You animal! IRS Betas? You are going to destroy your hearing! What are you driving them with? Nothing like having 8 12" woofers staring at you.
Speakers 10 years old or older that can compete with todays best,
I attend High End Audio Shows whenever I get a chance. I also regularly visit several of my local High End Audio parlors, so I get to hear quite a few different speaker brands all the time. And these speakers are also at various price points. Of course, the new speakers with their current technology sound totally incredible. However, I strongly feel that my beloved Revel Salon 2 speakers, which have been around for over ten years, still sound just as good or even better than the vast majority of the newer speakers that I get a chance to hear or audition in todays market. And that goes for speakers at, or well above the Salon 2s price point. I feel that my Revel Salon 2 speakers (especially for the money) are so incredibly outstanding compared to the current speaker offerings of today, that I will probably never part with them. Are there others who feel that your beloved older speakers compare favorably with todays, newfangled, shinny-penny, obscenely expensive models?
Showing 14 responses by mijostyn
That itch is tough to ignore. Sometimes the newer system winds up being worse! Speakers like that are very expensive to make and the market for them is limited. There is certainly a point of diminishing returns and you are well past it. Once you are use to that amount of bass power it is hard to revert to something smaller. You might try working with them, not just changing amps or other electronics. The two most difficult parts of speaker design are the enclosures, which I seriously doubt you want to mess with and the crossovers which you can easily play with, for fun! You might just surprise yourself. DEQX is recruiting 120 audiophiles to beta test the programming of their new processor, the Pre 8. It has a programmable 4 way digital crossover in it. Retail in the US is going to be $13K but they are giving them to the beta testers for $6K. Cheap entertainment! I do not think they have yet reached 120. Have a look at it. https://www.deqx.com/
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There is no such thing as a perfect room. There is also no such thing as a perfect loudspeaker and there is certainly no such thing as a perfect analog crossover. Each one of your speakers has its own amplitude curve and they are not the same, even if your room is perfectly symmetrical. This leads to smearing of the image. The secret is getting the two channels within 1 dB or better from 100 Hz to 12kHz. You can use much steeper orders without any distortion in the digital realm and you can perfectly align all the drivers in phase and time regardless of where you place them. In short, your speaker plus the DEQX will be way more accurate than any speaker these people can come up with. That sir is an absolute fact. I spent decades on your side of the fence. The single greatest development in HiFi since the advent of the KLH Model 3 is digital signal processing. The Pre 8 is currently the best processor available. It has a 64 bit floating point system and will stay above 192/24 regardless of anything it does. What is the difference? It is like trying to compare a good direct to disc record and a good studio record. But, stay on your side of the fence. Instead of knowing you have the best possible system, waste time and money searching for something better. That search will never end. That question mark will drive you crazy. |
The Trinnov is fine for home theater. I looked carefully at the Amethyst but Its bass management is severely limited and it is not programmable at a level that is acceptable. I waited 3 years to see what DEQX was going to do making a PITA out of myself in the process as my old TacT processor was dying. It did three months ago. At any rate I will be getting one of the first units. The DEQX is far more powerful and flexible than the Trinnov. It will do everything I want and more. It is also obviously built as well or better than any other equipment on the market. The technology is so powerful now that you can make a system sound anyway you want within the limitations of your other equipment, the speaker/room being the most significant. You can not make a point source system sound like a linear array and vice versa. Mike, come on, every modern record and most of the rereleases you listen to are digitally modified. I just got a new pressing of Fontessa in mono (Modern Jazz Quartet) and the tape hiss is gone, disappeared. I wonder how that happened. All modern material with few exceptions are recorded digitally on a hard drive. I know that too many digital recordings are compressed into high volume pancakes. Vinyl is also to some degree to keep the volume above the noise floor. I just recently recorded an audiophile delite from a friends collection in 192//24 with digital RIAA correction. Nobody can reliably tell the difference between the original and the recording. It is a great way to get music that is no longer being produced.
