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Capital Audiofest 2022 - November 11th-13th

Duke

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when I went to some of the high end rooms at CES once, it was the same deal. $100K+ worth of gear in a room, $0-100 worth of acoustic treatment. Would it kill these people to lug a few bass traps and diffusors to the show?

An exhibitor may wish to demonstrate that his speakers do not need acoustic treatment to get good performance even in a hotel room.
 

kemmler3D

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An exhibitor may wish to demonstrate that his speakers do not need acoustic treatment to get good performance even in a hotel room.
In your case, I can see why that would be a cool demo. Every other hotel room demo I've heard with box speakers sounded more like a hotel room than a nice speaker setup, though.
 

Capitol C

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That's great news, women in this hobby are shockingly rare today.

+1 to this, when I went to some of the high end rooms at CES once, it was the same deal. $100K+ worth of gear in a room, $0-100 worth of acoustic treatment. Would it kill these people to lug a few bass traps and diffusors to the show?

Well, you have to evaluate the speaker based on audio, not music. Verisimilitude relative to a live performance is a way to evaluate the audible gestalt, but for me critical listening is more about evaluating one piece at a time - frequency range by frequency range, then distortion, then dynamic response. IMO you can do this with any given song as long as it has enough energy to reveal flaws in those areas.

The overall impression matters most in the end, but if you're trying to compare speakers I think it helps to zero in on specifics.

To put it another way, you can tell a great deal about a speaker by listening to test tones if they'll let you, and this could not be any less like a recording of live music.
Test tones would be great, as would the kinds of tracks on old test records (warble tones, etc.) It really is too bad that there are very few stereo stores left. I can't imagine that an audio show exhibitor would let one of us in with test CDs and favorite pieces of music!
 

RayDunzl

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Test tones would be great, as would the kinds of tracks on old test records (warble tones, etc.)

Even I would probably walk out if those were playing when I walked in...
 

cavedriver

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Test tones would be great, as would the kinds of tracks on old test records (warble tones, etc.) It really is too bad that there are very few stereo stores left. I can't imagine that an audio show exhibitor would let one of us in with test CDs and favorite pieces of music!
now that's laying it on pretty thick!
 

kemmler3D

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What's interesting is that at actual trade shows (you know, where wholesale orders are in the offing) exhibitors will very often let you do test tones or play whatever tracks you want. Funny but not surprising that in a semi-consumer environment the seller gets so much more control... I guess if you really want to kick the tires you have to buy an actual truckload of something.
 

Duke

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In your case, I can see why that would be a cool demo. Every other hotel room demo I've heard with box speakers sounded more like a hotel room than a nice speaker setup, though.

Thank you for your open-mindedness towards an unorthodox approach - in this case, mine!

Here are a couple of YouTube clips from our room at the show. Not that a sighted YouTube clip is going to "prove" anything to anyone... But if you have headphones or earbuds, you might close your eyes and give each clip maybe a minute or so. If I did my speaker design job well, aside from the reviewer's movements and/or extraneous noise it should not be obvious that there is a hotel room in the signal path:






 
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cavedriver

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anyone publish a decent review of the systems at the show yet? I've found a couple that were superficial.
 

TheFrator

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Thank you for your open-mindedness towards an unorthodox approach - in this case, mine!

Here are a couple of YouTube clips from our room at the show. Not that a sighted YouTube clip is going to "prove" anything to anyone... But if you have headphones or earbuds, you might close your eyes and give each clip maybe a minute or so. If I did my speaker design job well, aside from the reviewer's movements and/or extraneous noise it should not be obvious that there is a hotel room in the signal path:






Your room was one of the first rooms I visited on Friday! I must say that you are a pleasant person and cellos sounded really nice to my ear
Illusio Audio Speakers - $ ??
  • Cello and drums sound great and natural. Jazz is lively and not bright at all. Dealer didn't have any music to stream :/
I wish you would've let me play some Tool though haha. Take care!
 

Duke

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Your room was one of the first rooms I visited on Friday! I must say that you are a pleasant person and cellos sounded really nice to my ear

Thank you very much!! We made some spectral and level adjustments later in the day on Friday and again on Saturday, so imo the sound was better later in the show. The speakers were eight days old when you came by on Friday, and most of those eight days they had spent in transit, so we really weren't all that familiar with them yet.

I wish you would've let me play some Tool though haha. Take care!

IF we had been able to stream or play from people's thumb drives we would have taken requests, including Tool. Or even Toole.

