You must have extremely good hearing to be able to select the three excellent opamps in a blind test.

Maybe that is why you selected playing a saxophone.
I tried playing the piano when I was young (my grandfather conducted a symphony orchestra) then I played a trombone in my high school band.
I blast my neighbourhood with "The Saints" every new years eve.

In my youth I listened to ALL the classical music until I heard them all many times then later changed my preference to modern pop music. I never liked acid rock NOISES.

 

I don't think the need of extremely good hearing, my audio system do magnify the differences, my wife is able to pick the TLE2071 too since it's the most detailed and dynamic chip. Of course using my wife's stereo Denon budget system I wasn't able to tell any difference.

My conclusion of the test is that you don't need to buy the more expensive chip nor the best one on paper specs, but the one which is optimized for the circuit, it's obvious but not so for many audiophiles like the half part of myself...

 

Are you listening through speakers or headphones?

 

However, the audiophiles got a hold of them. Now the company makes vastly over-spec'd products with enormous prices.

[*]It's total bunk
[*]PT Barnum was right, there's a sucker born every minute.
[/LIST]

Hee, hee and I agree.
Bryston amplifiers are not "special". They are the same as any other properly designed amplifier. Low distortion and truthful output power.

Good for them. They can sell their good quality amplifiers at whatever price that they can get.

Look on Google for Bose Basher. Is Dr. Bose an audio expert or an animal doctor?
Can his 4.5`` woofer produce deep bass soundsÉ

Why does this site mess up my typed ``quotation marks`` and my ``question marks`` ÉÉ latelyÉÉ

 

Are you listening through speakers or headphones?

My amazing Trenner & Friedl Pharoah speakers

 

The first paragraph in the Trane air conditioning book says, "a customer that believes they are uncomfortable is just as uncomfortable as if he was uncomfortable". A customer says it is 78 degrees in his office and he is uncomfortable. The service man places 3 thermometers next to the one on his desk and all three GOOD thermometers say his desk thermometer is crap. Suddenly, the customer is not so uncomfortable.

I'd extrapolate on this but I just got a call to go to work. I'm sure you can figure out my point.

 

Hee hee, ho ho, haw, haw.
The speakers have a little 8" woofer and a 1" horn (SHRIEK!) tweeter and cost (cough cough) $12,500 a pair!!!!! NO frequency response curve. NO maximum power spec.
BUT they look pretty.

My slightly used new car costed less.

 

My amazing Trenner & Friedl Pharoah speakers

http://www.trenner-friedl.com/index2.php?menu=pharoah&seite=1&sprache=en

And your room has nothing to do with what your hearing?

 

One of the things I did back in college was test speakers for distortion in an anechoic chamber. Speakers have distortion which is so many orders of magnitude higher than the audio amp components in question, it's hard to believe the differences could be definitive. And as correctly pointed out, the room acoustic interaction is huge as well. It's why we tested speakers in an anechoic chamber which has no reflected sound.

BTW: buy some of the top end Sennheiser headphones and you will see what I mean. The danger is you will never be able to listen to speakers again without cringing at the sound....

 

Hee hee, ho ho, haw, haw.
The speakers have a little 8" woofer and a 1" horn (SHRIEK!) tweeter and cost (cough cough) $12,500 a pair!!!!! NO frequency response curve. NO maximum power spec.
BUT they look pretty.

My slightly used new car costed less.

I don't know...... it says the speakers are built using the "golden ratio" and that's probably what makes them sound so good.

Cabinet built in golden ratio proportions

And the drivers:

Paper cones impregnated with six layered finish of Italian balsamic oil lacquer

paper cones... that's state of the art.

This is the sort of thing that makes cynics like me even more cynical....

 

My amazing Trenner & Friedl Pharoah speakers

Try these and see what I mean:

http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-Dynamic-Professional-Stereo-Headphones/dp/B00004SY4H

http://reviews.cnet.com/headphones/sennheiser-hd-600/4505-7877_7-6899581.html#!




I bought the 580 model some years back which was the predecessor of the 600:

http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1294senn/

 

The Sennheiser headphones are also VERY expensive and "look pretty".

Spend your money on high COST and pretty LOOKs. Like some women?

 

The Sennheiser headphones are also VERY expensive and "look pretty".

