The greatest speakers ever?

[Salt]

View attachment 480523

Price with Mounting Stand inclusive?

 

[xanalog]

I'd like to hear them side by side

Yeah, that would be our collective orgasmic pleasure... [replace 'them' with any two!]

....But chances are 0 unfortunately lol

as it should be....

 

[wadude]

I can vouch for Philharmonic BMR Towers. They can throw an incredible soundstage with the right recording

I’m really curious about those and Ascend Acoustics Sierra LX.

 

[MattHooper]

Of course, I don’t really think there’s an answer to this question.

But if I had to nominate one possibility, I think I might say the MBL 101 X-Treme omnis.

They’re probably one of the most advanced speaker designs in terms of engineering, and taking a run at a true Omni.

And the smaller models produce the most realistic sound I personally have ever heard.

I got a chance to listen for a while on my own to the X-Tremes at an AV store in a dedicated room. Some of the tracks were amazing and it showed plenty of promise, but I had the distinct impression they were not fully dialled in. Since I have always experienced better performance from loudspeakers once I’ve had a chance to dial them in at home, I’m presuming the X-Tremes set up with great care could be incredible (and I put some stock in JV at The Absolute Sound, who has lived with the X-Tremes and says as much, given I found his descriptions of MBLs to be very accurate to my experience as well).

 

[JustJones]

View attachment 480548

Don't know if it's true but that's what the site says

MBL has a new owner. They specialize in luxury goods.

mbl has a new owner, says future is secure | Stereophile.com

German speaker and electronics manufacturer MBL Akustikgeräte has been acquired by MBL International GmbH, a new subsidiary of China’s Chow Tai Seng. MBL says the deal secures the company's long-term future and is a step toward resolving ongoing insolvency proceedings. Chow Tai Seng, whose core...

www.stereophile.com

 

[Salt]

As it is a niche product, it will survive by it's quality, or not.
(seen no distributors on DIY site, any information about that?)

 

[MattHooper]

MBL has a new owner. They specialize in luxury goods.

mbl has a new owner, says future is secure | Stereophile.com

German speaker and electronics manufacturer MBL Akustikgeräte has been acquired by MBL International GmbH, a new subsidiary of China’s Chow Tai Seng. MBL says the deal secures the company's long-term future and is a step toward resolving ongoing insolvency proceedings. Chow Tai Seng, whose core...

www.stereophile.com

Yeah, I saw that earlier.

I hope the current MBL staff can keep steering the course.

I watched in real time what happened to Thiel after Jim Thiel died, and eventually Thiel was bought by a “ lifestyle brand” company. It was the most absurd and predictably disastrous descent I’ve ever seen of a brand.
(eventually they were selling something like Bluetooth desktop speakers, and that was it).

 

[Arindal]

The ‘real thing’ is the recording

So you mean to say that only the mixing or mastering engineer could judge if the ´real thing´ sounds like their ´real thing´?

Transparency is guaranteed ( or not ) by the components measurements.

That might be the case with steps of signal processing such as amplification, ADC and DAC, as you can compare the initial signal and the output. It is certainly not the case with transducers, converting electrical signals into soundwaves, like a loudspeaker, particularly if a room is involved which is adding something to it.

Measurements of a loudspeaker are always an overly simplified and very rudimentary model of the real soundfield produced. They can be very useful to identify the root of certain phenomena in subjective tests, for improving sound quality or ensuring certain minimum specs are met. They do not allow a prediction how something will sound. This would be way to complex.

Subjective description is pretty much worthless to anyone except the individual.

I agree. Subjective description should ideally be using precise terms and descriptive language which others can decode. Within the pro audio community, such have been defined and are largely used by most people who are describing sound and sound quality. There might be exceptions, though. I personally think it is a very good idea to describe sound in words in a precise way, referring to objective data like frequency bands, level in Decibels or terms which are commonly understandable, such as precise vs. blurred vs. unstable localization.

 

[jmdesignz2]

Subjective opinion are valuable IF the listener/reviewer is critical and the reader can understand the context of the system and source material used and the reviewer has extensive experience with actual live acoustic presentations

Would be nice if we all had an open source reference of some acoustic instruments playing with detailed notes on exactly the soundstage and dynamics etc

For general example: Steinway grand playing a piece that covers the whole range of keys with maximum possible dynamic range with specific notes such as a reference tone at the beginning of XdB
then another tone at the maximum possible dB of the recording equipment and mastering chain.

 

[Duke]

Subjective description should ideally be using precise terms and descriptive language which others can decode.

I make bass guitar cabs, so I interact with a lot of bass players.

Bass players have their own subjective language which is highly useful to them. A bass player might say "I hated that cab because it was grindy", and another might say "thanks, that's exactly the sound I'm looking for".

