Tekton Design Moab
We hear and feel vibrations with all our body parts in a different way thru all those parts. This is a flight of fancy. The proposition that your body feels or that you hear the vibration difference between one screw material over another is an extraordinary claim that ought to have more evidence than "I tell you I can HEAR it!" When did the hi-fi world take this turn in to looking like walking in to a psychic fair? |
Congratulations on new speakers millercarbon. I'm sure they'll be great. I wouldn't mention this if you hadn't replaced your speakers with what are likely excellent Tekton products. But in my view, almost anything would be an upgrade over the Talon speakers. I once had the Talon Khite speakers to audition, same era as the Khorus, and they were so bad I literally thought they were broken. The most colored speakers I might ever have heard. Just a bizarre voicing. In fact Talon was a bit of a cause celeb back in the day: a couple reviews raved, but they left others scratching their head. To those who heard what was going on in the frequency response and dispersion, it wasn't a surprise to see the Talons produced some of the worst measurements you can find in the soundstage archive.: https://www.soundstagenetwork.com/measurements/talon_khorus/ Those measurements mirror what I heard in the Khites as well. Congrats on the upgrade! :-) |
Uninformed opinions are a dime a dozen, Except that one of our opinions is actually backed up with objective evidence (see measurements), making it more than just "opinion." ;-) Anyway, I sincerely hope the Tektons work out well for you. I bet they'll sound very impressive. It seems Tekton has run the gauntlet of skepticism about their design, but have earned respect. |
erik, Oh yeah, people can like all sorts of colorations. I like colorations myself in some speakers. There’s nothing wrong with liking or loving any speaker, colorations and all, of course. And there isn’t one eeny, teeny thing wrong with loving a speaker like the Talon. But it’s another thing not to hear or notice the existence of those colorations. Especially gross deviations as you see in the Talon Khorus. (Which is perfectly fine of course; no audiophile has to make it his goal to notice them; but then, it’s harder to take seriously someone as a Super Hearer able to hear the finest nuances, if you aren’t noticing something so obvious it can be easily seen in measurements). I don’t profess to have Extraordinary Ears, but as I work in sound all day long I’m used to dialing in eq and many other subtle characteristics, so frequency deviations can stick out to my ear. I’m sure that as an experienced DIY speaker builder you are adept at correlating what you hear to measurements to a relevant degree, and I’m sure you’d pick up on the Talon’s non-neutral voicing in a split second. What’s interesting is that in some subjective reviews, like the Stereotimes review, the writer actually upon first listening to the speaker described the frequency deviations pretty well: "It was immediately so full bodied and over-rich, that I was stunned. The bass was phenomenal, the midrange was a bit overblown (particularly the lower mids) and the treble? -- it sounded rolled off. No, I think recessed is the better word. It was there but distant, lingering more toward the back of the stage. " Pretty close, if you look at the soundstage measurements. But what I think happened is the reviewer, like most, bought in to the "the sound will improve with break-in" trope, and simply adjusted to the sound character over time. Having done some reviews myself long ago, and known many reviewers, I’ve found that their first impressions can sometimes be the most accurate, vs later when they start compensating and adapting to the sound. A reviewer pal of mine is aware of this and often invites me over at times through the process to get a take from some "fresh ears" and it can help with a little course-correction sometimes for pinning down the sound for a review. Anyway, back to the Moab speakers. I’d love to see how they measure! |
From my point of view: I haven't heard any Tekton speakers. I'd really like to. The Tekton speakers engendered quite a lot of skepticism due to their design. But it seems people have been won over and over upon hearing them. Including people skeptical of the design. And the Stereophile measurements of a Tekton speaker suggest, as JA expressed, that what may seem to be some dubious choices have been cannily chosen to result in better than expected neutrality and performance. So even as one who has not heard Tekton, they've earned some respect. |
p05129 Most measurements mean nothing about the sound of the speaker. Sounds like you are unaware of the science on this issue. For instance, have you ever read Floyd Toole, or seen him speak on this subject, in which he adduces many scientific studies that have correlated various speaker measurements that help predict listener preferences with a high degree of accuracy? |
millercarbon: Anyone so freaking clueless they think people can't feel music, I don't even know where to begin. Which is, not surprisingly, utterly irrelevant to the point I made. rixthetrick It's not inconceivable that screws could make a sonic difference in terms of their looseness. Loosen the screws enough on a speaker at the rightplaces and insofar as they then allow more gross vibrations (e.g. of speaker cabinet, or perhaps those that hold drivers tightly), then that's not unrealistic. But when people start talking about the "sound" of different screw materials, properly deployed, that gets in to "lets see the evidence" territory, at the very least. And the other folks were producing mushy hypotheses like "music is vibration and everything vibrates during music so OF COURSE you can hear different screws." That particular line of reasoning is nonsense. If you are telling me that, say, properly deployed brass screws vs copper screws result in measurable differences in a speaker (and also audible), I'd certainly be intrigued to see those measurements. Thanks! |
