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Loudspeaker directivity by Roy Allison


Howard Ferstler

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I remember the Infinity and others of its era. But those were intended to to augment fuller-range speakers that usually went down into the 40-60 Hz range on their own. I was thinking specifically of when we first saw the satellite/sub scheme in which the sub takes over everything under 100-200 Hz and the satellites have no woofers at all.

I just looked up the history of Cambridge Soundworks, and it was founded by Henry Kloss in 1988, so if sub/satellites came before that it had to have been by someone else.

According to the article in this link Bose invented it in 1986.

http://www.ehow.com/about_6508942_satellit...-explained.html

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Does anybody remember, historically, whether the tiny satellite/subwoofer scheme was introduced for home theater or if someone came up with it for music prior to that?

Home theater made it popular but there was a lot around before that. Remember the Visonik David's (David and Goliath system, they called it)? The little Braun and ADS systems also.

In the 60's Paul Weathers had a small system where the satellites looked like books to be hidden on a bookshelf. In the early stereo days EV came out with second channels sans woofers. I think it was called a Stereohedron. Midrange and tweeter horns but the first system handled all the bass. (Not exactly the same, I know.)

Whenever there is a jump in the number of speakers we want consumers to buy, 1 to 2 or 2 to 5, we have to get creative in finding ways to make them smaller.

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Although, TBT, it always seems to be worse in theory than it is in practice. I've usually gotten very good results with full-range speakers exercising common-sense placement practices. Never really thought any of my systems was 'ruined' by the Allison mid-bass floor-bounce dip.

Steve F.

Heresy!!

I've noticed the same thing, whether considering the wall bounce behind or the floor bounce in front. When the speaker is fairly close to the wall behind, the Allison dip is quite pronounced. As you pull away from the wall it gets confused in the general room effects. Same with floor bounces, from a meter or so away the cancelation dip is quite distinct, as you move off to a realistic listening distance it is still there but harder to devine amongst other room effects.

David

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Home theater made it popular but there was a lot around before that. Remember the Visonik David's (David and Goliath system, they called it)? The little Braun and ADS systems also.

In the 60's Paul Weathers had a small system where the satellites looked like books to be hidden on a bookshelf. In the early stereo days EV came out with second channels sans woofers. I think it was called a Stereohedron. Midrange and tweeter horns but the first system handled all the bass. (Not exactly the same, I know.)

Whenever there is a jump in the number of speakers we want consumers to buy, 1 to 2 or 2 to 5, we have to get creative in finding ways to make them smaller.

I remember the Visoniks and the Braun/ADS. I have a pair of AR's answer to them, the 1ms. IIRC, though, only the Davids were teamed with external woofers; the ADS and AR-1ms weren't and were perfectly usable without them in an office, bedroom or dorm type of system. Weathers' Triphonic (which I think I actually saw and heard long ago, but had forgotten about,thanks for reminding me) is probably the earliest one of the sort I was thinking of.

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Same here.

Does anybody remember, historically, whether the tiny satellite/subwoofer scheme was introduced for home theater or if someone came up with it for music prior to that?

A friend of mine had the JBL L212 3-piece system, although the "satellites" were 8" 3-way floorstanders. Still, the theory was the same--a separate sub for optimum bass placement, and sats for optimum M-T imaging. This system was from the early 80's, I believe. Strictly a music system.

The Bose AM-5 was the product that really popularized the concept. It was an '87 intro, and was a music product only at first. The twisting small cubes, plus the "invisible" bass module were incredibly successful. Cambridge Soundworks followed with their Ensemble system about a year later (with two--not one--hideaway bass modules), and Boston Acoustics came out with their Sub-Sat 6 in 1989, which used dual 6 1/2" woofs in a bandpass enclosure and sats with a 4" mid and 3/4" dome tweeter. The BA sounded really good, the Ensemble sounded pretty good, and the AM-5 sounded good to the people who bought it.

Steve F.

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Home theater made it popular but there was a lot around before that. Remember the Visonik David's (David and Goliath system, they called it)? The little Braun and ADS systems also.

In the 60's Paul Weathers had a small system where the satellites looked like books to be hidden on a bookshelf. In the early stereo days EV came out with second channels sans woofers. I think it was called a Stereohedron. Midrange and tweeter horns but the first system handled all the bass. (Not exactly the same, I know.)

