The tweeter is an interesting animal. Like with musical instruments, it's usually smaller than the main driver or drivers. Instruments have a wide range of different designs to cover the musical range, some having a drive unit for each note. A tweeter however takes what the woofer can't reach and completes the music scale.

I look at drivers for what they really are, playback instruments. The difference between a playback instrument and a musical instrument is a playback instrument has to play back all the musical instruments. In some ways that makes the job of the playback instrument far more complicated. On the other hand a playback driver only has to playback the sum of the sound pressure the mikes receive and the mixer, mixes. Even though I like a wide range of playback speakers one type to me is closer to the musical instrument than the rest, the free resonant speaker. I've owned a lot of panel speakers and have enjoyed (still do) working with them. The whole idea of free resonance to me is the way to go, and this is why many panel speakers setup correctly can do wonders. Box speakers however have taken a weird twist in the last 30 or so years. There's a school of engineering out there that was born with the belief that the cabinet is only there for providing air (space) for the drivers. This is a strange spin on audio playback and separates the speaker from common instrument building concepts. There are more speaker designs that use the inside of the cabinet as voicers than any other type of speaker design, and the ranges of theories are just as big. In exploring this one thing we have found is there is no separating the driver from the cabinet. The pressure and vibration, or lack of, are every bit as much of the sound of a speaker as the drivers themselves.

but this doesn't stop here

There's one more part to speaker designing that is easily if not more important, at least equal to, the speaker cabinet itself. A speaker is only as good as the playback room. The playback room is every bit as much of a speaker design as the the drivers or cabinets used. This is a chapter of the hobby that is still very young and in many ways unexplored or at least not very well understood.

Busy days so I need to run again and will be back, but I want to leave you with something to think about. As you look at all these different speaker designs and types and how they work, a room is an even bigger speaker cabinet, with more variables than the inside of the speaker cabinet and is part of the cabinet design. Loudspeakers are not separate designs from rooms, they are one. When you turn on that speaker you are not hearing the speaker, but the room the speaker is in. The speaker is part of the audio chain with the room being the biggest sonic factor in playback.

see you soon

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

When designing speakers I don't look at here's a woofer, here's a mid, a tweeter and cross-over. I look at speakers as if they are a musical body (the cabinet) and the main driver. Everything else to me is a support system, including the room. The idea for me is to make the "whole" of the sound pressure in the room balanced and harmonically correct, and able to respond to whatever recording someone puts on.

At first I was like many a cross-over guy, but as time and listening went on I started to realize that this way of thinking ended up in one thing chasing another and at the end the speaker itself became a frankenstein. Think about it. Why do I want a speaker that taxes the amp, and an amp that taxes the speaker? It's an endless cycle and is never quite right. The whole dead speaker cabinet is a bust. I make a super heavy duty cabinet and now I need to use more drivers, more complicated drivers, complicated cross-overs, complicated amp, complicated pre to control the amp, and now a room that I don't know what to do with. This is backward.

VS

Why don't I make a cabinet that compliments the main drive unit. I take a simple speaker design and put it in a cabinet that allows the speaker to operate to it's fullest potential. Maybe I have to mod the speaker a little but no big deal. I direct couple that drive unit to the low mass cabinet and find myself with a main drive unit that goes from 38-7000 without sweating at normal volumes. At this point I can add a sub if I wish to shake the place, and a tweeter to extend into harmonic land.

let me show you why this is important

If you look at the instrument frequency scale your going to see a scale that for the most part gets cooking around the 38hz mark (goes as low as 16hz) and up to around 4K (goes up to 5Khz). To give a reference, a bass guitar goes from around 60hz-300Hz, electric guitar 90hz-1khz and to show what most call the center of the acoustical scale middle C on the piano is only barely above 260hz. You hear people talk about 20,000hz and some of us old farts actually brag that we can hear this. Well there are many fish tales to this biz but lets save that for another chuckle. Sometime when you get a chance look up the instrument frequency range, but this time be sure to look at one that includes the harmonics. One thing you'll notice is the harmonic scale is wider than the fundamental scale. You might ask why is this important? The harmonic range (scale) is what holds the fundamentals in pitch. If you get a screwed up structure to those harmonics your going to get "frequency clustering", and this is one of the biggest and misunderstood distortions in audio.

