Speaker review - part 2

[azekeil]

Okay. So I'm sitting here with these Castle Howard S2s that I've just plonked in place without spikes or anything. Pretty much as expected really. No nasty boominess - apart from one large one that makes people sound quite nasal. I'm beginning to suspect the room more than anything else. However, they are detailed, although laid back. Lacking punchiness even at reasonable volume (these have 90dB sensitivity), I decided to fiddle. I turned off the Class-A output on my amp, which turned the output up from 25W RMS to 100W RMS per channel. This did wonders to the dynamic-ness of the sound. And again the same with the source direct button. With it selected, the sound was flat and lacked stereo imagery; with it switched off (ie. passing through the bass and treble controls which are turned to neutral) the sound comes to life.

I will have to fiddle more and try the Mordaunt Short 914s again.

The Suzanne Vega bucket test is passed :)

I'm pretty happy with these and don't feel afraid that I'll grow to dislike them; they suit the room. I'm not blown away but then I don't think I can be with the rest of my setup.

My current leaning is to keep these unless I can find something better, and I do plan to keep looking.

Comments

[dylan.livejournal.com]

I don't remember my setup being nasal in your room (the eventual one with the Primare that is)

I might come up and listen sometime, have to wait for my right eardrum to recover first though, its playing up a bit again

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Cool, that would be appreciated. I was listening to the first track off Tori Amos - Boys for Pele, in which she sings quite nasally anyway. So I don't think it's as bad as I was first making out.. but still.

I've put the Castles back now and moved them closer to the walls(!). They seem to be pretty laid back with positioning too. I might be arsed to put the spikes on soon and see how that goes.

I assume ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... you've given them time to run in?

Some hifi reviewers put on a mono track, and then face the speakers towards each other (and pretty much touching) so that the sound "cancels out" (I don't know if you're supposed to reverse the polarity or not) ...

Re: I assume ...

[gerald_duck]

You are supposed to reverse the polarity.

But given how hard it is to get a mono track, you're better off making a disc that has the left and right channels in perfect antiphase. While you're at it, you can make the residual effect a lot less annoying by using white noise rolled off at 5kHz or so.

Alternatively, buy speakers from a company that actually tests its products. That way, they'll have been run in during factory soak-tests. (-8

Re: I assume ...

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

They're second-hand, hence why I could even think of trialing them. I'm not looking to spend much more than £300 (and these are on offer for £350).

[gerald_duck]

Your system sounds better with the tone controls engaged but at central position than it does with the tone controls bypassed?!?

There's something very very wrong, there. That surely has to be a fault in the amplifier, and might be better fixed than worked around.

Maybe ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... but on the other hand, there would be no reason to have a "source direct" button if the neutral position on the bass and treble didn't have a sonic effect ...

... and (aside from the bass mad loonies) the main reason for EQ is to make the music sound better (tailoring the response to match the acoustics of the room etc.) though few people get it right.

So there's every chance that the effect of having the two EQ knobs set to their neutral/midpoint is to introduce some sound shaping circuitry and does *something* to the sound, which (coincidentally) makes it sound better ... most filter designs aren't a simple 12db/octave with perfectly sharp edges ... so having the centre frequency for each of treble and bass set to have zero effect means that there could be strange effects as you get further from the central filter frequency.

[gerald_duck]

The neutral position on the bass and treble controls does have an effect — it's detrimental. The "source direct" button is there so you can minimise the damage if you're a sensible person who doesn't want to frig with tone controls (the button itself will have some sonic character, even when it's defeating them).

The main reason for EQ is to provide a cheap and nasty feature some misguided fools will want. Normally, it's provided as a last resort, when the manufacturer can't provide more attractive features such as sound quality. A manufacturer of Marantz's calibre ought to have known better.

Room acoustics simply don't vary in ways even remotely suited to being corrected for by such blunt instruments. Anything else ought to have been sorted out when they designed the hi-fi component in question, or when they made the piece of music.

Tone controls are better approximated as low-pass and high-pass filters with variable depth than with variable centre frequency. In any case, the central position ought to be giving no slope whatever. The detrimental discrepancies are likely a combination of the centre position on the knob not being the true zero mark, and the side-effects of putting a whole bunch of resistors and capacitors near your precious music. No good can come of this.

I repeat: if engaging azekeil's "source direct" button doesn't improve the sound, he should get the button fixed. (-8

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

It's an old one (PM-80) - it was second-hand in '95. I believe their more modern amps no longer have tonal controls.

