Surround sound for music is a dumb idea

[tonyE]

Oh he describes what he hears. If there is deficient/emphasized bass, if there is brightness/dullness, if he notices distortion, or imaging problems, how well the dispersion is, etc. He even cites what tracks he listened to. He just doesn't use the ambiguous, BS, non technical terms that are far too common in speaker review.

The issue is that there is a lexicon of words that has been developed and agreed upon by the audiophile community that describes quite well certain subjective auditory experiences . To denigrate that would be like going around telling people that what they see as RED is actually GREEN! See, that's also a subjective word.

For example, stuff like time coherency, planars, dipoles, multipoles, soundstage, dynamics, etc... those are expressed in hard to measure, or understand, measurements. I mean, is it better to describe that a speaker has really good time coherence with realistic, shimmering treble able to make the crash cymbal sound realistic or do you want to see a pair of waterfall plots that describe the spectral and time delay/decay?

For example, although it is easy to see the harmonic distortion spectrum of a device, it's easier to say that one device sounds harsh and another musical. How about inadequate power supply current? Easier to say that one device produces limits the dynamics while another soars and generates crescendos while remaining accurate during pianissimos.

I think using the 'agreed upon words' that reflect the act of listening are likely much easier to use than spending five minutes analyzing the plots. Nevermind that most non-audiophiles likely know neither. Hence, using non-audiophile words and no graphs/plots to measure frequency and time, is a very gross approximation and useless for the cognoscenti and the audiophile/engineer/scientists.

Example again, I have three terms for snow, but eskimos have like 40++. Does that mean that eskimos are wasting their time? Nope, they KNOW snow, they spend time on snow, they have words to describe all kinds of snow that to us would be like the same. Just as audiophiles spend time and care about audio while most people claim they can't hear the difference between a Bose Acoustimass MP3 player and a pair of Magnepans driven by a Nelson Pass XA200.8....

See? IMHO, the guy at ASR is guilty of over simplification. Again, he reminds me of Julian Hirsch. Good with the scope but in serious need of a new battery for his hearing aid. ;-)

 

[LuvMyQuad]

To each his own.

 

[tonyE]

To each his own.

The issue with being so dismissive is that it supports a version of the status quo which does not support the advancement of the art and science of audio reproduction.

Mind you, I'm a strong proponent of laizer faire, but when it comes to people making assertions to authority ( such as a 'reviewer' ) by publishing 'component reviews' then I expect that such person is not just maintaining but attempting to implement a change in the body of knowledge.

Hence, I expect a higher level of discipline.

Look, eons ago we didn't know how Intermodulation Distortion affected the sound so we didn't much measure it... we only measured "total harmonic" distortion. Well, guess what, at some point, because people were saying they were hearing (*) peculiar aspects of devices that shared certain THD and IM characteristics, we developed measurements for IM and harmonic distortion frequency based analysis graphs and we discovered that odd and even order harmonics were very important and that a summary THD measurement was insufficient. New measuring apparatus were invented to take such measurements and this advanced the state of audio reproduction and the quality of sound.

Another one... cables. Yes, cables do make a difference but this is because there are no real electrical standards (outside of voltage and some general techniques) for the electrical characteristics of audio components. Input and output impedances for single ended connections are all over the map... so cables of all kinds of characteristics will make a difference: phase shifts, damping factors, frequency filters... at the worst case they may lead to instability, Ay!

The sad part here is that all of this can be heard and measured in many ways but there is no easy way to describe this event. Perhaps some day, instead of shunting the "sound of cables" to the snake oil pile, we might move forward and address it properly by organizing cables and devices into types of electrical characteristics so we can match the interface properly (or go to fully balanced interconnects).

This is how the science and art progresses... not by being content with the current status (To Each His Own) but by being curious and attentive to those all.

OK, I do admit that the Tice Clock was over the top.

(*) I recently got a B1Korg preamp. It's an interesting device. It has a bias trim pot that changes the distortion characteristics of the preamp circuit: changes the spectrum from odd to even harmonic distortion. The manual offers some suggestions but defers the final "tuning" to the ears of the builder. I got mine so that test points and trim pot are accessible from the rear and set up to Pass' recommendation. I like Nelson's sound choices, BUT, I could change it if I wanted it. This is only made possible because at some point a group of people started to correlate what they were hearing with what was being measured, and yes, they had developed a lexicon to describe it.

