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05-19-2010 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,160
Joined on 05-28-2004
Post #: 1
Post ID: 13585
Reply to: 13585
"Seamless extended midrange"
fiogf49gjkf0d

I got today an email with description of a playback sound that made me to think that the author linguisticly formed and nailed down one aspect of sound  that I very long looking myself and even practicing but never was able to put it into the words. I think he did it very nice and very thoughts provoking. Here are his words, reprinted without permission:

“The first thing that impressed me was the bass, or really the lack of bass, you don’t hear bass you don’t hear highs there is only midrange, … I was expecting to listen to a bunch of concepts like the air between the instruments or the midbass slam or the transparency of the highs, there is none, there is only seamless extended midrange, but lets call it plainly, there are only instruments playing, and a bunch of them! “

A single sentence but it very loaded and it encompass years and year of observation about sound. What the sentence introduces is very tangible characteristic of sound of a playback – the bandwidth of Midrange. I sound oxymoronic – how a Midrange might have a different bandwidth? What we call Midrange is defined but there is a lot of “buts”.

The key in the sentence above the describer “Seamless extended midrange” which implies that a playback must be of course full-range but the wider bandwidth is perceived as Midrange the better sound is. I mean if the system has extended bass and extended HF but they sound as Midrange then something in the system is done properly.  The irony is that live sound has no HF and no LF – it has ONLY Midrange but the bandwidth of this Midrange and the amount of information in this Midrange is enormous. The reproduced sound very frequently gets broken down to LF, Midrange and HF that is in a way a surrogate of sound reproduction. So, the rule is:

The wider Midrange bandwidth is without trained listener experience deficiency in upper and lower octaves the more pregnant reproduced Sound is.

I think I need to start to review from this perspective the performance of the orchestral conductors and musicants…

Rgs, Romy the caT

"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
05-19-2010 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
msaudio
Posts 45
Joined on 12-09-2009
Post #: 2
Post ID: 13586
Reply to: 13585
It would Be Nice, But It Won't Sale In The Real World.
fiogf49gjkf0d
I look at it this way, it is all about your original source of prerecorded crap. Most of the problems with speakers are not the speakers it is the source of music the record album and the cd. Everyone is out of touch with the source, if you want good playback through your system it has to start there, How is this done, with a good tape recorder, yes tape recorder, i use a ampex 351 with tube electronics and there is nothing better, it is 2 track, all so i use 2 altec m30 tube mics. My brother has a jazz band and play's the drums and his band comes over few times a week to practice in my make shift studio and i record them, cd's and records can not playback the sound that i have, not even close because you all have a third generation copy of the original done with solidstate junk equipment, once you hear a real source you can try to get a good playback speaker system to sound real, but it will never sound good until you have everything in the line of playback as close to original as possible.    Preaching Horn Religion  MSAUDIO
05-20-2010 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
el`Ol
Posts 225
Joined on 10-13-2007
Post #: 3
Post ID: 13587
Reply to: 13585
Does Mocando have seamless midrange?
fiogf49gjkf0d
Romy,

what I have been wondering for a while, why don't you run your S2 from 500 Hz to 5000 Hz?
05-20-2010 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,160
Joined on 05-28-2004
Post #: 4
Post ID: 13588
Reply to: 13587
The Mocando and non-extended midrange.
fiogf49gjkf0d

 msaudio wrote:
…. but it will never sound good until you have everything in the line of playback as close to original as possible. 

This is very faulty premise, I multiple times objected it. The people who play live music, record it and then play recording right the way (like Levinson did in his demo room in NY) are truly do not understand what audio is all about. It is not the subject of this thread however.
 el`Ol wrote:
Romy, what I have been wondering for a while, why don't you run your S2 from 500 Hz to 5000 Hz?

Because I very much appreciate what S2 does at 8000-1000 region.  I feel that none of the drivers out there has this frosty and throaty upper mid region, but at the same time very detailed and very connected, graceful and very pronounced.
 el`Ol wrote:
Does Mocando have seamless midrange?

I would say that nowdays Mocando has very much no extended midrange. The Macondo midrange is narrow, not as narrow as let say Kharma loudspeakers have, but still the Macondo midrange has very definitive boundaries that do not hole as much “sounds” as I would like them to be. Interesting that Macondo does hold some feeling of midrange wholeness but it is kind of very fragile and vulnerable. A full of attitude LF or HF event is clearly auditable as audio event, not as music even, and it destroys the feeling of midrange totality.

The caT

"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
05-20-2010 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Paul S
San Diego, California, USA
Posts 2,658
Joined on 10-12-2006
Post #: 5
Post ID: 13589
Reply to: 13588
Slice and Dice
fiogf49gjkf0d
Although Levinson appears to have missed the boat with respect to musical content, he did show what can be done with Sound, per se.  I still use his demos as a sort of mental yardstick with respect to the quality of the sound he did "reproduce".

With respect to the "continuous midrange", the problem has always been to include both the continuousness and the unlimited energy simultaneously.  This is why we don't all use single drivers, 2-ways or old Quads.

This concept of continuous midrange must also include the "spikey" quality of "treble" that is embedded in natural sound but gets mixed, brushed in and over repro sound as "HF".  And the LF has to have both power and the ease to come and go like a ghost.

It seems to throw hi-fi to "reproduce" the sheer density and power of instrumental and vocal music.  In live performances, even the quietest passages - even silence - errupt with power we just can't seem to get from the single drivers, etc., or even the big hi-fi systems, for that matter.  I actually get what some of the single driver crowd like about these small systems; I just can't abide the shortcomings.  And so it goes, a channel at a time, trying to get the density and power as we chop up the "midrange".


Best regards,
Paul S
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