Thank you for providing the link, Al!
It's quite strange in exactly what you said being true, the same point is made over and over again. I find it doesn't lend tremendous insight into the design of the AZ loudspeakers. At any rate, forgive me for reading between the lines, as it's all I have to continue the conversation with...
It seems the focus is on materials. Robert Lee, who we've hosted in our audio society, and was the consummate gentleman, may have a background, as do I, as a material scientist/engineer.
However, I can say that my career in that realm provided me with little in the way of what makes a speaker good or bad. Interestingly enough, that happened during a time when there were a lot more audiophiles, and I was just one among a larger crowd in a company of just 65 people. I would likewise say that none of our diverse (ceramics, metals, polymers, organic/inorganic chemistry, physicists, etc.) backgrounds in the field endowed us with loudspeaker knowledge. As an aside, we did make the raw materials for products used in the high-end audio industry such as Vishay and Caddock resistors, though I can assure you high-end audio was not the aim of those companies, or ours for that matter.
Getting to have Bud Fried as a mentor taught me that it's the crossover that plays more a role in how a speaker sounds than anything else, and has a huge impact in the sort of impedance curves you're especially fond of. Most have forgotten Bud, but it was the series crossover, and not transmission line bass loading that he considered the most important component of his outstanding loudspeakers.
Today, companies put a lot more emphasis in cabinetry, and finishing of such. That seems to separate the more serious products today, as investing a lot in tomblike dead cabinets, book matched veneers, and multi-step finishes allow companies to charge tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a products pre Y2K went for $2-$10K. After cabinetry, driver technology garners the focus, though it doesn't take much creativity, skill, or intelligence to pick from the upper echelon Scan Speak or Seas product lines. I'll return to Bill Legall of Millersound, who doesn't give a hoot about the cost or reputation of a driver, but when you put it in his hands of 50+ years of experience, and just by playing with for a minute or two, he can tell you if it's going to sound good or not. Funny thing is, he'll often pick up a 1972 paper cone Pioneer driver, and show you why it works better than the latest and greatest from Dynaudio.
No, in my opinion, it's that area no one sees or really thinks about, apart from perhaps upping the parts quality, the crossover that separates the wheat from the chaff. We live in an age where we just assume that an outfit that put as much care and effort into putting those expensive drivers into a furniture grade box will also get the crossover right. Except, as it's no longer plunge routers and 1000 grit sandpaper, but mathematics that come into play here. And, I hope no one's under the illusion that our society has the same level of math chops we used to possess.
A good friend of mine builds loudspeakers. Mind you, he came from an engineering background, so the ins and outs of crossovers should not present something that scares him away from mastering. I listened to them over and over again, and always came across the same oddity in them. Finally, one day, he showed me the values, and I immediately told him one of them is off by a factor of 10; a classic case of the decimal point getting moved one place. It was pretty clearly cut and obvious, though his reaction was one of sticking his head in the sand. I told him we could quickly confirm everything by working the numbers out in Excel, but he wanted to run the other way. When I asked him about how he came up with the numbers, his answer was that a mutual friend of ours gave them to him, and he didn't feel comfortable even thinking about a change. OK, but there's the mystery of the sonics unraveled. In fact, it was no longer a mystery at all.
The upshot of this being I no longer have much faith in loudspeaker manufacturers having any idea of what they're doing in regard to what I consider the most important factor in how a loudspeaker sounds. AZ seems to produce good cabling, and using that in their loudspeakers might draw interest for very legitimate reasons. But in the end, if a company doesn't do well in the mathematical formula of the crossover, those expensive drivers and boutique crossover parts in the beautiful can only take one so far.
Finally, I must apologize for lack of clarity. A few people have written to me in regard to my use of the word "plastic" to describe the AZ sound. As folks like Charles have mentioned, there's a certain naturalness to paper drivers that result in that musical sound so many of us love. Plastic is the opposite of that. Instead of naturalness, the sound is something that comes off as odd or off. Guitar folk like to talk about tone, and for many, that's the be all and end all. In short, it's the tone that so very wrong, and that's what I mean by the description, plastic. Hope that helps...
