In praise of AR3a's

[tysontom]

O.K., the middle and right curves at #92, then. I measured both.

Wrong.

I've provided the measurements of dispersion for you. That little 90° waveguide, 4430, Geddes, and a bunch of others easily outperform the AR3a tweeter with respect to dispersion.

Geddes measured the E'Waveguide; it does so, too, even in the vertical, despite being axiasymmetric 50° there. Read up the experiences of E'Wave builders. They're all astounded by its dispersion outperforming any cone/dome they've ever heard.

You presume domes radiate uniformly in a hemispheric pattern; just measure a few, or look at their off-axis performance, if published. Show me ANY dome good to half that, even.

Allison shows it for the AR3A tweeter in his Fig. 3 (1972). It crashes beyond 30°, i.e., 60° beamwidth, and that's not even with the cabinet molding blocking it.

Look at Carl's measurements of the AR3A tweeter dispersion characteristics, also. We're talking mythology here....

Zilch, I hope you aren’t serious about the JBL 4430 big horn tweeter “outperforming” the AR-3a tweeter with respect to dispersion! Are you serious? I have a friend who owned the 4435, the larger version of the 4430, and I’ve heard it several times. That speaker will wear you out -- it’s “honky,” and that’s about all you can say about it. It rolls off around 15 kHz, yet in-your-face “bright-sounding,” yet requiring serious equalization to get up above 15 kHz. It’s extremely efficient, of course, and can play at high volume levels. The dispersion is there to some degree because of the bizarre reflective horn, but I think the speaker has coloration and is unnatural sounding by any reasonable measure. It might be a great sound-reinforcement or public-address speaker, but it has questionable use as a serious audiophile-quality loudspeaker. As with most JBL speakers, it is capable of high acoustic output, but not necessarily accurate sound.

Attached is one of the AR-published anechoic curves of the AR-3a tweeter. Show me how it “crashes” beyond 30° or even 60° off-axis, even up to 20 kHz? I fail to see how you arrive at that conclusion! It’s only down 5 dB at 20 kHz 60° off axis. With accurate, calibrated measuring equipment, you could duplicate this very thing yourself.

--Tom Tyson

[Mexicomike]

You know, for all this discussion re accuracy, music, etc etc etc, the fact remains that AR was the only speaker company to my knowledge that ever even attempted to publicly compare the sound of their speakers directly with live sound. Whether their effort was a objective as the advertising indicated, it was still an effort that no one else tried to match. One would think that all the other manufacturers could have done the same thing to "prove" their speakers could do it better and were therefore "better" than the ARs. But nobody else did back then...and nobody's doing it now.

[genek]

You know, for all this discussion re accuracy, music, etc etc etc, the fact remains that AR was the only speaker company to my knowledge that ever even attempted to publicly compare the sound of their speakers directly with live sound. Whether their effort was a objective as the advertising indicated, it was still an effort that no one else tried to match. One would think that all the other manufacturers could have done the same thing to "prove" their speakers could do it better and were therefore "better" than the ARs. But nobody else did back then...and nobody's doing it now.

Is there anyone even claiming that their speakers are "accurate" anymore? I just came across Sound & Vision's picks for the "best" speakers in every category, and in the section for stereo pairs not one single speaker is described with terms like "accurate," "realistic" or "lifelike." The closest I could find was "believable." So what is the current "industry standard" for a "good speaker?"

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/speakers/...airs-page5.html

[Mexicomike]

"So what is the current "industry standard" for a "good speaker?""

It appears that it has to fall into one of three categories: "Pretty and expensive" or "industrial-looking and expensive" or "bizarre-looking and expensive." "Sounding like music sounds" no longer appears to be an important category.

[Zilch]

Who said anything about the tweeter?? I was talking about the mid dome.

That's Fig. 2, and it rolls down off axis from 2.5 kHz and is down 8 dB at 5 kHz, where the tweeter kicks it back up 'til it crashes an octave higher.

Further as has been point out, majority of instruments are direct radiators.

