There is frequency response, including resonance, and there is distortion, which 'muddies' things up and makes instruments hard to pick out in say an orchestra.
Frequency response is there at all sound levels but distorion tends to be less at low volumes. The lowest distortion I ever heard at decent power was from profession horn drivers. one foot long aluminium cast mid range horn, JBL bullet style tweeter. Twin 15" bass units and IIRC a pair of 8" lower mid range units. Ultimate disco speakers.
But you can get very good results out of a 3 ways system with a dome mid range and tweeter. Distortion comes when you are pushing your small upper frequency units too hard, because the are are only two units and the crossover frequency is a compromise
Colouration is simply a fact of life, and in the end people just tune most it out in a given environment. Unless there are very peaky resonances like what you get with cardboard cones, or an undamped metal dome etc.
In the end that is in fact it. People are massively influenced by marketing. They don't want to admit they paid £4000 for two pieces of shit or that a home built pair at £150 is in fact 'better'. I spent years designing and testing and listening to audio kit, and learnt how to relate what the test equipment said to what I was hearing.
And I have related my conclusions., Today all amps sound alike, and are essentially so near perfect as makes no difference. and a good CD beats vinyl hands down, and is pretty much perfect also. Bad stuff happens in the recording studio and in the loudspeakers, but recording studios that are now 100% digital are pretty much free of the dreadful recording quality that recording engineers with no technical background used to make.
So the weakest link in the chain is the loudspeakers. You simply pick which flaw bothers you least and run with that.
**Absolute and complete nonsense. Insanity, in fact.
**Then that is not necessarily high fidelity. It is something else entirely. Accuracy is vital if a claim is made for a product to be high fidelity.
**Again: Not necessarily high fidelity. Something like a Quad ESL63, suitably arranged in a room, IS capable of high fidelity reproduction. The LS3/5A cannot achieve such a thing. Ever.
The LS3/5A may sound pleasant to an uneducated listener, but it is not an accurate loudspeaker.
**I have a couple of Quad 303 amps here. I also possess some SOTA test equipment. I will check on your claims about the Quad 303. Please advise of the levels and frequencies you tested the Quad 303 at to arrive at the claims of crossover distortion. I assume it was in the region of
20mW and 20kHz or so. That has been my standard of uncovering crossover distortion.
**As were mine. My Bailey T-lines (fitted with Radford crossovers) were fabulous speakers back in the day. Very accurate, as measured with some primitive test equipment.
Not if coming from an informed view. Informed preferably by live performances and decent hifi systems.
Even if you have no reference, I don't get too upset by people who buy by label (Bose etc.). It's their money. Internet buying and lack of demonstration facilities has made making an informed choice more difficult I suppose. Hats off to Richer Sounds in this regard.
Is hifi 'low distortion'? If so, it sounds OK as a start. I've never known what the term HiFi actually means.
Personally, if you've taken the trouble to reach an informed opinion, I don't care.
That is a bit low power wise. It will still be in class A at that point.
Try 10KHz and do a distortion versus (log) power all the way up. IIRC it peaks at around 0.5%. But it was all 50 years ago..
The problem with those amps is simply that the Class B operation switches off one half of the amp, and it takes a finite time to switch it back on, due to parasitic capacitance and other delays. Until it does that the internal gain is pretty low.
Once faster transistors and in particular FETS were in use, that pushed the distortion into the ultrasonic band, and clever circuit design (which I used, on one amp, but thermal stability was never reliable) could keep the 'off' half of the amplifier sufficiently ON to remove the effect completely .
Of course class 'D' amplifiers which were pie in the sky when I was designing stuff, don't have any crossover distortion at all. They have other problems instead!
The Sony amplifier I still have from the 1990s uses that technique, with massively integrated output chips so the thermal stability is more than adequate.
As far as I am concerned it is far moire 'perfect' than my speakers, at a fraction of the price of those speakers.
It really depends on what music you listen to. Some people like to hear their guts rumble with organ music. T lines do well on that. Other people like the thump of the bass guitar and drums. T-lies are 'orrible for that. You need a massive concrete bass horn or bass reflex to do justice to that. Then again if you are listening to just a few instruments, like the average rock or jazz track, intermodulation distortion wont affect the subjective effect too much, but if its orchestral music with a choir or full violin section. low intermodulation distortion will turn it from a 'sound' to 'i can hear each voice and each violin' sort of clarity. That's where an ESL scores at low volumes. At high volumes use horns.
Then as far as resonances go, the spoken male voice can sound very 'woody' or 'boxy'. And mid and upper ranges 'cardboardy' if the units have paper cones and the cabinets are badly damped.
KEF pioneered 'non paper' cones with Bextrene, today you can have carbon fibre for bass units and titanium for tweeters and even cheap speakers are really pretty good.
As the other half of my experience was with the exact opposite of hi fi, i..e. guitar amplifiers and loudspeakers. I learnt by exposure to gross examples, what highly resonant loudspeakers and cabinets, especially driven from very high impedances, sounded like, as well as high levels of particular forms of distortion. And even the differences between Ceramic, and AlNiCo magnets - and yes there is a difference, though why that is I haven't worked out.
