So Thorsten has broken cover ...

[The Devil]

Well mine literally deafened their previous owner - he lost virtually all hearing in his left ear - due to him playing them very very loud indeed. They are still going strong. IMO, the dome mid-driver is the one of the highlights of the active ATCs.

This isn't BBV-style competition, btw. I am not interested in playing music at deafening volume.

 

[KUB3]

The guy I mentioned above moved from large PMC (with mid domes) to custom ATC (with different new mid domes these days) and has had no problems since. So something is different. He seems to think ATC has more circuit protection, so it may not be the mid driver alone. His change was purely down to playing at really insane volume, filling a large house with one pair of speakers. (The loon melted some passive x-overs with Krell amps previously )

 

[Tenson]

The guy I mentioned above moved from large PMC (with mid domes) to custom ATC (with different new mid domes these days) and has had no problems since. So something is different. He seems to think ATC has more circuit protection, so it may not be the mid driver alone. His change was purely down to playing at really insane volume, filling a large house with one pair of speakers. (The loon melted some passive x-overs with Krell amps previously )

It may be that ATC's have dynamic protection circuitry. It will save the driver but music will get compressed the louder you push it.

 

[KUB3]

He's also using custom ATC P4 amps and other trickery too, so I have no idea really...

 

[Stereo Mic]

Well mine literally deafened their previous owner - he lost virtually all hearing in his left ear - due to him playing them very very loud indeed.

Go on? Jeff Beck or Beethoven? Or was it that spikey bloke with the money problems from Anglesey?

 

[Alex S]

So, the salient point here is who's going to be deaf sooner, bub or BBV. I know bub is 2/3rds there but can't speak for the other spl-meister.

 

[KUB3]

Seeing as SPL relies upon pressure in a fixed volume, I guess bub has the quietest hifi on the entire forum - as his flat is soooo large

 

[anon_bb]

Not surprisingly only shin and tenson took me up on my challenge and gave sensible answers. As I expected . Heavy bass drivers pfaw!

S&M - some minor criticisms were noted which is to be expected, and not all comments were made available to the forum as I didnt want to be accused of willy waving or provocation. I am very pleased with the outcome. Doubtless in the near future there will be another bakeoff and the improvements since the first can be judged. Paper specs are only part of the universe of all specs.

MJ - I was taking the **** knowing exactly what response your preconceptions would lead you to make. My audio priority as for accurate and enjoyable reproduction accross all genres. Your tendency to attach labels and prejudices undermines your points - sadly, as you seem to actually know something and it just acts to stymie useful intercourse on any topic.

The spl peak quoted by PMC is 126db (for the entire speaker). Verify for yourself.

Excursion? Linearity my dear chap.

 

[Markus S]

some minor criticisms were noted which is to be expected, and not all comments were made available to the forum as I didnt want to be accused of willy waving or provocation. I am very pleased with the outcome.

For someone who has proven himself to have no sense of humour, that is actually a quite funny comment.

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

Have you toyed with transmission lines at all? They suprised me a while back as I had assumed (incorrectly) that a sealed enclosure would be the most accurate, and that ported would be less than ideal. I presumed a TL would be pretty much the same as ported. How wrong I was! The TL's I have heard have been by far the most accurate start/stop bass I've ever heard. They also seem to make smaller drivers sound even deeper on extension than larger drivers in any other type of enclosure. It almost seemed to good to be true - more accuracy with as much depth as anything else I've ever heard. I know these enclosures are much harder to design properly, but the pay off is quite something in the right room.

Hi

Yes I've worked with transmission lines before, one project was a pair of small floorstanders I built a couple of years back:

Nice performance and the bass reached to 35hz flat in-room which is pretty remarkable for a 4" driver. Line length was 1.6m if I remember correctly.

Any alignment can sound equally good, its just that vented is often done wrong and has a nasty habit of interacting with the room a little more than sealed, it generally gets an undeserved name for itself.

 

[anon_bb]

Oh markus - if only you knew. For an example of lack of humour I should entice you into such with negative comments about stereophile.

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

Hi!

It's my humble belied that the more we play with EQ, filters, and other ways of manipulating the sound the more stagnant and stale sounding the eventual sound becomes.

I'm sorry to use words like 'stagnant and stale' - but this is the difficulty of describing sound in words.

The approach I would take (if I could) would be the simplest possible signal path (from beginning to end) - and ensure that the listening environment could do justice to that.

This method has produced the best sounds I have heard.

Thanks for humouring me Bottleneck. I see where your comming from and agree with some points.

All else being equal though, would you have accurate tracking of the source/recording or coloured reproduction? Do you believe the recording process is lacking so flavour has to be added to bridge the gap between 'live' and 'reproduced'? Without having a seperate XO setup for every piece of music, is it possible to allow this colouration to work equally well over a wide range of music?

Of course, I use EQ myself and any trick I can to make a poor room sound okay - but when you start from a fatally flawed position there is only so much shine you can put on your turd.

In short I believe in lifting veils rather than adding them - but find that this works best in a good acoustic space.

Completely agree, a sorted room goes a long way to decent sound. I started out with brute force DRC and an untreated room, something was missing, then added all round treatments and was surprised at how much less EQ was needed, especially 800hz up which now has virtually nothing and a much better sound.

EQ overdone is bad. EQ used very conservatively with a sorted room is a pretty potent combination.