THAT argument's goin' nowhere, either, Jerry, nope....

Attached is one of the AR-published anechoic curves of the AR-3a tweeter. Show me how it “crashes” beyond 30° or even 60° off-axis, even up to 20 kHz? I fail to see how you arrive at that conclusion! It’s only down 5 dB at 20 kHz 60° off axis. With accurate, calibrated measuring equipment, you could duplicate this very thing yourself.

Our reference here thus far has been the Allison paper presented before the AES in 1970 and reprinted 1972, as it appears in the AES Loudspeakers anthology, and I have referenced Fig. 3 on P. 259, taken in the cabinet with the grill and molding removed, under 2-Pi conditions. Once the molding is in place, it turns to chaos in Fig. 6. Looks like I have to fire up the scanner again.

Regarding 4430, the best I can offer is that you look at the system beamwidth, directivity, and polars in the link I provided, itself the subject of an AES presentation. It's good to 100° at -6 dB in both axes, and whether you like JBL's premiere modern two-way large-format Studio Monitor in production for 20 years or not is irrelevant to the question at hand, nor is there much point in innuendo regarding the capabilities of CLIO MLS measurements, or my own competence in using it here....

[Pete B]

The ABX Comparator (which, thanks to Tom Nousaine some time ago, I managed to get a lot of use out of) is not designed to identify products. It is designed to let the user listen for differences and nothing else; certainly not to identify any kiind of product as better than another. It is best used to compare stuff like amps and wires, and with care, digital players.

Nifty tool.

Howard Ferstler

Really? You are going to tell me how to use my own version?

[Pete B]

Well, no. Are you saying, or at least implying, that what I said about the device is wrong? I wrote two complete articles about its use for The Sensible Sound. The one I used was actually owned by Nousaine, and he shipped it and a Bryston amp to me to use for a series of amp comparisons that I did for the magazine. Did wire comparisons, too. The unit taught me nothing more about amp and wire "sound" than I already knew, but it certainly did solidify my credentials when I told people that all good amps, up to their clipping levels, sound alike. Wires? Well, those are just that: wires.

The trick to any kind of comparison is to get the levels precisely matched. Each channel, one at a time. The Comparitor I used had a built-in digital volt meter for doing that.

Howard Ferstler

Because you write articles and use one owned by Nousaine you seem to think you have the last word?

Yes, I think you are wrong.

Yes, I know about level matching:

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...amp;#entry56671

I had a look at the schematics for one of the Brystons; I was not impressed:

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...amp;#entry57325

[Zilch]

You know, for all this discussion re accuracy, music, etc etc etc, the fact remains that AR was the only speaker company to my knowledge that ever even attempted to publicly compare the sound of their speakers directly with live sound. Whether their effort was a objective as the advertising indicated, it was still an effort that no one else tried to match. One would think that all the other manufacturers could have done the same thing to "prove" their speakers could do it better and were therefore "better" than the ARs. But nobody else did back then...and nobody's doing it now.

See Toole, P. 13:

Edison did it in 1901, as well as a demonstration in Carnegie Hall before a capacity audience of "musically cultured and musically critical" listeners in 1901.

RCA did it in 1947, and Wharfedale in the 1950s (P. 14).

Based on these reports, one could conclude that there had been no consequential progress in loudpeaker design in over 50 years. Have we come much farther a century later? Are today's loudspeakers significantly better sounding than those of decades past? The answer in technical terms is a resounding "Yes!" But would the person on the street or even a "musically cultured" listener be able to discern the improvement in such a demonstration? Are we now more wise, more aurally acute, and less likely to be taken in by a good demonstration?

********

Forgive the caps that I used, but this whole "debate" is becoming a tweak-audio joke.

Nope, not gonna, because they highlight the fundamental fallacies in your analysis.

There IS no reverberant field in MLS measurements; reflections are windowed out. See D'Appolito "Measuring Loudspeakers."

That's why it's called "quasi-anechoic."

