Ridiculous. Go measure some new and old car stereos. They sure sound better.
Keeping group delay to a minimum is important, yes; generally, under 1 cycle at frequency x is considered good. However it is tied directly to amplitude and phase response, so keep that in mind.
Sealed cabinets have a slower roll-off than bass reflex alignments. All filters ring, including the rolloff of a speaker, and phase rotates more for a steeper roll-off.
That's exactly the opposite of what I said: "I also believe the reason this types of speakers can be helpful to some is because of their strengths and not their weaknesses (uneven frequency response and resonances)".
No offense to the guy, but I'm getting the impression he's trying to too hard to justify his purchase. If he likes it and finds it useful, so be it.
A number of people have described coherently how the speaker type has utility in a mixing context. Justifying a purchase is rational if it helps you pay the bills. But acting like you can intuit knowledge about the mixing work without experience is rather remarkable.
I agree. If works for him, that's all that matters.
Nope, that's not how it happened re the points I & others raised with you, you're misrepresenting again what's been said to you, and I'm not repeating them, you take up an awful lot of space in creating nothing. Anyway, as I said thanks for sending the speaker in, but I must really cease to discuss further with you.How come you get to 'voice' your opinions but when I do it, it's 'harping', 'spouting', and 'getting hung up on stuff'?
I'm definitely arguing in good faith but maybe I'm not making myself clear. Let me try it with bullet points:
- 1.
I am bornI get into audio and start at zero consequently accepting almost everything without much frame of reference.- 2. I discover Spinorama and think it's the last word on loudspeakers
- 3. Regrettably, I post on gearspace requesting a spin of the SCM25A pro and subsequently get dog piled by feisty fans who say, practically in unison, things like, "I can't mix on flat loudspeakers like the KH 310, the SCM25A is the standard, who the **** are you? What do measurements have to do with whether a speaker works in a pro environment," et cetera, ad nauseam...
- 4. Meanwhile, my Mixcube is in the Pacific Northwest awaiting its spin.
- 5. We receive the shocking news that this speaker looks objectively broken. Interestingly, the review mentions that several aspects of the usual data do not apply nearfield.
- 6. The data and Amir's opinion conflict with my experience that this is a useful speaker and I say so
- 7. It becomes obvious that 'translation' quality of a loudspeaker is undefined
- 8. We discuss as to how to define it
- 9. You disagree that this speaker is literally worth anything more than actual, stinking refuse and vehemently reject it in the absolute sense with the prejudice of a thousand Supreme Court Justices
- 10. I try to explain the course of events with bullet points (but then realize that an ordered list would've been more appropriate and now my list looks like rump)
You demand that I don't repeat myself so I will not. Please reread what I've said if you wish to understand. Logic is no alien in my cognitive universe. With utmost certainty, I have made pristinely clear that I think this speaker has merit for its intended purpose and I simply wish to know what that is in objective terms.
Thank you for almost commending me, the whiff of commendation almost made me feel honored.
In my response upthread, I forgot to answer your questions. I worked in live TV news at the CBS affiliate in West Palm Beach, Florida and on a number of programs for ABC-TV (USA,) NBC-TV and PBS. I also recorded classical music broadcasts of the New Orleans Philharmonic for NPR. In all of that, I only had access to a subwoofer at WPEC-TV, (CBS) in West Palm Beach. Its primary function? To allow me to hear traffic rumble and HVAC noise in sound from field video so I could selectively cut it out of the mix.
Thanks for this. The World Radio History site shows the amplitude response of the (presumably vintage) Auratone 5C to be almost an inverse of the Avantone, with its own resonance at 8kHz. Audiofanzine got a slightly different response out of the Avantone than I did but part of that must be down to room acoustics. Lamentable to see that the currently-produced Auratone 5C lacks some of the defining character of the vintage 5PSC. As with many devices in the audio production world, vintage remains unmatched.I have a pair of original Auratones from the 1970's and still use them always in mixdown and reference mix comparisons (though that's rarely, nowadays). I had to re-foam them a few years ago, the original Auratones like mine had a roll surround and did not exhibit so much of the nasty upper mid/low hf of these Avantones -- speakers which I would avoid.
