[DVV]

One more thought - I feel most speakers, and especially the smaller ones, fail because they try to be what they are not, and do things they simply cannot do.

What I look for first in any speaker, of any size and price, is honesty - do what you can and do that well, and what you can't will be forgiven. But try to act as something you are not, and you will ultimately fail altogether.

Not that this is limited to just speakers.

Cheers,
DVV

[nathanm]

One more thought - I feel most speakers, and especially the smaller ones, fail because they try to be what they are not, and do things they simply cannot do.

I see what you're saying, but could you give an example?  How would you describe a speaker that is "trying" to do more than it can?  Now as far as a company marketing what a speaker can do which the actual product can't, that I can understand fully! But a speaker's size and driver characteristics are only going to allow it to play such and such frequency bandwidth at X amount of amplitude, so how could it possibly TRY to do more?  Perhaps it's just a personal feeling thing?

[audiojerry]

Nathan, just to clarify, and maybe I am misunderstanding you, but you seem to believe that jazz recordings are deliberately recorded to emphaisize the extreme bass and extreme hf, leaving the middle recessed, and are aimed at audiophiliacs.

Although some of this goes on, the vast, vast majority of jazz recordings were done for jazz lovers. I would say that the vast, vast majority of jazz lovers couldn't care care less about high-end audio, or even know it exists. It's just that most jazz recordings are performed in a real setting by recording technicians and engineers who are attempting to capture the event as authentically as possible using minimalist recording techniques.  So the recordings sound great because the intent of the musicians and the technicians is to recreate the reality of the event, not some artificially re-assembled abortion.

Jazz musicians play acoustic instruments, and are often recorded live before an audience, or they are playing together in a room at the same time with mic'ing that captures not only the instruments and vocalists, but the space they are playing in; not as individuals sitting in a sound booth wearing headphones while listening to a recording of another musician who also was recorded in a booth, and then assembled by some know-it-all adolescent "recording engineer" using his mixers, and equlalizers, and re-mixers, and wave file editors  to create what he thinks the recording should sound like.  

You wil also find countless jazz recordings that are 20, 30, even 50 years old that sound phenomenal because number one, the music is phenomenal, and number two, the recording process was straight forward and natural. That's why so many vinyl recordings including mono still sound fantastic today. The stand-up acoustic bass that you seem so critical of in jazz recordings is not manufactured or exaggerated. It just sounds wonderful and has so much more texture and tonal richness than most folks have probably been accustomed to. However, it does require good gear to capture these qualities. The same can be said for the snare drum.

An example of this natural recording techinique is 'Jazz at the Pawnshop' recorded live at the Pawnshop nightclub in the mid-seventies in Denmark or Sweden, I believe. The story I heard is that the technician set up a real to real recorder with a couple mics in front of the stage and either left or sat at the bar until the session was over. He then turned of the machine, packed his gear and left. The tape recording was then transferred to a master pressing, and that was it. No editing, no mixing, no nothing. And it is one of the most incredible, lifelike recordings ever made. At least that's the story I was told. In the background you can quite conversations by the patrons, the cash register ringing up sales, and glasses clanking. The whole thing adds up to a stunning soundstage that makes you believe you
have traveled back through time and are sitting in that club yourself.        

And I got into all this because I may have misunderstood what Nathan had said about jazz recordings...  

Anyways, Nathan, if you are ever interested in listening to a variety of great jazz recordings, come on back with an open mind. But, you could probably lecture me about my lack of understanding of the subtleties of your brand of music as well. BTW, what do you call that genre of music, anyway?  

[JohnR]

My goal is definitely a zero WAF factor, imposing mammoth of a speaker.  (But I'm torn cause I also like the single full range driver concept.)

These are not necessarily incompatible...

http://cain-cain.hypermart.net/audio/studio.html

[nathanm]

I was just venturing a guess about Dejan's assertation that light jazz and chamber music is the prevailing demo music of choice , and why that might be.  No, I am not saying that jazz recordings emphasize those frequencies, but rather that it usually comes out that way.  Like you said, they use minimal recording technique so it works well as a demo.  I really have no answers, but to me they probably pick that stuff because it sounds "nice" and maybe you can still have a conversation over it in the demo room, I dunno!

I have very little interest in jazz as a whole.  The closest I have is Don Shirley "waterboy" which is more folk than jazz I suppose.  Piano, upright bass and violin I think.  Great record.  I have a friend who has been in numerous bands in the Milwaukee area and have attended many of his gigs.  It is very nice music, but not what I wanna listen to at home.  This is a gross generalization, but there seems to be a lot of noodling.  Noodly music is cool for awhile, but it wears on you.  It seems to be the natural progression of musicians who get SO good and their fingers just fly across the instrument playing amazing stuff, but in the end you can't remember any of it.  It just doesn't register.  The jazz gigs I've been to tended to blur into a mass of round-robin tradeoff solos.  Wanking.  Sometimes it can be cool, but sometimes it looks like the musicians are having more fun than the crowd is.  Just my impression.