Unfortunately a suitcase full of critical equipment was lost by the airlines, so Hans Looman of Infigo spent most of set-up day (Thursday) cobbling together a way to play files, which involved some adaptors which are not easy to find. We were lucky to have music at all.
 
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Mr. Widget

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I don't think I agree. The data posted here by Amir from harman kardon's blind testing and listeners' ability to detect differences in speakers clearly supports my first hand experience that dense rock with vocals is quite effective at distinguishing speakers. Put another way, Atlantic's recording of Immigrant Song might be one of the lower-fi things you could demo a speaker with but if it sounds bad on a given system why even listen to all the pretty well-recorded jazz and classical music?
I think the point is that you should listen to music that you are very familiar with and that represents what you typically listen to.

That said, if you listen to music that is bandwidth limited and dynamically compressed, then you will never know how a speaker performs at the frequency extremes or at preserving dynamics, but it probably doesn't matter if you never expand your playlist.
...but I can listen to Voodoo Chile and say, "Hendrix's voice should sound like this during this stretch".
Obviously we don't really know what Hendrix's voice should sound like in person or on any particular recording.

I have a theory that we average our experience listening to an artist or a recording over time. We will hear a particular recording on everything from a table radio, to our friends' systems, playback on commercial systems, and our own systems over time and we throw out the "bits" that don't fit in the standard normal distribution and this we call, "How it should sound."
 
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Mr. Widget

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Thank you for your open-mindedness towards an unorthodox approach - in this case, mine!
I may have missed it elsewhere, but can you describe your unorthodox approach and your system here? I assume you are using compression drivers. 1 1/2" or 2" exit? Do you mind saying which brand or model? Tractrix flare rate on those horns? Are the cone drivers woofers or mid bass drivers with a sub? Passive networks or active?

Sorry to pepper you with so many questions, but these are really cool looking and I'd love to know more about your design goals and your journey to this point. o_O
 

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Mr. Widget

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Thanks for pointing me to that thread. Several of my questions are answered, oblate spheroid horns and 75Hz lower limit, but these appear to be a much more unique design than what you can see in the images... very interesting.
 

Duke

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I may have missed it elsewhere, but can you describe your unorthodox approach and your system here? I assume you are using compression drivers. 1 1/2" or 2" exit? Do you mind saying which brand or model? Tractrix flare rate on those horns? Are the cone drivers woofers or mid bass drivers with a sub? Passive networks or active?

Sorry to pepper you with so many questions, but these are really cool looking and I'd love to know more about your design goals and your journey to this point. o_O

Thanks for your interest!

By way of background, I like some of the things a good horn speaker does well, and I like some of the things a good dipole speaker does well. (I'm a SoundLab dealer so that's my idea of a "good dipole speaker".)

At the risk of oversimplifying, we're trying to get two things right; namely, the direct sound, and the reflected sound. We're taking a somewhat unorthodox approach to the latter: In addition to pattern control, we use a rear-firing horn in the stand which contributes to and manipulates the reflection field.

We're minimizing the early reflections through a combination of pattern control and aggressive toe-in, the latter to avoid early same-side-wall reflections. The rear-firing horn improves the spectral balance of the reflections, and gives us a generally later-arriving reflection field than would normally be the case with most speakers. So in a way we're shooting for a "best of both worlds", combining the freedom from early reflections and dynamics of a good hybrid horn system with the spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset reflection field we might get from a good dipole speaker. The up-and-back-firing orientation of the rear-firing horn results in a fairly long reflection path length, so we can place the speakers quite close to the front wall and still get as much time delay for the backwave as we'd have from dipoles five feet or more out into the room.

(Imo in addition to the sound quality benefits, there are spatial quality benefits to having a spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset reflection field, but that's a big topic in and of itself.)

The front-firing horn is a constant-directivity Oblate Spheroid designed using Earl Geddes' math. The compression driver is the Beryllium diaphragm version of Radian's biggest-magnet 1" compression driver, the 475. The entry angle of the horn matches the exit angle of the compression driver, and the 1.4 kHz crossover is where the midwoofer's pattern has narrowed to match the 90 degree pattern of the horn.

Now the midwoofer's pattern is widening below the crossover region, so at far off-axis angles there is a relative scarcity of energy in the top half of the spectrum. That's where the rear-firing horn hidden in the stand comes in. It's the big 1.4" throat Faital horn with one of their polymer-diaphragm compression drivers. Its power response is "voiced" to fill in the "missing" off-axis energy in the front-firing horn's range and partially down into the 10" midwoofer's range. It fires up-and-back at a 45-degree angle, so that it has a nice long reflection path (off the wall and then off the ceiling) before its energy reaches the listening area. The rear-firing horn's spectral balance and level are user-adjustable for different room acoustic situations.

The midwoofer is a custom unit that uses Eminence's Kappalite motor, which is imo one of the best motors out there. I can't explain this from the specs, but my bass guitar cab customers consistently report that the Kappalites "hit harder" than other woofers which may look better "on paper". I presume it has something to do with how Eminence manages the magnetic field in the motor.

Four small subwoofers distributed around the room handle the bottom couple of octaves.

The crossovers in the main speakers (and the highpass filters in the stands) are passive, and the subwoofer amp has active filters. We don't normally use the highpass filter in the subwoofer amp to roll off the bottom end of the main speakers. Instead, the main speakers normally run "full range", as they have enough excursion to do about 114 dB @ 1 meter broadband before they need a protective highpass filter. The passive crossover in the speakers takes advantage of the horn depth, which is about 1/2 wavelength in the crossover region, allowing us to connect the compression driver in "normal" polarity (which seems to benefit imaging).

Let me know if you have questions about any of this.
 
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magicLX

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As previously mentioned, passive vs active Crossovers: "The only excuse for passive crossovers is their low cost" https://www.linkwitzlab.com/crossovers.htm

Active crossovers, Analog vs digital sound processing, ASP vs DSP:
DSP shows unrivaled flexibility in its use for several speaker models and its cheaper price.
However, with 4-way e.g. LX521.4, a DSP solution requires 8 DAC channels.
An ASP needs only 2 DAC channels.
When assuming the D/A-conversion the most sound critical aspect in this part of the chain, you have to choose to distribute your efforts/budget among 8 channels (DSP) or among two channels (ASP).
Our listening test between these two possibilities revealed a clear result: ASP.

This led to a change in our crossover type from DSP to ASP.
(A future "multichannel super-DSP/DAC-combo", that outperforms today's top-notch DACs may change the picture again)
 

cavedriver

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As previously mentioned, passive vs active Crossovers: "The only excuse for passive crossovers is their low cost" https://www.linkwitzlab.com/crossovers.htm

Active crossovers, Analog vs digital sound processing, ASP vs DSP:
DSP shows unrivaled flexibility in its use for several speaker models and its cheaper price.
However, with 4-way e.g. LX521.4, a DSP solution requires 8 DAC channels.
An ASP needs only 2 DAC channels.
When assuming the D/A-conversion the most sound critical aspect in this part of the chain, you have to choose to distribute your efforts/budget among 8 channels (DSP) or among two channels (ASP).
Our listening test between these two possibilities revealed a clear result: ASP.

This led to a change in our crossover type from DSP to ASP.
(A future "multichannel super-DSP/DAC-combo", that outperforms today's top-notch DACs may change the picture again)
I assume you mean "an affordable multichannel super-DSP/DAC combo". Aren't there already products like this that just aren't that affordable or standalone? The Genelec One series handles a digital input and has three way DSP and digital amplification, no? Don't get me wrong, I too would like such an 8-way or at least 6-way DSP/DAC/amp combo...
 

Burning Sounds

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As previously mentioned, passive vs active Crossovers: "The only excuse for passive crossovers is their low cost" https://www.linkwitzlab.com/crossovers.htm

Active crossovers, Analog vs digital sound processing, ASP vs DSP:
DSP shows unrivaled flexibility in its use for several speaker models and its cheaper price.
However, with 4-way e.g. LX521.4, a DSP solution requires 8 DAC channels.
An ASP needs only 2 DAC channels.
When assuming the D/A-conversion the most sound critical aspect in this part of the chain, you have to choose to distribute your efforts/budget among 8 channels (DSP) or among two channels (ASP).
Our listening test between these two possibilities revealed a clear result: ASP.

This led to a change in our crossover type from DSP to ASP.
(A future "multichannel super-DSP/DAC-combo", that outperforms today's top-notch DACs may change the picture again)

Please correct me if I am wrong, but when you say DSP I presume you are referring to the Hypex DLCP?

And when it comes to budget, an 8 channel DAC such as an Okto DAC8 Pro and x/overs/EQ done in JRiver or Roon can work out less expensive than a 2 channel DAC and the ASP which alone is about twice the price of an Okto DAC.
 
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