I want to show you something else

The most sensitive part pitch wise in the human hearing is between 1Khz-4.5khz. Upper harmonics start at around 200hz and go strong till around 16khz. The fundamental and harmonic mingle ground's strongest point is between 200hz-5khz. Within that range is the place where the human hearing is the most challenged and also happens to be where the fundamentals and harmonics are the most mixed. This is the range of music where you don't want to do anything that throws off the structure. Your sound pressure patterns must be on their best behavior in this range, which means this is the worst place to put a slope. Throwing the recorded code into this storm of electronics is disaster, and look at where these high frequencies that people complain about are. If you measure the place where people start complaining about high frequency peaks you'll be surprised to see that they are really between 1khz-5khz. Where do you find most driver to tweeter cross-over points? Or worse, woofer to mid range to tweeter cross-over points?

The best case is to have a single driver to cover the range 38hz-7khz and at that point let the tweeter take the over flow.

At this point I can hear the screaming from here, so settle down. A simple driver design can easily cover this range, which means if there's a sonic problem it's not the driver, but the driver/cabinet/room interface. A good sounding driver doesn't need to be fixed, it just needs to be in the right enclosure and room to make it shine. Let me share something that may turn your world up-side-down but shouldn't. When a spec is made on a driver it is made based on an enclosure, free air, or room condition. This is not what a driver sounds like but a guideline within those specific set of conditions. Another fact. You can meassure a response all day long and not get an understanding for the actual sound. Notes are "not" frequencies. Notes are fundamentals plus that all so important harmonic structure. Play any note on two different instruments and they will sound different. With very hi-tech equipment you can come close to measuring this or be off a mile. Play a note on two different speaker cabinets, and once again they will sound different. With simple test equipment they might measure exactly the same, but sound completely different.

The more you understand the whole of a note the easier it is for you to understand speaker designing. For myself I want to repeat, the driver is a part of the cabinet and the cabinet is a part of the room.

sharing time again

You might think up until now I'm talking out of turn, but let me ask you, why would you want to listen to an instrument out of two or more drivers with different blends of electronic filtering? This is the opposite from being a purist. Many of you talk about using as few parts as possible on the recording end to make something pure. What's different about the playback end? Here's an example that might help you understand the complexity yet simplicity of music. A lot of people have problems with bass and being able to see the specific placement of a kick drum while also having the bass guitar or string bass playing ever notice that? Many times you see the bass and kick drum coming from the same place, but in fact this is an illusion. While the bass is playing it's range it operates usually half fundamental and half harmonic to keep it in balance. Most miking of kick drums cover from 45hz-8khz, a wider spread than a piano. Very few speakers reveal this because the pressure is lost in the cross-over and over dampened and dead cabinet. Here's another fact. Did you know that the sound of a cymbal is 80% harmonics and 20% fundamental? If you hear a cymbal as a dead hit when it is recorded in free resonance, you have a driver/cross-over/tweeter/cabinet/room problem. Think about it from 400hz-16khz and mostly harmonics. How do you take the structure of a cymbal and send it through a bunch of parts and different sounding drivers, a filled cab, and overly solid cabinet, and have them come out sounding right?

Well that's enough for now, but if you get a chance take a look at one of those charts, picture how important it is to keep distortion from creeping into the audio signal, and remember if you have a cross-over within that range that inductor's job is to cancel that sound.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

All my life I've been around acoustical instruments, so when I started reading speaker building how to guides I shook my head and thought "you've got to be kidding". If a driver is suppose to produce musical notes it most be made to sound like musical notes right?

It didn't take me too long to see that there's a problem here. I don't know a lot of instruments that are super thick walled, and stuffed with foam or poly. Many instruments are boxes. Thin walled boxes with tuners on them, and when they are played, they do not cause distortion. Just the opposite they provide both the fundamentals and their harmonics. There are all kinds of levels of voicing musical instruments and if you look at the scale again you'll see their ranges. But more than their ranges, musical instruments are works of tonal art. For thousands of years the designer has mastered the art of creating tonal correctness. Shaping, curing, finishing and sizing have all been handed down throughout time, then came the loudspeaker. The loudspeaker was basically two design concepts. One was to project the music, and the other was to place the music in a smaller room. The one designed to fill a big space was called a mid or long throw. It was based on not only making the sound wave but putting impact behind it, similar to a kick drum, forced pressure. The second was based on stimulating the pressure in a room. The sensitivities between these two designs have mingled together for seventy years for the hobbyist. Barely a dent of technology compared to the years of instrument voicing. There are hundreds if not thousands of speaker design arguements and theories, and just as many opinions on who is doing it right. There's also a safety net belief system in place that says if you can't get it right call it distortion. And many who have not looked deep enough pull that distortion card out often. For myself, if I'm going to learn about the sound of instruments and rooms, I'm going to study how they do what they do and not spend my time trying to fix a problem I've created because I'm trying to make a loudspeaker something different from a musical instrument. When you think about it, there's only one difference between an acoustical instrument and a loudspeaker. The loud speaker has an electronic motor. Other than that they're the same animal, with the same acoustic and mechanical rules.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

