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LA Audio Show 2017: Day 3

Always very interesting to see what counts as good demo tracks in the audiophile world. To me, they wouldn't be good demos...

Most of them, to my mind, are '2D' and have a hard edged over-the-top this-is-audiophile-music 'detail' to them. Or they are jazz, which again I don't think makes for a good demo. I really couldn't tell how good a system was with most of these tracks.

I cite Elton John's Rocket Man as a contrast to these demo tracks. It was put together in a studio, obviously, but it has warmth and room-scale (not artificial cathedral) 'ambience', detail and a sense of real space (no pun intended). Classical, of course, is an even bigger test of a system, and I don't mean polite string quartets or harpsichord solos.

I think we need to hear how a system handles voices and real instruments going from quiet to loud in a natural, organic way. We need to hear an organically-shifting composite of many different types of instruments to reveal system 'formants', and we need complexity to reveal intermodulation distortion. Typical audiophile music goes the opposite way - I wonder why?

My only problem with using the actual Rocket Man track is that the music is so good I wouldn't want to waste it listening to horrible systems at shows:).
 
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Always very interesting to see what counts as good demo tracks in the audiophile world. To me, they wouldn't be good demos...
To the extent you see me praising the track, it means that it was a very good demo track to me. Please note that the youtube demos are not proper representation. Please play them on your system using Tidal or CD to get a better feel for what they do. To the extent you don't hear your system sounding good on them, and I mention that they are common demo tracks, then something is amiss.
 
Some more MBL tracks.

Requiem: Pie Jesu (Pie Jesu) by The Turtle Creek Chorale & The Dallas Women's Chorus. https://shz.am/t66671308

Just the right type of music for the MBL speakers.
 
Evolution Acoustics Speaker, darTZeel amplifiers, Wave Kinetics, Ampex Reel to Reel tape drive, Durand Tonearm, Wave Kinetics
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Now this is a crossover:
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These Ampex Reel to Reel tape drivers are so plain. They would give a heart attack to any industrial designer at Apple! :D
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Evolution Acoustics speaker:
It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing;Live) by Ray Brown Trio. https://shz.am/t60946506

Dynamic track. Point source in each speaker though with a shallow image.
 
Complex crossover, and notice they oriented the components to minimize interaction, good job!
 
Evolution Acoustics Speaker, darTZeel amplifiers, Wave Kinetics, Ampex Reel to Reel tape drive, Durand Tonearm, Wave Kinetics
View attachment 7519 View attachment 7520

Now this is a crossover:
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These Ampex Reel to Reel tape drivers are so plain. They would give a heart attack to any industrial designer at Apple! :DView attachment 7518

Make a cut below third driver from top and you've got my second setup speakers, very power hungry. Still need to find right amp for them.

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Is it just a crossover or multiple filters on top of that to shape the response of the drivers/overall response?

Well, of course I don't know, but I tend to treat the entire network as the crossover, probably because to me a crossover is just another name for a filter network that happens to combine LPF, HPF, and sometimes BPF elements. At one time I created a filter using an initial Bessel-Thomson stage to get good time response, followed by a high-order Butterworth (I think, may have been Chebyshev) stage to provide steeper out-of-band rolloff. I needed good in-band pulse response, couldn't tolerate the in-band phase shift of most high-order filters, and had wide enough transition band that I could get away with a hybrid architecture. But, I just called the whole mess a "filter".

Blathering aside, it looks fairly complex, so may indeed provide additional shaping of the transfer function beyond just the usual crossover function.

Besides, in your post you said, and I quote: "Now this is a crossover:" -- so there! :D

I do like Revel's idea of splitting the crossover into separate boards to better isolate frequency components and reduce coupling/interaction among crossover sections.
 
Make a cut below third driver from top and you've got my second setup speakers, very power hungry. Still need to find right amp for them.

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How do you like their sound overall?

As for amp, my choice would be some kind of high power class D.
 
VSA/VAC
Symphonic Dances: Non Allegro by Minnesota Orchestra. https://shz.am/t56851258

Pretty impressive opening dynamics. Sounds like large speakers with huge scale that these speakers are.
 
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