Your Side by Side Experience With Best Vintage vs Newer Expensive Hi Tech Speakers
Michael, with all due respect, your argument makes no sense and just sounds like gazing at the past through Rose colored glasses. Flexibility? Most speakers these days are intended and quite content to not be driven by electronics with tone controls. Does anybody even build speakers with tone controls built into them? We're way past east coast, west coast, and British sound. Flat response is a fairly narrowly defined idea these days. Speakers from 40 plus years ago didn't even pretend or claim to be flat. They were boldly east, west, or British. I don't much agree with your idea about modern speakers not reproducing harmonics either. Having built an amp with only a DMM for test equipment, I've had no option but to listen very carefully and learn what distortion and it's phase sounded like. I built an F5 and it's got 3 pots per channel. 2 adjust bias, one adjust feedback balance. I've spent ungodly numbers of hours adjusting those pots on each channel until the sounded identical. And I wouldn't be able to do that unless my very modern speakers were pretty sensitive to harmonics of distortion. I can't tell you numbers, but I can tell you that the amp is tuned to a modest amount of second order negative phase distortion. |
Ok Kosst, lets look at this through your glasses then. "Flexibility? Most speakers these days are intended and quite content to not be driven by electronics with tone controls." Really? Name one. "Does anybody even build speakers with tone controls built into them?" www.michaelgreenaudio.net It’s called a Tuning Bar. "Flat response is a fairly narrowly defined idea these days." Correct, because it is an inaccurate assumption. Speakers can not be made to be flat in playback without equalization. This has always been the case old or new. "Having built an amp with only a DMM for test equipment, I’ve had no option but to listen very carefully and learn what distortion and it’s phase sounded like." With all due respect, that was with one specific set of conditions. But it’s cool that you built an amp. I think building amps teaches us a lot about the amp/speaker/room interactions. However where exactly does the rose color glasses come into play here, if you don’t mind me asking? What specific drivers and or speakers do you consider the most up to date? I have several of them sitting right here in my possession, maybe we can talk more specifically. Michael Green www.michaelgreenaudio.net |
The problem with the argument of the advance of technology and how it has been to the sonic betterment of modern speakers largely roots in how it relates to different speaker principles when comparing different eras here. Vintage speakers, certainly over 50-60 years ago, had a closer tie to the necessity of plain old physics in being much larger, and usually horn-driven. The frequency extremes weren’t the highest priority as opposed to what was in between, but while their size and principle came as a natural necessity out of the lack of amp power at the time, size and the adherence to physics is also indispensable in emulating acoustic live sound characteristics - there’s no way around it. Moreover, at the time a sound reproduction system wasn’t something one could easily tuck away, but neither did the mentality call for it nor did physical stature allow it. There was a certain pride in the big pieces of furniture as natural centerpieces almost in the homes they were found, whereas now and for the latest decades interior design dictates for such systems to be a secondary consideration and being in line with the existing decoration; movies are eager to display a B&O console and speakers as that which is found in wealthier homes, but you rarely if ever see a dedicated and space consuming stereo take up the picture. Even when audiophiles may resort to dedicated listening rooms the bi-products of transistor amps in some incarnation are still in full manifestation with overall smaller, direct radiating speakers. It seems that neither era will come to a fuller fruition, and hence an overall advance to truly speak of, unless the hallmarks of each are combined - that is, for physics to be accommodated while technology joins along. Those that blindly states modern speakers qua being modern are automatically more transparent and uninhibited in their presentation compared to vintage speakers (or their modern iterations) are simply oblivious to the lack the of context and a fuller picture. I’d claim that audio in some, and more fundamental respects have been in a decline that took its full measure decades ago, and the advance in technology can’t alleviate this within the existing paradigm. |