In an electric guitar the loudspeaker and it's cabinet are analogues of the soundbox of an acoustic guitar. The last thing you want is to accurately reproduce the soulless nature of the strings and pickups. Direct injection into the mixing desk is not the way to go, unless you can use multiple reverberators to create a synthetic 'sound box' inside the effects section of your electronics.
One thing that theory taught me, is the relationship between frequency response and impulse response. Tap a bass unit in a cabinet, and if its a dull 'thunk' it will be a good unit, if you can hear a cardboardy sort of 'doink' it will do well for a guitar.
I think the confusion arises of of the words used in an attempt to describe a subjective experience.
What I understand by 'accuracy' is what is also expressed as 'clarity' and is typically the ability to separate individual instruments and voices out of a musical piece.
The best way I can express it is that some loudspeakers turn the 'sound of an orchestra' into 'the sound of a lot of separate instruments all playing together' My theoretical understanding of that is that it almost certainly reflects low levels of distortion in the loudspeakers, so the cones and spiders are not reaching the limits of their travel. You wont hear that level of distortion on a single instrument, but you will subliminally become aware of it when there are a lot of instruments and the intermodulation products will produce frequencies that weren't there in the original recording. It sounds 'muddy'.
At low power the electrostatic speaker is one of the best attempts to reduce this, but they are fragile and limited. At high power you simply cannot do better than horns, because those impedance match the compression drivers to the air, so that very small (and hence more linear) excursions of the diaphraghms produce much louder sounds. The problem with horns is controlling the resonances within them. They are clean, but coloured.
And that brings me to the second part of loudspeaker design. Resonances or 'colouration'. If you 'like the sound of those speakers' rather than 'like the sound of the orchestra,played through those speakers' you have colouration. Resonances - narrow peaks and troughs in the frequency response.
Many people actually like that. They like 'the sound' of their
*speakers*. I personally don't.
But I am prepared to trade a little of it for low distortion.
*shrug*. Ive heard Bose. Its indifferent mid fi crap, but it looks good in your minimalist Scandinavian room made out of 'Norwegian wood, isn't it good?'
What you are looking for is accurate frequency response and low distortion. Then you hear the music, not the kit.
Accurate frequency response is hard to achieve in a domestic room, especially if its 'modern' and has hard walls and no curtains or carpets.
The best you can hope for is that you hear the room's resonances, not the loudspeaker's.
But low distortion is achievable in a domestic setting. But unless you understand what it sounds like, you probably wont actually like it. It doesn't sound expensive. It isn't something you can hear, its something that you *don't hear*.
Matey is very proud of his electrostatics and very disparaging of his KEFs. Ive heard both, and sure at low volumes ESLs are great if you don't mind the absence of bass, but I do. And I like to turn stuff up. Led Zep are not Led Zep at 60dbA. You cant do that on ESLs., You can get a bit closer with KEFs. KEFS are low colouration speakers, but not that great at distortion except at rather low power. Nice easy listening for classical, but not for a party, playing rock
Mine are worth what I paid for them, A couple of hundred tops. I could listen to them all day, and did.
Now awaiting putting back in cabinets
But for real gut thumping rock, NOTHING beats upper mid and high frequency horns and as many big badass bass units as you can screw into as large a cabinet as possible and probably some kevlar or carbon fibre lower mid range units as well. Its hard to get a horn to go much below
1.5Khz, and big bass units will crap out at around 500Hz, so there's an octave missing in the middle unless you go four way.
Use separate amps for each driver and electronic crossovers - far easier to get 'perfect' crossovers without coils in the way. And if you think that's sounding like a typical PA rig from a rock concert, yes it, is, just optimised for studio use rather than stadium,
ESLs are not going to get you 115dB of clean clear disco/rock music on the dance floor.
Well haven't dome that as such but more than the once I've been in a BBC OB van next to both Ely Cathedral and Kings college chapel and the audio sound field recreated in the vans was just like being in the building! On quite a wide range of materiel small orchestral ensemble large choir and Organ and solo singer and yep!, they didn't cause any trouser flapping on organ pedals but the rest was stunningly good.
If thats inaccurate then its a bloody fine inaccuracy i like:)..
**I've listened to the LS3/5A in several locations, compared to several other quality speakers (more and less expensive) with a wide range of music. At no time could the LS3/5A:
Supply a credible image.
Deliver anything resembling a bass response.
Deliver a reasonably flat response.
A rather muted HF response.
I suggest you compare the LS3/5A to, well, anything, but a pair of ESL63s would instantly show where all the flaws of the LS3/5A lie.
Look, I get the attraction to the LS3/5A. It exhibits a warm, woolly, poorly imaged sound. Some people like that, when listening to an extremely limited range of music. Whilst I may not like it and others may, the price of the LS3/5A is beyond reason.
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