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Post by duke on Jun 11, 2017 13:11:16 GMT -6
La Scala will definitely tell you when there's too little dynamic range, everything sounds overly-present and fairly harsh. Thank you very much for correcting my misconception!
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Post by duke on Jun 11, 2017 13:24:55 GMT -6
The NS 10 was a small high-end consumer speaker and not designed for monitoring. For a while the Yamaha NS4 was the biggest selling consumer speaker and was used for mixing as the JBL L-100 and KLH6 had previously been. The optimal setup is BOTH reference speakers and full range speakers. I did not know that about the NS-10! Very interesting! Lucky design!
Makes sense that both types of speakers are optimal.
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Post by johneppstein on Jun 11, 2017 16:07:07 GMT -6
A long time ago (back in the early to mid '7os I was involved with a groups of pretty hard core (but not themselves wealthy) audiophiles in the San Jose/Los Gatos area who I would characterize as being of the "technical" persuasion as opposed to the "Mystical" bent, if you get my distinction. At that time there was a lot of what now is regarded as "vitage" tube gear being cleared out of peoples garages, research labs in the tech industries of the budding Silicon Valley, and many of the area's radio stations were getting rid of old "junk" tube gear in favor of the new, fancy, High Tech broadcast gear that was taking the broadcast market by storm, and which was hitting the monster San Jose flea market, one of the largest in the world. My friend Dave Stafford (who was, among other things, a real sales whiz) and I were hitting the Flea and occasional garage sales, as well as the many electronics surplus outlets that were thriving at that time and picking up old, "junky" Dynaco, MacIntosh, and more esotectic gear like Ampex ands other professional tape machines for peanuts, taking them home, cleaning them up and going over them, and then Dave was selling them to wealthy doctors, lawyers, and other well off customers for a nice profit (Unfortunately neither of us yet knew enough about recording gear to have the sense to jump on the 4 RCA BA6 compressors and 2 Fairchild 670s being dumped by a local radio station, asking $50 each. When I mentioned it acouple years later to Dan Alexander he almost crapped his pants....)
At the same time we were involved with some very astute people who were into the audiophile gear modding scene, developing mods for Dyna and Mac stuff partly be electronics design principles and partly by auditioning higher quality parts substitutions by conducting listening tests, as well as listening sessions to set up some fairly advanced (for that time) and complex listening systems. (At one time Dave had a triamped stereo system with Phase Linear, Harmon Kardon Citation, and MacIntosh amps, tube crossover, Janzen electrostatic tweeters I.M. Fried mini monitors in the mids, and Altec 15s in Karlsons on the low end, which we set up by conducting live, blind AB sessions employing a classical lutenist/guitarist playing behind a screen and being recording to 15 ips 2-track tape, and being switched live between his playing live and the recording of his playing, while we worked on balancing the crossover and setting the precise angles of the various speaker components to match the sonics and imaging. We would spend hours comparing types of capacitors in preamp circuits and determining just the right gradations of dsamping materiaol to pack a transmission line subwoofer.
We also, of course, owned and had access to a lot of pretty good test gear, but in most cases final decisions were arrived at by listening tests.
A couple years later after I moved up to the Berkeley/SF part of the Bay area I began getting involved in the recording and sound reinforcement sides of audio, but you guys know all about what that's like.
Anyway, to get to the point (yes, I do have a point to this ramble), these various experiences have (I believe) given me something of a perspective to comment on the topic at hand. My feeling are that many of the more technically educated and less "mystical" people in the audiophile area do in fact have ears that are as highly trained and developed as the best ears in the recording profession, but they are trained to listen in different ways than recording engineers and producers are.
Recordists (to use a more general term) are trained to listen in ways that are related to the construction of the musical/audio work. They are a lot more aware of techiques used to obtain specific types of results and the effects of various methods of processing employed to arrive at certain ends in the creation of the work.
Audiophiles, OTOH, are frequently ignorant of much of the production process (with the exception on some cases of the more "purist" forms of recording employed to create (for lack of a better term) "documentary" recordings of live performances, usually classical or acoustic jazz.) The things that are important to an audiophiles listerning are euphony and detail. Sometimes "detail" gets taken to a much greater degree than that envisioned by the actual creators of the works. Audiophiles are also often inclined to take certain aspects of a recording at face value artistically, whereas recordist will look as such things from a more technical viewpoint - an example would be the somewhat odd panning choices (from a current viewpoint) found on many earlier stereo recordings, where a recordist will recognize that they're artifacts resulting from the limitations of the technology of the day, whereas the audiphile will often tend to take the finished recording as it is and view the panning "choices" as part of the artistic statement.
There are many different forms of listening, and most people employ different ones at different times without any real awareness of it. Both audiophiles and recordists are aware of critical listening modes to a much greater extent than the masses. A smaller number are aware that there are in fact a number of different modes of critical listening which are dictated by the actual listening situation and the task at hand. (One of my criticisms of much of the amateur A/B testing that has become so popular in certain circles to attempt to "prove" various ideas and viewpoints is that blind testing imposes its own peculiar form of listening on the subject that biases the results in the direction of uncertainty for most people, for one example). While the concept of different listening modes equating to actual different forms of processing by the human auditory system was commonly dismissed as "unscientific" hogwash by most people until fairly recently (and quite a number of people still hold that opinion), scientific evidence for different listening modes actually involving different types of auditory processing has started to gain increasing credibility due to the techical advances in scanning real time activity in the brain. Some things evoke electrical activity in different parts of the brain that others don't. What's really interesting to me is that some of this evidence is giving scientific credence to assertions made by some people that were formerely commonly dismissed as "expectation bias" or superstition, such as the fact that infomation in the near ultrasonic has a definite but difficult to define effect on our audio perception, in spite of the fact that the frequencies involved are "above the range of human hearing" and can't be reliably detected by the average blind test - but an MRI scan clearly shows stimulation of areas of the brain by program containing ultrasonic information that do NOT show activity on exposure to the exact same program that has been bandwidth limited to exclude everything above 20 or 22 kHz.
It's a fascinating area and I think that there is much to be learned as we develop the technology to study aspects of perception that have previously been relegated to the realm of folklore and "superstition".
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on Jun 11, 2017 16:07:24 GMT -6
The NS 10 was a small high-end consumer speaker and not designed for monitoring. For a while the Yamaha NS4 was the biggest selling consumer speaker and was used for mixing as the JBL L-100 and KLH6 had previously been. The optimal setup is BOTH reference speakers and full range speakers. Bob NS 10 wasn't a highend speaker by any means it was originally part of Yamaha's cheapest all in one system. The originals were built so cheaply the rear baffle wasn't glued just stapled ! It wasn't till engineering started asking reps that the NS10 became its own SKU!
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Post by Bob Olhsson on Jun 11, 2017 16:14:20 GMT -6
I first saw them in high end hi fi shops next to NS1000s. I'm not saying that's not the case but I never heard of that system before.
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Post by johneppstein on Jun 11, 2017 16:15:19 GMT -6
Any small speaker's low end will be increased by boundary reinforcement from placement on a large console meter bridge, but the NS-10 seems to have been specifically designed with just such reinforcement in mind.
The NS-10 was originally intended to be a cheap "hi-fi" speaker designed to sit on a bookshelf against a wall. And it still is, and not a particularly good one, either.
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Post by rowmat on Jun 11, 2017 17:09:00 GMT -6
The NS 10 was a small high-end consumer speaker and not designed for monitoring. For a while the Yamaha NS4 was the biggest selling consumer speaker and was used for mixing as the JBL L-100 and KLH6 had previously been. The optimal setup is BOTH reference speakers and full range speakers. I'm pretty sure I saw an article many years ago that predated NS10's referring to using Acoustic Research AR7's or AR8's as small control room reference monitors in the early to mid 1970's. These were also consumer bookshelf speakers. Does this ring a bell?
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Post by Bob Olhsson on Jun 11, 2017 17:48:05 GMT -6
I understand that they were common in England but I never saw them in the US.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Jun 11, 2017 20:13:31 GMT -6
I first saw them in high end hi fi shops next to NS1000s. I'm not saying that's not the case but I never heard of that system before. The NS1000 was years later, it seams that the engineers at Yamaha were embarrassed that the Crappy NS10 was the new reference and they wanted to show they could make a truelly greT speaker, the NS1000!
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on Jun 11, 2017 20:17:01 GMT -6
The NS 10 was a small high-end consumer speaker and not designed for monitoring. For a while the Yamaha NS4 was the biggest selling consumer speaker and was used for mixing as the JBL L-100 and KLH6 had previously been. The optimal setup is BOTH reference speakers and full range speakers. I'm pretty sure I saw an article many years ago that predated NS10's referring to using Acoustic Research AR7's or AR8's as small control room reference monitors in the early to mid 1970's. These were also consumer bookshelf speakers. Does this ring a bell? View AttachmentNot sure which AR it was but the early AR acustic suspension speakers did end up as the common high reference, they were one of the most popular home hifi speakers at the time, this pre dates Teledynes purchase of AR which is when I think that ad is from.
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Post by Bob Olhsson on Jun 12, 2017 19:41:16 GMT -6
We used AR3s at Motown.
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Post by adamjbrass on Jun 16, 2017 8:43:59 GMT -6
I have learned that, Audio Production is much harder than being an Audiophile. You only have to listen when you are an Audiophile.
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