In the vertical plane (fig.8…
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The match in dispersion between the midrange unit at the top of its passband and the tweeter at the bottom of its band is also excellent, with just a hint of an off-axis bulge in this region. All things being equal, I would have imagined that this slight presence-region excess in the speaker's off-axis behavior would subjectively compensate for the similarly slight lack of energy in the on-axis response. However, it's possible that it overcompensated in Kal's listening environment, meaning that well-damped rooms will work better with the F30 than live rooms.
Elsewhere in this issue, I review the new Spica Angelus loudspeaker, only the fourth product to appear from this Santa Fe-based manufacturer since it started operations at the end of the 1970s. You will have to read the review to learn what I thought of the speaker, a distinctively styled floor-standing two-way, but I also thought it would be beneficial to talk with Spica's founder and chief engineer John Bau. I therefore made arrangements to meet with him in their facility just a couple of blocks from Stereophile's old Early Street HQ. I had been told that John was tall, but until he…
Atkinson: We'll come back to that. In the meantime, your next product was the TC-50 system, which was launched at the WCES in January 1983.
Bau: Right. Basically, how we got to the TC-50 was by throwing out all preconceptions, and just trying, number one, to find a transfer function for a crossover network that actually summed to linear amplitude and phase. That was the biggest thing that needed to be solved. I had already come to realize, with the help of the FFT and later the Time Delay Spectrometry (TDS) measurement technique system—which I found to be superior, more revealing—that…
Boy, the light went on in my head. I immediately started investigating the Bessel algorithms, evolving models and playing around with time delay as an optimizable parameter—something I had never thought of before, and I don't know if anyone else had at that point. Not only can you play around with the slopes and enhance the phase response, but you can also move the mid section, or the bass/mid and the high section relative to each other in time, which creates its own phase relation between the two. By a process of elimination, I started working with the fourth-order Bessel because it was…
Bau: Right. We had chosen those drivers almost a year prior to getting seriously to work on the Angelus. We first had to wait for Audax to send us identical samples from two production runs in a row, which took a long time. Once we had that, and knew what we were working with, we worked on optimizing the baffle geometry and the placement of the drivers on the baffle—just one thing after another. We would find that we would do something that was good for the tweeter but bad for the woofer, and then we'd find something that was good for the woofer but bad for the tweeter, and obviously the…
Bau: Oh God, yes. In the early days, even as early as 1979 and '80 after I'd gotten the Hewlett Packard FFT analyzer to do phase measurement quasi-accurately, I read his early work which had been sitting there unnoticed—how could such genius work could go unnoticed for ten years before somebody picked it up and said, "Hey, this is important"? And because I'm not trained in this area, I couldn't make sense of a lot of his stuff because so much is formulae, it's like, "This is explained by chicken scratches." Fortunately, every now and then he would say "what all this means is," and then he…
In the early 1950s, a quiet, undistinguished Senator named Joseph Raymond McCarthy began a crusade against what he imagined were subversive, dangerous elements in American government. His tactics included irresponsible accusation, militant attacks on his opponents, and self-aggrandizing witch-hunting. So virulent were his methods the term "McCarthyism" entered the language. McCarthyism came to mean any unjustified persecution and the false conformity this strategy engendered (footnote 1).
Do you now, or have you ever, heard differences between loudspeaker cables?
At the Audio…
With Dugan conducting the listening, we heard 30 seconds of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony through both cables, with the audience knowing which cables they were hearing. When Dugan asked if people heard differences, about half the audience indicated they did hear a difference. Dugan wanted individuals to state on the record what differences they heard—presumably for later ridicule. Dugan said facetiously, "If you can train your hearing to hear certain kinds of qualities, you can pick them up. Maybe you don't know what to listen for." Little did he realize the irony of this remark.
A few…
After these first two demonstration trials, the MIT and 12/2 were connected back to the ABX box and the real-science investigation into loudspeaker cables began. The very first trial was barely over when an audience member stood up and shouted that the test was a joke and should be stopped immediately. There was a general murmur of agreement among a portion of the audience. Dugan asked for a show of hands for how many people wanted to stop the test after just one trial. "It looks about evenly divided—we'll continue," Dugan said.
When five trials had been completed (two demonstrations…
It would be easy to dismiss this circus if it weren't for the next speaker, Wilfredo Lopez of the New York Department of Consumer Affairs. He was there to discuss how his office views loudspeaker cables and other audio products from a legal perspective. Rather than paraphrase Mr. Lopez, I shall instead present his chilling vision of the government's role in high-end audio in his own words.
"The commissioner [of the New York Department of Consumer Affairs] is committed to the protection and education of consumers. Our office has jurisdiction over all print, radio, and television…