P.S.: After spending 5 hours at AXPONA today, in my opinion the Live Edge Dipoles sound better than 95% of the rooms at the show.
The Bitches Brews, 98%. Every system in the same league cost over $100K.
I took 5 GenZ's to the show - my kids and their friends, all really enjoyed it. I asked my son: "How many rooms sounded better than what you're used to hearing at home?"
"Oh... maybe two."
The Bitches Brews, 98%. Every system in the same league cost over $100K.
I took 5 GenZ's to the show - my kids and their friends, all really enjoyed it. I asked my son: "How many rooms sounded better than what you're used to hearing at home?"
"Oh... maybe two."
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I like that idea, Flanagangster/ported sub...might need a new name for it which would be up to you of course
AKM, my favorite DAC as well, why I bought the E70 Velvet, maybe someday I can try the Danville unit, might be happy with something less but still great. I am more into building things and the music I listen to than searching for the holy grail in how it sounds knowing I can get very close for a very reasonable amount of money.
I do like a great coax driver, used a few over the years, car audio mostely and my son build a TL for his high school senior project using some nice ones.
Rick
AKM, my favorite DAC as well, why I bought the E70 Velvet, maybe someday I can try the Danville unit, might be happy with something less but still great. I am more into building things and the music I listen to than searching for the holy grail in how it sounds knowing I can get very close for a very reasonable amount of money.
I do like a great coax driver, used a few over the years, car audio mostely and my son build a TL for his high school senior project using some nice ones.
Rick
I've started building the baffles for my Perry Marshall Dipoles.....more updates to come....
Love it! Great to introduce your family to the wonderful world of home audio that does not have to cost a fortune!
Reminds me of when I took my son to CES in Vegas back when I had just stopped competing in car audio SQ comps. I had pulled my $20k system out to sell and help finance the rapid growth of my sound deadening business and put in around $2k in retail, home audio drivers, 2-way and two 10" subs, 5 channel amp, etc...for under $1k. After about an hour he asked to go back and listen to our system in the Tacoma, then said he liked it much better, it was very good. Went back in, listened to a few more, then stopped to see Dr Edgar whom I knew but my son did not know I did, after handshakes and hugs we listened to his Titan horns and huge sub, total system including DAC, digital player, turntable, preamp, amps.... was under $20k and my son looked at me and asked why people bought all that other crap, when the Edgarhorn system was so much better, I agreed completely with him.
(I prefer OB most of all but also love horns well done which I have had in home and car audio)
Rick
Reminds me of when I took my son to CES in Vegas back when I had just stopped competing in car audio SQ comps. I had pulled my $20k system out to sell and help finance the rapid growth of my sound deadening business and put in around $2k in retail, home audio drivers, 2-way and two 10" subs, 5 channel amp, etc...for under $1k. After about an hour he asked to go back and listen to our system in the Tacoma, then said he liked it much better, it was very good. Went back in, listened to a few more, then stopped to see Dr Edgar whom I knew but my son did not know I did, after handshakes and hugs we listened to his Titan horns and huge sub, total system including DAC, digital player, turntable, preamp, amps.... was under $20k and my son looked at me and asked why people bought all that other crap, when the Edgarhorn system was so much better, I agreed completely with him.
(I prefer OB most of all but also love horns well done which I have had in home and car audio)
Rick
Interesting.
What were, in your opinion, those few speakers that did sound similar or better than The Bitches Brews ?
Perry,
In the over 200 hotel listening rooms, do you have an idea of what percentage of the systems used FIR DSP ?
How many of those hotel rooms would you say you would acoustically prefer over your home's rooms?
What percentage of the music you listened to was the same or better than what you you're used to hearing at home ?
Art
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FIR DSP? Maybe 1-2%. No idea, really, but that crowd doesn't tend to roll that direction anyway. I didn't even get close to hitting every room, just the ones that somehow caught my attention.
I liked the sound of some of the larger rooms closer to the ground floor. My own listening room is 12' by 14' which is rather small, but better than the average hotel room.
I'd say maybe 2-3 booths were comparable to what I hear at home. Avant Garde horns from Germany and a set of huge ribbons by Clarysis. And Estelon. All over $100K. @Zvu @weltersys
Referencing the Danville active DSP vs passive demo above with the Magnepan MG 1.7s, these huge ribbons pictured below with passive crossovers might likewise have been quite a bit better triamped with a good DSP crossover.