Had the next post ready to go and out goes the power. Come on you Vegas Hotels quit being so pigish lol.

I wanted to put this in, and will try to at every opportunity here on Stereophile. As we talk about our views, and for us guys, designs we need to keep in mind that the industry over all is full of some very smart people and some very good technologies. I'm mainly speaking now about CD's. If you have a CD based system and can't play them, don't burn your time and ours telling us CD's are bad. Honestly it makes the audiophile look like he doesn't know what he is doing. CD's are not bad, but if you have a playback system that can not play them well, you need to look into why that is and not trash talk a great technology.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

It might be better to talk about the quality of recording on CD's on the correct threads. I would recommend the thread on compression vs distortion. Both of you have mentioned that your playback systems are not able to play certain CD's without distortion and others here play those CD's just fine.

At the same time, knowing how this forum works, if your comments result in more people reading this thread, I will look at the positives out weighing naysaying which as we all have seen where those end up.

Personally I would rather keep the topics about successful listening, and how to get there and the why of it.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

The difference between sound and great sound is looking at those charts of both fundamentals and harmonics and making what happens with musical instruments happen with our playback musical instruments "the loudspeaker".

Why is an instrument able to go from low to high without distorting vs a loudspeaker doing the same? The answer is obviously not killing the sound, and it's not over processing it with parts. The answer can be found in making a loudspeaker like an instrument and seeing what happens. And that's exactly what we did. To start with the audio rule books had to go out the window, but not after using their guidelines to try to make a musical instrument. In this reverse designing we took popular speaker cabinets and attached sets of string hardward on them, then we began to play these cabinets. Interesting, how every cabinet we tried with the exact set of parts sounded so different from each other, but you might be surprised how some actually were able to play once the filler was removed from them. We like wise put the filler in the instruments we had on hand and the sound went pitchy and fell apart.

Next step was to attach a driver to the instrument and see what happened. We had a range of drivers to choose from. These ranged from very high mass expensive drivers to extremely simple ones. We also had several instrument bodies to use. This R&D went on for some time and I'm cutting to the end of it, but here were the results. With the high mass drivers the cabinets distorted and with the simple drivers there was no distortion. The high mass drivers made the frequencies cluster and the more simple the driver was the wider the range, and the instrument bodies once you found the right one sounded full and dynamic.

Going back to the rule books, we found that in a well matched cabinet/driver combo, it gave us no back wave, and no cross talk distortions. The theory that a light weight free resonant cabinet gives distortion is a myth.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

In order to move any industry forward you need to respect the past for what it was and you have to be able to combined the good with the new. Many times this means letting go of some of the theories that were created to explain results, but didn't really have very good roots. Dampening being used to restore content is one of the most touchy areas and is usually way over done. Over done to the point where a design will start chasing it's own audio tail.

Today we have a better understanding of this than ever before but we still have a ways to go. The open baffle movement is one good example of this. With an open baffle design you are forced to use the room as part of the speaker and even though this movement is still very young the concept is eye opening. This hobby is going to take a huge jump forward when the box as it is, is gone. The same is going to happen when the cross-overs as we know them as well as most of the drivers find a resting place (RIP).

We have been over building the High End Audio part of this industry to the point where we have made problems to fix other problems creating their own problems yet to be problematic. LOL. it's time to get past the problems and move on to the solutions. One solution is accepting our close relative the musical instrument as kin to the loudspeaker. The second is taking a look again at what we are trying to do. Our goal is to play back something natural, and doing this through a complicated system is not the way.

Follow me on this. If we allow our systems to play, we will not have to force them to play!

When we play those instruments in our music rooms, intune there is a sense of ease to the structures. With our playback system can this be done by sending our music content through tons of electronics and non-musical materials? On certain recordings that happen to make their way through the maze, but for the most part you are going to hear a thin, or hard, or clustered, or compressed sound. The price tag of the system doesn't matter. What matters is, does your system do it or not?

