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Nice Talk with Paul Barton of PSB Speakers

amirm

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As some of you may know, Paul Barton was there at National Research Institute when Dr. Toole started doing his research on speakers. In this interview with Darko, he fills in some of the details about that experience. It is about 50 minutes and sadly, I don't know how to speed it up on Soundcloud. But is very well worth a listen:
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Interview with Paul Barton

As an aside, Darko without mentioning my name, asks Paul about listening to speakers to mono. To his surprised, Paul confirms why this is better and explains why. There are other moments where Darko has no choice but to accept the technical points Paul is making about importance of measurements, etc.

Here are some bits I transcribed if you don't want to listen to it:
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Before you were introduced to dr. Toole were you designing by ear? Yes, I was designing based on early days ..... pink noise listening to it and music... when I took the first speaker to Ottawa [at NRC], there were clearly things that could be improved based on theory that speaker is a window.... flat frequency response and dispersion are all a factor."

"[measurements at NRC] put a microscope on what I was doing... correlating measurements with listener preference."

1. Most of the people most of the time agree on relative quality of a group of loudspeaker. There is no personal taste when it comes to asking what sounds the most natural. That is the goal to make the recording exactly the musician intended.

2. Properly interpreted set of objective measurements correlate strongly with listener preferences. You can see the measurements and predict how listeners will prefer.

[3] Musical tastes and experience is not material.

When listeners go into the room, it will take a few minutes for listeners to adjust to the acoustics of the room. After that, they are able to sort out the speakers from room.

We did both stereo and mono listening.... did the same experiment in mono and stereo (double blind)...when testing in stereo the anchor got better in stereo because stereo masks tonal aspects of a speaker. You get better differentiation between sonic differences of speakers in mono than stereo. Most of stereo imaging we hear is in the recording, not the room.

The final tuning is done by ear, i.e. ratio of highs to lows. Darko summarizing: "95% is done with measurements last bit is done by ear." Tuning is still done using measurements. Subjecting himself to double blind as he tweaks.

"We can measure everything... but the scale of it you judge by ear."
 
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I don't know how to speed it up on Soundcloud.
Ah, you listen to things sped up as well?! I’m almost always at ~1.75x speed unless: there are lots of external distractions, it’s harder to hear (e.g., low volume, lots of road noise, person speaking is quiet), or the content is super dense/technical. In those cases I usually have to drop to 1.5x speed. This way I can enjoy more content in the limited time I have. ;)
 
When listeners go into the room, it will take a few minutes for listeners to adjust to the acoustics of the room. After that, they are able to sort out the speakers from room.

We did both stereo and mono listening.... did the same experiment in mono and stereo (double blind)...when testing in stereo the anker got better in stereo because stereo masks tonal aspects of a speaker. You get better differentiation between sonic differences of speakers in mono than stereo. Most of stereo imaging we hear is in the recording, not the room.

The final tuning is done by ear, i.e. ratio of highs to lows. Darko summarizing: "95% is done with measurements last bit is done by ear." Tuning is still done using measurements. Subjecting himself to double blind as he tweaks.

"We can measure everything... but the scale of it you judge by ear."

I agree.

There aren’t too many people voting yet, but there are some really interesting points that will explain the final results, especially since I am converting to mono with the recording.

Thread 'Monaural Speaker Recordings - Blind Testing Six Speakers for Fun'
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...ngs-blind-testing-six-speakers-for-fun.46010/
 
Ah, you listen to things sped up as well?!
Yes, all the time. I usually go to 1.7 to 2X until it gets interesting and then slow down as needed. I also use the right and left arrow to jump ahead and back.
 
Haha I thought that only teenagers watch YouTube like that. You proved me wrong.

Anyway the ignorance of Darko and not believing in measurements are just beyond me.:rolleyes:
Nevertheless an interesting interview worth listening.
I am more than 40 tears from my teens. I do that all the time. Quite often these days you can tell some youtubes have been sped up already. So maybe only 1.25x will work for you.
 
"when testing in stereo the anker got better in stereo"

anker?

I'm a strong proponent of judging speakers in stereo rather than mono (for comsumers deciding what to buy, as opposed to engineers deciding what to fix or improve), so I'd really like to know what Paul said here.
 
I do build a lot of speakers diy, and measuring in mono does 99% of the job on judging my builds, but the final judgment is also by ear and in stereo. Even personal preference tuning can be put in numbers and graphs and can be measured. And measuring speakers is best in mono if you only want the speakers to be measured. But to tune speakers to a room (with Dirac or other methods), you need to measure stereo, or all channels of a multichannel sysem as speakers interact with each other.

For measuring like Amir does, in semi-anechoic way, mono is the only way to go. And even for double blind test, mono is the best way. And i agree not everything is measured with his tests, but i'm sure if he took the time, he probally could. The question is, does it matter. And my answer is no, what he measures tells enough to deduct the rest also if you got some experience with speakers. Amir's time and resources are limited. It's already a big improvement that Amir and some others do this kind of tests, they tell way more than what others do with their poetry advertisements writings or youtube video's that don't tell anything about the sound.
 
"when testing in stereo the anker got better in stereo"

anker?
Sorry, it was the "anchor." Was typing quickly to keep up with the podcast. :) They used a professional monitor of the era that just sounded horrible as a negative anchor, i.e. "known bad." If someone rates it the highest, you get to throw out their vote!
 
I'm a strong proponent of judging speakers in stereo rather than mono (for comsumers deciding what to buy, as opposed to engineers deciding what to fix or improve), so I'd really like to know what Paul said here.
Adding on, he said that when testing in stereo, the anchor got higher votes than in mono testing. In other words, listeners are less picky about the fidelity of a speaker in stereo. He explains that Stereo playback helps to mask tonality errors. He also explains as I quoted that the imaging people talk about mostly comes from content and not any property of the speaker.
 
Darko best be careful, if he carries on interviewing people who know what they're talking about his Dunning-Kruger world might start to collapse around him.
He tries so hard to get the answers he wants, only to have Paul tell him the opposite! I wish I could see his face as Paul disputed every assumption he had. Maybe he has learned something and will change in the future.
 
For measuring like Amir does, in semi-anechoic way, mono is the only way to go.
He doesn't measure semi-anechoic, his measurements are anechoic thanks to some clever maths.
 
Maybe he has learned something and will change in the future
Not too radically I would think.
That's not where the money's at in this industry.
He knows where his bread is buttered.
 
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