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  »  New  Macondo's Axioms: Horn-loaded acoustic systems..  A link to another thread....  Horn-Loaded Speakers Forum     120  687060  07-29-2007
  »  New  Macondo Frame modification...  Parquet...  Horn-Loaded Speakers Forum     46  466763  12-22-2006
07-16-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
de charlus
Posts 94
Joined on 06-11-2013
Post #: 51
Post ID: 19689
Reply to: 19685
Ale 45 Super
fiogf49gjkf0d
Dear Harlanov,

For me the most impressive thing about this driver was its ability to simultaneously render soft/crisp sounds of similar frequencies distinctly, without muddling or other compromise. Additionally, at low volumes musical detail was not subsumed in murk to any degree, as seemingly occurs in the majority of cases. Tempo seemed consistent with my expectations of the best representations of given recordings that I've heard; there was certainly no sense of excessive tempo, as occurs in many "high resolution" speakers these days. There was no noticeable thickness in upper HF; lower HF, mid-HF and upper-HF were more or less of a piece, so no, there was no sense of excessive energy at the upper part of the upper mids in relation to other parts of the frequency range. Since i do not yet own these drivers I am unable to experiment with covering the complementary HF channel. As far as I was able to determine, the driver imparted little discernible character of its own across the recordings that I was able to listen to on it, giving a very neutral presentation indeed. One thing perhaps needs to be borne in mind though; I heard these drivers in a custom horn arrangement made by Audio Tekne, the superstructure and horns being formed from a carbon compound - as a caveat, I would suggest that perhaps some of the neutrality could have been contributed by this, "taming" the driver somewhat. I have no reason to suppose that this driver is not as good as it seemed to be, but it seems to be worth considering the whole package. Could you kindly elaborate upon what you mean by "parasitic sounds", as I am not familiar with this epithet.

de Charlus
07-16-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
haralanov


Bulgaria
Posts 130
Joined on 05-20-2008
Post #: 52
Post ID: 19690
Reply to: 19689
"Parasitic sounds" and human perception
fiogf49gjkf0d
 de charlus wrote:
Could you kindly elaborate upon what you mean by "parasitic sounds", as I am not familiar with this epithet.

By "parasitic sounds" I mean all sounds which are contained in the signal that are not part of the performed music. Different people call them with different names – for example "alien sounds". These are all kind of audio cracks when playing dirty LPs, all kind of digital front end distortions, distorted recordings, distorting amplifiers and speaker drivers, distortion due to bad electricity and many more. All those non-musically related sounds are part of the signal flowing through the voice coils of the drivers and they cannot be analyzed as a separate "parts". However this is only true if we are analyzing the electrical signal itself. Right in the moment when the signal is converted into acoustic waves, we have completely different situation. Now these parasitic sounds can be perceived by the brain as completely separate sounds that do not pollute the voice of the instruments. They exist with the music, but in no way interfere with the music. I made an illustration to show how the same signal (distorted audio signal in electrical domain) can be perceived when reproduced by drivers of different quality:

distortion perception.JPG

Fig.1 visualizes what’s going on when you play good music having bad audio quality via very bad speaker driver. The bad sounds are perceived as a part of the violin and you cannot hear the voice of the violin any more – it is heavily polluted with dirt.
Fig.3 represents what happens when you play the same music with the same quality of the electrical signal, but this time reproduced by a very high quality driver. You see – the bad sounds are there, but they do not affect the timbre of the instrument, nor affect the value of the musical message. It helps the listener to better understand the essence of the music.
Fig.4 shows what happens when you reproduce the signal via ultra high performance driver. Now the bad sounds of any kind are completely pushed away from the river where the music is flowing. The parasitic sounds no longer draw attention to themselves - only the Music remains. You can even deliberately introduce heavy distortion of high order (5th, 7th, 9th, 11th order) in the signal and they will not affect the sound.  It will be the same as you are listening live music in the park and someone starts the engine of his motorcycle. The sound of the engine could be irritating, but you can still easily perceive the music, despite it is contaminated with noise. You just perceive the noise as completely separate part of the complex acoustic interaction.

Best regards,
Petar

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." -A.E.
07-16-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,184
Joined on 05-28-2004
Post #: 53
Post ID: 19691
Reply to: 19690
As usually: well......
fiogf49gjkf0d
Hmmm…. With all elegance and I would say pictures’ explanation that Petar gave I do not know if I agree that the phenomena he described has to do a lot with driver. For sure the quality of a driver itself is important, very important but there are so many more participants that shape that “Parasitic Sounds”! perceptional decoupling of  Parasitic Sounds from music is fine but in my view it has less to do with acoustic system, at least with the acoustic systems that I am familiar. You can make ma very simple experiment. Take two phonostages (very good and very bad) and play a worn record. You will clearly hear that the bad surface noise of better phonostage will be less annoying and intrusive then from bad phonostage. If you however use the same phonostage but different speakers I feel that the effect will be less notable. The irony is that perceptional decoupling of Parasitic Sounds from music is very tricky and in many cases has nothing to do with quality of audio equipment as we commonly understand it in audio. I do not claim that I know how this mechanism works but I do feel that round everything around some kind of mythical characteristic of a driver is to make a disservice to own expectations.

