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Electrostatic speakers?

Willem

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Not that this speaker (whatever it is) could be supposed to carry the flame for all electrostats ofc
I think this is important. My Quad ELS57s impressed with a very natural sound, but had clear limitations with respect to dynamics, bass extension and listening window. My modern Quad 2805s have far less of all that: they can play louder, they extend quite a bit lower (in my large listening room I measured them flat down to about 37 Hz, as per specification) and the listening window is much wider, thanks, I think, to the fact that they have these concentric rings with delay lines. They emulate point sources originating from a bit behind the speaker.
 

Mnyb

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I think this is important. My Quad ELS57s impressed with a very natural sound, but had clear limitations with respect to dynamics, bass extension and listening window. My modern Quad 2805s have far less of all that: they can play louder, they extend quite a bit lower (in my large listening room I measured them flat down to about 37 Hz, as per specification) and the listening window is much wider, thanks, I think, to the fact that they have these concentric rings with delay lines. They emulate point sources originating from a bit behind the speaker.

Wonder how the back wave behaves with Quads ? will back and front wave have different "virtual" origins ?
 

richard12511

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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.

Horns are a good comparison, imo. At least in terms of imaging, clarity, and "speed", the panels I've heard actually sound quite similar to the horns I have at home(JTR), which are also very narrow dispersion. Tonality was different(which could have been the room), but those other aspects were similar. That similarity is the main thing leading me to my belief that the "speed" of panels has something to do with dispersion.

That's not to say horns and panels are the same, as there are still differences. Most panels seem to have a backwave that horns don't, and that should be later arriving, as @Duke points out. That seems to be an advantage of panels that horns don't have. I can't say exactly the perceived sound difference that back wave has, but I'm guessing it's there for a reason. Additional ambiance? Of course, horns have their own advantages. Many horns have the ability to produce actual live sound dynamics(at least what's on the recording). Live sound can get really loud, and I'm guessing most panels can't recreate that(maybe some of the bigger ones?). I've never heard the giant panels, though.

While I do think narrow dispersion is a lot of it, I also think @Blumlein 88 is right about the lack of bass also contributing. I'm of the opinion that slow sounding bass is caused by room modes. My subs sound subjectively faster when I position and delay them better. Less bass means exciting those nasty room modes less.
 
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mhardy6647

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Wonder how the back wave behaves with Quads ? will back and front wave have different "virtual" origins ?
They're -- interesting -- in that regard, as there is a thick damping pad located behind the ESL-57's radiating membrane to do... something to the back wave.
I don't pretend to understand the logic, nor the physics -- but it still seemed worthy of mention. :rolleyes:

YMMV. ;)

1610547776195.png

Here's the rear view, with the felt pads still in place.

source: https://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/606listening

PS as a typically pointless & egocentric aside :rolleyes: I discovered about a year ago that I live less than 1/2 hour from ESL-57 guru Sheldon Stokes. It's a small world! ;)
 

Willem

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But the modern ones, from the ELS63 onwards, are different. Only the modern ones have the concentric circles with delay lines.
 

Blumlein 88

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Wonder how the back wave behaves with Quads ? will back and front wave have different "virtual" origins ?
From memory the point source virtual location is 11 inches (28 cm) behind the panel.
 

Thomas savage

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Despite no longer owning them, I do not regret my time with electrostats.

You have to own panel speakers at least once in your life to earn all the audiophile merit badges.
In this instance you can't beat trying things out for yourself, if ones at all interested in reproduce sound / audio and the various delivery methods and technology why would anyone recommend against trying different approaches .

Its enlightening.
 

Frank Dernie

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I'm of the opinion that slow sounding bass is caused by room modes. My subs sound subjectively faster when I position and delay them better. Less bass means exciting those nasty room modes less.
Whilst in agreement with most of what you write I am not convinced that a "slow" bass is entirely, or even mainly, down to room modes.
I have noticed big differences between the bass of speakers in this room, which I have had over 20 years.
My Goldmunds, which are reflex and have a -6dB point of 26Hz iirc have clean enjoyable bass in here without any room compensation.
Another big speaker, which shall remain nameless, I could not get to sound clean and enjoyable in the bass here wherever I placed it. It is also front ported reflex and specs a -3dB point of 35Hz and was in every other way super sounding IMO.
I have chosen speakers on their timbre, dynamics and cleanness of bass for the lasts 50 years and at least for the first 4 decades of that time room compensation was not even an an option. Everything had to be balanced by speaker position adjustments.
 