In order to get to the solutions, we have to be aware and be willing to be aware. The industry and your personal listening goes nowhere if you don't understand the audio code, the musical scale (fundamental & harmonic) the complexity of parts and materials and the balance between the 3 parts to the audio trilogy.

After you have a respect for these things, you in my opinion will get the best results if you make your system two things. Able to perform with the least amount of mass possible (as musical instruments do) and make your system flexible (able to tune to the info).

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

Some of you reading this might be DIYers. Here's a test you can do to see how well your room and speakers are able to play the harmonic structures.

Most of you have cross-overs or at least a cap or resistor between your woofer and tweeter. Pick out your reference music and study the bass lines. Change a cap or resistor (same value different brand) for the tweeter. Don't make any changes to the low end section. Now play the piece of music again and listen for how the bass has changed. The character of the mids and bottom end should have changed dramatically. If you hear no effect you have problems, if you hear a change but no big deal you still have a collapsed harmonic structure but not as bad. What you should be hearing is a completely different character to the bottom end as well as all the instruments.

We've been talking about how harmonics are what hold the pitch together of fundamentals, but harmonics do more than just hold things together. They are also the support system of musical timbre (the color or flavor of tone). A common place for timbre to be noticeably out-of-tune is the top end of playback. It may also be out-of-tune in the lower notes but where it bugs most listeners is in that sensitive areas from 1khz-5khz (but can be as high as 8khz). There's two parts to this problem, but I'm going to focused for now on the physics side. The human side can be talked about later, and if you are over 40 is something you will increasingly face as time marches on.

If you haven't read up on compression vs distortion now is a good time. http://www.stereophile.com/content/compression-or-distortion

There are two sides to compression and you can read up on it, but to make it short, you may have recorded compression or you may have system compression. On that thread I talk about the difference.

If your playing back a recording and it is hard or distored sounding on the top end, this is usually not recorded compression, but playback compression or can even be a distortion from age. We all have heard mixes and remixes where the engineer uses engineering compression, but this is not an upward shift in frequencies, but more making a dynamic window within the recorded space. On a revealing audio system you can hear the compression taking place but it will not be a brittle sound. Recorded compression and system compression are two different things and if you put on music and it sounds bright, this means your system has failed to match itself to the recorded code and the highs are not able to reproduce the timbre on that recording.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

I thought maybe I would hear from one but it was even more fun with two. I don't have any idea how many tried or are going to try the parts change for the tweeter, but I'm glad to hear some did, surprise!

Timbre is one of the most important parts to this hobby. It's the music industries coloring book, and when you are able to play back timbre there are a couple of things that happen. The very first sign is the size of the soundstage grows a lot closer to the real space of the recording. You can not have proper timbre in playback without space, impossible. The second thing you notice is specificity. When someone talks about revealing yet have a small stage, I know at that point they are missing a whole lot of music and more than liking have some type of clustering going on.

Detail, size and timbre are all very close relatives. You can have a perfectly squeezed soundstage and put on a piece of music meant to be played with space and it will sound horrible. Listen to me carefully here. It doesn't matter if it is test equipment, a mixture or a component, if you are experiencing a series of frequency clusters it means that somewhere you have a signal blockage problem.

Timbre is having your harmonics & fundamentals in-tune or out-of-tune. If you have a cello playing amoung other cellos and don't have the harmonics aligned you are going to hear a mass of cellos, instead of each one having it's own particular sound within the blend. A ton of audiophiles play classical and can't play rock, why? Well the fact is they aren't even playing the classical correctly but because it is playing back as a mass instead of particulars they say it is good sounding, but let me show you something.

We conducted several tests with UMI, where we tested tuned and un-tune instruments in tuned and un-tuned spaces. We played a live symphony in an untuned room first and had 3 instruments out of tune in the orchestra. The conductors were not able to point specifically to the out of tuned instruments we place in the room. They all heard the pitch wrong coming from the sections but had to go down the rows to find the exact instrument. We then tuned the room and all four conductors were able to choose the exact individual instruments out of tune.

Later we did the same tests in our rooms with recorded music. The results were the same only worse. In the playback the listener could not tell which instruments were out of tune or what section they were coming from. This recording was played at a CES and only one listener mention he thought something was off. When we tuned the system so you could hear the individual instruments, only the same guy (a guitar player) spotted the untuned instrument, however all of the listeners were able to see every instrument.

