I have less time and patience for tinkering, I want fewer boxes, fewer speakers, fewer cables, fewer magic gizmos, etc. ...
...which is why my new system is being built around ...a turntable...
Does not compute. (literally!)
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I have less time and patience for tinkering, I want fewer boxes, fewer speakers, fewer cables, fewer magic gizmos, etc. ...
...which is why my new system is being built around ...a turntable...
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my decade of electrostatic listening. I could even argue that owning panel speakers at some point is a necessary right of passage for a serious audio enthusiast.
But after futzing with them and placement and EQ and subs for years, I think I have a handle on their strengths and weaknesses, I'm ready to move in another direction -- which, will of course, expose me to a different set of strength and weaknesses and I'll bemoan that X speaker doesn't do Y as well as electrostats.
Ultimately, though, I'm becoming less of an audiophile. I have less time and patience for tinkering, I want fewer boxes, fewer speakers, fewer cables, fewer magic gizmos, etc. I just want to come home from work, decompress, and, for an hour or two, listen to some good music on a good system while avoiding audiophile nervosa.
Luckily, the bar for 'good system' (enjoyable, without horrible defect, although not state of the art) has come way, way down in cost and complexity from what it was decades ago. I'm ready to embrace that and simplify, which is why my new system is being built around an all-in-one electronics box, a turntable, and 2 speakers. Everything else is in software.
Many, many systems benefit considerably from subwoofers and room EQ, even many big mother, all dynamic speakers, and not just electrostats.But there's the rub...if I need more dynamic drivers to make the electrostatic sound right, what's the point of having the electrostatic?
They were just too thin in the mid/upper bass
BTW, a strength of the electrostat, even in a hybrid system, is that they can operate full range above the xover to the woofer. So, there is no passive xover in the critical 2-3k Hz range, where the ear is most sensitive, as is all too typical of so many 2/3 way dynamic systems.
Reliable audio measurement tools were not available in the Paleolithic era. And, I was purely an unsophisticated "ears" guy back then, with much less live concert experience. But, increasingly over time and with my development of better listening standards, there was not any doubt about the existence of this issue. I just have no details about what the frequency response curve looked like. I do think it was pure dipole cancellationWas that a measurable problem?
I am not disagreeing. Actives with DSP are new paradigm with excellent prospects. If buying new today, who knows, I might go in that direction. But, I am not also not believing that these few measurements tell the whole story, which is complicated.Before the advent of modern DSP crossovers, I would have said the 'no crossover in the listening range' was one of the killer attributes of electrostats.
But, these days, with active DSP speakers being as good as they are, I just don't see that as such a big advantage anymore. Tying this all back to the thread, below is the step response for the Dynaudio Focus XD 200, with its DSP crossover / EQ:
Those results are simply superb. If step response matters, that result is superior to any measured hybrid electrostat I've seen.
The spectral decay is equally great. These are not vibratory monkey coffins of yore:
(All graphs courtesy of Stereophile)
Unless I subjectively prefer the radiation pattern of panel speakers, I don't see any objective reason these days to prefer them to digitally EQed multi-way dynamic speakers. Some of the biggest advantages of panels (lack of crossover, good impulse response) can now be addressed digitally in dynamic speakers.
I agree about measurements, but I don't think it is that complicated. I think that the designers of a certain German DSP-based speaker (that some people are sick of hearing about!) have approached the problem in full knowledge of what they were doing, and their relatively simple design just works. It wasn't put together by trial and error, and lots of listening, or even lots of measurements. It was, instead, based on predictions of the simple physics of driver dimensions, baffle sizes, and the role of DSP as 'glue'. I rather expect that their first prototype sounded better than 95% of all other 'high end' speakers within a day of them first trying it out.I am not also not believing that these few measurements tell the whole story, which is complicated.
Yikes! YES. 5 MICROseconds. Will edit.Is that a typo?
Relatively, yes. But I should think FIR can slide things earlier or later however the filter is designed.
I think this is the moment to come clean: I have never really understood this "step response" thing. I've tried to read about it, but it's still fuzzy to me. It's still unclear after this thread.
Could someone please have patience with me and make a "step response for dummies" explanation, using layman terms?
I may be sleep-deprived myself, and may be answering the wrong question, but if we are talking 6 inches then around .5 milliseconds (500 micro) seems more appropriate.
Could someone please have patience with me and make a "step response for dummies" explanation, using layman terms?
This is how I would see it:Could someone please have patience with me and make a "step response for dummies" explanation, using layman terms?
Step response is rarely measured with a literal step input, but is usually derived mathematically from a sinusoidal frequency sweep. However, the oft-cited square wave test is effectively a direct measure of the speaker's step response if the frequency is low enough.
Pretty darned good, Cosmik. I think it fair to say that we would prefer buying a speaker that has a better looking step response measurement. But, I don't think we really know how important/unimportant that is to preferences we might choose under double - blind listening conditions.