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Music in the Round #8

For months now, I've been beating the drum for full-range center-channel speakers, to reproduce recordings with a true center-channel signal. There are many reasons for this.

First, if you have a refrigerator-sized, big-screen TV in the middle, there's no way your main L/R pair can create decent centerfill without help (and even then, don't expect much).

Second, even without that monster in the middle, redistributing the center channel to the left and right speakers will, of necessity, introduce phase problems that can't be corrected with level adjustments or speaker…

Music in the Round #8 Recordings In the Round

Sidebar: Recordings In the Round: RCA Living Stereo on SACD

Three-Channel SACD/Two-Channel SACD/Two-Channel CD

A HI-FI SPECTACULAR
SAINT-SAËNS: Symphony 3, "Organ"
DEBUSSY: La Mer
IBERT: Escales
Charles Munch, Boston Symphony Orchestra
BMG Classics 8287-661387

TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto 1
RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto 2*
Van Cliburn, piano; Kiril Kondrashin, RCA Symphony Orchestra; Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orchestra*
BMG Classics 8287-661392

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition, Night On Bald Mountain
Fritz Reiner,…

The Tragedy of the Commons

In my January "The Fifth Element" column, I discussed the concept of value in the context of audio component manufacture. This month's "Letters" includes a response to that column from Austrian distributor Hans Hirner. In his letter, Herr Hirner writes about some of his Web-surfing non-customers: "If that weren't enough, they also call me or my dealers to tell them how proud they are, after having taken all from me that is possible in system matching and trial—and even denoising their systems—to have been able to find 'our' products cheaper out there."

The phenomenon Hans Hirner…

The Tragedy of the Commons Letters

The letter that triggered the column, from March 2002 (Vol.25 No.3):

Sensible shopping?

Editor: John Marks was so right, in "The Fifth Element" in January (pp.55-59), that there is a lot of unfair competition out there. As a small distributor of pro and home audio products in "little" Austria, I have more than once had to feel that kind of storm. I adhere to a philosophy of strict and absolute service to the customer: Never in eight years have I taken one schilling for any repair or service for products distributed by me; everybody is offered free listening in his own system (…

Blind Listening

John Atkinson sets the stage
Nothing seems to polarize people as much as the vexed question concerning the importance of audible differences between amplifiers. If you think there are subjective differences, you're an audiophile; if you don't, you're not. And as any glance at an appropriate issue of Consumer Reports—the publication for non-audiophiles—will confirm, the established wisdom is that once the price of an amplifier or receiver crosses a certain threshold, any further improvement in sound quality becomes irrelevant, in that it puts the price up for no apparent gain. In other…

Blind Listening Page 2

System & Methodology
As suggested in one of this month's "Letters," I had actually considered restaging the 1985 "Carver Challenge," where a Carver M1.0t could be compared with a pair of Conrad-Johnson Premier Fives. In the event, however, I decided that as Stereophile had just bought a recent Adcom GFA-555 to compare with an early sample (footnote 3), it would be one of the test amplifiers. (The $750 '555 has always been a safe Class C recommendation in Stereophile's "Recommended Components.") The other amplifier, as different in design as possible, would be the similarly powerful…

Blind Listening Page 3

The splitter box fed both power amplifiers via 1m lengths of Monster M1000 and the output levels of the two amplifiers were matched at 1kHz by reducing the input to the VTLs. A debate ensued in some of the sessions as to whether it would have been better to have used wide-band noise to determine the level matching. I decided against this mainly because of the impracticality—noise naturally results in a constantly changing reading on the meter unless a large time-constant is contrived. I must admit to some puzzlement, however, when told by one member of the audience that this method was…

Blind Listening Page 4

Overall, 19.9% of the listeners scored 2 correct or less out of 7, 53.8% scored 3 or 4 correct, while 27.9% scored 5 correct or more out of 7. The best group score was 82% correct identification of the Adcom/VTL difference in Session V with the Fauré Requiem movement, and the worst was only 23% correct identification of Adcom/Adcom in Session II on the King's Singers track.

You can see from the data in fig.1 that the proportion of KEOs ranged from 13.3% in Session VIII to 47.3% (!) in Session I. How come? Beats me. I've long since abandoned fruitless speculation, but there it is. No, it…

Blind Listening Page 5

In retrospect (what a clear view you get through the retrospectoscope!), the drum track on the HFN/RR Test CD was a definite non-starter. Among the 4 available amp comparisons, there were 14 sets of comparisons with this selection in the 8 sessions. Table 5 shows that in only 1 of the 14 was the correctness of the responses any better than by chance alone. As can be seen from Table 4, the other six selections were all equally highly effective in demonstrating the overall ability to distinguish difference rather well but to determine sameness rather poorly.

What does one make of…

Blind Listening Page 6

John Atkinson scratches his head
I hope that you will agree from Will's analysis that there did seem to be a slight audible difference between the two power amplifiers. With so many trials, the statistics give a high degree of confidence in the results. Are there obvious measured differences that would explain the blind identification?

Absolute phase differences, though often audible under blind conditions, were not a factor here as both amplifiers are non-inverting. Level differences also did not contribute. However, there were slight frequency-response differences between the two…