Anyone see this train wreck in Stereophile?

[tomissoawesome]

It's made of lovely wood, cost multiple thousands of dollars, and configured to reproduce a comb filter in the upper mid/lower treble region.

The bummer of it is they used that beautiful wood to make a great big rectangular prism that looks like trash with the grills off. Grills on they look like slightly taller and more refined version of my Dynaco A35s. I’ll cite this review when I list Dynacos on Craigslist for a grand.

 

[pdmjoker]

The bummer of it is they used that beautiful wood to make a great big rectangular prism that looks like trash with the grills off. Grills on they look like slightly taller and more refined version of my Dynaco A35s. I’ll cite this review when I list Dynacos on Craigslist for a grand.

Perhaps they were going for the undoubtedly difficult design concept of combining something that can emanate sound with a working postbox?

 

[Martin]

I think I found the inspiration for the Razz name... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...rry.ogv/Blowing_a_raspberry.ogv.360p.vp9.webm

That's the sound it makes between 4,000 & 15,000 Hz.

Martin

 

[Ilkless]

Plenty of well-engineered horn/waveguide designs out there (Danley, JTR, Gedlee, JBL, @Joseph Crowe etc.) and they choose to give pages to trainwreck cult-of-personality design.

 

[RickSanchez]

From the article (emphasis mine): "The Volti Razz's measured performance suggests that its treble balance can be adjusted by experimenting with toe-in."

Or -- and hear me out on this -- I could save $18k and buy some speakers that don't have these treble issues.

 

[Poseidons Voice]

Here’s another train wreck:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/volti-audio-rival-loudspeaker-measurements
I recall the Manufacturer’s response on this speaker and it made me laugh. Let me see if I can dig it up.

 

[MediumRare]

That is actually not suspicious at all. Similar kinds of extreme toe-in are advocated by Earl Geddes and Jorma Salmi of Gradient. This increases the lateral sweetspot while reducing early reflections, particularly for narrow-directivty-speakers.

I certainly have a lot to learn in this area, but my logic tells me that if you have narrow directivity you should not have as many early reflections to reduce. On the other hand, with extreme toe-in they're compensating for some other shortcomings and violating the basic stereo concept. By definition, the right channel should be coming from the right (primarily right-side reflections), not being sent to the left wall, not to mention the numerous tonality problems being created. OTHO, if your speaker sounds like shit because it has uneven dispersion and severe comb filtering, you need to create a tonal smear and deliver a surround-sound party trick to distract from the fundamental problems. My reading of the subjective review is that is exactly what happened.

 

[raindance]

@Poseidons Voice ... It's the classic:

 

[ttimer]

@MediumRare : With extreme toe in you still get direct sound to the respective ear from the "correct" speaker, just not at the same volume as with on-axis listening. There are no speakers with such narrow directivity that they could beam past your head at normal listening distances. Extreme toe in works because time differences and volume differences have identical effects on our hearing (to some extent). Dr. Geddes has explained the concept far better than i ever could. Compare this paper on speaker directivity, page 9ff.

 

[tomtoo]

Thats so much up and down that your brain cant follow and interpolates a straight line out of pure self defence.

 

[blueone]

Yes and no. The magazine I write for has never, ever asked me to hold back on my conclusions and has always backed me when manufacturers complain because what I wrote "won't help us sell this product." (actual phrase used by a speaker company whose product measured and sounded unimpressive)

One can have a commercial enterprise and still act ethically. I admit that in this business, it's the exception.

Thanks for the link. Interesting magazine. Now I'll have two to read regularly (the first being this site).

 

[F1308]

Cannot see the sea level pressure they had when testing...

 

[Mountain Goat]

@Poseidons Voice ... It's the classic: View attachment 73847

My favorite metal guitar curve.

