PS Audio FR30 speakers

[Sal1950]

A friend has just spent about $25k on speakers in his newly designed and very beautiful house and his wife is not happy with them at all.

Is there a point in that?

I'm telling you that the size of the house, dedicated audio room and the costliness of the audio system would all be irrelevant to my wife's insistence on aesthetics.

Hell, she has criteria for what stuff is allowed in our garage, and where I need to put it.

Reminds me of the days I was selling Harleys on the showroom floors of Chicago. Occasionally a fellow would come in kicking tires and asking questions. At some point in the discussion I would start to discuss an actual purchase and be told, "oh no, my wife would never let me own a motorcycle". After a while and a rush of incredulity, never understanding how one man could actually ever admit something like that to another man, the realization would hit me that I would probably never sell him a bike and he was just wasting my time. At that point I would tell him something along the lines of, "when I was 12 I let my mommy tell me what to do, shortly after that I grew up". Most often they then left me to the serious customers. LOL
Sorry Amir / mod's, way past time to stay on-topic.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Is there a point in that?


Reminds me of the days I was selling Harleys on the showroom floors of Chicago. Occasionally a fellow would come in kicking tires and asking questions. At some point in the discussion I would start to discuss an actual purchase and be told, "oh no, my wife would never let me own a motorcycle". After a while and a rush of incredulity, never understanding how one man could actually ever admit something like that to another man, the realization would hit me that I would probably never sell him a bike and he was just wasting my time. At that point I would tell him something along the lines of, "when I was 12 I let my mommy tell me what to do, shortly after that I grew up". Most often they then left me to the serious customers. LOL
Sorry Amir / mod's, way past time to stay on-topic.

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Sal, I don't post stuff like this as I think it would get me an online message from Adam. So, I will let you do it. I totally agree. When neither person in a marriage is the man, then the wife steps into the role. It is just like a dog looking for an alpha leader, if he doesn't find one in his house, then he assumes it is him! But then the discussion has to go into what does it mean to be a "real man"? I think one of the major problems is so many broken homes nowadays. No role models and no good instruction on how to properly treat a good woman. Personally I like cave man style but that is just me.

 

[mightycicadalord]

I think the argument for not wanting a SO to get a motorcycle is that they don't want them to die, or at least increase the chance of it.

 

[hardisj]

I think the argument for not wanting a SO to get a motorcycle is that they don't want them to die, or at least increase the chance of it.

Or maybe she’s the more sensible one and knows they can’t afford it.

 

[MaxBuck]

Is there a point in that?


Reminds me of the days I was selling Harleys on the showroom floors of Chicago. Occasionally a fellow would come in kicking tires and asking questions. At some point in the discussion I would start to discuss an actual purchase and be told, "oh no, my wife would never let me own a motorcycle". After a while and a rush of incredulity, never understanding how one man could actually ever admit something like that to another man, the realization would hit me that I would probably never sell him a bike and he was just wasting my time. At that point I would tell him something along the lines of, "when I was 12 I let my mommy tell me what to do, shortly after that I grew up". Most often they then left me to the serious customers. LOL
Sorry Amir / mod's, way past time to stay on-topic.

View attachment 206307

I've always said, if you're gonna get whipped, there's no better weapon on earth.

 

[restorer-john]

Hell, she has criteria for what stuff is allowed in our garage, and where I need to put it.

You are joking, right?

 

[MaxBuck]

You are joking, right?

Not at all. Though to be fair, where she wants the stuff makes a lot of sense.

 

[mightycicadalord]

So how bout them PS audio speakers am i right?

 

[amirm]

If owning a Klippel system is an objective indication of a manufacturer's seriousness, here in the UK the consumer brands with Klippel are B&W, ATC, Monitor Audio, Celestion and PMC.

"Klippel" is not the same as "Klippel NFS." The robotic NFS hardware and software dwarf the cost of base klippel analyzer. While the base system is useful to designers, our interest as consumers is comprehensive speaker measurements which requires the NFS option. I looked at PMC website and while they use a laser module with Klippel analyzer for driver assessment, they seem to have rented space for anechoic chamber measurements which is fine. What is not so fine is that in the video they posted on their website, they only made a handful of measurements even though in text they emphasis importance of off-axis measurements.

On ROI of Klippel NFS, I made the call that for my work it was mandatory. I too could make manual measurements. Or have agency measure speakers for us. But I looked ahead and realized we will need to measure hundreds of speakers so we have to get our own system to have high throughput we need. I have measured to date 244 speakers and number keeps rising. No question then that we have come ahead with this investment.

