Electrostatic speakers?

[RayDunzl]

See the resonances in speaker M?

I see interference combing from nearfield measure of a very large tweeter.

 

[NTK]

I see interference.combing from nearfield measure of a very large tweeter.

Here are the ratings from the comparison.

 

[RayDunzl]

At 10 feet, the panel (black) may be a little smoother than a cone and dome:

The difference probably the interference combing of the cone and dome with the floor walls and ceiling

 

[MRC01]

Do you know of any measurements of the bigger Maggies that show this dispersion width?

No, which is I only speculate based on the physics of driver size vs. sound wavelength.
Stereophile measured the 3.6/R about 20 years ago, but the diagram (link below) is too small to really make it out.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/magnepan-magneplanar-mg36r-loudspeaker-measurements-part-2

 

[RayDunzl]

Here are the ratings from the comparison.

This chart is even better!

https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2008/12/loudspeaker-preferences-of-trained.html


Almost rated 0 by the Harman Trained listeners.

I am only left to wonder what would receive a lower rating, and what it might sound like.

 

[NTK]

This chart is even better!

View attachment 105716

https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2008/12/loudspeaker-preferences-of-trained.html


Almost rated 0 by the Harman Trained listeners.

I am only left to wonder what would receive a lower rating, and what it might sound like.

Once you unblind yourself, none of those graphs matters anymore

 

[30 Ounce]

The story sounds nice, but reality is quite different.

How accurately do you think you can suspend a very thin diaphragm perfectly centered between two plate electrodes? How uniform do you think the thickness and other material properties of the diaphragm are? Is there any residual stress in the diaphragm from its forming operation? Is the diaphragm uniformly tensioned? How uniform is the deposition of the conductive layer, which determines the uniformity of the electrical conductivity of the diaphragm, and therefore the electric field and the electrostatic force. Any of these will result in the diaphragm not moving in a flat plane.

Here are FR plots of 4 different speakers from a well known speaker comparison test. See the resonances in speaker M? Want to guess what type of speaker it was?

View attachment 105688

That was Wiki, not me.

Also, the membrane doesn’t need to be held centered between the stators. Once energized it will center itself.

There are poor implementations of all speaker technology. Electrostatic speakers require hours of setup in a room. If they simply set up ESL’s in the same location as the dynamic drivers it’s almost guaranteed to sound bad.

Since the author didn’t reveal the speakers and you seem to know, why don’t you enlighten us?

 

[RayDunzl]

Once you unblind yourself, none of those graphs matters anymore

Oh, I thought you said "unbind".

Unbind your mind
There is no time
To lick your stamps
And paste them in
DISCORPORATE
And we will begin . . .WAH WAH!

 

[NTK]

Since the author didn’t reveal the speakers and you seem to know, why don’t you enlighten us?

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/b-...toole-sean-olive.2914582/page-4#post-54711918

 

[MattHooper]

I find most people have the same subjective idea and understand the idea of speed much more widely than PRAT.

Agreed. It's as close to unanimous as I've seen in the audiophile world that stats sound "fast" - a word people are using to try to describe essentially what you described earlier. What causes that perception is another question, but it is no doubt a common perception.

 

[MattHooper]

Take tone-colour for instance. What I've noticed from listening to top-notch instruments played by first-rate musicians is how beautiful they sounded. I took clarinet lessons from a virtuoso and used to be transfixed when he demonstrated passages which he played through his own instrument. They sounded utterly ravishing, completely at odds with the sound I was getting from my inferior student instrument which was drab, impoverished harmonically, and uninspiring. The sound he got was, (wait for it!) "magical". And the same thing happened every time I heard high-quality unamplified instruments: there was an unearthly beauty to the sound. And so when I started buying quality audio to play music through I was hoping to get some of this beauty any time I wanted in my very own room! Unfortunately, what I heard was a pale imitation. I NEVER heard clarinet sound like the one I heard my teacher play. Mostly, it sounded closer to what I'd got from my own poor instrument. And even expensive gear rarely came close to transmitting the magic. Strings rarely have that "je ne sais quoi" magical glow; trumpet rarely has that golden uninhibited "blare". And yet most audiophiles seemed to have no idea on what I was on about when I talked about the reproduced sound seeming like it was in black and white. That's exactly what most playback systems sound like to me: as if someone's turned down the colour and those expensive, highly-sought after instruments have been downgraded into cheap knockoffs. So when I hear that ALL you need is a flat frequency response and everything's hunky dory I wonder if I'm living in the same universe.