Not really. Compared to $10,000 speakers, they cost about 1/3 what the sales tax is on that purchase.

But, they also give the most perfect sound I have ever heard. Try them and see.

As for looking pretty: they are actually pretty ugly. Not for people seeking status, just HI-FI sound.

 

paper cones... that's state of the art.

This is the sort of thing that makes cynics like me even more cynical....

Paper cones are the last development in their driver technology after using ceramic drivers for nearly fifteen years...
Maybe you've to listen to them before conclude something?

Even their horn tweeter is custom made and it sounds not like usual cheap horn tweeter like Klipsch and similar, sweet and natural, not aggressive and mechanical.

BTW which are your reference speakers? So we can put something in perspective.


For the op-amp test since the speakers are so low fidelity as you stated then the differences are even more pronunced than you'd theorized.

 

Paper cones are the last development in their driver technology after using ceramic drivers for nearly fifteen years...
Maybe you've to listen to them before conclude something?

Even their horn tweeter is custom made and it sounds not like usual cheap horn tweeter like Klipsch and similar, sweet and natural, not aggressive and mechanical.

BTW which are your reference speakers? So we can put something in perspective.

My refrence speakers are Infinity Qc, made back in 1980 when Infinity was still top of the line.

But, as I posted endlessly, my BEST REFERENCE is Sennheiser headphones I posted a lnk to which, if you ever tried them, would give you sound so perfect you would never want to listen to speakers again.

One of my degrees is mechanical engineering, along with BSEE, and the point I made is that speakers, even very good ones, have distortion that is orders of magnitude higher than the circuitry that drives them. The various mechanical reasons are well known, not to mention interactions with physical barriers like walls and floor. As I said: try the headphones, or some other superb quality headphone if you want to do actual comparisons.


http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/bas/0708/

The loudspeaker is by far the poorest link in the reproduction chain for all forms of distortion, and this includes nonlinear distortion, frequency response distortion, phase distortion, and time distortion. Compared to the electronics of a system, loudspeakers are horrible.

It is fairly difficult to find data in the literature and in test reports that give consistent and comparable information on loudspeaker distortion. Some reasons are that it is difficult to make such measurements, there are no standards for frequencies and loudness levels, and manufacturers are certainly not going to give distortion figures, even when they know them, because the numbers are so high.

I suppose most people have listened to a long string of high-distortion loudspeakers for so long that they think music is supposed to sound like hash when the level is turned up a little. In fact, it should not, and it does not. Live music sounds just fine at high levels, and there is no reason that reproduced music should not also sound fine. In fact, it does when the distortion from the loudspeaker is kept well below one percent.

 

A partial list of speaker distortion sources:

http://www.nutshellhifi.com/library/speaker-design1.html

2-speaker stereo falls far short of a true acoustic wavefront, producing a phasey, unrealistic image of small size that causes listening fatigue for many people (particularly non-audiophiles). The virtual image is unstable with respect to listener position, spectral energy distribution, and room characteristics.


Even a simple central mono image has been shown to suffer from deep comb-filter cancellation nulls between 1 kHz and 4 kHz, which is why a solo vocalist sounds different coming from a single mono speaker and a conventional stereo pair. Psychoacoustic research indicates that 2-channel signal sources require a minimum of 3 loudspeakers to faithfully re-create the tonal quality of centrally located sound sources, such as vocalists.


• Large amounts of harmonic, intermodulation, and crossmodulation distortions combine with mechanical driver resonances to concentrate spectral energy at certain frequencies. Driver damping techniques usually improve spectral characteristics (the frequency response curve looks better as a result) but do not provide much improvement for the underlying breakup modes, so the distortions may actually be spread over a much broader frequency range.

The narrowband nature of resonant distortions in loudspeakers is why a single-frequency THD or IM measurement is useless; it takes an expensive tracking-generator type of measuring system in order to create a usable frequency vs. harmonic distortion graph. These graphs usually show quite different frequency spectra for the 2nd and 3rd harmonics, as well as curves as rough as undersea topographic maps. Asking for the "average distortion" of a speaker is similar to asking about the "average depth" of the Atlantic Ocean.