And nobody on the bass cabinet forums comes along and says "well those terms don't mean anything because they're subjective and unproven and not precisely defined". The descriptive terms they use have utility, and that's all that matters to the professional music makers. THEY can decode those terms, even if WE would need to see the data to decode them.

 

[MattHooper]

So you mean to say that only the mixing or mastering engineer could judge if the ´real thing´ sounds like their ´real thing´?

For some reason my response to Keith’s opinion was taken down, but I went through why it contained any number of questionable assumptions.

And speaking of…re:

“Subjective description is pretty much worthless to anyone except the individual.”

I agree.

I’m surprised you agree with what is manifestly a false claim. I recognize that you followed up with more detail, but that detail makes your “ I agree” seem all the more puzzling to me.

Certainly a lexicon of subjective terms, agreed upon by a profession, can be helpful.
But to imply that outside of those bounds subjective impressions and description is “pretty much worthless to anyone except the individual” is to unreasonably denigrate or abandon one of our greatest tools: the very flexibility of language for communication.

We are successfully communicating to one another all the time through informal language, and novel combinations of words and descriptions, in a way that often works to communicate. As I pointed out in the post that was removed, in my business as a sound designer for film and TV, I’m not restricted to communicating with mixers in technical language - we also communicate all the time with informal language. And when it comes to working with clients, we exchange informal creative use of language to communicate about the sound we are hearing, what’s wrong with it or what we might want to change, which direction to go, and whether we have been successful in doing so .

There is no reason to think that the power of every day, subjective language for communication is magically excepted in the realm of talking about audio gear. And plenty of audiophiles including myself have found subjective reports from the audiophile community and some reviews to be extremely useful.

In fact I noticed in a post you made on another thread, you finished with this description: Despite from colorated reverb and dull ambience, the result in many cases is also frontal phantom sources ´in a vacuum´ instead of being embedded in the reverb.

That last sentence certainly isn’t a technical description from any lexicon I’m familiar with.
Instead, it simply seems like your attempt to put an idea or impression into words to get across the idea. And this is what we often have to do. Because there’s a hell of a lot more that we can describe about sound than we have a lexicon for. That’s why creativity is so important in language. And I don’t think we should poo-poo or wave away such attempts to do so. It’s a very impoverished approach the communication.

Cheers.

 

[Purité Audio]

I make bass guitar cabs, so I interact with a lot of bass players.

Bass players have their own subjective language which is highly useful to them. A bass player might say "I hated that cab because it was grindy", and another might say "thanks, that's exactly the sound I'm looking for".

And nobody on the bass cabinet forums comes along and says "well those terms don't mean anything because they're subjective and unproven and not precisely defined". The descriptive terms they use have utility, and that's all that matters to the professional music makers. THEY can decode those terms, even if WE would need to see the data to decode them.

Music creation is subjective we are discussing its reproduction.
Keith

 

[MattHooper]

Music creation is subjective we are discussing its reproduction.
Keith

I’m always amazed how often this false distinction is raised here, and it just misses the point.

You’re setting up a false dichotomy between creative sound description and technical sound reproduction. In practice those two domains are continuous. The language we use to describe how a sound feels or presents is just as relevant on the playback side as it is in the performance or recording.

Let’s say you have an electric bass player involved in recording an album. They’ve just recorded track one of the album, but the bass player says for track two “I’m going to choose this other bass guitar because it has a brighter tone that will punch through the mix better.”
(maybe he replaces his fender precision bass with a fender jazz bass).

That’s a perfectly reasonable way to communicate about the sound of the different bass guitars.

OK, so what happens at the reproduction end?

Well, if you play it back through an accurate system, you’ll hear the bass qualities that the musician selected: you will hear the bass guitar on the second track has a “brighter” tone - just as the musician described.

There’s no magic division where this type of perception and descriptive language breaks down on either side of the microphone and the loudspeaker.

Likewise, if you’re comparing two loudspeakers if one has tipped up high frequencies over the other, it can be described as sounding “ brighter.”
Just like comparing two bass guitars.

It all comes down to sound perception, and trying to convey to one another that perception. It is just a false division to think that there suddenly becomes a magic wall between sound creation and sound reproduction against the usefulness of exchanging such impressions.

Just as a musician can get creative with language when trying to describe their sound - think Eddie Van Halen’s famous “ brown sound” to his guitar - one can use language in any creative way that is useful for getting across the impression of ANYTHING we perceive, including the characteristics of any particular high-end audio system.

 

[Audionaut]

one can use language in any creative way that is useful for getting across the impression of ANYTHING we perceive, including the characteristics of any particular high-end audio system.

If the sender and receiver use the same decryption code in communication, this can work.
The problem is that most sound descriptions do not consistently evoke the same associations as the sender of the linguistic message intended.