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

Sorry, but why should this "bother" me? You heard them, apparantly, in a "demo", and then go on to froth seemingly endlessly about how much better your "implementation" is than ATC's. If you can't see the gaping hole in your logic, perhaps we had better leave it at that?

It wasn't intended to bother. It was correcting your rubbish about not having heard ATC's before.

You seem to forget that I also know the ATC mid and bass drivers inside out. However you think that ATC does magic things with its XO implementation which isn't the case at all, its all governed by physics. They give details on their implemention, I measure the drivers(my results also tally very well with a chap from Aus) and say "I wouldn't do that because...". Its common good loudspeaker design sense that I'm talking based on data and listening. Does the ATC implementation sound good? Yes. Can it be bettered? Yes. There's NO magic or BS involved which you clearly seem to think is the case. ATC are a very straight down the line company with a somewhat old fashioned but appealing approach to design. Get chummy with Bob or Billy and take a trip down to the factory and look at the production line, all hand built with very fine craftsmanship but they also use very standard parts, I was surprised actually. I noticed that the amp panels in the ATC SCM50/100/150 had a single common torroid that was shared between the three modules, didn't look particularly hefty either. Same goes for the crossovers with baseline components. I also had the demo of the 30th anniversary's down there. Really nice bunch of people though, Nikki and Diane were especially kind and Bob didn't shy away from answering questions in honest no BS fashion.

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

Of course, anything can be improved upon. The point is that Shinpads doesn't actually know whether his "tweak" has made things better, worse, or left them the same because he hasn't compared nor measured the standard-issue ATC model with his own under the same conditions. That is the point, and nothing but the point. If he has genuinely made improvements, fair play to him. I remain sceptical, and in any case, I can't hear any of this alleged dreadful ATC distortion which apparantly assails other people's ears.

But you can't hear any distortion full stop. You've got the greatest system in the universe!

Bubs, setup passes a perfect square wave everyone. Incredible!

I don't know why its so hard to believe what I'm saying. Anyway take it easy and ciao or should that be l8ters

 

[bottleneck]

All else being equal though, would you have accurate tracking of the source/recording or coloured reproduction? Do you believe the recording process is lacking so flavour has to be added to bridge the gap between 'live' and 'reproduced'? Without having a seperate XO setup for every piece of music, is it possible to allow this colouration to work equally well over a wide range of music?
.

There are a lot of topics in that paragraphs, and a lot of opinions to be had - almost in every sentence.

'coloured reproduction' has always been a bit of a red flag to a bull for me.

People often accuse horns of being coloured, and therefore unacurate. I personally feel that conventional paper cones and electrostatics (and ribbons) don't have the immediacy and dynamics of a horn. The more dynamic and immediate a driver, the closer it gets to that particular aspect of live music reproduction. Therefore, less dynamic forms of drive unit are coloured by ommission, rather than coloured by alteration.

So what is accurate tracking of the source?

If we miss out dynamics, miss out immediacy - and concentrate on tonal neutrality and response plotted on a chart - it can be argued (and I would argue) that you simply have a form of reproduction which is accurate to other features of the source, not the entire musical message.

I don't personally believe in making up for poor recordings with EQ or whatever, because the more you add, the more you seem to take away. A little like the bass and treble controls in a car - I play with them at first, but always end up putting them both back on 'zero' after a while.

Essentially I don't think there is very much to hifi. Just trying a lot of different stuff out, and picking a set of compromises that you feel allow you to best enjoy the music.

For myself, I wish I'd known more about acoustics before I bought my house. It will be an expensive mistake to rectify!

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

An admirable objective. Sad to say I have yet to hear a system developed from this base point that has convinced on any level when making comparisons with live performance. I would go so far as to suggest that it is a high end dead end that many explored in the eighties and nineties before setting off in more rewarding directions.

Thanks for the opinion.

Its interesting to hear so many views on how it should or shouldn't be done. I'm not out to please anyone else but myself though, so don't mind being different at all.

Some go to live venues and complain about the acoustics or the performance whilst others sit enthralled. So how on earth can we have a facsimilie that pleases everyone, best just to cater to yourself and not worry about opinion and know that nothing actually ever completely fools you into thinking its the real deal, you can get close enough though.

 

[anon_bb]

Last night I went to see Ministry, Alex - it was perhaps one of the two loudest gigs I have ever attended and today I may well be 2/3 deaf as well.

 

[Stereo Mic]

best just to cater to yourself and not worry about opinion and know that nothing actually ever completely fools you into thinking its the real deal, you can get close enough though.

Good advice and words some posters would do well to follow.

I was interested to hear a couple of well respected classical musicians describe a certain brand of monitor as "neutral to the point of sounding coloured". I know what they mean.

 

[anon_bb]

It means it isnt really neutral - it means it lacks life - confusion of two different senses of neutral. You should get them to listen to PMC

 

[ShinOBIWAN]

There are a lot of topics in that paragraphs, and a lot of opinions to be had - almost in every sentence.

'coloured reproduction' has always been a bit of a red flag to a bull for me.

I only meant the term 'coloured' as a deviation from the source material; something is added to or taken away from the original in other words.

I didn't realise it was a swear word

Essentially I don't think there is very much to hifi. Just trying a lot of different stuff out, and picking a set of compromises that you feel allow you to best enjoy the music.

I think with all that's come to pass these past 20-odd pages, that couldn't be more true.

:beer: