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Let us consider that there is a good chance that you are arguing with your experience of your own and your judgement of your own personal capacities for discernment under such situations.
Dismissal of bias can be difficult when the very basis of thought emerges from the unconscious, which is not ruled by logic. Thus the basic emotional coloration of the very idea of logic as expression -as experienced within the idea of thought that is emergent from the depths of the mind.
Or perhaps it is simple misunderstanding of the intent. Although the above always applies-within each human breath taken.
When I say do not dismiss the observation I speak on the idea of science itself being predicated on the point of human observation as an initial starting point.
To invalidate the original observation through the blind application of potentials in human observation (ie, predicated upon the negative:people can fool themselves within the scope of their observations) is to dismiss via desire for simplicity, or to narrow things down to lowest common denominators so it can all funnel through a single predetermined testing regimen -- such a thing is dangerous to the utilization of the human condition. The problem is that the human condition is endemic to the situation(s) involved.
We don't know the limits of human perception.
All we really know is that the logic of a human has created a narrow set of test conditionals that relate specifically to the test regimen and very little else.
When answers do not present themselves via scientific methodology as applied to the creation and utilization of a regimen or set of protocols...then the testing regimen or conditionals/parameters/basis/whatever -are at fault.
Not the original observer.
In essence, solipsism is a fundamental point that science has tried desperately to erase..but it cannot..as all observation and science tells the same sad tale of it's permanence in the basis of existence.
Basically, sadly..in the end...Descartes was/is an embarrassment to logic and premise.
Note the massive unspoken gulf between the two above sentences.
Read 'The Field' by Lynne McTaggart (massively documented). I'm not sure how you'll take such a book, but I'm well certain it is important book of note, that should be tied to first year university studies that involve any directional (as a final point of a given schooling ending in scientific vocation) or attempt to define the ideals of logic and application in the human sphere. It quite handily illustrates via even the most rigorous dogmatic conditionals of science -that reality is not even remotely what you think it is.
I can say, in my experience, that if a given person cannot stomach or handle the contents of that particular work with without being able to reflect and or expand upon what the contents reveal to them..then I'm not sure that they are even remotely useful in their existence for the furthering of man in any useful or correct manner.
I must warn you, though.. that the book has the ability to completely crash the mind of the linear thinking and unprepared, if their world view is strictly Newtonian and 'reality' based. This is, of course, ~IF~ they attempt to disprove the contents of the book. The only way such a person can get past the book, if it is actually read by the individual--- is to lie to oneself on the deepest level possible. I shit you not.
I say, start by reading Howl and work your way up from there. Best audiophile referencing work of all time...
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; "
Anyone who's ever been to a Hi Fi show knows what Ginsberg is talking about there!
(Next, he specifically talks Hi FI and audiophiles...)
"Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...."
(If that isn't a transcendent Hi FI reference, I don't know what is! I also think it means he preferred McIntosh gear.)
Later on, he goes directly Hi Fi again:
1) An allusion to Klipsch and Hi Fi controversy:
"Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedies among the scholars of war" and
Buddha- Man, you were layin' down some hep jive. The poets know its.
March off to the bookstore and buy the book, gentlemen.
You will, for your ~$18, receive a fully top-loaded in-depth cosmic mindfuck of a most serious and undeniable nature. The book did not tell me anything that I do not already know, but I find it is good for introducing people to the emergent world, not the dogmatic 'realism' of yesteryear which has harmed humanity so, with regard to holding it back.
Max Planck said (paraphrase), 'Science advances, funeral by funeral'. I have no qualms about helping such people into their graves. I'll even shovel dirt on them while they are still alive.
A note from Al to show what I mean. Once he was at the appropriate level of influence, he could clearly see what the average man could not. They simply did not have the vantage point:
Albert Einstein:
'The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.'
Books like 'The Field' actually DO allow one to begin figuring out how to break that control. Ie, it starts inside the individual.
As the assertion is not my own, your mind reading has failed in the most tragic of fashions.
I support the assertion that DBT's are necessary for determining if something actually sounds different BY SOUND ALONE. (assuming that we're not talking obvious, like comparing the rolling stones to the cowboy junkies)
But I'm not the first one to make the assertion, and attributing the idea to my own "experiences and judgement" is throwing out close to 100 years of publications and experience amounting to literally man-centuries of research, including by many people who, like me, initially did not believe the idea themselves.
Getting back to the original topic , I nail cats to the top of my speakers.......kind of like super tweeters.
And , yes, I can pass a DBT, the shrieking and hissing are a dead giveaway.
Everyone is a "mind reader" to jj.
Everyone is "insulting" to jj.
Everyone is "pathetic" to jj.
Everyone is "stalking" jj.
Everyone is "dismissed" by jj.
Everyone owes jj an apology.
Everyone is on to jj.
Whatever.
It does not mean that the rest of it is wrong..and it does not mean that your position is correct.
Mankind has thrown out multitudes of types and categories of research that do not fit the given situation, or new information. In this case it is a situation where DBT does not stand up to the level of finesse required for the job to be done at the level it needs be done.
