Speakers are a musical instrument

[karatestu]

Quote from the doc 2012


User avatarDr Bunsen Honeydew
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Re: Another speaker project
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Post by Dr Bunsen Honeydew » Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:52 am

You are really being given the ignorant bollocks treatment at AoS. A good speaker is the one that plays the music in tune with a clean information window and acceptable dynamics. As far as I am concerned it boils down to one thing - does it play music the way *you* want it. You can get cheap little critters like the JPW that sing and with some mods are really good. Yet you can pay thousands to get flat frequency response and neutral presentation and all the other crapology you are being fed with at AoS and the music is dead.

Remember a speaker is a musical instrument, designed to reproduce / produce tonality, it will *always* contribute to that tonality. When everything else is right surprisingly this is the least problem, but still better to contribute less, but not at the expense of the original tonality and music



The more i mess about with diy speakers the more this quote makes sense. My marantz semi omni journey has really brought it home that a speaker really is a musical instrument. Having removed the shackles of phase altering crossovers and mechanical capacitors (wadding, singing cabinets) i am seeing and hearing music in a whole different light. Only now does the doc's quote above make sense.

Guitar players are obsessed with the tone they get from their cabs, the guitar forums are full of it. We should consider that hifi speakers are no different in that respect. Flimsy, singing cabinets really do suck. Glue some substantial steel plate inside and prepare to be amazed. In fact the sound of all instruments is affected by what they are made of and how they are constructed.

I am a drummer of 25 years, semi professional at one time. The guys in the bands (including me) were constantly obsessed with the sound of their equipment. Drums made of chipboard sound different to those made of birch ply or maple for that fact. Snare drums are even more varied as not only wood is available but steel and brass. I have a brass piccolo nare which i will take to the grave. But i also have a birch one of greater depth that i also love but for different reasons.

Even the way the grain runs affects the sound of wooden drums. Almost all are made with the grain running concentrically. I once bought a set of birch drums with the grain running from top head to bottom. The difference in sound was substantial. They sounded fuller with a much longer reverb - drums with top and bottom heads work by passing the sound waves between them and the different grain orientation allowed this bouncing back and forth to go on for much longer. They were great for un miked performances but i soon realised that sound engineers hated them when they were miked up and had to resort to gating them (another bloody filter) that kind of negated the use of them in the first place.

Anyway the more i play with speakers the more i realise that they are very similar to drums any many aspects of the construction can affect their musical abilities, for better or for worse.


Some bed time thinking.

[Simon Hickie]

The more I think about it the more obvious it becomes. With a 'traditional' speaker setup, I imagine the sound engineers hoovering up the sound from the instruments and singers along with any ambience in the recording venue, mixing and mastering it and for us to then take the CD, vinyl disc or whatever and then squirting the sound back at us straight in our faces: an essentially 2D presentation of a 3D event.

Well planned systems, even with P&S speaker technology, can if properly set up give us the illusion of 3D sound with width, height and depth and with a sound stage that escapes the narrow confines of the speakers themselves. But, just like a musical instrument, how it's voiced will depend to a large extent on the speakers. I see the kinds of technology discussed on this forum as being an attempt to make that voice as neutral, transparent and involving as possible so that the music comes through as the artists intended. After all, it's the harmonics that define the sound of an instrument or how a voice sounds, not the fundamental notes. The more those harmonics get coloured at any point in the recording process, the greater the deviation from the original sound. Simple really.

[Classicrock]

The other thing to remember is that a Speaker is supposed to reproduce the signal it is fed with some degree of accuracy. So there is a balance between a musical presentation and modifying the sound (recreating it's own musical interpretation). The question is what is 'accurate'? Not necessarily a flat response (which more often means bright).

[karatestu]

A good point classic.

I have been wondering recently if it is possible to add too much steel to a speaker cabinet when doing doc mods.