I've been saying the same thing as long as I can remember, in terms of the difference I percieve between live instruments vs what I hear through most hi-fi systems. I'm an absolute tone/timbre fanatic. I LOVE listening to different types of speakers, but when it comes to something I'd like to own, that causes me to actually want to just sit and listen to the music/sound, it's very rare I encounter something compelling. Because most audio reproduction falls so short of the real thing to me it sounds timbrally black and white.

I remember when this hit home most vividly for me in the 90s. As a budding audiophile who'd already at that time literally driven around parts of Canada and the USA to audition tons of different speakers, I had a chance to sit down, solo, in a room and play a bunch of my test tracks on the gigantic Genesis 1.1 speakers in a very large room. I put on a well recorded track of symphonic music sat back and closed my eyes. I was overwhelmed by the most convincing sense of size and scale I'd ever heard from loudspeakers, playing symphonic music. I could really imagine an orchestra playing before me - the clarity, soundstage, dynamics! But it wasn't long before I became bummed out over what was missing: any realistic sense of timbre/tone. The fact the presentation came so close to the real thing in all other regards seemed to make what was missing stick out like a sore thumb. The instruments sounded like they'd been stripped of color, black and white. Sort of like a real orchestra where all the instruments had been replaced with plastic replicas. As I was used to attending the symphony often at that time, luxuriating in the richness of real instrumental tone, the disparity seemed stark. I left disappointed, wondering "Damn, those speakers were essentially end-of-the-line for current speaker technology. And tonally, did I just learn that it's a dead end, at least for the aspect of sound I cherished most?"

What I've found, at least as I've perceived it, over the years is that while I haven't found a sound system that reproduces the richness of the real thing, some systems strike me as at least *more* like the real thing than others. Every speaker system seems to homogenize, but some seem to have a tone that generalizes somewhat more towards what I hear in real instruments.

Ideally blinded live vs reproduced experiments would help give some solid objective evidence telling us if one speaker design was able to sound closer to the real thing. But not many of those around it seems. And given speakers are compromised in their ability to reproduce instruments/voices perfectly, many of us pick our compromises based on our own criteria, built over time, for what "sounds real" to us.

Reminds me that my friend, who has been reviewing gear including tons of speakers, for decades, now has the Klipsch La Scalas in his home.
He talked about the various ways they are colored, deficient, can't image with much precision etc. Nonetheless, they leave him with more of an impression of hearing "live musicians playing" than any other speaker he's had in his home.

 

[Sir Sanders Zingmore]

So you're saying that nothing exists unless we can measure i?. I can think of plenty of very real things that can't be measured: the beauty of a melody; the aptness of a turn of phrase; the sense of the "right" word. In other words, the things that give this world a sense of wonder.

<checks which forum we are on……>*

*yep ASR

 

[Mnyb]

While I agree that it is probably impossible for any playback system to completely capture the original sound, I HAVE heard speakers that capture much of the tone-colour magic I was referring to. But they're rare, and the JBL is unequivocally not one of them.

Is that not just serendipities, if one understands that this magic is mostly lost already at the recording stage hence not really present in recordings ( if it’s not there it can’t be reproduced) .
Then we can have some combination of recordings and speakers that do this for some reason.

But the circle of confusion can not be broken from one end .

If you have more research based scientifically “better” speaker or what would we would call them
Does not help if the recording engineers does not have them or use them correctly..

We need both . A predictable neutral listening environment for the recording engineers and likewise at home.
Then future recordings would translate better to home listeners and thus not be a fluke or serendipity when it works.
So it’s a long term fix .
The “better” speaker alone would not help all aspects with already done recordings monitored incorrectly during production . The “better” speaker may interact more favourable with your acoustics and listening positions and give an in general better result ( less listeners fatigue and a more neutral response) but it would not help fundamentally wrongly balanced recordings all the way it would be better yes . If your end is neutral we don’t have two competing sets of random colourations to contend with and I guess that more recordings would sound ok from more genres.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Reminds me that my friend, who has been reviewing gear including tons of speakers, for decades, now has the Klipsch La Scalas in his home.
He talked about the various ways they are colored, deficient, can't image with much precision etc. Nonetheless, they leave him with more of an impression of hearing "live musicians playing" than any other speaker he's had in his home.