We over the years have done a lot of tests like these with the results being the same. When the system had a smaller soundstage and the equipment was not tuned in to the recording the instruments showed up as more of a mass instead of particular specific instruments, and when the same recording was intune the stage was huge and the instruments all were extremely detailed.

here was the test that sealed the fate for cross-overs

In 2004 I did a similar test only with this playback the recording was fine, and we played the same speaker back, one pair with cross-over and one with only a cap and resisitor. We did this with both a high mass High End driver setup and a low mass setup. playing the music we asked which setup sounded the most like real music and in a real space. All eight listeners choose the low mass cap/resistor setup by a big margin.

We've done this tests a few times with the same results everytime except for one guy, and he had no preference at all.

This of course is a small sample of some of the tests we have done and do. The point is that when trying to separate the components in a speaker or room as far as that goes, the fundamentals and harmonics have a harder time with a smooth transition and makes it more difficult to play music that was recorded with a higher degree of musical parts that depend on the structures being intact.

If the tests above didn't make sense or you've had a hard time following what I'm saying let me break it down.

Your speaker system is not broken down to separate parts all playing something different. The way sound works is based on a dependency systems and as soon as those frequency units hit the air they are looking for order. If there is no order you will hear frequency clustering. You may not even notice this in testing but it's there and is what makes something sound good or bad. It's also what makes timbre work or not work.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

If your reading along and if you have an understanding of what I'm saying, the fundamentals & harmonics working together to make notes, this next part is either going to be depressing or liberating.

"A purist is one who desires that an item remain true to its essence and free from adulterating or diluting influences"

Well how does this apply to music, which is a variable?

In the case of a musical instrument, the fact of it being variable is the science behind it being able to be pure. Again picture a fundamental with it's moving support structure of harmonics. This is all happening within the structure of oscillation "a repetitive variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states".

Musical notes and soundwaves work off of the same science, and so does the audio signal. There is no place along the analog chain that does not host the same characters of motion. It's all a system of oscillating energy.

I use the word vibration when talking about the signal. For me it works as a description of bringing the actual energy and mechanical conduits together in working order. Oscillation, cycles, sound, signal all work well with the word vibrations. Musically speaking sum of good vibrations (fundamental & support) could be thought of as in-tune and something where the vibrations are out of order could be out-of-tune. The same goes for the order of timbre. Something out-of-tune will not produce the whole of an instrument's timbre or sound, and something in-tune will show more of the whole. The more correct the harmonic alignment the more of the instrument will be seen in the stage along with all the surroundings.

I have a session so will be back

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

It was nice to visit with my listener last night, he's a member on Stereophile and I didn't ask but believe this is how he found me. After we listened a while we talked about the hobby a bit and the growing interest in tuning this last year. His view is the same as mine, make a change "that's tuning", common sense right? He also thinks that as many who come up pooh-poohing on the phile there are a great number more that are experimenting on their own, which is also what we are seeing by the amount of readers and emails we are receiving.

He was also surprised to see how much high end audio gear we play with. Maybe I should make this clear again so readers don't miss understand us. We are an equal opportunity designer, and don't mention certain names of components on purpose. Many listeners come to us to tune up their components. We don't say you have to change to our way. Of course we understand that most people who come to us want the best possible sounding environment and mechanical transfer for what they have. We talk the way we do on TuneLand because these are the methods we use to get to where we are going. This doesn't mean we give High End Audio components the boot. We simply don't want to offend anyone if we remove feet, or top plate or snip some cable ties.

I think maybe people are supprised when they come to some of our test sights to find that we are very much in the high end game, and at times look like a high end store depending on our projects. For those who do wonder, we do all the food groups when tuning and designing for specific products. We may not have all of them here all the time but that's only a phone call away. We are not one place but several that have different testing, plus our trusted ears around the world. We are pro-music and are not here to favor one source only which I think some here tend to jump on as an opportunity to flame, but those have not bothered to get to know us as a design team. If the readers here saw the list of projects we do throughout the year they would be surprised to see the flexibility we have.

What we don't do, is get stuck in one approach. If I'm for example working on Krell digital one week I wear a different hat from when I'm working on a vintage Pioneer reel to reel system. All the systems and projects we get to work on have unique situations and we adapt an adopt to these as well as the clients goal. Tuning is not about "A" way but "All" ways from our point of view. If you see me rolling my eyes on other threads it's not because I'm dismissing, but rather because the person talking and creating whatever flame they are, are talking about things that are based on non-sense. Of course we love vinyl and tape, computers and Cd's, as well as natural acoustic settings with no electronics at all.