The driver diaphragm needs to have a density equal to air and absolutely uniform acceleration over the entire surface at all frequencies if you want to remove all resonant distortions. We are nowhere close to meeting this criterion. As a result, all speakers have tonal colorations ranging from subtle to gross, with some types of colorations present at all times, and other types of colorations appearing only at high or low levels. A reviewer's preferences in music can easily mask the presence of these problems if they listen to music with a relatively simple spectral structure. (Small jazz trios playing at modest levels, for example.)


• Standing-wave resonant energy is stored in drivers (except for "massless" plasmas), cabinets, and in the listening room itself. The unwanted mechanical energy must be quickly discharged in two ways: rigid, low-loss mechanical links to the earth itself (a rigid path from the magnet to stand to floor to ground), and also dissipated as heat energy in high-loss, amorphous materials such as lead, sand, sorbothane, etc. The energy that is not removed is re-radiated as spurious noise from every single mechanical part of the speaker and cabinet, each of which has its own individual resonant signature.


In any real speaker system, regardless of operating principle, there are hundreds of standing-wave resonances at any one time, which are released over times ranging from milliseconds to several seconds. These resonances continually overlay the actual structure of the music and alter the tonal color, distort and mask the reverberent qualities of the original recording, and flatten and blur the stereo image.


In speakers that measure "textbook-perfect," this type of "hidden" resonance is the dominant source of coloration. This is also the reason that 1/3 octave pink-noise measurement techniques have fallen out of favor, being replaced by much more revealing techniques such as TDS, FFT, MLS, and others.


• Radiation patterns shift dramatically with frequency, and change sharply at crossover points; in addition, the radiation pattern is further deformed by diffractive re-radiation at every sharp cabinet edge (regardless of cabinet size or type - this includes compact and planar loudspeakers).


Diffraction, which occurs at every sharp cabinet boundary, creates delayed, reverse-phase phantom sources that interfere with the direct sound from the actual driver. These secondary phantom images create significant ripples in the midrange response (up to 6 dB) and create delayed sounds which disrupt the timing cues necessary to perceive stereo images. These dispersion problems are audible as room-dependent colorations, coarse midrange, diffuse stereo, and a "detenting" effect that pulls images in towards the loudspeaker cabinets.

 

Given the above and since speaker distorsion is higher than any other audio components, you'd need the best speaker around to improve the weaker part of the chain, the gap from worst to best (or state of the art) is bigger compared to other components, so there are big differences between speakers.
Coherence in phase and time is even more importat in a loudspeaker design since humans react to impulses (a need to survive) and are not so much able to hear distorsion of 0,000...x% as you stated before. Bandwidth is another weak point for loudspeakers.
All considered a speaker is harder to design in a good way than an amplifier and my experience confirm it.

I insist in loudspeakers because I can't feel the same emotions via HPs, I listen a lot with my body, vibratilons in my chest, bones, skin and dunno what else... I like pressure and pulse from speakers.
I usually listen to Sennheiser up to 800 or Grado RS or GS, but they need a very good headphone amp to sound best, however even at their best I don't get the phisical impact I want and which only speakers could try to achieve.

I agree Infinity were great speakers, very expensive (more than mine in comparison) and difficul to drive, but they're no more competitive to today state of the art, we have had a lot of technical advancements which weren't avaiable during those eighties, my 'little' 8' goes deeper in bass and with more control and detail than any old 10' or even more, my speakers are much more easier to drive so the amp goes louder with less distortion.

 

I'm thinking of getting the better versions of the trenner-friedl speakers. Don't want to go the cheap route.

Can anybody lend me $175,000?

Maybe we can all chip in a $50,000 bucks each and time share them....

http://www.ultrahighendreview.com/trenner-friedl-duke-speaker/

 

I'm thinking of getting the better versions of the trenner-friedl speakers. Don't want to go the cheap route.

Can anybody lend me $175,000?

Maybe we can all chip in a $50,000 bucks each and time share them....

http://www.ultrahighendreview.com/trenner-friedl-duke-speaker/

Very clever and illuminate post! And how much good humor you bring us, thanks!

I'm sure I can get my money back if you suggest me a good set of speakers for a few hundreds bucks, make and model?
How unfortunate I am having not met you before!

 

So you're not in for the $50,000 time share?

The funny thing is the price tag of $175,000 is exactly what I paid for my house.....

As for good speakers:

We all hear what we think we hear.