 

[Electric Moo]

I have one question, What's is or will the shoe be used for?

LOL!!

good question. Maybe she gets better traction barefoot?

 

[tonyE]

LOL!!

good question. Maybe she gets better traction barefoot?

With only two shoes... can she do Quad?

 

[gene_stl]

I wish I could unsee that album cover.

The TROOF, da whole TROOF and nothin but th TROOF!

 

[~dave~~wave~]

(*) I recently got a B1Korg preamp. It's an interesting device. It has a bias trim pot that changes the distortion characteristics of the preamp circuit: changes the spectrum from odd to even harmonic distortion. The manual offers some suggestions but defers the final "tuning" to the ears of the builder. I got mine so that test points and trim pot are accessible from the rear and set up to Pass' recommendation. I like Nelson's sound choices, BUT, I could change it if I wanted it. This is only made possible because at some point a group of people started to correlate what they were hearing with what was being measured, and yes, they had developed a lexicon to describe it.

Thanks for the trip down a rabbit hole, Tony.

Nutube : A new vacuum tube which puts vacuum fluorescent display technology to practical use
B1 with Korg Triode (B1K) Full Kit

 

[gene_stl]

The DIY audio store charges $299 for the KORG KIT! what a rip off. Of course nobody is pointing a gun at you.

 

[tonyE]

I wish I could unsee that album cover.

In my not at all humble opinion Nelson Pass is a classic audio charlatan.
In one sense measurements are almost irrelevant because both amplifiers for quite a while (can be back in the 1970s if you picked carefully) and DACs (I won't comment on when the differences became audibly irrelevant because I don't know) have been so much better than our program material (even leaving alone the issue of the distortion of vinyl and phono cartridges on the one hand and the distortion of speaker drivers and speaker systems on the other) that worrying very much about amplifier sound is silly.

One of the things Amir does well is check audiophile tweaky things like USB cables ,Power cables, interconnects and little things sold for absurd prices and prove they do nothing or often show they actually cause deterioration of the sound.

Why anyone who believes that an expensive power cable makes a difference ignores the travel of the power from god knows where to the outlet. Do you think they worried about the oxygen content in the Romex inside your walls??

Speaker cables only make a difference in unblinded test , with suggestible people and often when tests are conducted by the sellers of things they are corrupt tests. This has been caught a few times. The physics of wires, at audio frequencies and speaker impedances just don't require any magic of any kind. This has been hammered over and over again with articles going back to the eighties. But the marketing machine keeps at it because there are always new crops of gullible audiophiles.

My reference sound is mid orchestra, row M, middle of the row, one seat shifted to the left so we can watch the hands of the pianist. I don't think you can claim that source is not perfect.. because, let's face it... a real orchestra, playing live is well.. perfect. One year glorious season we got to watch the Vienna Phil and Berlin Phil both twice each, imagine the Vienna Phil playing The Blue Danube and the Berlin playing Beethoven's 5th... it just doesn't get any better than that...

...oh well perhaps the London Philarmonia or the LA or Cleveland or Chicago....

I would like my audio system to sound like that... but it is impossible, it will never sound like that. But I KNOW what real sound is like. You see, I used to do PA and recording of bluegrass back in my youth. I can hear the sound of voices, string instruments, etc...

I got a bunch of amps at home. All kinds of amps... Class A FET DIY, Class AB SS, Class AB tubes, ICE amps, Ncore amps, etc... and guess what, hook them up to the Maggies, the big PSBs, the Acoustic Reality AE1 and you can hear the difference.

In any event, you are ignoring my point. My point is that our hearing experience points out to the insufficiency of our measurements. And our development paradigm is behind it.

That, btw, is how Western Empirical Science works.

And calling Nelson a charlatan is a very cheap shot. Have you heard his amps?

