One of the reasons I will not have a manufacturers forum is that I have the freedom to speak out as an indiviual on subjects such as this. For the past ten years I have witnessed "high End" audio sink into the depths of absurdity, and most of the posts I have seen on this thread and elsewhere, show exactly that. If I repeat my self from an earlier post on this thread it's because the message bares repeating, and it needs to be repeated because of the massive amount of misinformation most of us have been subjected to.
I am convinced that most people go to tubes for the following reasons, most of which are correctable.
Now we're talking!
Reason One: After looking at many peoples pictures of their stereo set ups I have noticed a near total lack of acoustic room treatment, especially behind the loudspeakers where it is needed most. Acoustically treating the back wall behind the speakers deadens the reflections of the rear wall and reduces the acoustical "smearing" of the rear wall reflections. The technique is called live end dead end. It's been in use in recording studios for years and countless speaker designers recommend it, including Brian Cheney of VMPS. The practice of going to tube amplifiers instead of using this classic technique is a result of ignorant consumer critics who aren't smart enough to listen or practice good and well proven advice.
Using tube amplifiers instead of doing this produces the folowing. The distortion of the tube equipment "masks" the rear wall reflections and can make listening in some respects less obnoxious. The rolled of frequency response on the top end that is typical of tube equipment reduces the smearing due to the rolled off response. The net result to you the consumer is money flying out of your wallet for a decrease in performance and high maintenance costs. At the web site www.audioperfectionist.com Journal number two outlines this problem and on page 29 gives materials you can use that have even take into account the Wife Acceptance Factor.
Let me add one more thing here. It's a neat little trick I've been discussing with James Bongiorno. "Common wisdom" has it that for "perfect alignment" your ears should be in a straight perfectly horizontal line to the tweeter. Well, just for the hell of it, try lifting your speakers (if you can) so that the ear is in line with the center of the bass driver, and that the tweeter is above the "ideal" point. This in fact emulates your seating position in a say jazz or folk club far better than otherwise, unless you are one of the performers. You might be surprised, nay, shocked at what happens.
Do this after you have done what Dan has suggested, which is to acoustically treat at least the back planes behind the speakers, and you will hear some drastic improvements. In case you are worried what will happen to your bass if you own a bass reflex systems with a backwards firing tuning port, worry not, bass will not be smeared, if anything, it will be less overblown, more coherent and better integrated than before. Of course, there's always the danger that you might not like your speakers any more ...
Since a good preacher man does what he preaches, else he's a bigot, my speakers are aligned so that my ears are almost perfectly in horizontal line to the bass drivers - and I own a 3 way system, so there's the 5" midrange driver above the 10" bass and below the 1" dome tweeter. This places the tweeter approximately 2 feet above the "ideal" straight line.
Reason number two. In all probability most of you listen to pop music for most of your listening. Pop music has had a long history of being some of the most heavily processed music. For a more detailed explanation I recommend my article that is on www.audioholics.com and at www.zero-distortion.com called Current Trends in the Recording Format Arena. My suggestion to all of you is put on some classical music and see how your system responds. If it stops shrieking at you, don't blame your eqipment, blame the producers and the people involved in the recording of most of pop music.
Or some folk, as by Pete Seeger, Kingston Trio, and best of all, try some Joan Baez or Loreena McKennitt. Crystal clear female voices are usually a very good and difficult test to pass, all too easy to go astray.
Reason number three: The shreiking metal dome tweeter syndrome. To date I have yet to hear one of these things work properly. Most of them ring like crazy. If you have a speaker that uses on of these horrific devices get rid of the speaker or if possible get rid of the tweeter.
Here I strongly disagree in part. I partly agree insofar that metal tweeters as usually found are cheap and nasty affairs; it's quite common to find a $25 tweeter in a speaker costing $4,000. I disagree simply because metal tweeters can be shown to be far superior to any other type of dome tweeter, and in particular cloth (covered with this or that) tweeters both in measurements (waterfall graph) and in listening.
However, for this to be so, one does need a quality unit - an example (though by no means the only one around) would be Son Audax Profile IV metal dome tweeter (titanium, one step pressing, no gluing together, surround made also of titanium), a 1" job. This one can be made to really come on song, assuming two things: 1) that it is allowed to work no lower than 3.5 kHz so as to avoid internal overload and some breakup, and 2) that the capacitors used in the crossover be of the composite type. This is to say that the required value be achieved by parallelling capacitors made of different materials, in my case polypropylene, polyethylene and polycarbonate. Sounds complex, but it's really quite simple, just three 400 VAC caps placed in parallel, total cost per set of three about $12 in my case (though this will vary with required size).
Item 1) is the usual culprit, Dan. I have seen far too many loudspeakers which, in the name of simplicity, go directly against the manufacturer's specifications and recommendations. For example, Audax specifies that this unit be used from 2.5 kHz upeards only with a 12 dB/oct crossover with no more than 50W, yet I saw quite a few occasions when it was dropped down to about 2.2 kHz and with a first order crossover, because "it sounds better". It sure does - at 10 mW, but go higher than a whisper and you are overloading the tweeter even in frequency terms. To compensate, designers give it more than its ideal share of power, and since it cannot reproduce 2.2 kHz properly, you end up with a midrange suckout, which subjectively makes the high range seem overblown and shrieking.
Also, I find this particular tweeter really needs pure silver wiring to show off all its talent; then again, most tweeters sound better with it.
All for now folks. I will not shut up on this subject, and I don't care how much crap comes my way on this subject. I will continue to speak out.
The marketing of "high end" wire is next on my list.
Ah, we'll have a field day on that topic, Dan. I can hardly wait.
Cheers,
DVV