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The purist and the early adapter. Black and white. My room is also epic and I use dipole linear arrays which limit room interaction, ESLs with an order of magnitude less distortion than any dynamic driver. I digitize my turntable and use digital RIAA correction which is more accurate than any analog circuit. I would never buy another tape machine (I am being given an old Nagra for display purposes only) IMHO they all belong in museums next to Edison's cylinder machines. Recording in 24/192 is more accurate with less distortion not to mention that it is far less expensive, no tape and the software is far less expensive. The only reasons I play records is because I have thousands of them and I've been doing it since I was 4 years old. Black and White. Two entirely different approaches to the same problem, the romantic and the modern. Both are valid for differing reasons. |
I do not think anyone has mentioned the Rogers LS3 5A, the little speaker that could. If you have never heard these with properly integrated subwoofers you have no idea what you are missing. We had these set up next to a huge pair of Dunlavys. People routinely would think it was the Dunlavys playing! And that sirs is the trap. What a system and room looks like and what it sounds like are two entirely different issues. I have heard really tricked out systems/rooms sound like crap. This is not to say Mike's room does not sound good but he does stubbornly refuse to make it sound better over the romantic concept that he has to keep everything analog. It is interesting to see the contrast between Mike and myself, also a Mike. We are polar opposites in so many ways. I am line source Dipole, Mike is Big point source. Mike will spend huge money, I will approach it from a value perspective. Mike has everything on display. I have as much as possible hidden. There is no cable visible until you look behind the speakers. The amps are below in my basement shop. My room is rather plain, I can not stand anything rattling. The only commonality I can see is we both use 8 woofer drivers and both rooms were purpose designed for audio. It would be a lot of fun to take people blindfolded into both rooms, play the same program and see which system they liked better. There are two diseases that audiophiles routinely catch for which there is no vaccine. There is the Mark Levinson disease, if it costs more it must sound better and the Dan D'Agostino disease, if it looks cool it must sound better. |
I have been using digital signal processing for 25 years. For the last two years I have been running my phono stage into an ADC, digitizing the signal into 192/24. RIAA correction is applied digitally without any distortion or phase shift. I can also turn any record into a digital file. I can AB pure analog to Digital at any time and there is no one individual that has prefered the analog version. My system is also optimized for digital use and does not represent the finest of analog system, but I do use ESLs with subwoofers and fine cartridges like the MSL Sig Platinum, Lyra Atlas SL and Ortofon MC Diamond. If you know what you are doing and have the right equipment, the benefits of digital signal processing far outweigh any disadvantages. It is also true that two channel processors have not really come into their own until recently. Digital volume has always been a problem because as you drop the volume from 0 dBFS you lose bits. The newest 64 bit floating point processors still lose bits but they start out with so many that resolution never drops below 192/24. Volume is no longer an issue. |
@phusis There is no such thing as a "lossless" digital volume control. Some units may revert to an analog volume control. But, even the best digital volume controls lose bits as the volume goes down. It is just that the really fast processors do not lose enough bits to affect sound quality. Down the road? I have been tuning my system one Hz at a time for 25 years. Let's say I measure my system and see a 3 dB dip in the left channel at a specific frequency say 358 Hz. I can select 358 Hz and increase it 3 dB. I can also adjust the Q of the filter matching what I see on the measurement exactly. |
@daveyf , I record rare, out of print records to my hard drive all the time. The people who bring these records over are other audiophiles. Not a single person can reliably identify the recording vs the real record. I can go back and forth between analog and digital RIAA correction. This one is close. Most people cannot tell the difference. I notice an improvement in imaging on the digital side. A few others describe similar improvements. IMHO the people who prefer analog have uncontrollable expectation bias. There are evils used frequently in digital recordings like extreme dynamic compression which is very unfortunate. This is not the fault of digital, and there are many digital sources that are not compressed. IMHE it can go either way. Some analog records are better than their digital counterparts and vice versa. I think my own system is the best residential system I have ever heard, but I designed it to be that way and it is certainly not others cup of tea. This is not to say there are not improvements to be had. There are. I am sure it can be even better and I know where specific problems are that need to be addressed. Going back to analog is not on the list and never will be. Forgetting about digital vs analog sources, there are things you can do in the digital domain that are impossible to do in the analog domain either entirely or without unacceptable distortion. Crossovers are one example, correction of group delays and adjustment of amplitude are others. |
It seems we are always destined to do that. No, you correct it as much as you can especially if the irregularity is only in one channel. It is not so important that the amplitude curve is perfectly flat, it is important that the two channels are perfectly identical, or as close as possible. And just how are you correcting amplitude 1 Hz at a time? It is not down the road for me. You can do it in an automated fashion or manually including programing delays. I start with automated then fine tune manually. I find it best to program for flat then overlay my own preference target curves which were constructed by ear. Efficiency is nice if you want to use small amplifiers. Personally, I do not care about it. I prefer to look at the type of loudspeaker. You like horns, I prefer ESLs which admittedly are not efficient @ 86 dB. But, since I remove 100 Hz down from them they go louder than ---- , which is all I really care about, the ability of a system to reach realistic volume levels. Back in the day speakers like the EV Patrician and the KlipschHorn were SOTA as the most powerful amp we had was 70 watts/ch. The Marantz Model 9 comes to mind. Then came the hideous Crown Stereo 150 followed by the Fuzzlinear 700, somewhat better than the Crown, but..... These initial SS amps were the reason people stuck resolutely with tubes. Some hangovers are hard to get rid of. At any rate with the amps we have today efficiency is not an issue. It only determines volume per watt and not sound quality. |
I never said to limit yourself to one approach. But what you hear repeatedly is that people get high efficiency loudspeakers to support low powered amps that are deemed to sound better. That is not my experience, but that is why Howard Johnsons made 28 flavors. Also many classic speakers were very high efficiency because the amps they had back then were not very big. Efficiency was a big deal, back then, unfortunately time alignment was not. Also nobody took sub bass seriously. It was not until the late 70's that subwoofers creeped into the situation and due to the lack of adequate bass management were endlessly belittled to the extent that many audiophiles will not go near them even today. As far a digital EQ is concerned, it is not parametric EQ in the traditional sense, you draw target curves on a grid and the computer will apply them assuming the curve does not go outside boundaries. Once the system is flat down to 18 Hz I apply a rather standard target curve that increases bass up to 10 dB at 18 Hz, is back down to 0 dB by 100 Hz then tapers off slowly from 1000 Hz on up to 20 kHz which is down 9 dB. This allows stress free listening at high volumes giving the feeling of a live performance at volumes that are not destructive to iones hearing. I have one curve aside that has a notch filter at 3500 Hz in case I encounter a sibilant female or violin. I have not used it in over a year. It seems that the AtmaSphere MA2s have abolished sibilance in my system. |