It's quite strange in exactly what you said being true, the same point is made over and over again. I find it doesn't lend tremendous insight into the design of the AZ loudspeakers. At any rate, forgive me for reading between the lines, as it's all I have to continue the conversation with...
It seems the focus is on materials. Robert Lee, who we've hosted in our audio society, and was the consummate gentleman, may have a background, as do I, as a material scientist/engineer.
However, I can say that my career in that realm provided me with little in the way of what makes a speaker good or bad. Interestingly enough, that happened during a time when there were a lot more audiophiles, and I was just one among a larger crowd in a company of just 65 people. I would likewise say that none of our diverse (ceramics, metals, polymers, organic/inorganic chemistry, physicists, etc.) backgrounds in the field endowed us with loudspeaker knowledge. As an aside, we did make the raw materials for products used in the high-end audio industry such as Vishay and Caddock resistors, though I can assure you high-end audio was not the aim of those companies, or ours for that matter.
Getting to have Bud Fried as a mentor taught me that it's the crossover that plays more a role in how a speaker sounds than anything else, and has a huge impact in the sort of impedance curves you're especially fond of. Most have forgotten Bud, but it was the series crossover, and not transmission line bass loading that he considered the most important component of his outstanding loudspeakers.
Today, companies put a lot more emphasis in cabinetry, and finishing of such. That seems to separate the more serious products today, as investing a lot in tomblike dead cabinets, book matched veneers, and multi-step finishes allow companies to charge tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a products pre Y2K went for $2-$10K. After cabinetry, driver technology garners the focus, though it doesn't take much creativity, skill, or intelligence to pick from the upper echelon Scan Speak or Seas product lines. I'll return to Bill Legall of Millersound, who doesn't give a hoot about the cost or reputation of a driver, but when you put it in his hands of 50+ years of experience, and just by playing with for a minute or two, he can tell you if it's going to sound good or not. Funny thing is, he'll often pick up a 1972 paper cone Pioneer driver, and show you why it works better than the latest and greatest from Dynaudio.
No, in my opinion, it's that area no one sees or really thinks about, apart from perhaps upping the parts quality, the crossover that separates the wheat from the chaff. We live in an age where we just assume that an outfit that put as much care and effort into putting those expensive drivers into a furniture grade box will also get the crossover right. Except, as it's no longer plunge routers and 1000 grit sandpaper, but mathematics that come into play here. And, I hope no one's under the illusion that our society has the same level of math chops we used to possess.
A good friend of mine builds loudspeakers. Mind you, he came from an engineering background, so the ins and outs of crossovers should not present something that scares him away from mastering. I listened to them over and over again, and always came across the same oddity in them. Finally, one day, he showed me the values, and I immediately told him one of them is off by a factor of 10; a classic case of the decimal point getting moved one place. It was pretty clearly cut and obvious, though his reaction was one of sticking his head in the sand. I told him we could quickly confirm everything by working the numbers out in Excel, but he wanted to run the other way. When I asked him about how he came up with the numbers, his answer was that a mutual friend of ours gave them to him, and he didn't feel comfortable even thinking about a change. OK, but there's the mystery of the sonics unraveled. In fact, it was no longer a mystery at all.
The upshot of this being I no longer have much faith in loudspeaker manufacturers having any idea of what they're doing in regard to what I consider the most important factor in how a loudspeaker sounds. AZ seems to produce good cabling, and using that in their loudspeakers might draw interest for very legitimate reasons. But in the end, if a company doesn't do well in the mathematical formula of the crossover, those expensive drivers and boutique crossover parts in the beautiful can only take one so far.
Finally, I must apologize for lack of clarity. A few people have written to me in regard to my use of the word "plastic" to describe the AZ sound. As folks like Charles have mentioned, there's a certain naturalness to paper drivers that result in that musical sound so many of us love. Plastic is the opposite of that. Instead of naturalness, the sound is something that comes off as odd or off. Guitar folk like to talk about tone, and for many, that's the be all and end all. In short, it's the tone that so very wrong, and that's what I mean by the description, plastic. Hope that helps...