Speakers Are The Enemy

[mhardy6647]

That's a lot of equipment.

Are you running a vintage audio business as a side gig?

My wife more or less subtly encourages me so to do.

Nah -- I am more like those people (I'll reckon some of you know one) who take in strays. Stray animals, in their case. Stray electronics, in mine.
I have, after more than a half-century of fiddling around with audio hardware, slowly come to understand what I like in terms of reproduced music -- appearances to the contrary.

 

[MattHooper]

My wife more or less subtly encourages me so to do.

Nah -- I am more like those people (I'll reckon some of you know one) who take in strays. Stray animals, in their case. Stray electronics, in mine.
I have, after more than a half-century of fiddling around with audio hardware, slowly come to understand what I like in terms of reproduced music -- appearances to the contrary.

I always enjoy seeing photos of your amazing collection!

 

[alankila]

I think the statement “speakers are the enemy” describes the frustration of the HiFi enthusiast, knowing that the “perfect” speaker is forever just out of reach. This can mean either an ongoing quest to narrow the gap or a capitulation in the form of accepting that you’ve found something that is good enough based on your circumstances.

I personally think marketing and product differentiation for sake of having unique talking points are the enemies, but part of the blame also falls on the customers. Ultimately, companies tend to end up at least in part in the snake oil selling business, because it is strategically useful to lie. At risk of sounding sexist, men seem to be especially susceptible to certain types of sales technobabble. It isn't unique to audio -- I happen to bike as a hobby and it's chock full of the exact same kind of crap.

The technology of transducer seems good enough to me -- certainly with respect to things like harmonic distortion, flatness in the passband of the drivers. I'm sure someone can still try to improve on these century old designs, and materials could become marginally better still, but my conclusion is that great sound has existed for something like half century by this point -- you can be entirely happy in front of many of these vintage systems, I reckon. Active speakers with class D amplification and DSP control are my poison, though. A single box does the entire sound and there's almost nothing a consumer can mess up when as much choice is taken away as possible, and spinorama measurements will simply guarantee a baseline performance without any user input or adjustment needed.

 

[Bleib]

Well, we need computer chips in our heads and direct file sending to it.
I've never heard the perfect speaker either

 

[OCA]

I have very little info on how drivers work but I feel it's a bit questionable why nobody tries to use AC direct drive active voice coils in woofers in this day and age of super fast micro controllers.

 

[Mart68]

I have very little info on how drivers work but I feel it's a bit questionable why nobody tries to use AC direct drive active voice coils in woofers in this day and age of super fast micro controllers.

There are some fairly recent speakers using active voice coils. I had a listen to some a few years ago, can't recall the brand. They were terrible.

 

[Audionaut]

a 1khz crossover. It's something many are aware they should strive for, but few even attempt to go below 1500hz in a 2-way dome tweeter design.

1kHz is actually a very poor range of separation. It is in the middle of the range of formants and the human voice.
It would be ideal to have a single driver transmit from 150Hz to 5khz.
In practice, 300 - 3000 Hz is appropriate for a three-way design.

 

[Oddball]

I don't view speakers as an enemy, but my problem with them is that they are still very expensive in the upper range of performance. Lucky are the ones that stick to 2 channels and perhaps a sub or two.

Budget for great 9.4.6 HT is scary. Even budget for good 5.1.4 system is probably the reason why people don't do them so the at the end the whole HT market is shrinking, if not to say dying.