I have linked you to several JBL product spec sheets showing that not only is it possible to measure accurately from different microphone positions, those measurements reveal the very nature of the influence of driver interactions, and provide the information necessary to mitigate the chaos evident in AR3a with improved design practices and features.

Kantor showed how it was accomplished by AR itself by 1985.

It's apparent you've put me on "Ignore" in this discussion in favor of conducting a repetitive Ferstler monologue here....

You missed Allison's point with those readouts of edge-molding artifacts. What he was illustration was that such artifacts do NOT have an impact on the way a speakier sounds in terms of spectral balance and sonic realism. He emphatically pointed out that the direct-field signals do no more than stabilize the soundfield and tighten imaging. Now, if imaging is the ultimate for the listener, then obviously AR and Allison speakers may not be their cup of tea. But if hall-style realism is the goal, then the AR and Allison lines do the job nicely. As for the AR designs being outmoded, you have yet to explain just how Villchur was able to so nicely mimic the sound of the live quartet. Could your favored speakers have done that? Well, we do not know, do we. But we DO know that the AR-3 could do it.

Nobody gives a flying whit about hall-style realism anymore. See Toole. The music is masked in large reverberant spaces. Today's listeners want to experience the the accurate and detailed image and soundstage the conductor hears. Somehow, it doesn't work real well for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, or Patricia Barber, either....

As for the anechoic recording issue. Villchur had to use those in order to keep from having a recorded hall ambiance color the sound. The live instruments were not generating any hall reverb other than what was in the live-performance hall itself. Consequently, it was necessary to have the speakers generate an anechoic-space playback signal to keep from having double reverberation. The idea was to have the speakers mimic the live instruments, and to do that the recording had to be of the instruments only, and not those instruments embraced by hall reverb.

How hard is it to grasp that that's NOT what's in our CD players, and neither are our listening spaces reverberant as prescribed for those demos? ANY speaker with uniform power response will perform as well under those conditions, and many newer designs better than the ARs, even....

However, after he left AR and started his own company his later, simulated "pulsating hemisphere" tweeter, used in most Allison Acoustics models, managed to better the best AR tweeters when it comes to dispersion.

A tweeter with better dispersion than that in AR3a?

PLEASE, Howard, say it ain't SO!

That Toole wrote off those speakers so cavalierly in his book was solidly unfair, and that some here have done the same thing with even less info than Toole (and perhaps with an ulterior motive involving commercial interests) is even more unfair.

More innuendo, Howard? Who would you possibly be thinking about?

Toole gave short shrift to AR and Allison largely because they fall outside the mainstream of contemporary loudspeaker design.

I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, but from looking in the index, AR gets more play than Bose, certainly....

[soundminded]

Actually, with the moving-microphone integration technique I used with my published The Sensible Sound speaker reviews I discovered that speakers that had room/power measurements that were really close sounded, well, really close, too. Indeed, a Triad sub/sat package I had on hand for a while measured very similarly to the Dunlavy Cantatas I had been using in my smaller system, and when I did a series of level-matched A/B listening comparisons I was at times really hard pressed to tell which speakers were playing. With some source materials, and switching from one pair to the other, I could not hear ANY difference at all. At times I did hear differences, however, but when I did they were not particularly great. What's more, with lots of other brand good speakers that measured similarl to each other, the subjective evaluations (making sure that the average levels were decently matched) resulted in revealing demonstrations that the better speakers being produced today really do sound a lot alike. Most of the time, differences were the result of placement differences, such as mid-bass (Allison Effect) suckout notches in the midrange that differed from speaker to speaker because of boundary-distance differences.

When I did hear solid differences, those could easily be explained by just looking at the two system response curves. If a speaker had a serious dip up in the crossover region and a pair were compared to speakers with flatter response (this is a room-curve response, by the way, and not a direct-field response I am talking about) the difference was clearly evident with nearly all kinds of music. Ditto if there were diffferences in the area of response-curve slopes, or middle-bass peaks.

