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Poll: Should We Get Into Testing Headphones or Speakers?

Should ASR get into testing speakers, headphones, or neither for now.

  • Speakers

    Votes: 145 56.0%
  • Headphones

    Votes: 77 29.7%
  • Neither. Can look again in a year or two.

    Votes: 35 13.5%
  • Never

    Votes: 2 0.8%

  • Total voters
    259

Nango

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My proposal: Take the 100k + €200k financing from JPM, collaborate with people like Khadas, IVX, etc. and become a mfr of HiFi gear. Produce just 2-3 best ever over the world and the Galaxy measuring items each category within DAC, Sources, Speakers, Amps and Headphones. Use the reputation you won during the time this site exists and become the reference for what is called in German Volks-DAC, Volks-Amp, Volks-Speaker and so on. No one mid-class person or below (= 90% of population) should ever waste any monies and any thoughts in other nonsense brands. Establish a new Deal, where HiFi gear is just to be used, not admired or deified/idolized. As it was a toothbrush.
 
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RayDunzl

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Vovgan

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So what do we/I do? Any words of wisdom?

Talking money from a few confident manufacturers and juxtaposing their products' measurements with some old / average speakers is a way to go. Provided there are major speaker makers who can justifiably boast about their technical perfection to the degree that Benchmark / Chord apparently can about their electronics. Taking money from 1-2-3 makers in exchange for giving them some control over which other great speakers are featured, and which are left unmentioned. To forum members like myself this will still be a great boon.

However, given the fact that neither What HiFi nor any other major HiFi reviewer has already done it probably means that all manufacturers are dead against such tests. Even if your top-of-the-line speakers are excellent, showing exactly where your mass-market speakers are inferior to them will unlikely boost your sales...
 
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scott wurcer

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Buy/sell 100,000sh of MSFT.

When it goes up/down $1, sell/buy.

Repeat, scaled, as necessary for individual speaker purchases and shipping.

Believe it or not back in the boom days (<2000) we were allowed to day trade directly with 401K's even shorts on our own stock no tax implications at all until year end. Some folks spent a 1/3rd of their day doing it. We had more than one person lose everything.
 

scott wurcer

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Panasonic WM61A capsules (the ones found everywhere are fakes and/or alternatives)

Looking forward to this.

Primo makes excellent electret capsules, they were used in Nakamichi's long gone line of recording mics. I've spent literally 100's of hours on this out of curiosity and would be glad to help out. One could also simply invest in something like the sub-miniature DPA capsules.

You can BTW calibrate a mic using the spark from a Weber grill starter (to better than +-1dB) I have plots to prove it.
 

SIY

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Primo makes excellent electret capsules, they were used in Nakamichi's long gone line of recording mics. I've spent literally 100's of hours on this out of curiosity and would be glad to help out. One could also simply invest in something like the sub-miniature DPA capsules.

You can BTW calibrate a mic using the spark from a Weber grill starter (to better than +-1dB) I have plots to prove it.

Can you describe the test setup?

IIRC, the spark output ended up as basically a Bessel function in SPL?
 

scott wurcer

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Can you describe the test setup?

IIRC, the spark output ended up as basically a Bessel function in SPL?

I took some wooden dowels and two needles and made a spark gap off the edge of a table, stretched out so it sort of hung in space. I wanted to eliminate all reflections so I could time window and go down to 500Hz or so (this is all I could expect in my living room). Mics are essentially ideal pistons below 500Hz down to where the pressure equalizing port kicks in. To be accurate talking omni measurement mics here. I only had a mechanical grill starter so I also had to keep the clicker back and away.

