Unity Audio Signature 1 loudspeaker Revealingness vs Forgivingness

Sidebar 1: Revealingness vs Forgivingness

It's often said that audio design involves tradeoffs. But what differentiates good design tradeoffs from the indifferent and the bad? In my opinion, this has to do with the relationship between "revealingness" and "forgivingness."

By "revealingness" I mean the component's ability to pass on the information in the source material in complete, unexpurgated detail. Lewis Lipnick has used the expression "ruthlessly revealing" to describe a particular component that he felt had a lot of this characteristic. We all know components like that: speakers that reveal what's on the LP or CD in a warts-and-all manner, and which let us hear all the problems in associated components. Those who place great value on this characteristic may refer to this sort of speaker as "accurate"; people who are turned off by the warts describe the speaker as having a "clinical" sound. A component low in "revealingness" simply doesn't do a good job of decoding the sonic information in the source. (Larry Archibald might refer to such a component as a "low-resolution design.")

"Forgivingness" is the component's ability to make the best of imperfect source materials and associated components, de-emphasizing their imperfections. Although "forgivingness" is often thought to be the opposite of "revealingness," I prefer to think of these as two theoretically independent dimensions that usually, but not necessarily, have a negative relationship to one another.

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And now it's time to look at the illustration. The horizontal axis plots "forgivingness"; "revealingness" is on the vertical axis. (Don't ask me about the units of measurement.) The straight line going from top left to bottom right depicts a sort of baseline "average design." At the extreme top left, we have a maximally revealing component that is not at all forgiving of faults in source materials and associated components. Fine if you have an unlimited equipment budget and play only state-of-the-art audiophile recordings. However, most people do have some financial constraints, and play records of music they like; in my experience, such records seldom fall into the audiophile category. By moving along this line, the designer can come up with different tradeoffs between revealingness and forgivingness. As forgivingness increases, revealingness drops by an equal amount. (I told you not to ask me about the units of measurement!)

Components with audiophile aspirations are in the top left quarter; an old-fashioned radio with "good tone" is at the bottom right. On the "bad design" curve (presumably, there are no audiophile products that fall along this line), any increase in forgivingness brings about a disproportionate drop in revealingness. "Good design" is characterized by losing very little revealingness as we move along the curve toward increasing forgivingness. How far to move along this curve is still an individual decision (the designer's and the consumer's) dependent on the quality of associated components, likely source material, and personal preference.—Robert Deutsch

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Unity Audio
Company no longer in existence in 2017 but Robert Grost now runs audio manufacturer Cerious Technologies
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LofiChris's picture

These speakers can now be had in the $200 - $300 range on the second hand market. I purchased my pair second hand from a friend and I love them. I am powering them with the NAD326BEE integrated, and my source 99.9% of the time is my REGA Planar 3 with Ortfon 2M Black cartridge. They sound superb in my humble opinion.

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