"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-17-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
haralanov


Bulgaria
Posts 130
Joined on 05-20-2008
Post #: 54
Post ID: 19693
Reply to: 19691
Of course everything affects the sound
fiogf49gjkf0d
Romy, as you can see, I have never wrote that these parasitic sounds depend ONLY on the quality of the drivers. It is quite obvious they depend on many many many other things (practically everything) as for example bad microphones, bad microphone cables, bad cartridges, bad electricity, bad amplifiers, steel around the output transformers and so on and so on. My point is that when someone plays low quality recordings (I mean low audio quality, not poorly performed music) on very low quality equipment (even terribly sounding equipment) if this low quality signal is fed to ultra high performance speaker driver, the music and the sound will be perfectly listenable and perfectly understandable. In any other case (anything lesser than ultra high performing speaker) the result will be very poor, because the sound will be polluted and the complains will start to pop up on the surface (complains about bad electricity, poor recordings and so on). The essence of my previous post is that if somebody has really top performing drivers, he will be practically immuned against everything that can ruin the Sound and Music. Of course if the rest of the equipment has better audio quality, the result will be better - no one denies the importance of the other audio components.
 Romy the Cat wrote:
The irony is that perceptional decoupling of Parasitic Sounds from music is very tricky and in many cases has nothing to do with quality of audio equipment as we commonly understand it in audio.

Would you explain why do you think so? It certainly depends on the ability of a given person to “filter” the bad sounds away from his consciousness when listening to music, but I see no reason why it has nothing to do with equipment, as the result certainly depends on the abilities of the audio equipment. If it was so, there will be no reason the people (including you) to build seriously performing audio systems. I know that an experienced listener with proper musical culture who listens to his table radio will be able to extract the musicality out of the poor sound, but…

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." -A.E.
07-17-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
de charlus
Posts 94
Joined on 06-11-2013
Post #: 55
Post ID: 19695
Reply to: 19693
Parasitic sounds cont.
fiogf49gjkf0d
Dear Petar,

OK, I see what you mean. As far as I'm concerned, the driver(s) in question rendered the "parasitic sounds" in question quite distinctly from the music as performed. I do not mean that they were somehow unnaturally pushed to the periphery of the presentation, merely that they were present - as one would expect in so detailed a presentation - but not unduly bothersome or unpleasant, any more so than such noises are during live performances at which one is present. That said, the recordings used for this audition were very good ones with which I was very familiar; the coughs, shuffling feet and pages being turned etc were no more or less present than they should have been, and occupied the correct/plausible locations within the soundstage. As for sounds any more alien than these, I wasn't aware of any, although I'm now keen to test the above theory by playing a really poor, messy and detritus-laden recording through drivers of this quality in order to determine if the actual music remains pristine within the interference. What I was able to infer from the above audition makes me think that this would be the case, but I cannot say so as a matter of certainty as of the present time.

de Charlus
07-18-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,184
Joined on 05-28-2004
Post #: 56
Post ID: 19696
Reply to: 19693
A self-contained entity.
fiogf49gjkf0d
 haralanov wrote:
Would you explain why do you think so? It certainly depends on the ability of a given person to “filter” the bad sounds away from his consciousness when listening to music, but I see no reason why it has nothing to do with equipment, as the result certainly depends on the abilities of the audio equipment. If it was so, there will be no reason the people (including you) to build seriously performing audio systems. I know that an experienced listener with proper musical culture who listens to his table radio will be able to extract the musicality out of the poor sound, but…

What I meant that in audio we deal with the sounds or Sound, or at least with perception of it. For sure it is valid and important category but it not necessarily has a direct relation with true music values. For sure bad Sound does impact musical values but we all know that good sound does not grand value to a bad performance. So, from a certain perspective we could recognize Sound as we deal with in audio and a self-contained entity that does not directly related to qualitative musical experience.  
 

"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-19-2013 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Paul S
San Diego, California, USA
Posts 2,672
Joined on 10-12-2006
Post #: 57
Post ID: 19703
Reply to: 19696
Drivers/Speakers As Filters
fiogf49gjkf0d
The idea of a driver/speaker that "sorts out" noise and "puts it in its place" is very interesting!  But perhaps we are thinking wrongly about how this might be done?  As far as doing it earlier in the "reproduction" chain, I do know a version of this can be done with/by phono cartridges (and their set up), to separate vinyl noises from the sound field and Music, but the "digital version" of dealing with noise is different, to say the least, just as the Dolby for tape and FM are different, as well.  Now I am thinking of digital noise and bad electricity effects I am too familiar with, and I am wondering how I would approach trying to deal with this at the speaker "level".  Perhaps the more "realistic" the main, musical Sound is to our ears/brain, the better we are able to automatically and comfortably make "internal" adjustments for non-musical noise, like the coughing at a concert?  In any case, this idea of "perceived realism", however subjective it might be, is what drives my own curiosity, and if it winds up "excluding" noise from the program, all the better!  So far, bad electricity might spoil my Sound and Music at any time.


Paul S
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  »  New  Macondo's Axioms: Horn-loaded acoustic systems..  A link to another thread....  Horn-Loaded Speakers Forum     120  687060  07-29-2007
  »  New  Macondo Frame modification...  Parquet...  Horn-Loaded Speakers Forum     46  466763  12-22-2006
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