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Do you suffer from Audiophilia nervosa, that dreaded disease afflicting long-time readers of Stereophile, The Abso!ute Sound, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, and various other sordid high-end rags? Well, take heart, my friends---relief is on the way. But before treatment can begin, as with all illnesses, proper diagnosis is of paramount importance. To help facilitate this, I have compiled a set of multiple-choice questions. Please take the time to read through these carefully, and jot down your best-guess response from the choices below. You really should use a #2 pencil, as the lead in a #2…
The talented loudspeaker engineer is a man who is always in competition with himself. When PSB's Paul Barton put the finishing touches on his Stratus Gold model back in 1990 (footnote 1), I'm sure he had more ideas in mind that he could have used in a flagship design. Yet the Gold offered so much performance at such a competitive price—$2000/pair in 1991, rising to $2100/pair by 1997, then $2400/pair for the the Gold i, an evolutionary development—that it was not surprising that Barton applied his talents to developing ranges of more affordable speakers, such as the best-selling Alpha and…
Once I had the speakers optimally set up, one of the things that impressed me most about the Platinum T8 was its reproduction of voices. If a constant throughout my years of service to the audiophile gods has been my preference for minimonitors, this has been partly because their reproduction of solo voices has tended to be more consistently satisfying than with full-range speakers that cost the same. I have at various time conjectured that this was due to practical reality—within a given budget, the cost of extending low frequencies drastically reduces the resources the designer can devote…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, reflex-loaded, magnetically shielded, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: two 1" (25mm) aluminum-dome tweeters with neodymium magnets and ferrofluid cooling, two 4.5" (110mm) woven-fiberglass cone midranges, three 8" woven-fiberglass cone woofers. Crossover frequencies and slopes: 2.2kHz, fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley (midranges-tweeters; 500Hz, third-order Butterworth (woofers-midranges). Frequency response: 30Hz-20kHz, ±1.5dB; 25Hz-33kHz, ±3dB (anechoic on-axis), -10dB at 22Hz. Sensitivity: 89dB/2.83V/m (anechoic). Nominal impedance: 4…
Sidebar 2: System
Analog source: Linn Sondek LP12/Cirkus/Trampolin/Lingo/Ekos/Arkiv LP player on a Sound Organisation table.
Digital sources: Mark Levinson No.31.5 CD transport; Mark Levinson No.30.6 D/A processor; Classé CDP-10 CD player; Technics DVD-A10 DVD-Audio player; and Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista SACD player.
Preamplification: Linn Linto phono preamp, Mark Levinson No.380S line preamp, Z-Systems rdp-1 digital control center (updated to handle 96kHz sources).
Power amplifiers: Mark Levinson No.33H monoblocks.
Cables: Datalinks: Kimber Illuminations Orchid AES/EBU,…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
My estimate of the Platinum T8's voltage sensitivity was a little lower than specified, at 87dB(B)/2.83V/m, though this will be partly due to my use of a B-weighted figure, which reduces the effect of a speaker's extension at both frequency extremes. However, the speaker's impedance (fig.1) was exactly to specification, at 4 ohms nominal and minimum. The traces in this graph diverge above 500Hz, one set being taken with the rear tweeter jumper in place, the other without. Without the rear tweeter in-circuit, the impedance steadily rises above 2kHz; with it, the…
"Test We Must," cried High Fidelity's erstwhile editor, Michael Riggs, in a January 1989 leader article condemning the growth of subjective testing. (See the sidebar for Peter Mitchell's obituary of HF magazine, now effectively merged with Stereo Review.) With the exception of loudspeakers, where it is still necessary to listen, he wrote, "laboratory testing (properly done) can tell us pretty much everything we need to know about the performance of a typical piece of electronics...We know what the important characteristics are, how to measure them, and how to interpret the results."
With…
More importantly, it is long enough that clipping a transient of this length is plainly audible to the ear. The IHF transient test, in which the toneburst lasts just 20ms, takes no account of the dynamics of the hearing process itself. According to NAD, pyschoacoustic studies have shown that the ear/brain system determines the subjective loudness of a sound by integrating the energy arrival over a 200ms window. Such a rating would therefore directly correlate with how loud an amplifier would play.
To be honest, I think that NAD's proposal has about as much chance of changing the primary…
Looking first at the dynamic range of real music, Mr. Fielder experimented with the lowest possible sound level people could hear, using gated white noise. It turns out to be around 4dB spl, well below typical background noise levels of 20-40dB spl. He then both researched the literature and carried out his own measurements on the peak levels featured by live music. Typically this appears to range from around 112dB peak for classical music to 129dB peak for rock, which implies that for domestic playback, a dynamic range of 98dB is necessary, while for professional playback a 122dB (!) range…
Sidebar: "High Fidelity Is Dead," from August 1989 (Vol.12 No.8)
High Fidelity magazine is dead. The July 1989 issue was the last. Diamandis Communications Inc., the owner of Stereo Review and Audio, eliminated its competitor in the simplest way: it bought the magazine from its owner, ABC, and killed it. In effect, since Diamandis didn't want to publish High Fidelity, it simply purchased the title, trademark, and subscription list. The title and subscription list are being merged with Stereo Review. High Fidelity's editors, technical writers, and record reviewers were immediately…