Note that my measurement technique consisted (and I still do this occasionally when checking out my existing speakers to make sure they are still up to spec) of moving a microphone slowly over a roughly 1 x 1 x 5 foot area near seated ear height at the listening couch while the stereo pair of speakers emit uncorrelated pink noise. While this is happening my AudioControl SA-3051 RTA is doing a cumulative curve over a 20-second interval. The result is a good room/power curve average. The readings I have gotten when measuring my Allison IC-20 main speakers in my main room (where I did all of my speaker testing) pretty much paralleled what Allison got with his own measurements of those speakers, as well as what David Moran got when using a dbx RTA-1 analyzer some years ago.

I think the technique I used did a fine job of getting me into the ball park when evaluating speakers, although my final analyses always involved level-matched A/B comparisons against known good speakers, like my wide-dispersing IC-20 models or my (at that time) Dunlavy Cantata models. I had a fixed number of recordings that I used, as produced by guys like the late John Eargle, Michael Bishop, John Dunkerly, Keith Johnson, and a few others.

I know you appear to have an axe to grind against many, if not most, modern designers, and old-time designers, too, but as best I can tell, the good designers of both speakers and surround processors have gotten us pretty close to small-room perfection when it comes to simulating live music in such spaces. Maybe things can be made better with still more processing (such as yours) but I think that practical limitations in the way of cost and room size and shape (and spouse decor constraints) have just about gotten us to a practical limit.

If you have a way to better this (and you claim that you do), I suggest you get busy and do something about the situation. Complaining about things is not a solution, by the way.

Howard Ferstler

I simply refer you to Genek's posting on Page 2 of this thread posted at 11:49 on March 17. That is my opinion too and a lot of other people's as well. It's Gordon Holt's, TAS Magazine's, and I think Tom Tyson's who said this industry died decades ago. If I have an axe to grind, it's that there is a pretense that the state of the art of products offered at the highest level reaches such perfection that they perform as implied meaning that they accurately reproduce the sound of music as performed by live musicians when they clearly don't. This to ostensibly justify their astronomical prices. And it seems to me that my refusal to be coerced into agreeing to go down the same mental rut of a thinking process that has led this industry to a dead end is viewed with the scorn a cleric has for a heretic in a religion.

My observations and conclusions are based on several factors. One is my ever improving ability to listen critically. Fortunately my hearing accuity is still good and tested well about 3 years ago. It was flat to the limit of the test 10 khz. If you have read any of my posts of prior months and years, you know that I listen to a lot of live music and I've become very sensitive to the subtle differences in timbre of certain kinds of instruments from one to another, especially pianos and violins. I've also focused on listening to acoustics. I'm also well technically trained having been fortunate to have been educated in one of the finest engineering colleges in the country and have given the problem a great deal of my own analytical thought. I've experimented considerably with it too with some surprising results. I've drawn my own conclusions that are often at odds with prevailing theories. That alone gives them a fighting chance of being right.

About two or three years ago I went out into the "market" to see how others were progressing, something I'd given up doing when I started developing my own ideas. I visited a high end audio store, heard $10,000 Martin Logan Summit loudspeakers and immediately identified 5 serious FR defects in them. I visited audiophile friends and friends of friends (I've got one friend who is President of an audiophile club) and heard a lot of expensive equipment people seemed to keep swapping around. I went to the VTV (Vacuum Tube Valley) show in NJ where I heard what struck me later as a building filled with junk. One guy had a $125,000 pair of speakers in a half million dollar rig. When I entered he was blasting rock music, when I left, he had a recut vinyl of 1940s Bing Crosby playing. He didn't seem at all interested in even demonstrating his product but I got him to play one of the discs I brought along (can you believe not one other visitor brought even a single disc with them?) and his equipment struck me as nothing to write home about.