Whenever there is a jump in the number of speakers we want consumers to buy, 1 to 2 or 2 to 5, we have to get creative in finding ways to make them smaller.

I'll take David's word for it about the work done in the 1960s.

I remember hearing Visonic Davids teamed with an M&K subwoofer around 1977 or perhaps 78:

http://old.visonik.de/en/historie.php

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Interestingly, while Toole and others (Zilch, for example, but also some other more notable individuals) make some solid claims about what does and does not matter with loudspeaker sound in real-world listening rooms, only Allison and Berkovitz managed to do some real research is real-world rooms. Sure, maybe Toole and others are correct about some things (I doubt some of this, but let's just speculate), but the fact is that Toole's work at the NRC and Harman, at least from what I gather, NEVER did do any real-world evaluations in real-world home listening rooms like what we had from Allison and Berkovitz. A lot of special measuring and listening has been done in the specialized rooms that Toole and Olive set up, but nowhere I know of did those guys go out into the world of consumers and actually measure, let alone do listening evaluations, in rooms that most people (including people like those who are members of our little CSP group, here) live with. Ideal situations were embraced by the Toole faction, and conculsions were reached by means of idealized listening environments that few people experience at home.

Yes, AR company data as it related to direct-field performance did not involve measuring in situations where cabinet diffraction and driver interference would have an impact. On the other hand, in real-world listening rooms other factors (boundary reflections, reflections from furniture, and placement anomalies) would also skew the results, so competing brands and brands in production right now that stress direct-field exactness, would have problems with those artifacts. In other words, there is really no way to predict the impact of the placement locations, or even listener positions, and so the best way to get at least a decent idea of what a system can do is provide good driver curves (on and off axis; the wider angled the better), and then provide power curves that illustrate what the speakers can do to input flat power in the bulk of home-listening environments. Anything else will vary widely from room to room. Heck, most speaker and driver manufacturers who do provide system or driver curves rarely show response characteristics much beyond 45 degrees off axis, and when we do see driver or system curves that show wide-angular response the results are often not all that good. Indeed, the driver curves that AR provided four decades ago (and Allison provided three decades ago) are still equal to or superior to any produced by contemporary manufacturers or speaker builders.

While it is true that the concert slope typical of pre-ferrofluid AR speakers of the era were sloped downward due to thermal issues, the fact is that many, if not most, classical recordings of that era were, as Allison has noted in some of his writings, much "hotter" in terms of brightness than what one would encounter at live performances in good halls, and when sitting in the best seats. (Jeeze, I do hope that some people here make it a habit to attend such concerts.) It may have been serendipity that things worked out as they did, but the fact is that the situation at that time did require some upper midrange and treble attenuation, and the AR line at the time delivered the required goods. Later on, Allison, who was using both ferrofluid and silicone grease as midrange and tweeter cooling agents from the word go with his Allison Acoustic systems, made it possible to select either a flat output or a "concert curve," with a middle option that kind of split the difference. Still later, once the digital age took hold and pop music began to eclipse classical even more than previously, Allison began to provide his speakers with no slope options at all, with the dialed-in curve both smooth and flat.

All I can offer up as a counterpoint to your comment "Why would anybody argue that engineering advances since then haven't been true progress?" is that if Villchur could make a pair of cabinet-diffracted, driver-interferenced speakers like the AR-3 work so well during those LvR concerts (proving to him at least, and to Allison, too, that maybe diffractions and driver interactions were not a big deal at all), just what kind of "meaningful" advances have we had in the last 40 years? I think that in terms of performance in real-world rooms Allison, with his woofer-placement approach, went beyond what AR and Villchur did prior to his retiring from AR (and Villchur, I should note, was impressed by those advances), and I think that liquid cooling for drivers certainly did make it possible for systems to take better advantage of advances in digital recording and playback technologies and the advent of home theater sound. And thanks to certain subwoofer manufacturers, low-bass performance certainly improved.

As for Villchur maybe doing things differently if he, as you noted, "could have achieved a speaker with better direct field response at the time and could have sold a very different looking grille-less system," well, no. I think that he proved to himself, and also proved to a lot of astute audio journalists and consumers (with the latter opting to buy a huge number of AR speakers), that the issue of diffraction effects, driver interference, and the so-called need for perfected performance in the direct field in opposition to perfected performance in the reverberant field, was not much of a serious issue at all. If his LvR concerts had been flops perhapse he would have changed direction, but they were not flops, as many contemporaries were ready to admit.

