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Edgar Villchur On Multiple AR-3 Speakers


ar_pro

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This letter published in the November, 1965 issue of High Fidelity really seems to indicate that Edgar Villchur would not have been especially interested in stacking AR-3 systems.

In his reply, Norman Eisenberg unfortunately conflates a few aspects of "absolute sound" in order to reduce the argument to "personal taste".

 

 

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This letter -- as with many that Ed Villchur wrote over the years to audio-magazine editors -- exemplifies the dry wit and high intelligence of the man.  Villchur was nearly always on another level when he was confronted with these sorts of things.  If you read Villchur's letter carefully, it's easy to see that he considered the question "of whether three AR-3s  'equal' one E-V Patrician" to be ridiculous in its context.  Norman Eisenberg, a bit "off the wall" at times, was was forced to reply with a convoluted rebuttal that was largely meaningless double-talk, probably flying over the heads of most readers.  

Norman Eisenberg,not surprisingly, got his facts confused regarding AR's live-vs.-recorded concerts and demonstrations.  He thought that Acoustic Research used multiple AR speakers for each channel; as Eisenberg said, "as witness the use of more than one AR system per channel to make such demonstrations more effective."  That is certainly not so, but what he misunderstood was that multiple AR speakers were used for sound reinforcement in NY's Museum of Modern Art and other venues for background jazz, etc.

--Tom Tyson

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Someone mistakes SPL with accuracy. Surely the Patrician sounds bigger and louder than AR 3 , so it needs more than two AR 3 to equal two Patricians or any other high efficiency system: but surely AR 3s are the most accurate speakers I 've ever heard , maybe with the exception of the KLH model 9. 

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EV's point is perfectly valid, in as much as he sets out a position that no-one could really argue with; he makes a speaker he thinks is most faithful to a live experience, and expects it to be judged as he designed it. Whether other speakers are more faithful than his seems to be not of much interest to him, and that's fair enough; he can only make the best speaker he can.

NE makes a very fair point about what one means by 'live-versus-recorded', but doesn't seek to make a rebuttal as such, as none is really possible.

Following up on NE's point, I would be interested to know under what conditions 'live-versus-recorded’ were conducted; please forgive if this is discussed ad nauseam elsewhere on the board. To have any significance at all, the audience would have to be in a  recording studio or well-damped small concert hall, be subjected to a short live performance by a group of gathered musicians, and then have the same performance played back to them minutes later, it having been recorded. Even this cannot deny the intervention of the means by which it was recorded, nor the fact that the audience will hear the acoustic of the environment twice while listening to the recorded version, even if the musicians were reasonably close-miked, and they were quite close to the speakers.

It may be the bar was not set this high, and also possible a more subjective approach was used, whereby the audience was asked to make some kind of judgement over whether the sound emanating from the speakers felt as 'real' to them as the musicians in the room.

Fantastic speakers as they were, the audience would be likely to give them the thumbs-up, especially in comparison to what was previously readily available in those days.

tim

 

 

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