I don't know what if anything is going to happen with my ideas. There are other issues in my life that have taken precedence far more important than audio gear. I'm thinking about contacting one or two large companies who might be able to exploit them. Much of the hardware revolves around technoloogy audiophiles derogatorily refer to as "mid-fi." Mid-fi is often a term audiophiles use to describe someone else's expensive equipment they turn their noses up at but in my case, it is just plain vanilla amplifiers and speakers configured in entirely novel ways. BTW, there was only one solid state amplifier at the VTV show and to my surprise I spotted it audibly instantly. It reminded me why I gave up on tube amplifiers over 40 years ago and never looked back. I didn't know my hearing was that good.

[genek]

I simply refer you to Genek's posting on Page 2 of this thread posted at 11:49 on March 17.

It's usually best to refer to posts by their number in the thread or use the link copying tool, as the forum displays posts using the reader's local timezone and date. I think there may even be an option to change how many posts are displayed on each page, but I may be thinking of a different forum on that.

I'm guessing you meant this one? http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...ost&p=77985

[genek]

How hard is it to grasp that that's NOT what's in our CD players

I don't know about this part. I have a pile of old recordings that I think must have been made in studios lined with sound-absorbing materials, and possibly even with each musician recording a track in a separate booth, because played through speakers the performers all sound as if they're in my living room, and through headphones as if they're inside my head. Back in the days when I had a Hafler surround setup, these recordings produced bupkis from the rear speakers.

[soundminded]

See Toole, P. 13:

Edison did it in 1901, as well as a demonstration in Carnegie Hall before a capacity audience of "musically cultured and musically critical" listeners in 1901.

RCA did it in 1947, and Wharfedale in the 1950s (P. 14).

********

Nope, not gonna, because they highlight the fundamental fallacies in your analysis.

There IS no reverberant field in MLS measurements; reflections are windowed out. See D'Appolito "Measuring Loudspeakers."

That's why it's called "quasi-anechoic."

I have linked you to several JBL product spec sheets showing that not only is it possible to measure accurately from different microphone positions, those measurements reveal the very nature of the influence of driver interactions, and provide the information necessary to mitigate the chaos evident in AR3a with improved design practices and features.

Kantor showed how it was accomplished by AR itself by 1985.

It's apparent you've put me on "Ignore" in this discussion in favor of conducting a repetitive Ferstler monologue here....

Nobody gives a flying whit about hall-style realism anymore. See Toole. The music is masked in large reverberant spaces. Today's listeners want to experience the the accurate and detailed image and soundstage the conductor hears. Somehow, it doesn't work real well for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, or Patricia Barber, either....

How hard is it to grasp that that's NOT what's in our CD players, and neither are our listening spaces reverberant as prescribed for those demos? ANY speaker with uniform power response will perform as well under those conditions, and many newer designs better than the ARs, even....

A tweeter with better dispersion than that in AR3a?

PLEASE, Howard, say it ain't SO!

More innuendo, Howard? Who would you possibly be thinking about?

Toole gave short shrift to AR and Allison largely because they fall outside the mainstream of contemporary loudspeaker design.

I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, but from looking in the index, AR gets more play than Bose, certainly....

"Nobody gives a flying whit about hall-style realism anymore. See Toole."

As I said, ultimately Toole is about market research, not high fidelity.

"The music is masked in large reverberant spaces."

Then why do municipalities, colleges, and other large institutions pay over $100 million to build one? Why do wealthy patrons contribute so much of their money to them? Why do people go to listen to music in them when the physical experience of siting captive in a chair for an hour or more at a time being exposed to communicable diseases, and the cost and effort to get to them is unnecessary except for the experience of hearing what you say is masked?

"Today's listeners want to experience the the accurate and detailed image and soundstage the conductor hears."

What difference if the oboe player seems to be sitting two feet to the left of clarinet player or five? And even if that were possible, what difference does it make when a grand piano sounds like a toy and a priceless violin sounds like a cat being squeezed in a vice?

"Somehow, it doesn't work real well for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, or Patricia Barber, either.... "

Is that music? I suppose for some people, maybe a lot of people it is. But if that was all there was to music, I'd be perfectly satisfied with a $50 boom box.