These days, with musical tastes being somewhat different, and with recordings in most pop-music cases NOT being made to simulate as best they can a real-world, acoustic-instrument performance space, Villchur might take a different approach. However, given HIS musical tastes I rather think that these days he would opt to get into a different business altogether.

Howard Ferstler

What makes you think that Villchur doesn't like contemporary music or contemporary recordings? I have never heard of anything to suggest that. In fact, AR was born in an era dominated by incredibly poor recordings and very cheesy musical tastes.

I haven't the slightest doubt that if EV were designing commercial products now, he would consider the nature of current music, the increased interest and understanding related to localization and imaging, and offer appropriate products.

-k

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Toole's work 25 years ago was performed in a listening space specifically engineered to simulate typical home conditions, which ultimately became the IEC industry standard listening room.

Baffle step compensation is well understood today.

Much of this is better viewed without wearing Allison sunglasses.

[There's another, more common way of saying that, but I will spare the forum so base a characterization.... :P ]

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Same here.

Does anybody remember, historically, whether the tiny satellite/subwoofer scheme was introduced for home theater or if someone came up with it for music prior to that?

The first sub-sat system of any commercial relevance that I know of was from Weathers, in the late 50's. No doubt, Bose resurrected the concept and defined the modern approach. Of particular note is their use of a "bandpass" woofer enclosure.

-k

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....but nowhere I know of did those guys go out into the world of consumers and actually measure, let alone do listening evaluations, in rooms that most people (including people like those who are members of our little CSP group, here) live with. Ideal situations were embraced by the Toole faction, and conculsions were reached by means of idealized listening environments that few people experience at home.

Try: "The Variability of Loudspeaker Sound Quality Among Four Domestic Sized Rooms" by Olive, Schuck, Bonneville and Sally.

I find it odd that you would claim this, since nearly half of Toole's book deals with the interaction between the speaker and the listening room. Research on the audibility of reflections is, of course, applicable to all rooms. In fact they both studied reflection audibility in LEDE cases and highly reflective cases. The number and placement of woofers in a room, reflections and their contribution to apparent source width. These all pertain to the speaker/room interface.

Yes, AR company data as it related to direct-field performance did not involve measuring in situations where cabinet diffraction and driver interference would have an impact. On the other hand, in real-world listening rooms other factors (boundary reflections, reflections from furniture, and placement anomalies) would also skew the results, so competing brands and brands in production right now that stress direct-field exactness, would have problems with those artifacts. In other words, there is really no way to predict the impact of the placement locations, or even listener positions,

So, since furniture and room boundaries might mess up the sound we shouldn't reduce the reflections that are built into the speaker, the cabinets edges and grilles? Doesn't that disadvantage anybody that might set their system up carefully to reduce the external issues?

All I can offer up as a counterpoint to your comment "Why would anybody argue that engineering advances since then haven't been true progress?" is that if Villchur could make a pair of cabinet-diffracted, driver-interferenced speakers like the AR-3 work so well during those LvR concerts (proving to him at least, and to Allison, too, that maybe diffractions and driver interactions were not a big deal at all), just what kind of "meaningful" advances have we had in the last 40 years? I think that in terms of performance in real-world rooms Allison, with his woofer-placement approach, went beyond what AR and Villchur did prior to his retiring from AR (and Villchur, I should note, was impressed by those advances), and I think that liquid cooling for drivers certainly did make it possible for systems to take better advantage of advances in digital recording and playback technologies and the advent of home theater sound. And thanks to certain subwoofer manufacturers, low-bass performance certainly improved.

As for Villchur maybe doing things differently if he, as you noted, "could have achieved a speaker with better direct field response at the time and could have sold a very different looking grille-less system," well, no. I think that he proved to himself, and also proved to a lot of astute audio journalists and consumers (with the latter opting to buy a huge number of AR speakers), that the issue of diffraction effects, driver interference, and the so-called need for perfected performance in the direct field in opposition to perfected performance in the reverberant field, was not much of a serious issue at all. If his LvR concerts had been flops perhapse he would have changed direction, but they were not flops, as many contemporaries were ready to admit.

Ah, yes, the Live vs. Recorded tests proved that perfection had been achieved. (But a different perfection than that achieved in the similar Edison Victrola demonstrations, the RCA demonstrations, or the well regarded Gilbert Briggs/Wharfedale demonstrations.) Isn't it a bit insulting to Vilcher to claim that a speaker he developed in 1965 was the highpoint and that he, himself, wouldn't have improved upon it if he'd stayed in the industry?

