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GoldenEar BRX Review (high-end Bookshelf Speaker)

Rate this speaker:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 103 43.5%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 108 45.6%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther

    Votes: 19 8.0%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 7 3.0%

  • Total voters
    237

Alice of Old Vincennes

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It's not a folded ribbon--it's more like a folded planar--pleats that expand and contract to "spit" the sound out. A ribbon tweeter, which has no voice coil of any kind, works on a different principle, and has some advantages and disadvantages.
Same problem. They beam. I have experienced planers. Sweet spot was about 18 inches.
 

Billy Budapest

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Same problem. They beam. I have experienced planers. Sweet spot was about 18 inches.
Totally different mechanics. That’s like saying that dome tweeters beam—and some do, but they aren’t ribbon tweeters.

You just messed up. That’s OK. We all do that sometimes! :)
 

Dennis Murphy

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Same problem. They beam. I have experienced planers. Sweet spot was about 18 inches.
Most AMT's are fairly wide, which is why they have narrower dispersion than a true narrow ribbon like the the RAAL 64-10. But other things equal, they an be crossed lower and have more power handling.
 

Billy Budapest

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Most AMT's are fairly wide, which is why they have narrower dispersion than a true narrow ribbon like the the RAAL 64-10. But other things equal, they an be crossed lower and have more power handling.
But also, let’s talk about the mechanical action of sound reproduction.

Both dome tweeters and ribbon tweeters are pistonic, producing sound waves by moving back and forth via EMF induced in either the voice coil and the magnet for a dome tweeter or via current running through through the aluminum ribbon and interacting with the magnets via the Lenz effect.

An AMT tweeter, on the other hand, does not rely on pistonic action to produce sound. Rather, the aluminum traces in the folds of each of the Mylar pleats create a sinusoidal motion which squeezes the air forward from the folded Mylar membrane.

So, you could say that a ribbon tweeter is more similar to a dome tweeter than to an AMT tweeter.

Now, there are certain similarities between an AMT tweeter and a Linaeum tweeter, but that’s a different discussion.
 

Dennis Murphy

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But also, let’s talk about the mechanical action of sound reproduction.

Both dome tweeters and ribbon tweeters are pistonic, producing sound waves by moving back and forth via EMF induced in either the voice coil and the magnet for a dome tweeter or via current running through through the aluminum ribbon and interacting with the magnets via the Lenz effect.

An AMT tweeter, on the other hand, does not rely on pistonic action to produce sound. Rather, the aluminum traces in the folds of each of the Mylar pleats create a sinusoidal motion which squeezes the air forward from the folded Mylar membrane.

So, you could say that a ribbon tweeter is more similar to a dome tweeter than to an AMT tweeter.

Now, there are certain similarities between an AMT tweeter and a Linaeum tweeter, but that’s a different discussion.
I believe that's what I said, more succinctly.
 

DavidEdwinAston

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Four decades of research shows that these measurements are quite powerful in predicting listener preference. What is sad is that if I asked you how much of that research you have read, your answer would be zero.

I suggest watching this video on I produced on how awful your "ears" are in assessing the sound of a speaker:

Perfect, just perfect Amir. Thank you.
 

DavidEdwinAston

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"This is a forum for hi-fi enthusiasts to discuss objective measurements of gear."
I thought a hi fi enthusiast's forum was for discssing how good equipment sounds. I stand corrected.
Surely a discussion of "how good" equipment sounds, is rather pointless as it must be purely subjective?
For instance, my set up sounds perfect! Oops, you might not agree!
(As it happens, it does sound perfect.)
 

Billy Budapest

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Amir, that is a really silly comment. "What is sad is that if I asked you how much of that research you have read, your answer would be zero." This quote is a rather ignorant one as you have no idea.
No doubt you aware of the phrase "De gustibus non est disputandum". I would never buy a piece of equipment based on measurements. Everything I own has been purchased after lengthy periods of listening and comparison. If I wish to purchase something and it sounds great to me, well I am the one who listend to it, not some sycophantic audience of readers. It appears to me that very few people here on this site do this. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
I think you should watch the speaker measurement video Amir posted above. Although it appears to be a truism that “we all have different tastes,” that is a fallacy and, in fact, statically everyone’s preferences for speaker tonality are the same. Those preferences are encapsulated in the speaker’s Olive preference score, and that is a great predictor of how “great” a speaker will sound to you, me, and everybody else. Instead of dismissing this offhand, I suggest again for you to watch the video.
 

Dennis_FL

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I remember to this day the speakers my ears picked as the best. They were Dahlquist DQ-10's. Not sure what the speaker measurements were but the dynamics of such things as a cymbal strike or any instrument for that matter. Sounded like I was in a live performance. Remember the old TV commercials "Is it live or is it Memorex?" I thought those speakers were unbelievable.

My biggest disappointment was Golden Ear. I had read all the reviews and decided it was for me. I had a Golden Ear store in town and drove down with my SUV fully expecting to come home with them but after a listening test it was a yawn. They sounded average.

Well, I take that back. My biggest disappointment was the Martin Logan passive soundbar followed closely by Definitive Technology towers.

The above was all before I found this ASR web site - now, Amir does the sorting out for me and I can pick from the recommended list.