How does he put up with the lack of bass in La Scalas?

 

[MattHooper]

How does he put up with the lack of bass in La Scalas?

I wondered too. When he first set them up a few weeks ago he felt it was very odd to have the huge speakers in the room putting out so little bass (and being rated for so little bass). He's used to speakers that putt out lots of bass and he loves to crank music, Rush, lots of Rock, Prog, etc. I was curious if the lack of bass would prove too much to ignore which is why I asked him today how he was getting on with the speakers. Was he only playing certain types of music? He said no, he's having a ball with them, with any type of music, including Rush, which they produce with great enthusiasm. So it seems for now the "alive" quality he is enjoying is enough to make up for or distract from the lack of low bass.

I remember how they sounded when I listened to a few tracks on the La Scalas, including michael jackson tracks, a little solo audition I was given at an audio show. And I actually didn't find myself missing the bass at all. I surmise that one expects a sense of energy and impact coming from the bass region for many speakers, but the La Scalas seem to squeeze much of that energy and excitement up in to it's limited frequency range. The upper bass/lower midrange sounded so dense and punchy it drove the music really well IMO.

 

[Duke]

My guess is that [lifelike timbre] has more to do with the typically narrow dispersion pattern [of electrostats].

Agreed that freedom from early reflections is likely beneficial, but I also think the backwave makes a significant contribution to lifelike timbre. The backwave is a major source of reverberant energy which may well be more spectrally-correct than the off-axis energy of a monopole speaker generally is.

Not that I expect personal anecdotes to have much credibility on this forum, but years ago I experimented with absorbing the backwave of large fullrange electrostats (SoundLabs) and to my ears timbre was degraded.

Along similar lines, in the course of product development I have compared monopole and bipole versions of what was otherwise essentially the same loudspeaker, and to my ears timbre was the area most obviously improved.

Ideally blinded live vs reproduced experiments would help give some solid objective evidence telling us if one speaker design was able to sound closer to the real thing. But not many of those around it seems.

Imo the closest thing most of us are likely to have access to is the aural memory of experienced musicians, and their comparisons to reproduced sound. For those of us who are not experienced musicians, this implies that we attribute credibility to someone who is.

 

[DrJ]

Also, why white Burgundies and Chablis seem to 'channel' the limestone and marl components in the soil, even tho chemists cannot detect it in the wine..

Simply, this statement is far too glib. A close colleague works in the sensory perceptions of wines at arguably the best viticulture and enology school in the world. She measures this sort of thing all the time. One needs a lot of analytical equipment horsepower to do so, but by and large this sort of equipment is not that difficult to source.

 

[Frank Dernie]

The best dynamic drivers have distortion around 0.1% at normal listening levels

Not over much of their frequency range, and not that many of the complete speakers either.

I think "citation needed" is operative phrase there

I agree.
I find that in my field Wikipedia is not to be relied on, mainly because enthusiasts who are far from knowledgeable think they understand and confidently add bollox to entries.
I used to correct the most obvious ones but the rubbish often re-appears.
People prefer to believe lies they like than facts they do not in all walks of life.

 

[andreasmaaan]

I see interference combing from nearfield measure of a very large tweeter.

You'd expect the peaks and dips present in the on-axis response to disappear (average out) in the sound power response if they really were caused by interference (as opposed to resonances), wouldn't you?

Not that this speaker (whatever it is) could be supposed to carry the flame for all electrostats ofc

 

[Frank Dernie]

My guess is that it has more to do with the typically narrow dispersion pattern.

Sort of plausible, is there any study trying to show why that may be?
I say plausible because horns also have narrow dispersion and a reputation for being fast.

I prefer narrow dispersion speakers personally, unlike, apparently, the majority of hifi owners.