[genek]

"Somehow, it doesn't work real well for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, or Patricia Barber, either.... "

Is that music? I suppose for some people, maybe a lot of people it is. But if that was all there was to music, I'd be perfectly satisfied with a $50 boom box.

I wasn' familiar with Patricia Barber, so I googled her, and the "gigs" section of her website shows several scheduled performances in...concert halls.

[Carlspeak]

I wasn' familiar with Patricia Barber, so I googled her, and the "gigs" section of her website shows several scheduled performances in...concert halls.

Pat Barber's latest release on Blue Note is "The Cole Porter Mix". A great audiophile quality recording. She may not be as sexy and attractive as Diana Krall, but her piano playing and singing chops are just as good. If you like saxophone, she's got a guest on this recording named Chris Potter. His amazing playing just takes over cut #10. It's obvious his strong influences are none other than Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.

[genek]

She may not be as sexy and attractive as Diana Krall

Seeing as how we're veering even more OT...

Am I the only person who finds it odd that the physical attractiveness or lack thereof of the performer is any factor at all in the sales of an audio-only recording?

[Mexicomike]

Maybe that happens using those "better" speakers that some folks are talking about that are so much superior to ARs. Remember, the ARs only SOUND like a real jazz group. Perhaps the speakers they refer to are so good that not only does it sound like a real jazz group, it sounds so good you can see the individual players!

[tysontom]

See Toole, P. 13:

Edison did it in 1901, as well as a demonstration in Carnegie Hall before a capacity audience of "musically cultured and musically critical" listeners in 1901.

RCA did it in 1947, and Wharfedale in the 1950s (P. 14).

Zilch,

Once again you quote Toole, but the author wrote "out-of-hand" regarding the details of so-called live-vs.-recorded demonstrations. I suspect that Toole "read-into" what he wanted to say in his book in order to minimize the significance of AR's many successful LVR sessions. What Briggs and Olson did -- and certainly Edison before any of them -- was to put on a "big audio demonstration," not a true live-vs.-recorded demonstration that would show how close the recorded sound could be to the original sound. For example, there was no switching back and forth during the demonstrations to see if the audience could detect the switchovers as was done in all the AR-Fine Arts concerts. Over 12,000 people in several large US cities during a four-year period were really quite unsure when the Fine Arts Quartet was playing or when the AR-3s were playing.

But overall, I really don't know what your objective has been to denegrate the AR-3a over here on the CSP site. I don't believe you have many believers, overall, except for one or two who felt the way you do before you said anything. Anyway, good luck to you with your home-brew horn speaker or whatever it is you are selling. I doubt that there are very many around here that would be interested in it.

--Tom Tyson

[Mexicomike]

"But overall, I really don't know what your objective has been to denegrate the AR-3a over here on the CSP site. I don't believe you have many believers, overall, except for one or two who felt the way you do before you said anything. Anyway, good luck to you with your home-brew horn speaker or whatever it is you are selling. I doubt that there are very many around here that would be interested in it."

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...

[Zilch]

I wasn' familiar with Patricia Barber, so I googled her, and the "gigs" section of her website shows several scheduled performances in...concert halls.

W/o sound reinforcement?

Time to read up Eargle's "Audio Engineering for Sound Reinforcement," apparently.

Once again you quote Toole, but the author wrote "out-of-hand" regarding the details of so-called live-vs.-recorded demonstrations. I suspect that Toole "read-into" what he wanted to say in his book in order to minimize the significance of AR's many successful LVR sessions. What Briggs and Olson did -- and certainly Edison before any of them -- was to put on a "big audio demonstration," not a true live-vs.-recorded demonstration that would show how close the recorded sound could be to the original sound. For example, there was no switching back and forth during the demonstrations to see if the audience could detect the switchovers as was done in all the AR-Fine Arts concerts.

Over 12,000 people in several large US cities during a four-year period were really quite unsure when the Fine Arts Quartet was playing or when the AR-3s were playing.

Toole wrote "out-of-hand" because the demos were marketing ploys, contrived to dupe the listeners.

