are there any modern woofers equal to ar3a woofer

[kkantor]

Genek,

Sorry, I have a personal rule not to give opinions on specific audio brands here. (I've broken it once or twice over the years, and regretted it...) Also, realistically, it's been a long time since I have kept up with the latest model introductions. My comments would, at best, be a reflection of the very small segment of products I happened to encounter at shows, during visits to OEM customers, or at friends' homes.

With that disclaimer, I have recently heard some speaker systems coming out of Europe that seemed to follow a "power response" design philosophy. Competently designed and good sounding. Unfortunately, I doubt any of them will find much traction in distribution channels, beyond a few boutique dealers. They were produced at small scale operations with too much overhead to be generally cost competitive.

So, do you have a proposed answer to your own question?

-k

[soundminded]

At this point, I suspect, if the perfect loudspeakers were developed to perfectly reproduce concert hall acoustics, it wouldn't make much of a dent in the audio marketplace. Of course, the niche market of purists will buy them, but I doubt if it would have the same effect the development of AS speakers had in the 50's. It's too late, the masses have spoken.......

In 1973 I visited Lisbon Portugal and went to a carriage museum. I saw a carriage the Pope used to make a visit to Lisbon I think in the 1600s. The trip from the Vatican took six months (and another six months back.) Between the lousy roads and the suspension of that carriage, it must have been a year of hell for him. Would he ever believe that one day, on any given day, anyone wanting to make such a visit could take such a trip in complete comfort in about an hour? Would he have believed that one day men would fly in heavier than air machines with little more thought than he had for taking a carriage ride across town? Yet over a century earlier, Leonardo Da Vinci had designed a heavier than air aircraft which of course had not and coult not be built at the time.

"If the perfect loudspeakers were developed to perfectly reproduce concert hall acoustics..." This is where you and I, and most others and I go off in entirely different directions. I think all audiophiles and probably most engineers working in this industry believe that perfecting the "capture/store/retrieve/reproduce" strategy for accurate recording and playback of music just needs to be perfected element by element and if all the elements were perfect enough, the idea would work as desired. IMO this will eventually be shown to be a technical dead end that cannot be made to work no matter how perfect each element or integration of elements becomes. The problem will need a complete rethink from the ground up with radically different answers, a complete shift in paradigms as I describe it.

"...it wouldn't make much dent in the marketplace." Well if and when the day comes that remains to be seen but I think it would be viewed as an entirely different class of product. What audiophiles refuse to accept but music lovers (who listen a great deal to actual music as opposed to recorded and reproduced facsimiles) know is that at the current state of the art, the experience of listening to recorded music even at its best is a grossly inferior experience to hearing live music. I'm not talking about the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd, I'm referring to the auditory experience alone. Live music contains dimensions which cannot be reproduced in our best state of the art technology now. These elements are crucial not only because they are part of the sound but inherently bound up in the music itself and the way our brains perceive it. In other words, our inferior technology alters music by distorting it in ways that are extremely deleterious to it, ways we haven't even defined yet. I was listening to an interesting radio program called Radio Times on WHYY radio in Philadelphia last friday in which a neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses his new book "Musicophilia" (love of music) in which he argues with strong medical evidence that music and the human brain are intimately bound up in each other. As far as we know this is true for no other species. He discusses the medical effects of music on certain mental illnesses, the fact that there is not a single known civilization anywhere in the world or at any period in history that did not have some form of music, and that musical instruments at least 40,000 years old have been discovered. It is entirely possible IMO that when far superior methods for reproducing music have been developed as I think they inevitably will, many if not most people will want access to them. They will not sound anything like what we are accostomed to hearing today. (And they certainly won't have to be listened to at literally ear shattering levels to provide maximum enjoyment.) However, before that can happen, those who actually have the technical training to study this problem and make a serious effort at solving it will have to be willing to set aside EVERYTHING they think they know about it and start all over again. So far, that is something they are not willing to do unless by a few who guard it as a well kept secret. In the meantime, we will be constrained to enjoy the best of what can be manufactured with the understanding that it falls far short of listening to actual music. Surprisingly, there are still large numbers of people including children who still study playing musical instruments, more evidence that Sacks is right.

[genek]

Sorry, I have a personal rule not to give opinions on specific audio brands here. (I've broken it once or twice over the years, and regretted it...) Also, realistically, it's been a long time since I have kept up with the latest model introductions. My comments would, at best, be a reflection of the very small segment of products I happened to encounter at shows, during visits to OEM customers, or at friends' homes.

With that disclaimer, I have recently heard some speaker systems coming out of Europe that seemed to follow a "power response" design philosophy. Competently designed and good sounding. Unfortunately, I doubt any of them will find much traction in distribution channels, beyond a few boutique dealers. They were produced at small scale operations with too much overhead to be generally cost competitive.

So, do you have a proposed answer to your own question?

Not really, and I'm not in the market for any new speakers, either, as my ears have essentially become joined to my AR-2ax's and AR-6's. I just wondered if there were any speaker designers today who still aimed at classic AR-like sound. The only reason I wonder about it at all is that a couple of months ago we found ourselves surrounded by SoCal wildfires, and although everything turned out ok here it did get me wondering again about what my options would have been if I'd had to leave my audio gear behind (the last time I wondered about it was after the big NorCal quake in '89). Barring a speaker-destroying disaster, my plan is to just keep refurbishing my old speakers indefinitely, because I haven't heard anything new that I liked much in the past 25 years or so.

[Carlspeak]

Soundminded, as I read your post of earlier today I couldn't help but be reminded of the theme of John Lenonn's wonderful & wistful anthem: "Imagine".

Someday, your dreams may indeed come true....

With all due respect, I have taken the liberty to make a few albeit, awkward changes to "Imagine" to make it more audio-appropriate..

Imagine there's no distortion

It's easy if you try

No nodes below us

Around us only soundstage

Imagine all the people

Listening for today...

Imagine there's no compression

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to download and pay for

And no MP3’s too

Imagine all the people

Listening to real music...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join me

And the music lover’s world will be as one

Imagine no resonances

I wonder if you can

No need for equalizers or bass traps

A brotherhood of audiophiles

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the resolution...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join me

And the music lover’s world will listen as one

I think we've discussed this subject enough and are starting to repeat ourselves. I know you'll want to have the last word, as you always do. And so, I hereby relinquish my rights to any future posts regarding this thread.