Cheap drivers in high end monitors / speakers

[Willem]

Harbeth buy Seas tweeters but produce their own woofers with an injection molding process. See here: https://harbeth.co.uk/blog/posts.php?category=5

 

[Leporello]

Some people still claim vinyl sounds better than even hi-res digital files.

Vinyl sound is their preference, nothing surprising about that. No matter how good digital is, some people will always have this preference.

But high quality sound reproduction is not about personal preference but fidelity to the original signal.

 

[RayDunzl]

Elucidate, please.

Dynamically crushed in mixing or mastering or both (2015) vs something given room to breathe (1981).

Al di Meola electric and acoustic guitar,piano, etc, vs various ensembles (right)

 

[Willem]

I would argue that this is where real skills, knowledge and and experience come into play. Anyone halfway decent designer should be able to build a great speaker for $10,000. Building a good $500 pair of speakers separates the men from the boys (to use the old expression).

Looking at the Kef Kube8b subwoofer that I just bought I notice how they deftly kept the cost of the cabinet down. The grille material is wrapped around the sides and back of the speaker, which obviously simplifies things. The top has a glossy black glass plate. My hunch is that the combination costs less to manufacture than the cheap and ugly fake wood vinyl wrap that you usually find at this price level, and it looks a lot better. I also like the subtle contrast between the matte black sides and the glossy black top. Since there is no fake wood, there is no need to have a choice between types of fake wood to match interiors. It does not pretend to be a piece of furniture. I think the design will work well in both a modern minimalist interior such as ours and in a more traditional interior with (often fake) antique furniture. So with this design you can have any colour you like as long as it is black. This saves a lot of money in the distribution chain.

 

[restorer-john]

Hi
OT
Good day to you people! That a thread veers from its subject is common in Internet fora, this thread is no exception. It's time to cast away the tendency to reject young companies on the pretext, that they are likely no to be around in the next few years. It is a complex issues but if people followed this logic there wouldn't be Samsung, LG, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Genelec ... etc... The strength/performance/reliability of the products and the company management will determine its longevity, hence success on the marketplace. It's time to stop knocking Dutch and Dutch or Topping (among many others) on those premises. It (almost) behoove us, the enthusiasts, to sustain such companies based on merits , thus insuring their deserved success/longevity.

Good point.

 

[Frank Dernie]

If you're buying MB for reliability, you are buying it for the wrong reason.

It used to be the case though, it is more recent generations of Mercs which have been unreliable. I ran Mercs as my everyday car from 1988 until 2005 without any problem ever, though the one I "retired" in 2005 was bought in 1991. I still have it but use a plug-in Prius mainly.
We have had Toyotas as well for 40 years or so with never a breakdown.

 

[Hephaestus]

Keith do you know if their coaxials are also manufactured (obviously to Genelec's spec) by Tymphany?

+1 for the quality of Tymphany's drivers.

All drive units in The Ones series are manufactured by Genelec. Some other drive units they source elsewhere.

 

[HooStat]

Hi
OT
Good day to you people! That a thread veers from its subject is common in Internet fora, this thread is no exception. It's time to cast away the tendency to reject young companies on the pretext, that they are likely no to be around in the next few years. It is a complex issues but if people followed this logic there wouldn't be Samsung, LG, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Genelec ... etc... The strength/performance/reliability of the products and the company management will determine its longevity, hence success on the marketplace. It's time to stop knocking Dutch and Dutch or Topping (among many others) on those premises. It (almost) behoove us, the enthusiasts, to sustain such companies based on merits , thus insuring their deserved success/longevity.

This is true, and I agree with this position. We should be supporting these novel products. A benefit of this is that we can get better and cheaper versions as competition increases.

But not everybody is equipped to take on the risk of a new company. One must keep in mind that companies are much more likely to fail in their first few years. Also, there is a different kind of risk with new software-based companies. In particular, there is a level of ongoing support that is required from a fully software-controlled product (i.e., D&D) than there is for a fully passive product (i.e., a passive speaker). So, it is also not unreasonable to decide not to take that risk.

 

[Pearljam5000]

Or you could support established companies in the hope that more sales will lower the price of the product (I'm looking at you Genelec)

 

[gene_stl]

The joke about the ship mechanic is actually a retelling of an ancient classic Yiddish joke where instead of a ship it is a watch and a watchmaker.
The watchmaker 's itemized bill says "drop of oil ten cents" "Gewusst wohin 19.90" (ie Knowing where to put the drop of oil)

 

[Pearljam5000]

Nice joke
You're Jewish?

 

[CDMC]

Some people still claim vinyl sounds better than even hi-res digital files.

Some also believe that vaccines cause autism. Objectively, both are false, however, one is subject to personal preference.

 

[gene_stl]

I have a local electronics acquaintance who believes the autism falsehood. He is a VERY intelligent electronics engineer. His autistic daughter began showing symptoms right after getting vaccinated as a child. He is convinced that there is causality rather than coincidence.

At least he has his own "data point" to convince him. What I don't understand is all the morons who believe shit they read on the internet and use it to make healthcare decisions. We are all very lucky to live now and have all the various modern tools to prevent something stupid from killing us prematurely. I myself want all the vaccines I can get. If dengue makes it this far north I will want the vaccine. Or sterilized mosquitos released.

