Salesman Talk

[MarkS]

Why is this any better than any other software EQ?

 

[Ricardus]

Do the people on this forum really not have the experience of a high end system revealing flaws with a recording that weren't noticeable on a lesser system?

I bet ALL of your examples can be heard on the Sam Goody's $59.99 special on sale from 1978 as well as on overpriced ego gear.

 

[egellings]

I don't know about the manufacturer but the salesman may be doing you a favor. Some 15 years ago I read a review of the speaker in the Stereophile stating among other things that it was closest to an electrostatic speaker, sounding airy, fast, detailed...you name it. The price was within my budget so I went to the dealer, brought a few of my best recorded CDs and had the demo room for myself. I was sold at the spot. The salesman asked what would be the equipment I will be using the speakers with because some people find them a bit too much "in your face" but of course, I knew it better. Went home, connected the speakers played the same music and again, found them impressive. After a few hours I felt a bit nervous but attributed that to the excitement and a long day...The next day I played some other recordings and they were not too bad but they were very hard to listen to and the music was too aggressive sounding. Some of the worse recordings were completely useless.
Luckily, they had a very generous return policy and returning them was like fully recovering from some very long and bad illness.

I supposed you can get wowed by the exciting sound of a pair of new speakers, and after you own them, the wow factor wears off and you find that you made a poor choice of speaker.

 

[Palladium]

I don't like any salespeople because they are always pushy for obvious reasons.

I much prefer the Crutchfield approach where I can test speakers at my home at my leisure for a minor stocking/return fee, but alas no such thing in my country.

 

[kevinh]

Why is this any better than any other software EQ?

First is ease of fuse, The filters are low Q and well selected, When you eq a piece of music the settings are saved so next time you listen to the piece no need to adjust the eq. again. There may be other software with similar design that I am not aware of, do you have software that I could look at?

This page has a description along with some embellishment by Levinson about the software.

Master Class

danielhertz.com

I do wish this sort of software was available on a pc.

 

[Purité Audio]

Looks a complete rip-off, Wiim, Roon, Jriver, all have far more sophisticated eq.
Keith

 

[Mart68]

Do the people on this forum really not have the experience of a high end system revealing flaws with a recording that weren't noticeable on a lesser system? I do feel that sometimes those flaws end up being less forgivable than the issues with the lesser system that covered them up. As a metaphor, consider looking at a pixelated image, but you aren't wearing your glasses, so everything is blury. When you put your glasses on and fix the blur issue, the pixelation issue becomes obvious. You might prefer the blur to the pixelaton.

I might hear a song on the radio in my car, and think it sounds great, and promising that it will sound even better at home. In my car, the low frequencies are boosted to cover road noise (pretty much all cars do this because of the spectrum of road noise). When I play the song at home, I might find out that it's actually very thin sounding.

Other times a song sounds fine at low level, and when you try to turn up the volume, you realize the balance doesn't hold up. On a lesser system, you blame the system, because you know it distorts when played loud. Take that song to a good system and try to turn it up, and now you realize the song is to blame. Even if the good system might have made it sound better at the same volume level, you're still left disappointed that the nicer system couldn't make that song sound better than it does at higher volumes.

Similarly, when a song fails to image well or create a nice soundstage on a lesser system, you blame the system. Sometimes your imagination leads you to expect it will sound better on a nicer system... but it doesn't always.

what are you defining as a 'high end' system?

If it's based on price then you can spend a lot of money on loudspeakers that are truly poor in every metric (FR. distortion, resonance). So that is no marker for anything.

On a high performance system you should get close to what was intended for you to hear. If that's a thin sound then so be it, they wanted it that way. In fact very few professional recordings have 'flaws' in the way I suspect you mean it.

Many audiophiles buy speakers based on anecdotal recommendation since the current paradigm is 'measurements won't tell you how it sounds'. A typical dealer or home demo with some undemanding showcase recordings will not show up problems with the speaker. Only with extensive use does the audiophile come to realise that a lot of recordings he previously enjoyed are now unpleasant or sound a bit odd.

This creates a dichotomy. The new speakers are expensive, and highly recommended. They cannot be the cause of this problem. So it must be poor recordings being 'shown up' by the 'high end' system.

They will then try to fix the problem with all manner of tricks, none of which will work since the problem is flawed loudspeaker. Eventually they will sell them on at a loss and buy another 'highly recommended' expensive piece of junk and start all over again.