 

[tonyE]

The NuTube preamp measurements I have seen have been terrible. One question is , why would you expect a fluorescent display to make a good vacuum tube. (Hint strong noisy emitters that can give enough current density to light up the fluorescent material. I believe this would be better for a power tube but why would you want that either )
Everyone knows that if you want a good vacuum tube preamp you use a 12AX7(dual triode in one of its selected incarnation of which there were ZILLIONS! For a reason). Nothing has surpassed it. In fact one of the things that made me realize that Nelson Pass was a charlatan was his promotion of the NuTube. It is complete audiophile silliness. Korg should know better than participating in this.

One of the things I found very amusing at ASR was when Amir tested "discrete component op amps" which are promoted as replacement for real op amps.
I can tell you that real op amps have gotten very very good. (Including thirty year old ones) Do you think some asshole working in his basement is going to come up with something superior in performance to something worked on by GENERATIONS of overachieving engineers at companies like Burr Brown , Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor and other silicon valley greats. I am prepared to seriously doubt that propostion.

Sure, sure.... but it sounds very good. HAVE YOU HEARD IT?

As a matter of fact I also have a Conrad Johnson PV9 tube preamp with the latest teflon caps and factory sourced tubes... and an Audio Research D70 Mk II that has Svetlana tubes all over it. The PV9 uses 12AX7s in the phono preamp but 5751s and 5965 elsewhere. The D70 MkII does use 12AX7s but it also uses 6922s.

But time does not stand still....

Oh, those Burson op amps... well, guess what, I got some of those, and you can hear the difference as well, you might like it or might not.

The thing about outfits like TI, NS etc... is that they are commercial enterprises that have to respond to commercial realities, their products are design to do well in metrology labs and to come in at the Bill Of Materials....

Interestingly, you just stumbled into my field... you see... I've spent like 40+ years handling stuff like Op Amps and what not and I can tell you that the cost of the Bill Of Materials is usually the most important and that we will put pressure on those "silicon valley greats" to cheapen their product.... heck, in one job I got Intel to redo a chip because we didn't want to spend the money on changing the design of the DMA that we had spec'd in our product. Yep, yours truly called the Intel guy and told him that we couldn't use it because it was gonna cost us a nickle to update the DMA and Intel went out and did a Mk II retape of the chip... just like that! Why? Because we were buying millions of their chips....

Or the time product development would rather we spent one million extra on R&D so we could save the 15 cents on production for a part that we wanted to use ( a multimedia DAC ) in a Set Top Box. Yep, you see. DACs do sound different too. Go ahead, measure them. They do. We, R&D engineers, heard it clearly.

Or the time, again, R&D didn't want us to spend the money on the IP for another multi media DAC and forced us to spend more money yet on R&D... and this time we were building a SoC with like 40++ cores.. all we wanted to buy was the IP definition using RTL because we were in the business of building the chips ourselves.

Having spent most of my career programming stuff in labs, including metrology, FPGAs, Palladiums, etc.. I know something about measurements, you see?

Besides, on the shelf I got an Akai AS980 and a Marantz 4415.. they measure terrible but they sound pretty fun. I will drive them with a Sony EP9ES to generate a four channel soundfield.

You really don't want to measure them... but their caps are fine.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Amazing how quickly this kind of thread fills up; it's like preachin' to the choir

 

[tonyE]

I got some CD-4 LPs off eBay a few years ago... and my Grado Master 2 cartridge seems to have the bandwidth, so I hooked it up to the Marantz 4415 and plugged in my quad headphones... It's awesome.

Smoke on the Water sounds so cool... Frank Zappa is smoking behind your back.

 

[gene_stl]

You get used to anything because of accomodation.

 

[Sal1950]

That is a pity, speakers are the most subjectively different sounding component of any audio system, followed by phono cartridges. Describing how they actually sound makes perfect sense.

Not really, not at all.
All he, you, or anyone else can tell me is if the unit in question fit's your preferences in sound, nothing more.
But whether you like it or not is irrelevant, does it reproduce the waveform that the microphones heard is the real issue at hand. That's why we measure.
Whatever you prefer a system to sound like in your home is completely up to you, no one can tell you what to like.
OTOH, if you want to know if a unit is capable of delivering a transparent sound, a true reflection of what the mic's heard, only on bench can that question really be answered.
The human ear/brain interface is much to bias to deliver anything like repeatable, accurate answers to the big question, does this output sound like the input. And that has no relationship to if you like it or not.

