SOME BACKGROUND ON MEASUREMENTS, MARKETING AND THE GULLIBLE OBJECTIVE CROWD
“It's all about the idea of having the best
Hah.”
The quote above is from a review of the measurement wise excellent Okto Research 8 channel DAC. I think everyone understands what’s behind that quote: It’s all about having the best!
Audiophiles have different needs. Some like the looks, some look inside. For those who look inside, measurements are important. I will focus here on the “objective”, “rational” crowd.
I think the quote above can be used to cast light over some of my previous posts. To understand some of the issues in audio, you obviously need an understanding of audio - but you also need to understand marketing and its workings. People who are strong in audio may take technological insights for granted and may evaluate a company and its lead people on technological merits alone, forgetting that marketing is at play too and may take the leading role in a company’s mode of operation. While my audio science background is non-existing, I understand marketing - especially towards an “objective” crowd.
People will have noticed that I have been irritated by the marketing of firms like Kii and Grimm. In the initial marketing of Kii, it was said to be a “small big speaker”. To document their claim, a frequency response (FR) and FR error were stated as 20 Hz-20kHz, +/-0.5 dB.
To understand what was at play here, I will draw upon two sources:
1) A Multiple Regression Model for Predicting Loudspeaker Preference Using Objective Measurements: Part I - Listening Test Results, Olive (2004)
A Multiple Regression Model for Predicting Loudspeaker Preference Using Objective Measurements: Part II - Development of the Model, Olive (2004)
2) The Subjective Loudness of Typical Program Material, Soulodre et al. (2003)
From the first source, Olive (2004), often quoted in Toole’s book, the reader learns that bass accounts for ca. 31 percent of perceived sound quality. Any marketeer understands that bass is imperative to sales, and profits if bass doesn’t drive costs.
The second source, Soulodre et al. (2003) confirms the common wisdom that sound level differences below ca. 0.5 dB are inaudible in music material (see figure below). So any artefacts from the flat smooth curve that are less than 0.5 dB are inaudible, i.e. a speaker curve that has a FR curve error below 0.5 dB must be deemed as neutral as it gets.
If a sales organization can play on both bass (cheap in terms of space and cost) and world record neutrality in a one-liner like 20Hz-20kHz (+/-0.5 dB), it will draw a large crowd of interested «objective», «rational» people. “It’s all about the idea of having the best”, right?
I think people of technical insight sometimes have difficulty understanding this line of reasoning (or they pretend they don’t understand except when they start their own venture), because technical people understand that there’s more to it than just a one-liner containing the FR and FR error. But for a marketing oriented mind pursuing sales and profits it makes a huge difference if you can formulate the rational, objective audiophile’s dream in one single line.
Kii’s initial marketing was based on “small big speaker” and a one-liner like 20Hz-20kHz (+/-0.25dB), thus fulfilling the “objective”, “rational” audiophile’s dream. Without any notice, 20Hz was changed to 30Hz. That’s a huge change, isn’t it? Remember, Kii Three is a 32 litres box. It normally takes in excess of 30 litres to produce adequate bass quality alone down to 20 Hz, right? Then came the BXT module, which tripled the size of Kii Three and more than doubled the price. Despite the sudden “loss” of bass capacity from the original Kii Three marketing brochure, and the tripling of size and more than doubling of price, people still defend “the small big speaker” and the Kii people.
The other part of the dream, Kii Three’s amazingly low FR error - a world record, mind you - always looked fishy to competent people. First, just the aborption of higher frequencies from 20 to 25 kHz makes it impossible to achieve such a low FR error if you don’t manipulate, i.e. colour, the initial output to score higher (lower FR error) on anechoic FR measurements. But this is a highly pedantic exercise, to take into account absorption in normal air in a near or mid-field situation.
A more interesting part of this story is the fact that Kii never documented their bass capacity or their neutral frequency response as stated in brochures. And external parties have NEVER been able to reproduce Kiis claims. Here are some measurement oriented comments from reviewers:
«Its forward frequency response, measured at 1 m on the tweeter axis [Graph 1, below], provides some evidence of this. lt is, to within tight limits, flat, the response errors being +/-2.1 dB for both speakers, 300H2-20kHz (...) This isn't quite the +/-0.5dB that Kii Audio claims but it's remarkable nonetheless».
Source:
https://www.kiiaudio.com/media/GENERAL/docs/reviews/kii3hfn818lowrez.pdf
«As may be expected from a DSP-enabled loudspeaker, the Kii Three’s frequency response curve is relatively flat, running from about 30 Hz to slightly above 20 kHz with minor deviations (see Figure 1). Most visible are a slight bump around 1,500 Hz and a depression at 12.5 kHz. According to Putzeys, these are due to component variations, which are not taken care of by the DSP correction. This might be the case to some extent, but there also seems to be some energy storage issues at play, since the same irregularities show up in the cumulative decay plots (see Figure 2)».
Source:
https://www.kiiaudio.com/media/GENERAL/docs/reviews/audioxpress012017low.pdf
The first source reproduces FR error which is 4 times the stated one in Kii brochures.
The second source, from which I copied the FR in a chart to compare it to another speaker, tells the reader about a «relatively flat» FR curve, not a world record.
In other words: When external parties tried to reproduce Kii’s claims, the FR error quadrupled. I guess the marketeers behind Kii always thought +/-0.5dB would sell more speakers than +/-2dB. What do you think?
My background may make me somewhat biased. I think I intuitively look more on the marketing side of things than the pure technical issues than some other members. I try and understand the technical issues too, but I have much more experience exposing and understanding marketing and its derivative, pure bullshit.
I don’t think it’s an accident that these marketing issues arise in Kii. Bruno Putzeys, the mastermind behind Kii Three (he is undoubtedly competent and clever), is associated with Grimm Audio, the audophile company that sells clocks and overpriced streamers. This is what Grimm states on their web site in MU1, a €10k streamer;
«We had the desire to develop the most accurate audio source of our imagination. In our experience the human hearing system shows an incredible sensitivity to anomalies. Even unimaginably small abberations appear to be audible. In principle digital audio does offer perfect reproduction. Its sonic quality however is limited by the implementation accuracy of the physical and mathematical laws that affect the conversion from one format to another. Grimm Audio strives to bring you confidence that all technical details are taken care of to the greatest extend. As a result the reproduction system steps out of the way of the music (...) Needless to say that the MU1 features our trademark ultra low jitter clock. This is a music player worthy of the name Grimm Audio».
Source:
http://www.grimmaudio.com/hifi-products/music-players/mu1/
Putzey’s Mola Mola venture, that produces €10k DACs with unmeasurably high specifications («THD, IMD: not measurable (estimated -150 dB)»), says:
«You probably know the frustration of discovering your DAC has suddenly gone out of date because some new super chip has hit the market. We decided to stay out of that cycle and design, from the ground up, a discrete DAC whose unbeatable staying power results simply from being more than 10 years ahead of the performance curve. There's room enough for improvement: today’s best DAC chip claims no better than 22 bits’ worth of dynamic range and only 20 bits’ worth of linearity. High resolution music deserves better than that. Mola-Mola’s DAC is designed from the ground up using circuits and digital algorithms that were entirely developed in house».
So it seems like marketing is in the blood of the people behind Kii. And it’s this marketing bias that deserves a closer look by ASR members, isn’t it?