It pained me to see the Clarisys ribbons flapping in and out with the turntable rumble. They sounded great - Diana Krall sounded 15 feet tall - but it was clear to me the system was technically far from optimum.
And by the way... I have a MiniDSP Flex Eight, a WiiM streamer, and two completely restomodded Phase Linear 400 amps (restomod considerably better than the original).
I don't have $4000 Danville Signal crossovers with state of the art DACs; I don't have $90,000 monoblock amplifiers etc. Total dollar cost of entire system less than $10K. My time is worth something of course. But I thoroughly enjoyed building them and I love the satisfaction of knowing how something works down to its individual components; and having been in charge of all the design choices.
I liked the sound of some of the larger rooms closer to the ground floor. My own listening room is 12' by 14' which is rather small, but better than the average hotel room.
I'd say maybe 2-3 booths were comparable to what I hear at home. Avant Garde horns from Germany and a set of huge ribbons by Clarysis. And Estelon. All over $100K. @Zvu @weltersys
Referencing the Danville active DSP vs passive demo above with the Magnepan MG 1.7s, these huge ribbons pictured below with passive crossovers might likewise have been quite a bit better triamped with a good DSP crossover.
It pained me to see the Clarisys ribbons flapping in and out with the turntable rumble. They sounded great - Diana Krall sounded 15 feet tall - but it was clear to me the system was technically far from optimum.
And by the way... I have a MiniDSP Flex Eight, a WiiM streamer, and two completely restomodded Phase Linear 400 amps (restomod considerably better than the original).
I don't have $4000 Danville Signal crossovers with state of the art DACs; I don't have $90,000 monoblock amplifiers etc. Total dollar cost of entire system less than $10K. My time is worth something of course. But I thoroughly enjoyed building them and I love the satisfaction of knowing how something works down to its individual components; and having been in charge of all the design choices.
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I appreciate, very much, how you do things, as in all things the cost of improvements once beyond a certain threshold are exponential, $10 is plenty enough to DIY/Restore buy and match up a system immensely better than most will ever hear. The DIY part is the most satisfying to me personally.,tes things for me.
I also have the WIIM but the Pro Plus, the Pro was all I really needed but just wanted to hear the Plus DAC and have it in case I needed to do a few different setup tests along the way, got it on sale for a very good price, I have no plans to "upgrade it".
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Those horns are beautiful indeed but $$$$$$ did you ever hear Edgarhorn Titans? They were not pretty unless a lot of effort put in but amazing and around $12k. Last audio show I went to was a long time ago and they were by far the best at the show but a big margin.
The Tactrix design was originally being developed, under great pressure to say the least, by the Nazi as a weapon. I know the basic but pretty deep story on them directly from Dr Edgar who was my friend. I am sure I can post it here, make a new thread on it if best, etc....let me know if interested.
I always wanted a set but simply never had the right space for them so settled on the highly upgraded Slimline model and loved them.
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Rick
I also have the WIIM but the Pro Plus, the Pro was all I really needed but just wanted to hear the Plus DAC and have it in case I needed to do a few different setup tests along the way, got it on sale for a very good price, I have no plans to "upgrade it".
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Those horns are beautiful indeed but $$$$$$ did you ever hear Edgarhorn Titans? They were not pretty unless a lot of effort put in but amazing and around $12k. Last audio show I went to was a long time ago and they were by far the best at the show but a big margin.
The Tactrix design was originally being developed, under great pressure to say the least, by the Nazi as a weapon. I know the basic but pretty deep story on them directly from Dr Edgar who was my friend. I am sure I can post it here, make a new thread on it if best, etc....let me know if interested.
I always wanted a set but simply never had the right space for them so settled on the highly upgraded Slimline model and loved them.
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Rick
The continued lack of FIR DSP processing when it's cost has dropped to well under that of good transducers is glaringly obvious as a technical "fail", but as you point out, "that crowd doesn't tend to roll that direction".
The "listen with your eyes" mentality appears to be still alive and well as ever.
Thanks for the report!
I can understand the appeal of Clarisys. If I thought I could DIY a full length ribbon driver, I would. Its nice to know based on your work that I don't need to. But I''m hung up on how big a room I need to let on OB shine and have been looking at cardioid instead. If yours are happy in a 12'x14' room, I should reconsider. The critical thing seems to be adequate space between the speaker and the front wall. The nulls to the side mean you can place them almost right up against the side walls?