 

[par4ken]

In my not at all humble opinion Nelson Pass is a classic audio charlatan.

Why trach Nelson Pass? I find his designs to be very innovative. The ultimate of simplicity. Do they produce the absolute best sound, likely not , BUT.

In my garage I have an unfinished amplifier the design of which came from Audio Amateur. It utilised tubes but with a Mosfet output stage. Because I had placed the the tube input circuity and the Mos output stage in separate enclosures I had stability problems (motorboating). Just for kicks I actually tried out the output stage on it's own, class AB no feedback and it didn't sound that bad. Reading articles/construction project by Nelson Pas made me realise that a not too complicated modification to my output stage would make a fully working Class A Mosfet Amplifier. Just another idea/project waiting for future consideration. It's fascinating to see just what can be accomplished in such a minimalistic manor!

 

[tonyE]

I am not interested in vacuum tubes. ...

What all this really proves is how poor ears are at determining the merit of sound equipment. You get used to anything because of accomodation.

So, in essence, you don't listen, you just measure.

Have you looked at the Classical Greek Scientific Method? They eschewed empiricism and based their analysis strictly on induction. They started their analysis with a known set of suppositions that were inalterable and they ignored any discovered 'facts' as "wrong"....

It seems to me that your approach to audio is the same.

In my experience there are three main genres of people in the audio community:

(1) Measurement
(2) Listening
(3) Both.

IMHO, only (3) are the true audiophiles, capable of changing their ways based upon their experience. 1 and 2 are stuck in their ways.

BTW, many engineers are also in the (3) group... actually, as an engineer you must be in the (3) group, otherwise you fall by the wayside and might as well retire.

So be it, I'm gonna go and filter the Quadruple Virgin Andean Mercury in the speaker connector troughs... when dust settles on it, it alters the transconductance of the output diodes and the micro dynamics and damping factor suffer a bit.

 

[gene_stl]

I detest people that are charlatans.

 

[tonyE]

So what exactly kind of amp(s) do you have?

I mean, I've been telling you the amps I have and how they sound when I listen to them... I don't sit around with a 100 watt 8 ohm load resistor measuring stuff, I put real speakers with reactive loads and listen to them!

I have four ACA amps that have been upgraded with additional PS filtering, two DIY Aleph 5s and one DIY F5.... Currently I'm doing the planning and buying for a DIY F5 v3.

I also have a nuForce STA-200 which sounds pretty good but it can't drive the Maggies, but at low levels, I like the sound of the F5 more than the STA-200. It just sounds better, deeper soundstage, sweeter midrange. The strings sound more natural.

Whatever your measurements, they sound really good. The sound that comes out of my Magnepans are outstanding, the reason why I'm getting the v3 done is because the 25 watts of the F5 is not enough -but the A5 do great.

Oh, I should note that I drive what you would consider obsolete: OMG! A tube preamp and, a turntable and an RME ADI Pro FS DAC.

Like I said, the measurements that you are looking at fail to measure the actual sound quality. I mean, that Denon AVR being included in the list, and all of those Class D amps, just shows you that it is not measuring that well.

Case in point about class D amps: I have two Acoustic Reality 100/200 watt amps. This is the guy who designed the ICE modules. They measure fantastic but when in actual use, the bottom end has an awesome damping factor but the output low pass filter interacts with the impedance of the speakers (all of I have tried) and makes it sound soft. I also have three Teac Reference amps... they all share the same trait.

Now, my two NuForce digital amps, DDA 100/120 sound much more open, perhaps because they have a different filter and for kicks I also have a NuForce MCA-20 ( 8-channels for the HT) that actually sounds quite open, but not as much as the Class A, tube and AB SS amps.

Futhermore, just to show you I'm not stuck in my ways.... I was just looking through my shelves and took out the Hypex NC225MP kit that I plan to put into a beautiful box wine bottle box... with a hinged top door. Once I refinish it and install the amp in it, I will play it alongside the 'classic' B1 preamp that I have in a humidor.

In fact, someone who I respect told me to check out the Purify amps. I might just build a pair of monos and put them in a nice wood box.

 

[gene_stl]

All I could say was "Ya shoon't have done that" but it was way too late.

 

[tonyE]

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