PMC vs. ATC

Haha thats ok, doubtless having a treated room makes the top end quite a bit more palatable. However this is something usually only studios or very dedicated individuals can commit to. I rent so it's not an option for me. Most rooms are very reverberent in the Uk due to wooden floors and even with carpets the treble just gets too strident especially with small rooms.

My first research job was working in speech recognition systems of which testing things like hearing and speaker systems is a very important part. One of the things I looked at was computer speech recognition in high noise and distortion environments like fighter cockpits. I then moved into RF engineering which also involved listening tests for radio intelligibility. I then went into nonlinear signals processing and analysis before jacking it all in to work in finance 5 years ago. My interest in diy just comes out of the fact I am interested in everything technical.

I have also rountinely had to have my hearing tested up to 20 KHz. My hearing extends flat past 16 kHz which is extremely unusual in a person of my age. I often find I can hear high pitched sounds that others can't and this is partially way high frequency treble boosts annoy me so much. To others they probably dont care. The person who complained the most when I took them to atc dems were female. They usually have better high frequency hearing too. She actually liked hifi (especially if it was big, bulky and black!) so she wasn't just petulant about being dragged in. ;-). She liekd the pmc best and I managed to convert her from cd to vynil in that dem (she thought there was soemthing wrong with the cd player initially!).

Are you using active crossovers with the atcs?

Nick.

Im impressed!

"The person who complained the most when I took them to atc dems were female."

If I get ever get past my Masters, my doctorate thesis is on why women do not participate in audio the physiological and psychological factors. Audiophiles? give me woman anytime to judge the sound of a system.

My ATC's are active, infact the speakers I build have room correction and response shaping built in with their amplification and Blue Sky, Meyer and ATC are all active speaker lines (ATC has a mix as you know), Most passive speakers simply cannot get to the level of performance active speakers can without using very expensive amplification, which makes them more expensive for the same performance. The reason I don't have PMC is they are more expensive and not a strong a line at more modest price points as ATC and DALI, so they had to slide on the priority scale a little but their time will come.

Have a good one.

PS: Checkout the lake technology crossover @ www.lake.com

Ah well active and room eq makes all the difference - of course it can be as sharp or dull as you like then ;-)

Very interesting thread! I hope to hear more from Brizon and Cinematic in the future!