 

[MattHooper]

Is there a point in that?


Reminds me of the days I was selling Harleys on the showroom floors of Chicago. Occasionally a fellow would come in kicking tires and asking questions. At some point in the discussion I would start to discuss an actual purchase and be told, "oh no, my wife would never let me own a motorcycle". After a while and a rush of incredulity, never understanding how one man could actually ever admit something like that to another man, the realization would hit me that I would probably never sell him a bike and he was just wasting my time. At that point I would tell him something along the lines of, "when I was 12 I let my mommy tell me what to do, shortly after that I grew up". Most often they then left me to the serious customers. LOL
Sorry Amir / mod's, way past time to stay on-topic.

View attachment 206307

oh gawd. I'd want to ask you about some of your experience selling Harleys, but given my attitude towards Harleys (let's just say South Park nailed it) I don't think I could do it in a non-inflammatory manner ;-)

 

[restorer-john]

bass klippel analyzer

Does it do charts like this?

 

[YSC]

Sure, I would like an automated setup and additional tools to make certain things quicker and easier and I said before that's on the wish list. There a lot of incorrect assumptions about the inner workings of the company and design process but that's neither here nor there.

As it stands, I do horizontal and vertical polar response measurements gated to about 200 Hz resolution on a turntable rig and splice in low frequency ground plane measured data (which is good to about 500 Hz), so there's good overlap and correlation. We are using labs and outside measurement resources as need (which I've mentioned before).

Attached is some horizontal directivity data I measured from a prototype. This isn't something I'd publish (because we are getting higher resolution lab testing done). Also, in this instance, I was able to solve the little off-axis dips at 1.2 and 5 kHz with some gasket and assembly tweaks on our waveguides. I don't like publishing data with any qualifications and so that's why I'm waiting on this set of measurements of the production units to publish.

However, you can see that we have very even and wide (about 140 degree) horizontal coverage until the tweeter starts to beam above 12-13 kHz. It beams a little more vertically.

There is a small notch in our waveguide at 7 kHz, which is why there is a small axial lifted area in our final crossover to flatten the listening window and in-room response here.

We do use the klippel distortion analyzer in our r&d and driver production and here is a sneak peak at some Klippel LSI data on another woofer that I've been working on (for some smaller models). It confirms my FEA work well but, but we need to push the test out a little further to resolve the curve data our to +/- 15 mm instead of +/- 10 mm. I ended up tweaking the coil to get a little flatter and more extended BL but you can see how broad and symmetrical the curves are and how well centered everything is (we use this in production as well to verify the physical alignment of everything)

It’s nice that you could share these result, I would definitely keep an eye on the final result of this and see if it can give the design justice, always good to know that the design have been through some measurement base but then hopefully it won't be bad

 

[Chris Brunhaver]

Thank you for showing them here, what I would be more curious though are the vertical data as due to the large mid driver they should be quite hard to optimise, would enjoy also hearing your experiences about that task.

This is a good question but I think that it's also important to understand the audibility/significance of vertical polar response errors.

There are actually some good threads here on ASR about this (the important or lack thereof of the vertical response of the a speaker in a home listening room). Certainly in professional sound reinforcement vertical directivity is super important and guys like Don Keele and line array folks have made great designs for this.

In his CBT paper (an arrangement with constant vertical directivity), you can see that on page 94, even a well designed tower speaker like the revel salon has very inconstant overall response (including boundary interactions with the floor etc).
https://www.xlrtechs.com/dbkeele.co...(AES-ASA-BAS presentation, Jan. 14, 2010).pdf

Thankfully, we have ears on the sides of our hears and the sound quality of speakers in a home environment are primarily driver by the horizontal directivity, otherwise we would see different baffle layouts or coaxial designs be favored a lot more. Yes, you want try to have floor and ceiling early reflections be as balanced as you can but this is one of the cases where the Nelson Pass saying of "ears are not microphones" could likely be used, though there doesn't seem to be a ton of scientific study (that I've seen at least) on this particular aspect of performance.

As far as directivity goes, as sound wavelengths approach the size of the cone or in this case the planar membrane, they start becoming directional because of phase cancellation. There is a dimensionless measure of this called “ka” - circumference of the cone divided by the wavelength of sound it producing. Relatively smooth off-axis response is maintained until ka=2. In the case of our mid, the effective circumference of the vertical length would be about ~62 cm, so ka=2 is just over 1 kHz. A 6.5" woofer puts this at about 1.65 kHz.