The spark follows shock wave propagation with the initial heating of the air almost instantaneous (compression) and the cooling side (rarefaction) slower. You get a lopsided doublet in pressure which is simple differentiation at low frequencies (easy, -20dB/dec equalization) and unfortunately because the spark has relatively low energy the high end rolls of as a first order Bessel function at a critical frequency that you need to find empirically. IIRC the literature showed that if the energy of the spark was above a certain number of Joules the transition was beyond audio, the first null was far enough beyond 20kHz that I was OK. Luckily Nakamichi used to sell ($40 believe it or not) individually calibrated (B&K "egg") microphone capsules so I used that as my mic. The plots lined up extremely well.
 

Soniclife

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So what do we/I do? Any words of wisdom?
Is it worth working out what measurements would mean something without the Klippel system first? For instance I wonder what the value is in highly accurate low frequency measurements, given that using DSP correction below the transition frequency is advised, and you can often have a reasonable guess what a speaker will do low down just by looking at it, e.g. with a 5" driver it's not going to have deep bass.

If this can be established then throw it out to the members to see what skills and time might be offered.
e.g.
Is there a design for a jig or turntable that could be build, is there someone that has the tools and ability to design and build it.
Is there one or more volunteers prepared to do the measurement grunt work?
Is there software that needs creating, or extending to either measure, or process measurements?

I say this as someone without the skills or time to contribute.
 

soundwave76

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How about investigating collaboration with Drop (ex Massdrop)? Since they engineer/produce their own headphones based on popular models, maybe they would like to expand to speakers and could use a helping hand?
 
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amirm

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I tried my my most likely source for sponsorship and did not work. On Massdrop, since they don't have speakers now I don't see them funding anything. They have reached out to me though to offer other gear for review. So maybe I can sell that gear after testing to help pay for things.
 

scott wurcer

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Is it worth working out what measurements would mean something without the Klippel system first?

I say this as someone without the skills or time to contribute.

There was a huge thread on DiyAudio about this. Someone was working with Earl Geddes to translate his FORTRAN software to an open source environment. I didn't really agree with the approach they took which was to figure out how to keep the FORTRAN routines to figure out how to get PYTHON to call and return data from them. I think it stalled (as these things usually end up) but I'm not sure.
 
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amirm

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Is it worth working out what measurements would mean something without the Klippel system first? For instance I wonder what the value is in highly accurate low frequency measurements, given that using DSP correction below the transition frequency is advised, and you can often have a reasonable guess what a speaker will do low down just by looking at it, e.g. with a 5" driver it's not going to have deep bass.

If this can be established then throw it out to the members to see what skills and time might be offered.
e.g.
Is there a design for a jig or turntable that could be build, is there someone that has the tools and ability to design and build it.
Is there one or more volunteers prepared to do the measurement grunt work?
Is there software that needs creating, or extending to either measure, or process measurements?

I say this as someone without the skills or time to contribute.
Thanks. I have been investigating building things for other audio projects and it is just too much work and expense. We all have other things to do than build stuff like this.

On using a turntable, they are available for about $6,000. The problem is that you still need vertical coverage and building that will be an expense yet again.

On low frequency measurement, current setups have almost no resolution below 500 Hz (due to use of gating to eliminate reflections). So all the ills will be hidden in too smooth of a curve using DIY methods.

We could try to clone Klippel system but my estimate of development expense for the math, control system and mechanicals will exceed what the system does and will include risk of getting it done.

Good thoughts anyway. May need to go to a back up plan if this does not work.
 

agtp

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I tried my my most likely source for sponsorship and did not work. On Massdrop, since they don't have speakers now I don't see them funding anything. They have reached out to me though to offer other gear for review. So maybe I can sell that gear after testing to help pay for things.

A few things to think about:

What will they do if you happen post 2-3 negative product reviews in a row? Are they likely to continue the relationship?

Are you only going to post positive reviews? This is something the current subjective mags are criticized for.

Are they eventually only going to sell gear that measures well? I doubt it. They’re interested in making money and not about to jeopardize sales of other in demand gear.
 

scott wurcer

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A few things to think about:

What will they do if you happen post 2-3 negative product reviews in a row? Are they likely to continue the relationship?

