my thread....

Thanks for your interest....