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Ah, yes, the Live vs. Recorded tests proved that perfection had been achieved. (But a different perfection than that achieved in the similar Edison Victrola demonstrations, the RCA demonstrations, or the well regarded Gilbert Briggs/Wharfedale demonstrations.) Isn't it a bit insulting to Villchur to claim that a speaker he developed in 1965 was the highpoint and that he, himself, wouldn't have improved upon it if he'd stayed in the industry?

Wasn't the AR-3a an improvement over the 3?

Wasn't the 10 Pi/11 an improvement over the 3a?

Wasn't the 9 an improvement over the 10 Pi/11?

HF, I love the sound of the old ARs and the company achieved some remarkable things, the L v R demos among them. But even in the AR line itself, there were tremendous technological advances through the years. Time didn't freeze in 1958 (the 3) or 1967 (the 3a).

It's perfectly valid to choose to like the sound of a classic speaker or the look of a classic watch or the driving experience of a classic car. But I try to keep things in perspective and understand why I like what I like, and I do so without any less admiration or respect for what those early pioneers achieved.

Steve F.

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Yes, AR company data as it related to direct-field performance did not involve measuring in situations where cabinet diffraction and driver interference would have an impact. On the other hand, in real-world listening rooms other factors (boundary reflections, reflections from furniture, and placement anomalies) would also skew the results, so competing brands and brands in production right now that stress direct-field exactness, would have problems with those artifacts. In other words, there is really no way to predict the impact of the placement locations, or even listener positions, and so the best way to get at least a decent idea of what a system can do is provide good driver curves (on and off axis; the wider angled the better), and then provide power curves that illustrate what the speakers can do to input flat power in the bulk of home-listening environments. Anything else will vary widely from room to room. Heck, most speaker and driver manufacturers who do provide system or driver curves rarely show response characteristics much beyond 45 degrees off axis, and when we do see driver or system curves that show wide-angular response the results are often not all that good. Indeed, the driver curves that AR provided four decades ago (and Allison provided three decades ago) are still equal to or superior to any produced by contemporary manufacturers or speaker builders.

COOL, let's make stuff up!

OR we can look at the facts:

See Atkinson's spatially averaged in-room response taken at the listening position using Howard's favorite technique, the one he claims best characterizes the actual performance, for JBL Array 1400, Fig. 7 here:

http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeake...ker/index5.html

And the Revel Ultima Salon2, Fig. 8 here:

http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeake...vel/index5.html

Both are easily correlated with the direct response measurements, once it is appreciated that there is no reverberant field of the Beranek/Allison sense in typical listening rooms.

The same is also true of the Allison/Berkovitz findings; the results are easily predicted from the anechoic direct field measurements by applying the contemporary analytical perspective as documented by Toole.

Interestingly, while Toole and others (Zilch, for example, but also some other more notable individuals) make some solid claims about what does and does not matter with loudspeaker sound in real-world listening rooms, only Allison and Berkovitz managed to do some real research is real-world rooms.

TOTAL baloney, but at least recognizes that Zilch is not as alone in these views as originally posited in these pages.... :P

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Wasn't the AR-3a an improvement over the 3?

Wasn't the 10 Pi/11 an improvement over the 3a?

Wasn't the 9 an improvement over the 10 Pi/11?

HF, I love the sound of the old ARs and the company achieved some remarkable things, the L v R demos among them. But even in the AR line itself, there were tremendous technological advances through the years. Time didn't freeze in 1958 (the 3) or 1967 (the 3a).

We had this discussion a while back about what EV would have done if he hadn't sold AR.

The 3a, ADD and 8 series were all produced after EV had left the building. We can surmise that the 3a would have met with his approval because it was produced by the management team he had hired and mentored, but by the time the ADDs and the 9's came out even they were mostly gone, so we have no idea what he thought about those. We can also surmise from the company's history from 1954-1967 that AR under EV would certainly have incorporated technological advances, but the question is, what would EV have recognized as a real "technological advance?" And considering Tom Tyson's view that EV never wanted to run a company in the first place, much less grow one into an industry giant, would he have done things he didn't think were real advances just to keep product moving and the company prominent in the mass market, or would he have become the American Ivor Tiefenbrun, running a smaller, more iconoclastic AR serving a tiny but devoted market niche of "true believers?"