I imagine the effect of the 'source direct' button being disengaged is detrimental to the quality of the music because of the additional circuitry it goes through, but then my musical philosophy (currently) is to go with some basic principles (and mine are simple is better), but then I'm not a fanatical purist: I will tweak things and if I think it sounds better then so be it.

I'm not at the stage where I have decent enough quality kit to appreciate the finer differences, but already I'm noticing differences in encoding techniques (OGG vs. MPC for example) in lossy compression.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. A lot can happen to analogue audio that's being fed through a button that's a decade old.

I suspect that describing the differences in sound with it engaged and disengaged could be tricky — any time when I'm in the area, I'd love to hear for myself. I suspect I'd find myself very tempted to recommend getting inside, desoldering the switch and replacing it with some wire jumpers!

(Speaking of the finer differences, I only ever got one response to my blind listening challenge earlier in the month…)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

True, but the switch sounds/feels like it activates a relay which sounds healthy and does disable the tonal controls as expected.

I may now feel more qualified to offer an opinion on your listening challenge, so I'll have a go when I get a chance :)

That's certainly an opinion!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Grin, and no, I'm not going to disagree with you as a general principle, but I will say that not everyone can rearrange their house to get the perfect listening environment.

Furniture, curtains, large glass windows, non-optimum speaker positioning etc. all colour the sound (perhaps we should all get Stax earspeakers?) and yes, starting with as pure a sound as possible is very important.

I took the graphic EQ out of the stack system I bought (second hand) and I usually use my amp with the "CD Direct" button selected ... so I do agree with you that that's the "best" option ...

... however, as I've gotten older (I'm 41 now) I find that my ears' sensitivity to various frequencies has changed (I've definitely lost some of the very top end, but that's normal).

Also, I listen to music sometimes to figure out lyrics or to identify guitar parts (so I can learn them) so the ability to boost the relevant frequencies and cut the rest is very useful.

Of course a *good* recording should be mixed pure and true ... but so many are not, they are mixed for FM radio, for listening in the car, for listening on earbuds while travelling etc. And a lot of my "hifi" listening is not hifi at all, it's Telewest Cable, or MP3 on CD-R, or FM radio, or live music recorded using a small stereo mike and a pocket MD recorder ... horrifying to the music purists I'm sure, but I want to get the best possible reproduction out of them, and a flat "source direct" isn't always the best solution.

The main *use* of EQ may be to provide a cheap and nasty feature some misguided fools will want but the "good" reason (in my opinion) for EQ is to adjust the frequency responses to get the best possible recording and the best possible playback (and sometimes, particularly for live music that has been recorded sub-optimally, that means doing things like bringing up the bass or removing the room resonance where it was recorded)

True, tone controls may be better thought of as highpass and lowpass, though on several bits of kit I own they do actually boost as well as filter. They also do muck about with the pure music.

The side effects of a bunch of resistors and capacitors (or digital eq) is of course something to worry about.

Some designers design their amps to be "wire with gain" (and it's a continuing quest to see how close they get), others tune their amps for particular markets (e.g. the Marantz KI-signature and "designed for UK" stuff). All amps (and I generalise here) add some colouration to the music. In the end I think it comes down to whether you want to hear it exactly as the recording engineer mixed it (and you may not agree with the balance of instruments etc.), or whether you want to enjoy the music.

But then I'm an uncultured heathen ... my speaker cables were under £3/m, most of my interconnects are £20 or less, and I have a Sony home cinema amp as my main listening amp ... so what would I know? :-)

[gerald_duck]

The right solution in all these cases is to get a system that's extremely precise, balanced and revealing. Such systems will shine when given material that is well-engineered, but will also allow you to hear the music through the defects in lesser material. Just as an example, the human ear is extremely good at hearing past white noise — the less coloured the treble, the less obtrusive hiss becomes, and the less need there is to ease down the treble on old recordings. Similarly, with a system that accurately handles anything you can throw at it in the bass registers, there's no need to turn bass down on radio-mix "rock/pop".

My system has tone controls that operate in the digital domain, and are genuinely distortion-free (give or take the 24th bit). I still never use them.

Oh — my speaker cable is 82p/metre, my stereo 1m interconnects are £15, and I always listen multi-channel through a surround decoder. I just shop extremely carefully. (-8

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly; I bought the unit second-hand for £220 from a guy in a small shop with old equipment stacked to the roof. He had no idea of the history. Once, I foolishly connected an old tv. set to it. Little did I realise but it had a HUGE DC offset which took about 3 mins to blow one of the channels. It then spent about 4 months in a repair shop waiting for a replacement part from Marantz - so god knows what they've done to it.