Therefore, long drawn out month long or more..sighted tests and reviews.
If you head was clear as to the depth of the reasons why, you might be able to 'get it'.
I've said this to other people before:...the foolishness begins when you think that the limits of your own intelligence and/ or listening/correlation/filtering skills-are the same as anyone else's.
In this case, it is the flat our attempt to dumb down reviewers and similarly skilled audio fans and audiophiles to some illiterately* conceived lowest common denominator.
*Basically, fans of DBT not being physiologically and psychologically literate enough in their listening skills -to get the job done.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have only gone as far as Duct taping gerbils to the tops of my speakers. I'm not sure if their struggles have much to do with any changes in the sound.
But.... it is amusing to watch.
Hey, Dianetics just merged with audiophilia!
Anyone else here 'clear?'
(On the serious side, audio and Scientology do seem to have their pricing structure/benefit ratio in common.)
My speakers are naked on top. Well, maybe a little dust! But I need to fix one that has flattened the little ball of BluTack I had under it. It is not as wonderful sounding as it was, so I must remedy the situation so that it points at me in a similar fashion to the other. It is messing with my center image a bit.
Trey
I'm guess that the more money you reward them with - the more books they give you to read. Ahhh....good ole' L. Ron and the Diabolics thing.
Battlefield Earth was an amusing read.
Out of the approx 4,000 books I've read..Dianetics is not in that pile! I have a copy somewhere in case they somehow become rulers of the world. I can carry it around as a pass on the roadblock/security checks, I'm guessing. If I can find it....
I use the Jeff Joseph-recommended M&Ms on top of my speakers.
On top of mine? Since the cabinets just got finished this weekend, nothing at all, except a little (*&*(&* dust.
But usually? CD's, dust jackets for LP's, kids books, kids toys, ....
Tell me more. Interesting. website with details/?
what speakers do you have? home built? what design?
Home-designed, paid a carpenter to build the boxes.
They're a WMTMW setup, with very controlled vertical dispersion, and very wide horizontal dispersion. They imagine like )(*(*, but they occasionally make you aware of things like "whoops, that was a clumsy edit".
They seem to meet the 'can listen to for hours' requirement. They bottom out at something like 34Hz. I don't have a full set of measurements (yet), or I'd be more specific.
Parts cost is about $300 in drivers plus a 5' high box about 1'x1' (not exactly though, needless to say that the two dimensions are not the same.
The main design goal? No distortion. I hateses distortion, I does... they don't sound loud, they just are loud if you are listening to the end of the telarc st seans organ symphony.
I've driven them with a variety of things from my Hafler P3000 to a cheap radio. In that, you get what you pay for but they are a pretty even 8 ohm load.
interesting. people seem to be fond of that configuration..I guess so, anyway..you see it a lot around audio forums.
I think now after falling in love with the Geddes Approach
http://gedlee.com/summa_.htm
(my Jazz Modules ) are based on Geddes principles, I think ive found my audio nirvana, but the WMTMW setup has always intrigued me.
PM me an email and I'll send you the plans. Feel free to experiment.
I've built 3 sets, one 2, one 5 and one 7 of them. All have come out very consistant, requiring no tuning.
The box is a PITA to build, lots of fiddly little cutting to get the midranges in the right place.
Cool Stuff, JJ. Making one's own speakers (ie, more than one design) is an important aspect of orienting one's knowledge with regard to knowing sources of coloration.
Yours are a heck of a lot prettier. Mine are black painted MDF, at least in the first incarnations. In a lot of ways the design principles are very similar, lots of attention to both direct and power response.
The kind of speaker depends on your room, but I think you knew that. Mine are built for when you have floor and ceiling issues, and work by keeping everything above about 200Hz reasonably off the floor and ceiling until the specular bounce is well behind the listener. They seem to work well in a good, treated room as well.
Anyhow, now that the latest are back from the finishing shop and have been for 8 hours, there is a pile of teenaged-girl-owned clothing on top of one, to get back to the OP. I swear, these kids clothing are going to take over the whole (*(& house.
Well, I've been doing this on and off for something like 30 years...
There was close to a 20 year hiatus in the middle. Magee Radio closing put me at a loss for drivers, and being on a couple of international standards committees really didn't do a lot for my spare time, either, to put it politely.
Boy the drivers today are a lot better, to say the least, once you get past the "cheapest possible". It's also nice nowdays to NOT be trying to do "the most with the least". That got old long ago.
You know, ncdrawl, you're not going to be that far from Springboro, Oh in a little while. At least that's where all the driver shipments come from.
ETA: No, not 30 years. First speaker I built was in 1969. In retrospect, it really was kinda, err, shall we say sound came out of it...
What's on top of my speakers? That is such a difficult question. I can try to quantify that question with an answer based on an analysis of the compasition of various gases, liquids, pressure and temperature. But that would be insignificant compared to the effect caused by the planets, magnetic fields, solar activity, and the penguin on the tele.
Is there a guide to Feng shui speaker placement?