I have not read every post, but I suspect there's a bit of mis-understanding going on about this class of monitors. I'm confident they were originally introduced to replace the grot-box, but mixers rapidly grasped that they forced concentration on the essential mid-frequencies of the mix, and encouraged precise balancing in that area, oddly, including ensuring that bass and bass drum balance is adequate on band-limited playback systems, Once that is all alright, then you turn them off and use better monitors to deal with the ends of the spectrum (while still checking on them).
As to why use them instead of, say, bandpass filters or some form of emulation, well people get used to what material sounds like and should sound like on their equipment, plus you could stick'em in a bag and take them to another studio with ease. They also have startlingly good imaging and no port!
Myself, I prefer my originals to any of the reissued Auratones, and did not like any of the substitutes offered by other manufacturers.
There’s contemporary frequency responses of a re-issue of the original Auratones (brighter with a peak) at:
https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/I...DX/80s/Studio-Sound-1984-10-OCR-Page-0098.pdf
Also comparative reviews of the originals, more recent reissues and Avantones at:
https://en.audiofanzine.com/passive...ube-2014/editorial/reviews/mystical-aura.html
Do note the 1/6th 8ve smoothing.
Behringer also did a soundcube and I recall a couple of others, none of which ever tempted me. There's a review of those explaining why they are not utterly awful, and Auratones are useful, at:
Behringer C5A & C50A
Behringer’s take on the classic Auratones won’t break the bank — but will they help you make those crucial mix-balancing decisions?www.soundonsound.com
In any case, improvements to overall frequency response are not the point here, the restrictions on it are what is important, much as with the truly awful (but very useful) Yamaha NS-10s, which replaced many of these. If you want good balanced monitors, Auratones are not they! And these, even less so.
I have a lot of modern, highly-capable software and a mixcube. If I want, I can do all sorts of DSP to my Yamaha HS50 - and I do - but often I just use the mixcube.
Your impression may be distorted. I explicitly stated my motivations here and elsewhere on this thread. Indeed I find it useful and I like it but I feel like you reducing my contribution here to a psychological defense mechanism seems inappropriate and highly presumptuous. You could’ve asked. I bought this speaker a decade ago. Who justifies such an old purchase?
Congratulations, you’re muted.
That link doesn't work, but I'll take your word for it.
I don’t know how to interpret phase as it relates to amplitude response. Yes, the group delay has a flatter slope. From what I understand, group delay is mostly inaudible in low frequencies up to a certain point. I don’t know what that audibility threshold is per frequency though. To make use of these metrics you’re showing, we need to know if they’re audible. Absolute phase is inaudible, from what I understand but the phase relationships among simultaneous frequencies is audible. Basically, I don’t know how to convert what your showing into what I hear. If you can elaborate, I’ll appreciate it.
I’m curious how you check your mixes for translation on transducers other than low quality mono cube speakers? Do you use software or do you have a wide range of stereo speakers, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, IEMs, earbuds, car speaker systems etc., etc. available?
Ok, I think my understanding about this is sharpening. Filtering of any kind, whether from a loudspeaker enclosure, a crossover, or a room introduces phase shift and group delay. Group delay applies mainly to low frequencies and low frequencies are by definition ‘slow’. Group delay is mostly inaudible unless excessive (anyone can probably hear 100ms of group delay but probably not 10ms below a certain frequency cutoff). A band-limited speaker such as these cubes has less phase shift because of a gentler physical high-pass filter (sealed cabinet) and no crossover. It also has less group delay, or at least whatever delay there is is greatly attenuated in level (a member here has shown a page back that the cube does exhibit group delay but that its relatively ‘flat’ when shown as a curve).