I like technical music, but it can get out of hand quickly.  This goes for metal too.  And metal does have a jazz influence, or rather some bands take bits and pieces of it. I think the complexity and technical style of playing comes from that genre, even though it may not come out sounding like jazz.

But, you could probably lecture me about my lack of understanding of the subtleties of your brand of music as well.

Yes I certainly could go on for days about that!  But what for?  Obviously our tastes could not be any more disparate, so I'll just leave it at that.  I like the natural room sound of jazz, but that's about it.  If it is fast and bombastic type stuff I might be into it.  But that whole slow, smoky club crooning thing doesn't interest me.

BTW, what do you call that genre of music, anyway?

You could call it Heavy Metal, but there's sub classes of course.  Tourniquet would be a trash band, Kyuss is kind of...hmm they're sorta in the stoner rock category, but not quite.  Cathedral is a Doom Metal band characterized by slow tempos, gloomy lyrics, and overall bludgeoning heaviness.  Their 1st album would've been a better genre-defining thing to play. (and not as distorted as far as the mix goes! heh!)  

So the recordings sound great because the intent of the musicians and the technicians is to recreate the reality of the event, not some artificially re-assembled abortion.

Jazz musicians play acoustic instruments, and are often recorded live before an audience, or they are playing together in a room at the same time with mic'ing that captures not only the instruments and vocalists, but the space they are playing in; not as individuals sitting in a sound booth wearing headphones while listening to a recording of another musician who also was recorded in a booth, and then assembled by some know-it-all adolescent "recording engineer" using his mixers, and equlalizers, and re-mixers, and wave file editors to create what he thinks the recording should sound like.

I don't think there's any right or wrong way to record something.  Jazz is suited to the means you described the recording process.  I am not certain it would work for amplified bands.  It would be intersting to try though.

The tools themselves are not evil, it's what people choose to do with them.  A lot of art is an "artificially re-assemled abortion" as you put it, but I don't think that necessarily means it has no value.  Do all of your jazz records say "No overdubs, No EQ, no noise gates, no digital editing"?  I doubt it.  I'm sure the sax player took a few takes before he got it "right".  Multi-track recording allows people to make things that maybe otherwise might not exist.  If this process is so objectionable to you I'd suggest never watching a movie or televsion again and only going to the theater because there again you have elements of something recorded in isolation and then assembled to form something new.  No, it's not the same as a theater performance, but so what? It's an art form unto itself.  You're free to only listen to purist records if you want, but that doesn't mean the alternative is fundamentally flawed and wrong.

I don't much like the idea of 'Pro-Tooling' a record to death either and I agree that you can get carried away with digital editing, but someone created those tools and people are going to want to use them, just as they may want to 'get back to basics' sometime and leave the computer at home.

[audiojerry]

The tools themselves are not evil, it's what people choose to do with them. A lot of art is an "artificially re-assemled abortion" as you put it, but I don't think that necessarily means it has no value. Do all of your jazz records say "No overdubs, No EQ, no noise gates, no digital editing"? I doubt it. I'm sure the sax player took a few takes before he got it "right". Multi-track recording allows people to make things that maybe otherwise might not exist. If this process is so objectionable to you I'd suggest never watching a movie or televsion again and only going to the theater because there again you have elements of something recorded in isolation and then assembled to form something new.
You're free to only listen to purist records if you want, but that doesn't mean the alternative is fundamentally flawed and wrong.

Good points, you got me there. I don't listen to only purist records. I get off on bombastic too. I forgot to play Blue Man for you on Saturday, and do you recall the piece we listened to from Iinterview with a Vampire and The Gladiator? There is also Pink Floyd, Shostakovich, Holly Cole, Chopin, and Jerry Garcia.    
 

Cathedral is a Doom Metal band characterized by slow tempos, gloomy lyrics, and overall bludgeoning heaviness.

Now you know why I felt like bludgeoning someone afterwards!

[audiojerry]

http://cain-cain.hypermart.net/audio/studio.html

JohnR, great link! Man, what a beautiful looking setup!

[DVV]

One more thought - I feel most speakers, and especially the smaller ones, fail because they try to be what they are not, and do things they simply cannot do.

