Eeyore wrote:
Andre Jute wrote [to Patrick Turner]:
I have never been as impressed with ultra-low silicon-
level Rout as you are
Yeah, you're probably impressed by the phoney low end boost you get with
moving coil loudspeakers when driving them from a high outout impedance
(underdamped resonance). The phrase 'single note bass' comes to mind.
Graham
Nah. I have been going to live concerts and thinking seriously about
the music so as to be able to write about it for five decades now. I
know what reproduced music should sound like. If you want to know,
perhaps it is time for a guy your age, my dear Graham, to stop
pretending you're some kind of overage hipster, and replace those
boomboxes of yours with
a) a set of Mr Walker's marvellously precise electrostatic speakers
(ESL) and
b) buy or build a pair of horns with Lowther driver and make my HWAF
mods to them, which are simple enough even for your limited dexterity
to achieve. You can see here how (relatively) simple it can be if you
start out with the factory-sawn wood:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/K...20T91HWAF3.jpg
If QUAD ESL are beyond your budget, and my T91 HWAF Lowther horns
beyond your woodworking skills or budget, you might consider that it
is not difficult to align a speaker to whatever bass is required and
to match it the DF of the amp. My Impresario speaker at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/K...Impresario.jpg
can be built for under £250 per pair, are simple straightsided boxes
with only one brace the same size as a top or bottom panel, therefore
can be built even by the tenthumbed, and work with an inexpensive SE
amp for which I also provide a design, my SEntry amp using trioded
EL34, a cheap taste of Nirvana for those on student budgets:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/Jute-EL34-SEntry.jpg
I might add that as a psychologist I understand perception, including
a point about musical perception that electronics engineers have the
greatest difficulty in grasping, to wit that the weight of the
fundamental is pretty low in reconstructing the frequency in the ear.
I demonstrated that the other day with regard to 196Hz on a violin in
a letter to Iain Churches which, typically, elicited no discussion
because no-one except he and I are interested, and we already know
about it. It means that the vaunted "audio range" of the engineers,
20Hz to 20kHz, is a joke at both ends, at the top end because most
people never were able to hear that high, at the bottom end because
the lowest note on any musical instrument, 16Hz on some organs, is
more than adequately produced in *any room of correct length* (and
preferably golden ratio proportions) by an amp that goes down to only
32Hz. That is one reason why my T39 KISS Amp
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/T...trafi-crct.jpg
is rolled off at 32Hz. (The other reason for rolling off an amp for
use with horns precisely right, or on the high side of precisely right
if you cannot achieve precision, is that a horn unloads the driver
right suddenly under Fs and you don't want the cone flapping around
pointlessly, a tricky special-instance consideration with horns).
So, to summarize, no "phoney low end boost" chez Jute (except for when
I deliberately do it as a joke, as for instance on my "Christmas
Pipes" for playing Gregorian Chant with *extra ambiance*). Quite the
contrary. I have put in the thought and spent the money to match my
amps and rooms precisely to the best speakers I could buy or build. It
is a method you might consider seriously now that you have outgrown
boomboxes, if indeed you have. I make no moral judgement about vented
speakers, you understand; I am merely more interested in making the
music sound like the concert hall than in the sound in isolation.
Andre Jute
For more visit Jute on Amps at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
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