 

[Palmer]

If the sender and receiver use the same decryption code in communication, this can work.
The problem is that most sound descriptions do not consistently evoke the same associations as the sender of the linguistic message intended.

"...
Return to sender, address unknown
No such number, no such zone... "

 

[Duke]

Music creation is subjective we are discussing its reproduction.
Keith

I understand the difference between the two.

My comment was on the ability of language to usefully convey a subjective qualitative impression of sound.

 

[MattHooper]

If the sender and receiver use the same decryption code in communication, this can work.

A tool is only useful if you use it. That goes for technical descriptions as much as subjective descriptions. If a mixer says to a layman audiophile “There’s about a 3.5 dB bump centered around 120 Hz with a Q of 1.2 …” The response will likely be “huh? What does that sound like?” And that goes for the engineer who doesn’t care to understand subjective descriptions.

On one extreme, you have golden eared subjectivist audiophiles who feel they have no use for measurements as a way of communicating about sound. And since they’ve decided that way of communicating is useless they of course don’t engage in a way in which they can be informed.

On the other hand you have engineer-minded folks who essentially reject the usefulness of subjective descriptions, and just as they are not inclined to use such a tool, they get no benefit.

The problem comes when somebody moves from “ this is a mode of communication I don’t care for” to “ that mode of communication is useless” …. Generalizing to everybody else…. that’s what deserves pushback.

The problem is that most sound descriptions do not consistently evoke the same associations as the sender of the linguistic message intended.

I disagree with that level of pessimism. Again, this is where the creativity of language comes in, and so long as somebody’s open to that tool, it can be more useful than I think you are implying.

As I’ve pointed out: I have had to interface with all sorts of people in the film industry, where we have to communicate perception in subjective terms. This has not required setting up some agreed-upon lexicon or “ description code” beforehand (although we have some of that) - it’s simply openness to the power and flexibility of language, and really caring about trying to understand what the other person is getting across (which will of course, often include back-and-forth communication and questioning).

Likewise, when I’m describing the sound of different loudspeakers on many audio forums it’s incredibly rare for me to receive feedback like “ I just have no idea what you’re getting at, I can’t understand the impression you’re trying to convey.” Somebody may have a different opinion from me, but rarely am I confronted with pure confusion as to what I am saying.

That tends to arise almost only here, with those who have decided subjective description is a tool they refuse to use, having decided it is effectively useless. And of course, the tool you never use is in fact useless.

 

[Arindal]

I’m surprised you agree with what is manifestly a false claim. I recognize that you followed up with more detail, but that detail makes your “ I agree” seem all the more puzzling to me.

Maybe we have a misunderstanding here. I did not agree to any claim that verbal expression of subjective impression itself is futile or understanding thereof limited to the individual. My point was that a purely subjective expression is not understandable or translatable for others, if there is no standardization of language, terms, no reference point, no agreement how to describe things and to root them in technical terms whenever possible.

To the same degree, I see the necessity to develop precise description methods for subjective sound evaluation. There are so many things to sound quality that cannot be qualified in technical terms, or cannot be even measured with the overly simplified models we have. Interestingly, this is particularly true to aspects of sound quality which many audiophiles are seeing as highest priority and which developers who simply look at flat FR graphs and low distortion figures, will never improve: Imaging, ambience, localization, transparency, subjective dynamics, bass quality and character, for example.

So my plea is to avoid very subjective language which is prone to being misinterpreted, which includes popular terms used by audiophiles, like ´warm´, ´fast´, ´slow´. I don't see it as pessimistic as @Audionaut that most descriptions are misleading, but some are. If we instead use more precise terms, or root them in either technical definition (i.e. naming affected frequency bands for example) or descriptive terms everyone understands correctly just by the means of natural hearing (like ´precisely localizable´ vs. ´blurred´), my guess would be most of subjective aspects of sound quality are actually describable and understandable.

The descriptive terms they use have utility, and that's all that matters to the professional music makers. THEY can decode those terms, even if WE would need to see the data to decode them.

Fully agree, and that is a good example. The problem I see with this: you cannot differentiate from real, exact understanding what the other one meant, to the loose associative feeling that the two are on the same page. With some audiophiles, this understanding regularly is just an illusion, in my understanding.

 

[jonfitch]

According to Spinorama.org the SunAudio Purified 4 4XP25B Fiber+Berryllium scores a 9.4 with a sub, based on their own measurements. I mean this is by far the best score that exists on the database. Of course these numbers could be bogus or overly smoothed, but it would be cool to see these reviewed to see if the numbers are legit.

 

[Moonlightshadow]

Nice arbitrary number rating.

Viewing the raw measurements, they look average to good. Certainly not exceptional. And that's just frequency response on and off axis anyway, which is far from everything needed to judge a speaker's quality.