I have volunteered for the Moderna messenger RNA COVID vaccine and received two sticks. soon I will find out whether I got saline or the vax and whether or not I have antibodies. Which may or may not help avoid the disease.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Vinyl sound is their preference, nothing surprising about that. No matter how good digital is, some people will always have this preference.

But high quality sound reproduction is not about personal preference but fidelity to the original signal.

A lot like preferring your mother's spaghetti and meatballs over Rao's.

 

[Pearljam5000]

I prefer McDonald's over more expensive hamburgers, I know it's low quality but I still like it more.

 

[KLang1]

Some of the best tweeters on the market cost about $30, even at retail prices. The same price in a woofer probably leaves a little to be desired, but as @617 points out, a lot can be done with a $30 woofer and good system design.

So where do I find proper measurements of speakers? I know of erinsaudiocorner, but not much else.

 

[andreasmaaan]

So where do I find proper measurements of speakers? I know of erinsaudiocorner, but not much else.

https://audioxpress.com/categories/vc-testbench

https://www.lautsprechershop.de/hifi/zeit_hhi.htm

https://hificompass.com/en/speakers/measurements

http://www.dibirama.altervista.org/le-prove.html

https://sites.google.com/site/drivervault/driver-measurements

http://zaphaudio.com/

http://feleppa.com.au/speakersaudio.html

Some are better than others

 

[CDMC]

I have a local electronics acquaintance who believes the autism falsehood. He is a VERY intelligent electronics engineer. His autistic daughter began showing symptoms right after getting vaccinated as a child. He is convinced that there is causality rather than coincidence.

At least he has his own "data point" to convince him. What I don't understand is all the morons who believe shit they read on the internet and use it to make healthcare decisions. We are all very lucky to live now and have all the various modern tools to prevent something stupid from killing us prematurely. I myself want all the vaccines I can get. If dengue makes it this far north I will want the vaccine. Or sterilized mosquitos released.

I have volunteered for the Moderna messenger RNA COVID vaccine and received two sticks. soon I will find out whether I got saline or the vax and whether or not I have antibodies. Which may or may not help avoid the disease.

Continuing the off topic. I believe that fundamentally people are driven by emotion, not data. It takes a lot of work to overcome that natural tendency, there is a whole field of study in confirmation bias and why we act that way. The bottom line is that even the most intelligent and aware of conformation bias still suffer from it, but less than most.

People want to be believe a story. People want to believe that there is a cure for the incurable. People want to believe there is a magic easy way to lose weight (rather ironically I am going through this now, my triglycerides were elevated, I have dropped 20 pounds, but need to lose another 15, and calorie deficiting 500-700 calories a day is hard). For your acquaintance it it probably far easier to blame the vaccine than accept the reality that autism happens, we are better at identifying it than we used to be, and we have no idea what really causes it. One allows control, the other does not.

My sister is an ER doctor that also has an alternative medicine practice. She also has a partner who is HIV positive so keeps up on the current research. She told me about a 20 something couple that got referred to her, he was HIV positive and had AIDS, she was so far negative. He wanted to know what else he could do as he was doing some alternative quack treatment he had found on the internet. My sister told me she tried to explain there was no alternative medical treatment, the antiviral regiments combined with a good diet and exercise are the only effective treatment. He wouldn't listen. She said she finally had to send him on his way telling him with his viral load, he would be dead in 6 months without the drugs and worse yet, his continued unprotected sex with his girlfriend was going to infect her, if it hadn't already. He was willing to die for that dream instead of reality.

Vaccines work and the infinitesimal bad reactions that occur are orders of magnitude lower than the lives they save. While I have all of my vaccines, rather ironically I have never had the flu vaccine, well until yesterday when I got my first one. Given the current situation and the likelihood of complications if I get the flu with Covid, it seemed stupid not to get it (hopefully they predicted well this year in the flu strains). I too will be getting a Covid vaccine after they have completed testing and approval. By the same token, I had my son get the HPV vaccine, I told him I thought it was the right thing to do to stop the potential spread.

Rant over.

 

[andreasmaaan]

My sister is an ER doctor that also has an alternative medicine practice. She also has a partner who is HIV positive so keeps up on the current research. She told me about a 20 something couple that got referred to her, he was HIV positive and had AIDS, she was so far negative. He wanted to know what else he could do as he was doing some alternative quack treatment he had found on the internet. My sister told me she tried to explain there was no alternative medical treatment, the antiviral regiments combined with a good diet and exercise are the only effective treatment. He wouldn't listen. She said she finally had to send him on his way telling him with his viral load, he would be dead in 6 months without the drugs and worse yet, his continued unprotected sex with his girlfriend was going to infect her, if it hadn't already. He was willing to die for that dream instead of reality.

I wonder how long he’d been HIV positive (or been aware of it). A friend of mine went through a similar initial phase of believing in implausible and dangerous alternative treatments for HIV when he contracted it. I think it was part of his emotional coming-to-terms with it, essentially a version of denial. Fortunately he soon began on conventional treatment and has no symptoms now (10 years on). Indeed, I’m surprised to hear there is still much of a market for alternative HIV “treatments“ these days - IIUC the mainstream treatments essentially suppress the virus to the point of being symptom free and untransmissable in most cases.

 

[gene_stl]

The HPV virus is a great example of what is wrong with the USA. As though protecting against a sexually transmitted disease somehow would encourage sons and daughters to behave badly or differently than they might otherwise. I have known a couple of women who either died or had problems with cervical cancer. Who wouldn't take steps to avoid that especially such and easy step with no downside.