I see what you're saying, but could you give an example?  How would you describe a speaker that is "trying" to do more than it can?  Now as far as a company marketing what a speaker can do which the actual product can't, that I can understand fully! But a speaker's size and driver characteristics are only going to allow it to play such and such frequency bandwidth at X amount of amplitude, so how could it possibly TRY to do more?  Perhaps it's just a personal feeling thing?

Sonus Faber speakers, for example, try to be what they are not, even if I like them overall. Some B&W speakers do as well, and I find quite a few British speakers attempting to play big music from a small enclosure, and not surprisingly, fail dismally. Yet many are really quite fair speakers which would do well to adjust to the fact that they are small speakers, period.

Obviously, I refer more to the designers than speakers as such. Surely you are aware that various crossover tricks can, and are, employed to lift that bass and make it "heavier", "more convincing", or whatnot. Others go for "air" and lift their responses by as much as 6 dB at about 15-16 kHz to get that "air".

Not to be all negative here, I must express my admiration for Spendor, for example, precisely because they never attamepted (to the best of my knowledge, that is) to be anything more than what that particualr model really was - hence their neutral character and their ease of being, of slipping into many a system without much trace.

Cheers,
DVV

[nathanm]

What!?  Are you saying they use EQ in the crossover!!!???  EQ!!!??? Blasphemy!!!  So even if I've cleansed my amp of all evil tone controls they're still forcing EQ on me in the crossover!?  Is there nothing sacred in this world!?  You know what that means don't ya?  That means if someone LIKED those speakers they were unwittingly liking the sound of EQ!  Instanteous banishment from the Purist Order!  Ahhhh!!!  Get in line son, you'll be issued your Bose Wave Radio and then straight to Hell with ya!

 

[DVV]

What!?  Are you saying they use EQ in the crossover!!!???  EQ!!!??? Blasphemy!!!  So even if I've cleansed my amp of all evil tone controls they're still forcing EQ on me in the crossover!?  Is there nothing sacred in this world!?  You know what that means don't ya?  That means if someone LIKED those speakers they were unwittingly liking the sound of EQ!  Instanteous banishment from the Purist Order!  Ahhhh!!!  Get in line son, you'll be issued your Bose Wave Radio and then straight to Hell with ya!

 

Of course they do, Nate. Two types of mods are very typical. One deals with phase shifts, or rather attempts to present the speaker as an easier load to the amplifier by evening out the impedance curve. The other one deals with frequency response, very commonly by adding some bass, some treble, or both. I have seen some VERY famous names deliver speakers with built-in loudness contour, gentle in general, but on occasion (and I admit this is rare) not at all gentle.

And don't for a moment think others are above it. A very famous European amp manufacturer cuts his 20 kHz response by 5 dB to better emulate tube sound. A very famous US manufacturer adds about 1 dB at 20 kHz, presumably because they realize most room tend to cut from thereabouts onwards (they peak out at +6 dB at about 120 kHz, thereafter dropping sharply).

Here's a story I lived through. A friend, who also services audio, called me over. I went and saw what i wouldn't have believed had I not seen it with my own two eyes. An amp costing many kilobucks came in for servicing. The actual breakdown was a simple burnt out resistor, so the repair cost about say $20 all told. But the amp had two channel arranged as mirror image pairs. Well, on one channel, there was a row of about 20-24 transistors neatly alligned - but on the other channel these were absent.

Yet both channels worked perfectly, measured out perfectly, sounded identical and worked in every respect. And the empty places clearly showed that the transistors were never soldered there.

Conclusion - these trannies do nothing but justify the extremely high price tag. They didn't want you to open it up and see much empty real estate, not for their price, so they soldered a lot of transistors simply to fill up the space. They serve no electrical purpose, and two days ago I bought 100 of those transistors at a retail price of less than $4.

Those places were empty probably because the guy working on them went off to lunch and forgot about them afterwards. Since they serve no actual purpose, the board passed all quality tests without a hitch. The customer has not been ripped off because the amp works as advertised and the customer got what he paid for.

But I think you begin to see why I am so enraged at the so-called high end.

The last time I saw this before was in 1968, in a portable transistor radio from Hong Kong called "Belson" I bought locally. It was advertised as having 9 transistor, of which 5 were in circuit, and 4 soldered there to justify the 9 transistor monicker. They said 9 and it had 9 transistors inside - they never said all 9 were actually doing something.

Cheers,
DVV

[JohnR]

The last time I saw this before was in 1968, in a portable transistor radio from Hong Kong called "Belson" I bought locally. It was advertised as having 9 transistor, of which 5 were in circuit, and 4 soldered there to justify the 9 transistor monicker. They said 9 and it had 9 transistors inside - they never said all 9 were actually doing something.

   

I'll have to remember that one. Maybe a new frontier for DIY?