A lot of people have wasted a lot of money due to this simple misunderstanding.

 

[Mart68]

by way of illustration, an anecdote

I went along to a meet and a bloke from a loudspeaker company had brought along some prototypes. They were running off a Sony professional CD player and some solid state amps of good pedigree. Sound was not good.

I left the room and encountered the designer, and mentioned to him what I thought were the issues. He agreed and said that he still had to do a lot of work on the crossovers.

Returning to the listening room I found that it had been decided that the Sony CD player was the source of the problem and that a good turntable was required. Someone had brought along a Studer reel to reel - even better! - so that was put in. Of course it still did not sound good but now there was no digital source to blame there was a chorus of 'Bad recording.'

I left them to it.

 

[DanielT]

I left the room and encountered the designer, and mentioned to him what I thought were the issues. He agreed and said that he still had to do a lot of work on the crossovers.

Returning to the listening room I found that it had been decided that the Sony CD player was the source of the problem and that a good turntable was required. Someone had brought along a Studer reel to reel - even better! - so that was put in. Of course it still did not sound good but now there was no digital source to blame there was a chorus of 'Bad recording.'

I left them to it.

But it can hardly have been an experienced and or trained loudspeaker designer?

Or..what do I know. HiFi can sometimes be such a bizarre world.

 

[Mart68]

But it can hardly have been an experienced and or trained loudspeaker designer?

Or..what do I know. HiFi can sometimes be such a bizarre world.

He was quite young, so I don't know. My point was the problem was the loudspeakers, but it was assumed the problem was the source, and then the recordings.

False assumptions cost time and money in this game.

 

[kevinh]

Looks a complete rip-off, Wiim, Roon, Jriver, all have far more sophisticated eq.
Keith

Not talking about RQ I am talking about a TONE Control, that can be adjusted in real time then saved for each piece of music. I didn't see were JRiver did that. Now the software hasn't advanced much since Burwen designed it, it doesn't support streaming for example. They have samples of recordings where they used the software so you can listen to a track with adn without the tone control applied to hear the difference.

 

[BenB]

what are you defining as a 'high end' system?

If it's based on price then you can spend a lot of money on loudspeakers that are truly poor in every metric (FR. distortion, resonance). So that is no marker for anything.

On a high performance system you should get close to what was intended for you to hear. If that's a thin sound then so be it, they wanted it that way. In fact very few professional recordings have 'flaws' in the way I suspect you mean it.

Many audiophiles buy speakers based on anecdotal recommendation since the current paradigm is 'measurements won't tell you how it sounds'. A typical dealer or home demo with some undemanding showcase recordings will not show up problems with the speaker. Only with extensive use does the audiophile come to realise that a lot of recordings he previously enjoyed are now unpleasant or sound a bit odd.

This creates a dichotomy. The new speakers are expensive, and highly recommended. They cannot be the cause of this problem. So it must be poor recordings being 'shown up' by the 'high end' system.

They will then try to fix the problem with all manner of tricks, none of which will work since the problem is flawed loudspeaker. Eventually they will sell them on at a loss and buy another 'highly recommended' expensive piece of junk and start all over again.

A lot of people have wasted a lot of money due to this simple misunderstanding.

I agree that many expensive speakers aren't nearly as good as they ought to be. In fact, once you spend above about 3-4 grand on a speaker, there's probably an inverse correlation between price and performance. I think in that space, many are selling exclusivity more than anything else. In order to justify the price, they have to do something different from what everyone else is doing. In prioritizing what makes them different, they end up compromising on established best practices.

I have to disagree on professional recordings not having flaws. I find the vast majority of them to have issues. The industry largely went from having recordings with good dynamic range but missing low end, to being overly compressed (starting in the 90s). Drums are squashed, vocals have too much reverb added, there's very little that actually sounds natural. Many of the micing techniques (for venues, not studios) exaggerate reverb due to cross-talk. Poor mic placement also leads to uneven frequency response, with boundary reinforcement of some frequencies and not others.

What we get is a mess, and while a great stereo might sound better than a mediocre one for most tracks, there's no guarantee that any particular track sounds better on the better stereo. An imperfect stereo gives you blind spots, and if the issues with a particular recording were in the blind spot of that stereo, the owner will have no idea.

 

[Purité Audio]

Not talking about RQ I am talking about a TONE Control, that can be adjusted in real time then saved for each piece of music. I didn't see were JRiver did that. Now the software hasn't advanced much since Burwen designed it, it doesn't support streaming for example. They have samples of recordings where they used the software so you can listen to a track with adn without the tone control applied to hear the difference.