Neat stuff jj.
I built my first speaker around the same time as you. But I did go the route of the most for the cheapest because I was in school with very limited funds. It was a one-way 'bass-reflex' design, bass rolloff at 70 Hz. Didn't work as well as I liked, and I didn't know about Neville Thiele's work.
Later, I converted the enclosure back to a sealed system and replaced the woofer with one of lower Fs - bass rolloff at 55 Hz. I added the tweeter in a separate box sitting on the woofer box.
Even later, the woofer was replaced with one calculated with Thiele-Small parameters. The bass roll-off point was pretty close to what the theory said, around 41 Hz. I don't remember what the system Q was but I was trying to get below 0.8.
Even later I added a midrange and put both in the same box. Now that one is sitting on the woofer box with foam inbetween as vibration isolation. This went through several incarnations.
I also improved the capacitors in the crossover to Mylar and polystyrene. Inductors were hand-wound, air-core inductors originally, and unchanged. Quality of L-pads make a difference (original ones rotted and sounded terrible until replaced with better ones).
I use these for 'better' sound when watching TV. Overall, it was good experience and fun, learned a lot too. Good to see others having similar experences.
Edit: There is an amplified TV antenna on top of one speaker. HD 1080i is received and it's nice.
Would you like help with all of those gasses?
Well, you know, it's true that most anyone can make sound come out of a speaker, but as you found out as well, making it sound good is harder.
My first designs were "the most for the least" as well, and the quality was what you'd expect.
But one of my designs got loose all over, and I know there were at least a couple of hundred pairs got made (they were set up to use exactly a half-sheet of ply, be about $115 for a pair back in 1980, and sound pretty *&( good for that price). There's a story there about a guy at Magee radio asking me "why have 200 people ordered exactly the same thing, can you tell me?" in there. (I gave away the plans to many summer students at Bell labs. Away it went, apparently. All sets are now dead due to foam rot, so it goes.)
But the ones I'm working on now just for the heck of it (and for an offspring's dorm room, I swear, I'm going to get them painted lacquer hot pink...
) are only running about $200, wood included, and I paid someone else to do the cutting, even. Won't work like the ones mentioned above, but ought to be good for teensy ones. But we shall see, the parts are somewhere in Montana, today...
ETA: Now look at that, NOW I have 16 year old girl clothing on one speaker, a sweater and her homework on the other, and her laptop on one of the rears.
Geeze.
(and guess who listened to them all last night? I didn't even get a chance)
mutter...
This is a nice thread and I'd like to keep it that way. I'd like to say that my gerbils died, but one escaped first, so now the new crew is duct taped to the tops with gaffer's tape, which should hold them for quite some time. They don't seem to like Rammstein so much.
You might try Mars Volta, then?
Just as important - let's not forget, What's under your components? A little fresh fruit comes in mighty handy in stubborn applications. You can keep all your Shun Mook Diamond Resonators, pyramidal lead fishing weights, NASA grade ceramics and hunting arrow tips. Give me fresh limes any day. You might say they're sub-lime. Or even subliminal.
Fresh Limes
Can't use fresh apples as they have a resonance.
I had to go and read about what a 'Mars Volta' is. Check this out, the gerbils are right set for it:"Strap yourself in, hold on, and feel free to scream."
As for their sound, nah, too classic rock in flavor for me. I always fell on the other side of the pile of rock dung. I love Rammstien's big clean sound, the way the hammer comes down so clean on the drum and bass line. I don't own a single Rammstien album, but I DO definitely appreciate their works.
Lemons are more my poison. Why is it that audiophiles seem to ignore the benefits of fresh fruit? And why is there such negative connotations to the lemon? ie. "Oh don't buy that car. It's a "LEMON" ". WTF?! Where does that even come from?! What could a lemon have possibly done to someone, that he would hate it so much, he'd have to immediately equate it with a defective car. Or did he just buy a defective car that was yellow, and then say "Why that's a lemony kind of colour. Now I'm gonna have to hate on lemons because of this". All I know is that I treated a lemon the other day, and I got a wonderful sound lift from doing that. So if someone tells me "The toaster I bought is a real lemon", I'm going to have to assume they mean it can improve their audio sound.
I estimate that I can improve the sound of over 500 audio systems, with just the rind of a single lemon, and an endless number of systems with a whole lemon intact. And that isn't even counting the juice of the lemon. I say that when life gives you lemons, improve your sound with them, that's what you do.
Yeah, one of their cuts is the present winner of "the most clipped album cut seen on CD" to my knowlege.
When you histogram the PCM levels on the CD, the two most common levels, by 1.5 orders of magnitude, are 32767 and -32768.
:gag:
Ionic, anti-static, polarity, charge, etc.
You're going to have to show a picture of that finished product. I want to see how hot that pink can be. (my kids and I do not like pink colors, unless it's in strawberry ice cream or frozen yogurt)
Ironically, she opted for Watco Oil finish.
She was, well, err, the idea of hot pink didn't sell...
To say the least.
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