Blumlein 88

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And for the back wave will it be in front instead ?
No it too should be displaced to the same apparent location. From the rear the apparent source should be closer to you while from the front it is further from you.
 

MRC01

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Whatever the cause(s) of "slow" vs. "fast" bass, IME room modes are at least a contributing factor. Put differently, when I've applied room treatments (big tube traps, bass traps, bass resonators) it dramatically improve bass response. Subjectively, I'd say cleaner and faster. In measurements, it weakened bass modes and shortened decay/ring time.

But room modes aren't the only factor, because different speakers can sound "fast" or "slow" in the same room.
 

Wes

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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.


measures what exactly?
 

Duke

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Horns are a good comparison, imo. At least in terms of imaging, clarity, and "speed", the panels I've heard actually sound quite similar to the horns I have at home(JTR), which are also very narrow dispersion.

Whether horns or panels or something else less room-friendly is involved, avoiding reflections within the first 10 milliseconds preserves transients... i.e. "speed":

"Transients are not corrupted by reflections if the room is large enough - and 10ms of reflections free time is enough." - David Griesinger.

That's not to say horns and panels are the same, as there are still differences. Most panels seem to have a backwave that horns don't, and that should be later arriving, as @Duke points out. That seems to be an advantage of panels that horns don't have... Additional ambiance?

Ime the backwave of a good panel speaker not only has spatial benefits (assuming it doesn't arrive too early), but also timbral ones. Most of my horn speakers have a "backwave", so they combine some of the characteristics of both types.
 
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Frank Dernie

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Put differently, when I've applied room treatments (big tube traps, bass traps, bass resonators) it dramatically improve bass response.
Certainly big improvements can be made by moving the speakers and adding bass traps, something is needed if the speakers have to be in a poor location for some reason.
Many of us have enjoyed clean in room bass for decades before room compensation programmes were available and without affording bulky expensive bass traps. I achieved it by choice of speaker and its room location.
Neither the Antimode box nor Audyssey have improved bass slam or cleanness to any marked degree in my room but my speakers were chosen partly because of their bass performance carefully positioned.
 

T.J. McKenna

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Ok, but a flat frequency response is precisely how we know that all the harmonics on a recording are reproduced at the same amplitude relative to the fundamental. There's no need to use a complex signal to measure this; in fact this would just make it unnecessarily difficult..

Perhaps, but isn't a frequency response test simply a matter of making a sweep of individual frequencies at a constant and sustained level? So you're basically only measuring fundamentals. Further, the harmonics on a real instrument are often tiny in level compared to this fundamental; surely with a complex signal isn't it at least possible that some of these harmonics aren't being accurately reproduced? Next, harmonics are largely transients; if the speaker isn't responding accurately in the time-domain then these harmonics aren't going to be properly reproduced.

But your argument points to a fundamental difference between how you and I regard science. To me, if a phenomenon exists then it's the imperative of science to treat it as real and try to explain it within its own (limited) parameters. It's not a matter of "we don't know what to do with it therefore it doesn't exist". Major differences in timbre reproduction in speakers exist (at least in my head) and it has very little to do with the FR measurements you advocate. Now, it's up to science to try to do something with this, not reduce it to an "explanation" consistent with the "established" canon of scientific dogma. Haven't you ever read Karl Popper? He'd be appalled at some of the "science" on this Forum.

As for the KRK, these are the VXT8 model, and quite comprehensive measurements are available at the RESOLUTION magazine website. FR is almost as flat as the JBL; apparently the huge differences in timbre reproduction that I at least perceive are spurious.
 

T.J. McKenna

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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.

Yes, I think buying speakers is necessarily a compromise between all the different facets of the sound and to try to encapsulate everything inside a handful of measurements completely belies the reality of the situation. Sure, I want flat frequency response but if the designer has to "slug" the speaker to do so and make it sound severely lacking in "life" then I'm willing to allow some compromises in FR to achieve what I consider to be more important than some nice graphs to look at and purr over. Why has there been a comeback in what was once considered to be a completely outmoded type of design, the horn? Because, despite all its compromises in frequency response, the horn seems to do something that the more conventional designs have problems doing: sound (despite all the "horn" colourations) enough like live voices and instruments playing in your listening room to enable your suspension of disbelief to be at least partly turned off. And, to me, that trumps having to turn up my nose at the measurements. It also prompts me to ask: why can't scientists find some measurement proxy for "sense of live instruments playing in your room" instead of constantly locking themselves in the panic room of Flat Frequency Response?
 
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