Everything you need to know about Marc Levinson is encapsulated in this sentence.

‘A+ is a version of Daniel Hertz's patent pending C Wave technology that fills in the spaces of the non-continuous digital waveform, so the brain responds more like to pure analog.’

Keith

 

[fpitas]

Everything you need to know about Marc Levinson is encapsulated in this sentence.

‘A+ is a version of Daniel Hertz's patent pending C Wave technology that fills in the spaces of the non-continuous digital waveform, so the brain responds more like to pure analog.’

Keith

I think that Levinson used to be a good engineer. I wonder what happened.

 

[Mart68]

I agree that many expensive speakers aren't nearly as good as they ought to be. In fact, once you spend above about 3-4 grand on a speaker, there's probably an inverse correlation between price and performance. I think in that space, many are selling exclusivity more than anything else. In order to justify the price, they have to do something different from what everyone else is doing. In prioritizing what makes them different, they end up compromising on established best practices.

I have to disagree on professional recordings not having flaws. I find the vast majority of them to have issues. The industry largely went from having recordings with good dynamic range but missing low end, to being overly compressed (starting in the 90s). Drums are squashed, vocals have too much reverb added, there's very little that actually sounds natural. Many of the micing techniques (for venues, not studios) exaggerate reverb due to cross-talk. Poor mic placement also leads to uneven frequency response, with boundary reinforcement of some frequencies and not others.

What we get is a mess, and while a great stereo might sound better than a mediocre one for most tracks, there's no guarantee that any particular track sounds better on the better stereo. An imperfect stereo gives you blind spots, and if the issues with a particular recording were in the blind spot of that stereo, the owner will have no idea.

using lots of limiting and compression is not a flaw, it's a deliberate choice. As is mic placement. You don't really think they don't know where to place the mics to get the sound they want?

If these things were due to lack of experience and knowledge then yes they would be flaws. But they aren't. 'Issues', yes - that's maybe a better word although I would call them 'Characteristics'.

A heavily compressed recording sounds heavily compressed on anything, you don't need to buy a high end system before you notice it.

I suppose to an extent it depends on what sort of music we are talking about. No-one making a rock or pop recording is bothered about how 'natural' it sounds.

Perhaps recording for Classical music has gone downhill? I wouldn't know as I never listen to it. Do they really compress that to death too?

 

[MarkS]

I think that Levinson used to be a good engineer. I wonder what happened.

Levinson was never an engineer. But he did seem to have a pretty interesting life:

Mark Levinson (audio equipment designer) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[fpitas]

Levinson was never an engineer. But he did seem to have a pretty interesting life:

Mark Levinson (audio equipment designer) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

OK. I was led to believe he designed some amplifiers and preamps.

 

[MarkS]

I guess it depends on what "design" means. I don't see anything in his background that would have given him the technical ability to design the actual circuits.

 

[fpitas]

I guess it depends on what "design" means. I don't see anything in his background that would have given him the technical ability to design the actual circuits.

Mark Levinson Audio Systems - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, I see what you mean:

Mark Levinson Audio Systems Ltd. (MLAS) was founded 1972 in Woodbridge, Connecticut (a suburb of New Haven) by Mark Levinson. Original MLAS products were designed by John Curl (Hence the JC abbreviation to many of the early products) under the supervision of Mark Levinson, with a team of associates. Audio pioneer Dick Burwen, Levinson’s first electronics mentor, helped Levinson start the company with the iconic LNP-2 Preamplifier.[1] Chief engineer Tom Colangelo, who brought visionary audio circuitry to the company, died in a tragic car accident in 2007.[2]

 

[sergeauckland]

I think that Levinson used to be a good engineer. I wonder what happened.

Quite a few 'good engineers' were seduced by the imperative to keep their companies afloat. By Good Engineers I mean those that early on designed good products, devoid of snake-oil. Bob Stuart of Meridian designed the excellent 100 series and M1/2/3 loudspeakers, before Meridian became a lifestyle company. (not to mention MQA!) Even the late Richard Dunn designed the excellent Tresham amps, before going all touchy-feely subjective, and Bob Carver had some good stuff before the current abortions.

One engineer who seemed to keep the faith was Peter Walker of Quad until he retired, then the company went to the dogs. David Hafler was another.

S