EV's 2005 Stereophile interview was notably silent on his views about AR after his time. He was less reticent about the state of the modern audio industry, saying that audio needs to be "brought back to the world of reason," and that he was still using the live sound of chamber music as his validation standard in 2005.

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Ken has answered this question @ #71, supra....

Yes, he would almost certainly "consider" them. The question is, what would he do with something that was very popular with consumers and common practice in the industry that he "considered" to be utter nonsense...? :P

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I again challenge your use of the term; Toole and Olive have nothing to do with "popular," and that cannot be used as a valid rationale for rejecting their findings....

I was speaking generically. "Popular" would be more along the lines of "high end" capacitors and speaker cables (I wonder what EV thinks of the current line of AR interconnects). If EV disagreed with Toole and Olive (and we don't know that he would, as he has been utterly silent on the subject, maybe his priority really would be to give listeners whatever they want), that would fall under "common practices in the industry that he considered to be utter nonsense." His last statement in the 2005 Stereophile interview does suggest that his idea of a listener panel would still be to put some live musicians and a bunch of speakers behind a screen and see which speakers do the best job of convincing listeners that they're hearing the musicians rather than which ones they "prefer" (which I maintain is still "popularity").

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We had this discussion a while back about what EV would have done if he hadn't sold AR.

QUOTE (Steve F @ May 30 2010, 08:58 AM) *

Wasn't the AR-3a an improvement over the 3?

Wasn't the 10 Pi/11 an improvement over the 3a?

Wasn't the 9 an improvement over the 10 Pi/11?

HF, I love the sound of the old ARs and the company achieved some remarkable things, the L v R demos among them. But even in the AR line itself, there were tremendous technological advances through the years. Time didn't freeze in 1958 (the 3) or 1967 (the 3a).

No, that's not what I'm referring to. The "What would EV do" is a different question.

I'm taking strenuous issue with the notion that the 3 and 3a were the ultimate AR achievements, and that the early-60's L v R demos proved all.

The '50-'60's AR products and achievements were extraordinary, and were, arguably, watershed events in audio history--regardless of how one feels history has since validated or repudiated those design theories and products.

My contention is that even AR products and design approaches moved well past the 50's-60's-think that the 3-3a and the 3-based L v R demos represented. The 11--with its truly flush-mounted drivers and truly low-diffraction foam grille and its truly greater HF energy output--could not possibly have been more completely, diametrically different and improved over the 3/3a than it was.

To hold the 3/3a up as some ultimate in speaker design achievement is highly questionable, in my view. To LIKE the 3/3a more than anything else since--from any manufacturer--is fine, and needs no justification or defense.

"What EV would do" is not the topic of my post. I'm simply saying that even AR made huge, tangible, verifiable, recognizable progress after the 3/3a, and that is to be expected. If one likes the earlier speakers, fine. That's the choice of the individual, and has to do with taste, emotion, all kinds of factors. But they weren't "better" than AR's later speakers. Not in my view, anyway.

Steve F.

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Nowhere have I ever seen any references to pop music in those old, Villchur-designed AR ads.

This is probably as close as you'll come. It's post-Villchur, but still classic-styled AR advertising.

post-102742-1275262867.jpg

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I'm simply saying that even AR made huge, tangible, verifiable, recognizable progress after the 3/3a, and that is to be expected. If one likes the earlier speakers, fine. That's the choice of the individual, and has to do with taste, emotion, all kinds of factors. But they weren't "better" than AR's later speakers. Not in my view, anyway.

Well, that's the inevitable problem of trying to have a technical discussion on a site devoted to vintage anything. "Better" is in the eye (or in this case, the ear) of the beholder,and the membership tends to be skewed toward those whose view is that newer didn't represent "progress,""improvement" or "better" if it moved things away from what they liked best.

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Judy Collins would not exactly be a cutting-edge example of the pop rock material of the era, let alone today's heavy metal music.

Billboard's best-selling albums of 1966-67 were by the Tijuana Brass and the Monkees, neither of which put much of a strain on a pair of ARs.

By the time Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple came along in 1968 to start heavy metal along, EV had already left the building. But so far, 40 years of Jimi and Jimmy still hasn't blown any tweeters here.

Is there any serious music being recorded anymore...?

