"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
Shortwave Sportfishing wrote:
On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:30:11 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
Doug Kanter wrote:
"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
How's it sound? When I was in the biz, Bose speakers were mainly
attractive
to guys who wore backwards Caterpillar hats 24x7, and listened to
nothing
but ZZ Top at full volume.
I'm no longer a Bose fan. They're too 'bassy' for me. But, my
hearing is not all that
great, so I need the treble boosted way up.

The only adjustment for bass and treble is on the subwoofer. I'd
never recommend the
set to anyone. But, it will play the Organ symphony loud enough to
get the neighbors
out of bed!
Part of the problem is that most production speakers are built for
moer bass response than is absolutely necessary. Bose speakers are
built with broader frequency response than most production speakers,
so I find that comment interesting.
Crappy ones are. Decent speakers should at least have the potential to
create nice, tightly controlled bass that doesn't sound out of
proportion to the rest of the sound. The problem is that there are too
many lousy salespeople out there. A customer walks into the stereo
store and says "According to Consumer Reports, my brother who's a
shmexpert, or some dice I rolled on my kitchen table, I don't need
more than 20 or 30 watts for my living room". The lousy salesman is
too lazy or dumb to explain reality to the customer, so he yesses the
customer, and another underpowered system goes out the door. Just
enough power to make the woofers move, but nowhere near enough to stop
them tightly. So, they sound fat and puky.

At the store where I worked, part of the interview process was a group
meeting with new candidates. First, we'd try and find out if they
really understood things like damping factor. If not, the next step
was to try and determine if they were spongy enough to absorb and
understand a lot of information really fast. If not, we'd politely
reject them and suggest that they apply at Lechemere or some other big
box store, so they wouldn't pollute any of the other stores like ours.

Bose speakers sound too "bassy"? Bose? If they do, it must be an
artificial electronic kind of bass, because there's nothing
"speakerwise" in those tiny little speakers that can reproduce the low
tones. Bose speakers have to be the biggest scam ever perpetrated on
the low-end audiophile market. Well, wait, there's always that $1200
plastic table radio with CD player Bose is pushing on TV these days.

When you want to shop for speakers, bring along some pipe organ music
on a CD, especially pipe organ music with tones in the low pedal
registers, preferably being played in a cathedral. No cheesy MP3s
recorded at 22,050 Hz, please.

To reproduce really big sound, you need really big speakers. The laws
of physics have not been repealed. You want some old Klipschorns,
Altec-Lansings, or some large electrostatics and a top-drawer subwoofer
with a serious adjustable crossover network. Little speakers=little
sounds.
It's not quite that simple. First of all, there are so many instruments
that make bass, that it's difficult to design any speaker that will
properly reproduce all of them. Just within the category of upright or
electric bass, there are a myriad of sounds to be dealt with. Listen to
a handful of albums with Ron Carter, the jazz acoustic bassist, and
you'll notice that he created lots of different sounds, depending on how
he was playing, and which bass he was using at the time. If the music
required playing in the upper registers of the instrument, a speaker
which makes wonderful low bass (below the open A, for instance) will
often muddy the higher registers, which means it's also going to sound
off with cello, bassoon and a segment of a piano's range.

Then, the mind either helps or hinders what you hear. My bass guitar
cabinet has two 10" speakers, and there's plenty of power behind it, but
in some rooms, it's still challenged because there are harmonics getting
lost somewhere, and they're necessary for the mind to complete the
picture of what you're hearing. Sometimes, what helps is totally
counterintuitive: Turning up the treble.

As far as speaker size, that's not exactly true. If you're able to see
(from where you're sitting) what electric bassists are using nowadays,
you'll notice they're mostly using arrays of 8", 10" or 12" speakers in
smaller boxes. 15" drivers aren't so popular any more. The goal is to
move a certain amount of air. It doesn't really matter how you do it.

Geek.


I suspect Doug listens to music entirely different from 90% of what I
choose. It's easy enough to select some serious music that fully tests the
abilities of sound reproduction equipment to play back almost all of what
you might hear in a live performance, and that is my criteria.

If I had been lucky enough to hear Dennis Brain in a live performance, I
would have expected it to sound very much like the recordings of his I
have, but a bit more spacious and open. I'm not interested in what an
"electronic" horn might sound like.

Live performance in which theatre? With which microphones (if any) assisting
the orchestra? With you sitting where? What time of year (which determines
how much people are wearing, and therefore how much sound they'll absorb)?
Recordings are as close to reality as they can be, but like photographs,
they're subject to interference with the reality.