[Audio Empire]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 06:27:40 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message


BTW, when I use a phrase like "blow them out of the
water", I'm referring to the speaker's ability to convey
some of the feeling and characteristics of real. live
music, playing in a real space.

Or, you are referrring to hyperbole, prejudice and expectation rather than
the actual sound of the loudspeakers?

Specifically, the
Behringers, while excellent for their purpose, do not
provide as satisfying a listener experience as do the
other above named speakers.

An effect that seems to go away when the identity of the speakers is
concealed by a scrim.

How do you DBT listener satisfaction, Arny?

You let people listen to the speakers under bias-controlled conditions and
ask them how satisfied they are????



I dunno, I think bias-controlled tests on speakers would be pretty
inconclusive. Speakers all sound so different, I don't believe that
"Controlled tests" will tell one anything except perhaps which is the more or
less spectacular (as opposed to accurate) of the speakers under evaluation.
DBTs are good for detecting differences (and in speakers, these differences
are so great, that one doesn't need a DBT to either notice or characterize
them) not which is "better". Now, if one could blindly switch between real,
live music and a speaker under evaluation, then PERHAPS, using the live music
as a control, we could get somewhere. But without a reference, you only get
to hear the differences, not the absolute quality.

OTOH, I remember back in the 1960's when Acoustic Research had a showroom in
Times Square in NYC. They were conducting "Live vs Recorded" demos there.
Behind a sheer scrim was a pair of AR3ax speakers and a string quartet. The
quartet had been recorded in the exact location that they were playing in and
the tape was being played back while the musicians pretended to play (all one
could see from the audience perspective was outlines of the musicians through
the scrim). At some point, the speakers were silenced and the musicians
played for real. The challenge was for the assembled audience to tell which
was which. I went back to that store several times over a week that I was
staying in New York. The thing that struck me was that most people couldn't
tell the difference between the real musicians playing and the speakers. AR
was clever because they didn't stop the tape, but let it run so that tape
hiss would be present whether the sound was coming from the musicians or from
the pre-recorded program. One couldn't use the absence or presence of tape
hiss as a clue.

Here's my point. By today's standards, a Crown reel-to-reel tape deck, a pair
of 60 Watt McIntosh tube amplifiers and a pair of AR3ax speakers is pretty
primitive stuff. If the vast majority of listeners couldn't, in 1963, tell
the difference between that equipment and live music, then I'm not so sure
what the value would be of a similar "live-vs-recorded" DBT today where
everything in the equipment chain is so much better than it was then. Hell,
even our self-powered Behringer B2131A speakers are better than a pair of
AR3s and a a couple of McIntosh tubed sixty-Watters!