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The AR-3a was an improvement over the AR-3, in that the frequency range between 500 and 1000 Hz was handled by a small midrange driver instead of a 12-inch woofer. That reduced midrange beaming, which would make it more workable (and realistic sounding) in typical home listening rooms. The 3a also had smaller midrange and tweeter driver diameters, which improved dispersion. This would make the speakers work better in typical living rooms, with nearby wall boundaries, but would not give it a significant advantage over the AR-3 in a rather largish auditorium space like those used for the Villchur LvR demos.

The 10 Pi and 11 used ferrofluid cooling for the midrange and tweeter drivers, thereby giving them more output capability than the AR-3a. The 10 Pi also had a midbass adjustment feature, I think, to compensate for the Allison boundary effect phenomenon. Other than that, they had no conceptual advantage over the AR-3a.

The AR-9 had double woofers (located to kind of deal with the Allison boundary effect) and an additional midrange driver (making it into a four-way speaker) that allowed it to go deeper in bass and play louder than the earlier AR speakers.

Howard Ferstler

Geez, HF, these were rhetorical questions, right? We all know the differences/improvements.

The point is they ARE improvements. Even within AR's own developmental history, tangible improvements were made, making the notion that the 3/3a were the ultimate speaker achievement--even by AR--an indefensible position. The 1960's AR-3 L v R demos notwithstanding, the 9 was better than the 10 Pi/11, which was better than the 3a which was better than the 3. Proof? The 3 and 3a could NEVER have pulled off the 10 Pi Neil Grover L v R demo in 1976-77. Never in a million years. Not to mention the myriad of well-accepted speaker engineering standards by which the 11 was far superior to the 3 and 3a.

Right?

Of course, anyone is free to like the sound/look/associative memory-emotions of any product they choose.

But the 9 is better than the 10 pi/11, which was better than the 3a which was better than the 3. All within the AR line.

It therefore stands to logical reason that later on, other companies might also have surpassed the AR-3 and 3a.

Possibly. Just my opinion.

Steve F.

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Pictures of that room were printed in the JAES. If anybody here or anywhere else has a listening room outfitted like that in their home I certainly have not heard of any.

Howard Ferstler

You are confusing decor with acoustics. The dimensions, RT and distribution of absorption are well within the norm of home living rooms.

I like the Allison, Berkowitz paper. It is nice to see a system placed in a number of rooms and the resultant response curves. In the end it is a survey of typical rooms and their effect. It doesn't answer what the speakers sounded like in those rooms, although we can infer things if the LF curves are sufficiently aberrant.

The deeper issues tackled in the last few decades: do reflections degrade sound quality? Does the delay or direction of arrival of reflections impact perception of response? Does the frequency spectrum of reflections have an impact? Does the rank ordering of a group of speakers change in another room? What creates a sense of envelopment? How do we assess frequency balance? Some brilliant people; Baron, Bech, Toole and Olive amongst others, have very methodically explored each variable with rigorously controlled listening tests.

And your argument against Toole's work is that you don't like the look of his listening room? Or maybe he doesn't listen to "serious music"?

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And your argument against Toole's work is that you don't like the look of his listening room? Or maybe he doesn't listen to "serious music"?

If the purpose of research into audio equipment is to duplicate the aural experience of hearing live serious music by playing recordings with electronic equipment in the kind of rooms most people have in their homes, then those should be legitimate objections. On the other hand, if the purpose of research is to maximize Sidney Harman's profits by finding out what people like most, then Toole did his job. Toole's useful contribution to knowledge of sound seems to be that you need four subwoofers arranged as he describes to get reasonably uniform bass response in a typical room. That line of investigation doesn't seem like much of a technical challenge for someone with the kinds of resources Toole had at his disposal nor his supposed credentials. OTOH, his contributions to marketing research seems more impressive.

Villchur's major contributions were the acoustic suspension low frequency loudspeaker system, the wide dispersion dome tweeter and midrange, ferrofluid cooling of tweeters and midrange drives to increase power handling, a practical method for isolating turntables from feedback causing vibrations generated by low frequency loudspeaker systems, and hearing aids to mitigate the damage people did to their hearing by listening to other than serious music at insanely loud levels.

Even if Villchur's contributions have all been eclipsed, and it is not at all clear that they have, he set the benchmark others had to compete against. He not only set technical benchmarks for performace but for quality, reliability, and value for money. It was a hard combination to beat. I'm not sure anyone has.

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