 

[Poseidons Voice]

And as promised, here is the manufacturers response on the Volti Audio Rival:


Volti Rival
Editor:
Thank you for a well-written article, Ken Micallef. I’m glad you had fun with the Rival speakers. Thank you, John Atkinson. I know how much work it was to do those measurements, and I have to say that they look very similar to mine. A couple of things to note:
First, regarding John’s discovery of the elevated tweeter and woofer response in relation to the midrange: I supply a resistor kit with each pair of Rival speakers, and if the end user wishes to flatten out the frequency response of the speaker by raising the output of the midrange, it is easily done. Also related to this, the adjustment that KM referred to with the midrange was to turn it down a bit more from the factory setting. Interesting, heh?
Second, I put extensive time into figuring out how much bracing and damping I wanted to put into the cabinet. I found that too much bracing/damping killed the musicality of the speaker, and too little made things busy and noisy. I know we are all “trained” to believe that there should be no cabinet resonances. My experience in listening to music with speakers that are overdamped says otherwise. There’s a fine line here.
I can’t think of a more conspicuous example of how speaker measurements simply do not portray how a speaker sounds than the dichotomy between KM’s review and JA’s testing. But this example goes beyond that, because here we have accurate measurements that illustrate exactly how the designer intended the speaker to sound.
My concern isn't that the measurements published here reflect poorly on the design, or what effect that may or may not have on my business; it's that we have now exposed to our industry some of the ways I accomplish my goals of building speakers that sound the way they do.
There’s a sound in my head that I’m chasing, and getting that sound out of a new speaker design is the most important aspect of the design to me. Speaker performance measurements are very important during the development, and I measure constantly as I’m working out the final voicing of the speaker. But after the design is done, the final measurements are of little value to me. When a design is complete and I’m happy with all aspects of it, I would certainly not change anything about it that would change the sound only for the sake of improving the measured performance.
Knowing how they measure doesn’t change how they sound, but I believe that changing the design so that they measure better would. I don’t have one single customer who would accept changes in the sound of their speakers for the sake of better measurements.
I have lots more to say on this subject, but I’ll save it for my newsletter.
I think John said it best in his summary: “‘Listen for yourself.’” In-home Rival demos are available.
Greg Roberts Volti Audio

 

[zelig]

Poor Stereophile - they really are in a pickle! On one horn of their dilemma they have a business model based on "accepting donations" from equipment manufacturers to wax lyrical about their products, and on the other horn they have science. The problem is that science doesn't really pay their bills, especially when it shines a light on the imperfections of its subjects. What should poor Stereophile to do? Well, they appear to have some options...

• They could publish the science and not state any conclusions. Perhaps that way the negative indicators might just get overlooked by their less informed listeners. [BTW, they have done this].
• They could publish articles arguing that the science should not be given too much weight when deciding which equipment to buy. [BTW, they have done this too].
• They could stop doing the science and return to the dark ages of publishing just the flowery bullshit. [They can't do this because (thanks to ASR and others) the science cannot be put back in its box].

Poor poor Stereophile!

 

[R Swerdlow]

… Another excellent job by JA to report the measurements and then find a way to dance around having to make any real negative comments.

JA is skilled at that. It's not what he says, it's what he avoids saying. I've always felt that I need a lawyer to help me interpret his comments.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

"Roberts used a tape measure to align the centers of the tweeters, then, rather than point the tweeters straight ahead, or directly at my head, or somewhere in between, he pointed the left tweeter at the right, outside edge of my chair and the right tweeter at its left outside edge, so that their axes crossed slightly in front of me."

That is actually not suspicious at all. Similar kinds of extreme toe-in are advocated by Earl Geddes and Jorma Salmi of Gradient. This increases the lateral sweetspot while reducing early reflections, particularly for narrow-directivty-speakers.

And Blumlein, before them.

 

[MediumRare]

And Blumlein, before them.

Good point. However, given the types of mikes used, are these actually the same thing?

 

[Feanor]

Wow. Yet no obvious conclusions from JA regarding it.

JA is often "too kind".

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

When I read the review and looked at the measurements I couldn't help think that the designer could have cleaned up the mess in the treble and still have found a way for the speaker to "sound good". By the way, is that tweeter really considered a "horn"?