This seems like something that deserves its own thread and if you write one, please post a link here so everyone can see.
The useful way I have found to think about this is there are "artisanal" products and there are "technological" products. Nassim Nicholas Taleb made this distinction clear to me.
Artisanal products are things like furniture and wine and homes and expensive watches and antique cars. They retain their resale value and sometimes increase in value.
Technological products are things like computers that are subject to Moore's Law (computers 2x in speed and 1/2 in price every 2 years) which drives the resale value down exponentially over time. A 10 year old computer is worthless. You can't even give it away.
Speakers in general are a decidedly artisanal product - let's say 2/3 artisanal, only 1/3 technological at most. You see this in resale value, a set of Wilson or B&W speakers will always fetch at least 1/3 of their original price and sometimes half or more.
DSP is the technological part of a speaker and is definitely subject to Moore's Law.
From a marketing perspective that's a lot of what's at work here. Not that people think of resale value when they buy a speaker, but that high end audiophiles do not think of their purchases as "technology" like NVIDIA chips or a Macbook Pro. All you have to do to figure this out is read Stereophile or Absolute Sound magazine.
So yes, the market is resistant to "throwing technology at the problem" and only a fraction of people are geeked out by a Dutch & Dutch 8C or a Purifi woofer or Bliesma tweeter or Genelec speaker that's almost ruler flat with a near perfect CD radiation pattern.
It IS "listen with your eyes" and this is also evident in the signage at the show. I didn't see a single booth at AXPONA that had extensive technical posters explaining all of the ingenious engineering. Even though some products DO have ingenious engineering. So apparently for me a speaker design is a cerebral, abstract exercise in design elegance that mostly only engineers on the DIYAudio forum deeply appreciate. So here we are having this conversation.
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The critical factor is the space between the speaker and the front wall. For me 3-4 feet sounds great.
The response of my systems 75 degrees off axis is -10dB and since the speakers are toed in, you can put them almost right next to the side walls and there's no problem.
"The useful way I have found to think about this is there are "artisanal" products and there are "technological" products. Nassim Nicholas Taleb made this distinction clear to me."
Those artisanal products are the result of craftsmanship. An artist has to be a craftsman in order to render his vision. The same is true of the technological products. They are the result of teams working with their hands with a high degree of skill in the pursuit of excellence and to realize a vision- even though the tools are all software and the only thing one works directly with his hands are a keyboard and mouse.
Those artisanal products are the result of craftsmanship. An artist has to be a craftsman in order to render his vision. The same is true of the technological products. They are the result of teams working with their hands with a high degree of skill in the pursuit of excellence and to realize a vision- even though the tools are all software and the only thing one works directly with his hands are a keyboard and mouse.
Very well put, art is in ones vision and then creating it in whatever form that fits the desired outcome.
That is one of the main, if not main attraction to live edge slab OB speakers, form and function and a level of natural art in the wood beyond most anything humans can even come close to. Anyone with a good router, circle jig, saw, straight edge, etc can build them for not a lot of cost or labor or have them done to there plans after picking the design and materials for a very reasonable cost.
The more spent when buying higher end speakers it seems you are paying far more for the art, materials, prestige, etc than actual performance of the product.
That is one of the main, if not main attraction to live edge slab OB speakers, form and function and a level of natural art in the wood beyond most anything humans can even come close to. Anyone with a good router, circle jig, saw, straight edge, etc can build them for not a lot of cost or labor or have them done to there plans after picking the design and materials for a very reasonable cost.
The more spent when buying higher end speakers it seems you are paying far more for the art, materials, prestige, etc than actual performance of the product.
Tom Perazella reports on the Danville Signal 2in 8out DSP system here in a Boston Audio Society zoom meeting:
@Subsonic1050
@Subsonic1050
Very interesting product—the Danville Nexus seems like a great deal at $4K for a top-of-the-line DSP/Crossover all in one. It features four AKM 4499EX chips, providing eight channels, making it perfect for a three-way stereo setup with subs. What’s not to like, right?
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For those interested in the genesis of the Danville DSP https://audioxpress.com/article/r-d-stories-a-dsp-audio-processor-at-the-heart