millercarbon, while certainly contributing some nice stuff to the forum, has nonetheless been talking down to other audiophiles and touting his own Golden Ears for years. However, these are the speakers his golden hears have extolled as great speakers, and his reference for years: https://www.soundstagenetwork.com/measurements/talon_khorus/ That should put things in to a bit more perspective ;-) Hopefully his Moabs will be better designed, and he'll find out what he was missing :-) |
Nothing wrong with preferring the sound of your current speakers to "million dollar" (or extremely expensive) speakers. I think most of us have had similar experiences with speakers we own.How many times have we heard super expensive systems at audio shows, or dealerships, or even other people’s homes, and come home to our own system feeling "Aaahh..that’s much more like it!" |
speedbump6, No not totally against tweaking a system, but not much for the pseudo-science aspect. The one where you place anything in or on your system, think you hear a change, and then make up vague explanations that are indistinguishable from pseudo-science or how psychics operate. Anyone who has looked at millercarbon's system or read his many tweak posts knows it's no surprise the thread has gone this direction. But...mercifully...I don't intend to spoil the party any more than that. Enjoy. |
Every single one of these things has its own characteristic sets of resonant frequencies. With instruments that’s how we tell violin from viola from cello. Because every single tiny little bit is vibrating, and because that after all is what we call music (vibrations) then it naturally follows that a change in any one of them is bound to be heard in the music. No that is the equivalent of new age, pseudo-science mumbo jumbo.It’s equivalent to the new age mushy thinking of "Hey, like everything is really just energy and vibrations, so of course I can affect you with my energy holding my hands over the cancer in your tummy!" The fact that something may be vibrating does NOT automatically entail that you can hear it. When you get an Ultrasound at a lab, you are being subjected to sonic vibrations at up to around 100 dB. Does that mean you can hear it?No. That’s why it’s called "ultrasound." If I play a clock radio loud enough from 3 rooms away from you, you can likely hear it. But as I turn down the volume I’ll reach a point where it’s still playing but you can’t hear it because the volume has gone too low for you to perceive. Why? Because you are neither a dog, a bat, nor Superman. Human hearing has limits. So the proposition that when music is playing at full volume that you can HEAR a screw vibrating, much less the difference between two screws, is just friggin’ absurd. It’s a truly extraordinary claim. And then you make up flight-of-fancy "explanations" for why it would make a difference "hey, everything is vibrating, man...." But this is where you end up when you take your own hearing abilities as the equivolent of a super power - you get to play in the world of imagination, both in what you think you can hear and in the stories you can make up to justify it, without any test but...your hearing and imagination again. BTW, compare the level of analysis regarding resonance when someone is doing actual engineering and appealing to science, vs the musings of people here on vibrating screws: https://audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-1 |
rixthetrick, Thanks for the invite. However, I’m not going to be near Texas any time soon, and also even based on what you’ve written the prospect seem very dubious to me. If we are talking about the actual vibration of the screws themselves being audible, I hold that to be an extraodinary claim.But if the proposition is that different screw materials, in being softer or harder, can affix speaker materials more or less loosely than others, and that it is the changes in vibration to THOSE materials as a result that people can hear (e.g. vibrating speaker cabinet parts or whatever), then that would be measurable. I’d certainly want to see that objective evidence before accepting any "I’m sure I heard it" subjective evidence, given the "I heard it" form of anecdote has been used to justify literally every crazy tweak idea anyone has ever come up with, no matter how unscientific. viber6, The notion of different screws changing the sound in cartridges seems alittle less fanciful (though I’d be skeptical without measurements or controlled listening tests), but of course that’s a different scenario.In that case the materials are attached to a device meant to pick up the teeniest vibrations and have them amplified by huge orders. That’s different from the claim that one can hear different screw materials in a speaker, where any such vibrations would be swamped by the already amplified music. The speaker is not "amplifying" the sound of a screw, it’s amplifying the music signal. But, again, if the claim is that the stiffness of a screw material causes gross changes in material resonances in a speaker such that it changes the sound, then that should be objectively quantifiable. |
first time anyone says double-blind write them off as clueless. Congratulations on perpetuating the anti-science audiophile stereotype. Flat Earthers will tell you to trust your eyes, not what those scientific-types are trying to tell you about "controlling for variables, testable hypotheses" and all that scientific nonsense. I think you'd get along at parties ;-) |