Our planar has the benefit of no breakup or resonances in this area, which is normally a big issue in the useful upper midrange bandwidth of cone drivers but they do start to narrow vertically sooner. I put the tweeter crossover as low as I could to get the best balance of power handling, tonal balance and distortion etc. and this involved a lot of measurements and listening etc. We did target the listening window and estimated in-room curves to be quite smooth, generally, and I think that obsessing about very small details of these may or may not correlate with better or worse overall because I think that a lot of the nested design decisions to get there (like the use of very small midranges or coaxials) have their own sound quality implications.

Depending on how the speakers are set up and listening axis, if a customer feels like there isn't enough energy in the 3 kHz range, the speaker could be raked vertically with the spikes a bit but I prefer the sound as-is.

 

[CtheArgie]

@Chris Brunhaver , nice summary. There were questions here and you addressed part somewhere else on the back firing tweeter. If I recall correctly, you were not too fan of this. Could you expand here as there were a few questions?

 

[thewas]

This is a good question but I think that it's also important to understand the audibility/significance of vertical polar response errors.

Thank you, I know the discussions about them, funnily I even posted few hours before your response a post in another thread about the "ka" but still hope to see them (together with also the according total sound power) as in my experience, they can matter audibly, even not if as prominent as the horizontal ones.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

Now that the music from Octave Records is being mixed on these speakers we should expect it to sound pretty dull.

I've been a lurker here, so first post lol. But, when I heard some of the Octave recordings I could not figure out why they sounded so dull on neutral equipment given Paul's leanings. But after I read this, I decided to use the FR30's published measurements along with some guestimation on their resultant in-room response to construct an EQ to approximate their response on a set of tonally neutral IEMs. And you know what? They now sound AMAZING!!! I actually want to go listen to them now even though I don't I really like the genre. Hmmm, aren't these recordings also being used for the FR30's demos as well? I will let the reader draw their own conclusions...

 

[YSC]

I've been a lurker here, so first post lol. But, when I heard some of the Octave recordings I could not figure out why they sounded so dull on neutral equipment given Paul's leanings. But after I read this, I decided to use the FR30's published measurements along with some guestimation on their resultant in-room response to construct an EQ to approximate their response on a set of tonally neutral IEMs. And you know what? They now sound AMAZING!!! I actually want to go listen to them now even though I don't I really like the genre. Hmmm, aren't these recordings also being used for the FR30's demos as well? I will let the reader draw their own conclusions...

It’s good marketing of why neutral speakers are lifeless and bad

 

[nerdoldnerdith]

I've been a lurker here, so first post lol. But, when I heard some of the Octave recordings I could not figure out why they sounded so dull on neutral equipment given Paul's leanings. But after I read this, I decided to use the FR30's published measurements along with some guestimation on their resultant in-room response to construct an EQ to approximate their response on a set of tonally neutral IEMs. And you know what? They now sound AMAZING!!! I actually want to go listen to them now even though I don't I really like the genre. Hmmm, aren't these recordings also being used for the FR30's demos as well? I will let the reader draw their own conclusions...

It's a shame that good mastering is wasted on bad speakers like these. The majority of people who listen to this music will not be able to fully appreciate it.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

It’s good marketing of why neutral speakers are lifeless and bad

Those where my thoughts exactly. I can almost imagine an "Ask Paul" where he does just that, if he has not done so already. What's potentially even more egregious is that the reviewers listening to their sound demos probably have no idea how much of a conflict of interest PS Audio and Octave records are when it comes to the FR30. The icing on the irony cake would be the fact that when Paul et al. are obliged to listen to the FR30, they immediately equalize it to be closer to neutral via the mixing console. The "circle of confusion" is bad enough. Here its the singularity of willful ignorance. Nothing can escape it once it falls in. Would be fascinating to know what Paul's true perspective is on the whole matter.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Those where my thoughts exactly. I can almost imagine an "Ask Paul" where he does just that, if he has not done so already. What's potentially even more egregious is that the reviewers listening to their sound demos probably have no idea how much of a conflict of interest PS Audio and Octave records are when it comes to the FR30. The icing on the irony cake would be the fact that when Paul et al. are obliged to listen to the FR30, they immediately equalize it to be closer to neutral via the mixing console. The "circle of confusion" is bad enough. Here its the singularity of willful ignorance. Nothing can escape it once it falls in. Would be fascinating to know what Paul's true perspective is on the whole matter.

You have to remember that Paul has 70 year old ears. He can't change that. So, it will affect everything he listens too. Plus he sets up sound system without any electronic help. All by ear. You can only go so far with 1980s and 90s setup methods. He just likes the "old" ways of doing things regardless of how it sounds. His company, so he can do what he wants.