We run into every type, from those who will only listen to pre-70's studio tape to the guy using a smart phone. Every project to us is fresh and new and we appreciate that you choose us to work with. We've been tuning whole systems longer than anyone and never get out of student mode.

thanks again for the comments and sharing

get tune!

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

If you read around the industry you will see people write that there is far more info on a recorded source than what the listener is retrieving. This is a profound statement on a few levels. I especially want to point out that if this is true (and I believe it is), if you have a system that is playing 10% of the music, how can you call that recording a bad one? Further more if the computer testing that recording is doing the same, how do we know if something is as the tests suggest?

While recording the Tabernacle Choir one year, I did a test in the studios in Salt Lake. I had the engineer look at the screen and recorded the signal. Moments later (after I did a fast tune-up) he did the same thing and freaked out when he saw his results were different after the main computer drive was re-tuned. I did the same thing in Detroit, and Nashville. Same results.

So lets flash to Keith Jarrett (bye bye blackbird) "for Miles". I'm listening with one of the designers of Conn (pre Selmer) who picked this recording. We did about 2 minutes, then I went back and made a slight change with the CD Player (I barely loosened the nut on the Clamp-Rak) and the cymbals went from super focused to focused plus splashing across the stage. Drums went from the skins to the entire drum. After the shock, I did the same demo only this time using two screws in the front of the room. To go a step further I did the exact same demo with a Tuning Bolt on the Chameleon Speaker.

I've repeated this same song demo now for many years with the same gasp from the listener. Not just this song though but a wide range of songs, and a wide range of listeners. Part of the tests included the listener hearing the changes during the adjustments. It's like opening and closing a camera.

I'm glad to see people here making changes to their systems. In time there will be those sharing not so much fixed changes but variable. And this is where the hobby changes forever.

While your listening you are able to make almost any change you want, to the song you are listening to. Cymbals too bright and hard? No more. You can make those cymbals spread out wide and rich. It's all about adjusting the "timbre" with the harmonic structures.

example

Play "graceland" Paul Simon (you can call me Al). There is a part in the song where this high note plays that on some of the copies sounds smooth and others sounds hard and piercing. You would be tempted to call some of these copies poor or even bad, but if you have a tunable setup, you can tame this sound by spreading the harmonic structure out and make it as smooth as can be.

This doesn't get rid of dynamic range, limiting and compression changes. What is does, is show you what is on the recording and how much info is there. The bright sound had nothing to do with any limiting, it was simply the recording slightly out of tune, not matching the recorded code to system the same.

Why do you hear Tunees talk about being able to play more music, on more mediums? We have made our systems into tools that open up the harmonic structures then we tuned them in to the sound we wish. All the sound is there, it's just a matter of knowing what to do with it.

This is also why you see more Tunees using in-room systems. An in-room system gives you one more step of acoustic freedom. Having a system that uses the room as the last stage amplifier gives the listener much more harmonic potential, and control over the signal.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

In my referencing the last couple of days some were surprised at the demo. On one system I was playing Rogers "amused to death" and on another "wish you were here".

I set the two systems up to give pretty much the described soundstages that you hear most guys talk about, with the Q sound vs the straight stereo. Then I started opening up the harmonics on both systems and watched eyes grow. The Q sound (which I love) ended up being smaller than "wish you were here" which I spread out to about 30 or so feet wide and the same front to back. Not only did guys hear more on wish you were here than they had before (some of them knowing this recording for over 30 years) but none of them have ever heard this recording move back to front, causing one guy to jump expecting the rush of sound to come out of the front. Almost kicking a platform I might add.

Hearing me or anyone talk about front to back staging is only talk until you experience it for yourself. We're not talking about a side to side stage with depth behind the speakers and a little moving forward. We're talking about the spread of everything musical hitting and spreading evenly in all directions, and then special effects moving through this lush setting front to back or back to front, or even side to side flutter paning, which is done on far more recordings that you think but never hear until the harmonics settle.

Over the next week or so I'm going to do the same demo, using different recordings and if I have time I'll describe the changes.

BTW anytime you guys want to jump in on the referencing let me know and we'll walk through some soundstages together.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/