Vibrations
The slate stands are massive, but not completely free from vibration, acoustically. Using a stethoscope, I could hear a "hooty" sound on the base plate and pillar sides when music was playing. Whether this was related to a slight midrange congestion I noticed, I don't know…
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The massive matching single-pillar stands are made from Welsh Cambrian slate, this a dense, relatively inert material. With its Bird's-Eye Maple veneered enclosure, yellow woofer cone, silver bullet tweeter and port trim, the Silver Signature is, to my eyes at least, a stunningly beautiful loudspeaker.
So sometimes I didn't resist it; the speakers went surprisingly loud in my relatively modest-sized room before they, the amplifier, and my ears all crapped out. Don't get me wrong—the Silver Signature is still a small two-way design. It's physically impossible for it to convey the true sense of live music's scale, the feeling of unlimited dynamics possessed by cost-no-object, size-no-object designs. The Silver Signatures' soundstage may be apparently unlimited in terms of resolution, but it is still perfection in miniature. Nevertheless, the big bass blasts at the start of "The Hit" and…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, stand-mounted, reflex-loaded loudspeaker with Matrix cabinet construction, remote crossover, and all-silver wiring. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) metal-dome tweeter, 7" (170mm) woven-Kevlar cone woofer. Measured crossover frequency: 4.2kHz. Electrical crossover slopes: 2nd-order low-pass, 12dB/octave; 3rd-order high-pass, 18dB/octave. Frequency response: 100Hz-15kHz ±1.5dB, 1/3-octave-weighted; 35Hz-22kHz, -3dB in typical listening room. Channel matching: typically within 0.25dB. Sensitivity: 88dB/W/m (2.83V). Nominal impedance: 8 ohms (minimum 5.…
Sidebar 2: System context
Power amplifiers used to drive the B&Ws were either a pair of Mark Levinson No.20.6 monoblocks or a YBA 2 HC, while the preamplifier was variously the Melos SHA-1 headphone amplifier used as a line-stage, the YBA 2, the Classé Six Mk.II, the remote-controlled Mark Levinson No.38, or the very promising McCormack TLC-1 buffered passive control unit. A Mod Squad Phono Drive EPS amplified LP signals from a Linn Sondek/Cirkus/Trampolin/Lingo/Ekos/Arkiv setup sitting on an ArchiDee table. Digital source was a Mark Levinson No.30 driven by a Mark Levinson No.31…
Sidebar 3: Sensitivity or Efficiency?
If there are areas of loudspeaker performance which are as consistently confused as efficiency and sensitivity, I've yet to discover them. Audiophiles almost universally talk about a loudspeaker's "efficiency" when what they really mean is its "sensitivity": how loud it will go for a given input level. Why is there this confusion?
Historically, dating from the days of tube amplifiers, when power outputs were very limited and the question of power transfer to the loudspeaker was more significant, there is "efficiency." Strictly speaking,…
Sidebar 4: Measurements
The Silver Signature's impedance magnitude and phase, measured using the magazine's Audio Precision System One, are shown in fig.1. Though the impedance magnitude is off the scale at 800Hz, a slight wrinkle in the phase trace can be seen between 700 and 800Hz, indicative of some sort of resonant problem in this region. The port tuning is revealed by the saddle between the two bass humps as lying at a low 35Hz, more than an octave below that of the similar-sized Velodyne. This is one easy speaker for an amplifier to drive, the impedance not dropping below 6 ohms…
So how do the crossover filters compensate for the basic drive-unit behavior? Their electrical responses, measured at the speaker terminals, can be seen in fig.5. The woofer drive signal gently slopes down above 150Hz to compensate for the driver's rising on-axis response, with the upper midrange shelved down by 7dB compared with the level at 100Hz. The electrical crossover point to the tweeter is high, at 4.2kHz, with then a second-order, 12dB/octave rollout. The tweeter drive signal is peaked up in the top audio octave to compensate for the unit's dip in this region. Its high-pass slope is…
Carrying out a spatially averaged 1/3-octave spectrum analysis for left and right speakers individually in my room and averaging the results gives the curve shown in fig.10. The unevenness between 50Hz and 300Hz is due to room effects that have not been eliminated by the spatial averaging. Superbly even in balance with, as conjectured earlier, just a slight depression in the presence region, this curve ties in neatly with my listening impressions: the Silver Signature is fundamentally a neutral, uncolored loudspeaker, with good small-signal low-frequency extension to the 32Hz band.
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Because I review the very-low-distortion Velodyne DF-661 in this issue, the levels of the B&W Silver Signature's individual harmonics are given in Table 1. (Note that I've listed the speaker's impedance magnitude at each of the test frequencies. This is because the 2.83V and 8.95V voltage levels I used will only be equivalent to 1W and 10W power levels if the impedance is exactly 8 ohms.)
Table 1: Distortion Harmonic Levels in dB ref. Fundamental Level
Frequency (Impedance)Drive Power2nd3rd4th5th 100Hz (11.9 ohms)2.83V 0.67W-40.5-53.3 -75.7-68.6 8.95V 6.7W-31.0-40.0-57.6-…
There is one date I dread every year: my wife's birthday. After nearly 16 years of marriage, I have exhausted every last iota of my spousal resources in trying to think of a suitable present. Nothing too ordinary, nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing that will trigger those dreaded words, "You did keep the receipt, right?"
This year was different. First, computer catalogs started appearing in my listening room, each opened to a specific page. Of course, I didn't get to be a long-term husband by displaying too much initiative, so I asked.
"I want an iPod. The 30-gigabyte model…