But I'm curious if the speed of the driver --- such as a percussion response can be measured. If the speaker has a lazy driver and doesn't reproduce the dynamics correctly, can that be measured? Maybe a square wave input?
 

kongwee

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Someone will bite you that you can't differential in different square waves
 

mhardy6647

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1644585926737.png


They get points from me (FWIW) for two things:
1) One of the earlier essays in time alignment, which became a thing in the 1970s.
2) It was Saul Marantz's last hurrah (at least AFAIK).

I was never too crazy about the DQ10s -- I'm still not (FWIW).
They would (could) only deliver "dynamics" fed with lots and lots of power -- which was pretty untenable in the mid 1970s (ahem -- at least on a college student's budget ;)).
They also used an odd mix of very good drivers (the European dome drivers and the Philips MR) -- and pretty bad ones (the CTS piezo, and, to a lesser extent, the Advent acoustic suspension woofer, which wasn't so much bad as mediocre).


3249790-dahlquist-dq-10-speakers-w-stands-amp-original-boxes-made-in-usa.jpg

(not mine -- needless to say)

The blatant appropriation of the Quad "ESL-57" aesthetic always kind of bugged me, as well.

07/]Mark Hardy[/url], on Flickr

I've yet to hear any of the Golden Ear loudspeakers -- but as a long-time Polk fanboi, I do have some semblance of respect for the company, at least as originally put together by Polk co-founder Sandy Gross.
 

JoshinAkron

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Hi there. The near-field scanner is not producing near-field measurements. It is producing far-field radiation of the entire speaker. It measures in near-field but that data is transformed using complex math to solve the wave propagation formula. It matters not to it what makes up the speaker. It samples at over 1000 points around the speaker and creates a 3-D model of the radiation of the speaker as whole.

Note that the above is *very* different than single point near-field measurement which does indeed run into many issues if not compensated for.

Also note that the Klippel Near-field scanner measures the speaker twice with a distance between them. Then using the phase information is able to deduce the direct sound of the speaker versus reflected ones. So it doesn't have the issues you mentioned when you measure.
Thank you for taking time and explaining that more and most of what you wrote makes sense. But I'm confused about your last comment - will the software consider room reflections, or is that ignored? Wouldn't those reflections be important for dipole/ bipole types of speakers or am I misunderstanding? (I've just seen some more far field, single placement measurements that show a flatter FQ response for these speakers from Stereophile and I'm not sure why they wouldn't match up better.) Thank you again for taking time to respond!
 

sweetmusic

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@amirm thanks for the video links! after reading several different threads, it's great to get the basics.

I have too many questions now...

I understand that frequency response is the single most important factor in speaker preference, and that mostly people prefer the same speakers, whether they're ordinary people or well trained. Great. That makes sense.

People adapt to their speakers, as you say. Our brains can correct the frequency response and spinorama results, to some extent, maybe better than equalization can. I bet we can even correct or get used to small dips that you can't easily fix with DSP. I wonder: What's left after people's ears and brains have adapted to a particular speaker? What can't our brains correct?

Distortion and noise cause information loss. Our brains can't recover information that isn't there. Speakers with a perfect spinorama with high distortion might have less musical information than speakers with jagged spinoramas and very low distortion. Our brains might EQ the latter speakers and prefer them after the "break-in" period where our brains rewire.

What other information loss could occur? There must be something happening in crossover regions, where lobing and imperfectly aligned sound waves intersect. Is there? Does that cause information loss that our brains can't learn to put back? Does the FR and spinorama capture that? Maybe speakers with worse FR would be subjectively preferable, if the tweeters were AMT or beryllium or ribbons, or the crossovers were concentric or time and phase aligned.

I guess I'm wondering if speaker preference also incorporates a little information theory. An imperfection that doesn't cause information loss can be corrected by our brains. An imperfection that causes information loss cannot. After we rewire our brains a little bit from extended listening, we can correct all the non-lossy deficiencies in the speakers. Of course, it's better not to have to do this. The most important factor in subjective preference will be the listener's initial perception of things like FR. But maybe there are other things that matter too, from an information-theoretic perspective.

To come back to the topic of this thread, what might there be about ribbons or AMT tweeters that might make a subjective difference and not show up in the standard plots that are shown on this site? Anything?

Full disclosure: I've owned speakers with aluminum dome tweeters, soft dome, AMT, and concentric drivers. I've always felt there was more to the difference than what is captured in the FR, distortion, and off-axis FR. After spending some time on ASR, now idk!
 

HooStat

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:)

I knew purchasing these, and sending them to Amir, would be a risky endeavor since they're really an unusual design. I gave them a good month of listening and was very impressed with them. My subjective opinion was similar to those of Guttenberg, JA1, and Herb Reichert; they sound good. Even better after running ARC with a sub (both an SVS SB1000 and an SVS 3000 Micro). There are definitely some issues listening off axis or having the tweeters situated too high or too low but in my treated listening room in the basement I just can't find much fault with them. But, some people like Bose and I'm just an enthusiast with no particular qualifying background in audio, so there's that :)
When you add a sub with room correction, it really makes a difference. The "score" with sub is 6.9. Not that the score is perfect, but it does tell us that it should sound pretty good once you add room correction and a sub.
 
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