Who cares, I would expect totally honest reviews and if the vendor does not like it they can go away and not come back no loss to anyone.
 

agtp

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Who cares, I would expect totally honest reviews and if the vendor does not like it they can go away and not come back no loss to anyone.

I agree. My point in mentioning it is that Amir should probably not count on it as a long term solution. It will likely end up how you describe.
 

jhaider

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Thanks. I have been investigating building things for other audio projects and it is just too much work and expense. We all have other things to do than build stuff like this.

On using a turntable, they are available for about $6,000.

You don't need to spend nearly that much. My first consistent horizontal polar measurements were taken using a repurposed lazy susan (free!) with the protractor printed out of Bill Waslo's Omnimic manual. Advancement is manual, but a full 360 horizontal polar in 10 degree increments takes about 30min, after measurement system calibration and lining everything up. Advancement is manual, but that's OK with me because sometimes you need to retake a measurement anyway. That's easier with manual control. Verticals are similarly easy with parallel-sided speakers. I would not try extensive verticals on someone else's angled or curved-side speaker with this method.

My current measurement setup (pictures in a forthcoming review - too large to attach here right now) is a PA speaker stand, Monoprice XL camera ball head, and projector plate with rubber feet. It is more convenient because the angle display is at eye level. The downside is a maximum speaker weight of about 50lbs.

The space to take clean measurements without making enemies around you is what's really expensive!

The other issue is, no software I know of takes measurements in and spits out a CEA-2034 Spinorama. It can be done in Excel, but it seems really hard. I corresponded with someone who has done it. The calculations include converting dB to scalars - I did not inquire further because I am not that advanced an Excel user. VituixCAD, Omnimic, and ARTA do polar maps for free or at reasonable cost. Princeton 3D3A wrote their own graphics in MathCAD. A software called Monkey Forest generates snappier looking polar maps, but costs a lot more.
 
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amirm

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The other issue is, no software I know of takes measurements in and spits out a CEA-2034 Spinorama.
The Klippel Nearfield Scanner does this out of the box.

Harman%2BANSI-CEA-2034%2Bexample%2Bfrom%2B2018.jpg


That is by far the reason I am interested in getting this system despite its very high cost.
 

Blumlein 88

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The Klippel Nearfield Scanner does this out of the box.

Harman%2BANSI-CEA-2034%2Bexample%2Bfrom%2B2018.jpg


That is by far the reason I am interested in getting this system despite its very high cost.
It is not at all hard to see why one would lust after the Klippel system. I'd have thought it by now an industry standard though it isn't yet. I think it is only a matter of time until it is.

But then I think of REW. The things REW can do for you would have been maybe a $200k+ proposition not all that long ago. Now a spare 10 year old laptop and a $100 calibrated microphone and there is so much you can do. I think it is only a matter of time until what Klippel does will be available in very inexpensive software. You might not ever get a super cheap mechanical apparatus for it to work. Heck, maybe in 10 years all this will be in REW.

So will Klippel be the norm among serious speaker makers in 5 years, in 10 years will it take longer? Will there be software that can do everything it does in 5 years or 10 years? Those things are hard to predict.

The bottom line, is of course the bottom line. Do you have a use case that justifies the expense? If not, you wait until it gets cheaper, or until you develop a lucrative enough use case for it to make sense in the bottom line. I think it is too much for ASR at this time unless you decide to commercialize ASR in at least some limited ways. I dearly would love to see you develop a database of measured speakers equal to what you have done with DACs. In my opinion there is nothing left on the consumer end that actually matters in quality audio other than the speakers.

BTW, did you ever get pricing from that place that has the Klippel system in the USA and will test speakers for a fee? Maybe that is a way to start along with a carefully chosen group of speakers at a handful of benchmark levels.
 

DuxServit

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What is the licensing agreement for Klippel —can you sell it as “used” after you have tested 100 speakers? (thereby recuperating some of your $100K expenditure).
 
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