Nice video of a talk at CIRMMT Distinguished Lectures in Sound and Technology in Music - May 2015 (McGill University).
Good discussion of speaker measurements and matching of "subjective measurements" with the objective. https://youtu.be/zrpUDuUtxPM 12:00 - chart of blind test vs. sighted test 14:00 - more influence from sighted listening 16:30 - "imagined differences between speaker wires", "complete marketing" 21:00 - ability to listen "through" rooms; differentiate room from speaker contributions 28:00 - importance of off-axis performance (KEF 105.2) and room 32:00 - importance of position and "corruption of all bass frequencies in small rooms" 34:30 - importance of better loudspeaker (rather than just EQ) 36:30 - "cold scientific measures" can correlate numbers with perceived quality 38:00 - interesting comments on "room equalization", transition frequency, contributions of speakers vs. room 42:00 - complexity of measurements of rooms - live production vs. reproduction, importance of hardware & software 44:00 - "Science in the service of art is our business." 45:30 - "Variable recordings" due to "circle of confusion" with poor speakers in control rooms. 48:00 - Consumer Reports reviews meaningless - "doing it wrong" 50:00 - 0.86 correlation between objective anechoic data and subjective evaluation of 70 speakers 51:00 - Consumer Reports vs. their tests! 52:00 - "Audiophile" $2000 speakers put through the test... Flatter and smoother better. 53:30 - "Whose opinion can we trust" - only selected with normal hearing then trained, then retail sales people, then audio reviewers 56:00 - Relative ranking between groups still good (so long as we know what we're listening to) 57:00 - "Olive's predictive algorithm" - flat, constant radiation pattern, no resonance, 1/20-octave better than 1/3-octave, bass performance 30% of subjective 1:00:00 - can we predict quality from manufacturer's specs? 1:02:00 - speakers are minimum phase devices - explanation. Active speakers is the "future". 1:03:00 - point of diminishing returns in speaker quality, example of $1800 good and $11,000 bad electrostatic speaker 1:05:00 - $24000/pair example... "Meets spec but no prizes", "Disappointing at the price"; then $16000 +/- 1dB speaker (discussion about consistency, esp small companies) 1:09:00 - sound today "way better" than 10 years ago and certainly 20 years ago... due to measurements, standardization 1:10:00 - importance of the recording, measuring neutrality 1:12:00 - measurement of JBL M2 in different rooms (transition zone 200Hz) Clearly all the stuff we argue about are relatively small potatoes compared to speaker / room issues... Archimago's Musings: (archimago.blogspot.com) A 'more objective' audiophile blog. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimago's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2207 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=103942 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