The New York Evening Mail reported that "the ear could not tell when it was listening to the phonograph alone, and when the actual voice an reproduction together. Only the eye could discover the truth by noting when the singer's mouth was open or closed".

The myth of AR accuracy seems to have Villchur's LVR demos as its primary, if not sole foundation, because it's clearly unsupported by current industry standard assessment methodology.

But overall, I really don't know what your objective has been to denegrate the AR-3a over here on the CSP site. I don't believe you have many believers, overall, except for one or two who felt the way you do before you said anything. Anyway, good luck to you with your home-brew horn speaker or whatever it is you are selling. I doubt that there are very many around here that would be interested in it.

I'm promoting nothing but a respect for reality here. Vintage ARs are what they are, and there is value in knowing what that is. I am fully aware that many enthusiasts would just as soon not know, but if the bottom line is personal preference and taste, then no one's enjoyment should in any way be diminished by knowledge of the truth. If Shacky wants to believe that AR was designed by "ear" and that audio science and measurements played no role, that's fine, but the appreciation of ARs, again, "for what they are," is little enhanced by making stuff up about them. In the larger sense, it's ignorance that most assuredly denigrates both ARs and us, each an all....

[genek]

W/o sound reinforcement?

Doesn't say on her website one way or the other. If her performances are amplified in the hall, would you even want to play them back on a stereo pair, or would a 7.1 HT setup be more appropriate?

[genek]

I doubt that there are very many around here that would be interested in it.

Useful information can come from anywhere. Even if you have no interest in what Zilch thinks of the sound of his 3a's or what he ends up doing to them (if anything), his measurements of the individual drivers have already demonstrated that 30+ year old drivers have not all necessarily deteriorated and can still produce measurements comparable to measurements published when the drivers were new. If AR had published system response curves for the 3a, we would be able to use his system measurements now to determine if the system evidences performance changes that might be attributable to crossover deterioration, different grill fabric, etc. These would all be objective datapoints that have not been previously established by anyone else, and which would not invalidated by any subjective opinion he might express about "how they sound."

[genek]

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...

It is fun watching them go at it, though, seeing as how dog and cock fighting are illegal in the US...

[genek]

Guess what - up to their respective clipping levels they all sounded alike.

For the past 30 years or so, my decisions on amplifier selection after making sure all the candidates have enough power have been mostly based on the design of the front panel controls and rear panel I/O connectors. My current "holy grail quest" is to find a bonafide 100WPC+ surround-sound unit that is 4 ohm-stable, has tone controls, a phono input, a real tape monitor loop and a silver front panel. Can't seem to get there from here.

[Zilch]

Then why do municipalities, colleges, and other large institutions pay over $100 million to build one? Why do wealthy patrons contribute so much of their money to them? Why do people go to listen to music in them when the physical experience of siting captive in a chair for an hour or more at a time being exposed to communicable diseases, and the cost and effort to get to them is unnecessary except for the experience of hearing what you say is masked?

Indeed, apparently:

Stravinsky offered the opinion, "How can we continue to prefer an inferior reality (the concert hall) to ideal stereophony?"

Milton Babbitt was similarly provocative:

"I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, sonically trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repat something thay have missed, when they can sit home under the most confortable and stimulating circustances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen. (Gould, 1966)

Get the book; it's enormously entertaining and informative....

[genek]

Toole

Stravinsky offered the opinion, "How can we continue to prefer an inferior reality (the concert hall) to ideal stereophony?"

Milton Babbitt was similarly provocative:

"I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, sonically trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repat something thay have missed, when they can sit home under the most confortable and stimulating circustances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen. (Gould, 1966)

I have much the same feeling about movie theaters and sporting events. It's why I have a big screen TV instead of season tickets, and I can't see myself ever turning a room into a replica of a multiplex or a stadum box. But I can hardly make a case based on that that "nobody" is interested in going to movies or sporting events, or in trying to simulate the experience at home. It may be hard to believe that other people want to recreate something that one doesn't find enjoyable, but they do nevertheless.