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Stereophile Review of AR3a...


Peter Breuninger

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So if it has all been settled, why are we still debating it? :blink:

Because Howard will never concede that Zilch has got it right with respect to the core issue.

He appears to be on the ropes, though, and now attempts a lateral arabesque, to wit (or to whit, rather):

"All problems associated with the wide dispersion design approach are mitigated via incorporation of a center channel; two-channel stereo is dead."

[Toole RULEZ! :D ]

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I think that many critics of the wide-dispersion approach read a few technical papers (or books) written by people with agendas and then come to deductive conclusions without ever having done level-matched comparisons between the better examples of the breed and their own more directional favorites.

Howard Ferstler

I work in the medical field which is full of scientific articles with agendas/bias. What matters most is the performance of a drug or instrument in the physician's hands and the outcome in the patient.

Ultimately spealer performance is in the eye/ear of the beholder. Trying to tell those that like AR's they are wrong is like telling a doctor what works for him and his patient really isn't best. The phrase Pi$$ing up a rope comes to mind.

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As for "lateral arabesques," you did that when you dismissed the Villchur concerts as a "stunt." You, like Toole, have no way to rebut the results of those concerts and so you, and Toole, merely dismiss them and move on to topics you felt safe with or guarantee a fan base.

We've been there a dozen or more times here already. Repeating the mantra does not afford it validity, rather, is merely indicative that it's all you've got. Allison has told you that many speakers could do as well or better; get over it.

Lots of audio buffs are in the same experience boat as Zilch, and I have no problem with them. However, they normally do not go onto the internet and badmouth speakers with which they have so little experience, basing their views on books and white papers written by individuals with a deductive approach to audio principles.

I haven't badmouthed any speakers, nor have I suggested that anyone is "wrong" to enjoy any of them.

There is merit in getting at the facts, is all, and in this respect we're going nowhere with only the fallacious understanding of them you promulgate here.

Allison obviously moved past this; it's time you did, as well....

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There is merit in getting at the facts, is all,

There lies the root of this whole discussion. Are the facts being sought the listening experience/performace or the science trying to define that listening experience/performance? Lots of variables with either one you choose.

Then there's the exercise of trying to prove who knows more about the former or the latter. Both also fraught with variables. :blink:

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There lies the root of this whole discussion. Are the facts being sought the listening experience/performace or the science trying to define that listening experience/performance? Lots of variables with either one you choose.

I repeat again what I have said many times here:

1) When we discuss what we like, we are talking about ourselves, not speakers.

2) Many people's likes are different.

3) What we like is subject to change, as early as the next time we listen.

Thus, with respect to the subject at hand, which is loudspeaker design, what you, I, or Howard likes has little bearing and is, for the most part, irrelevant.... :blink:

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If Zilch (and to an extent, you) is correct, then why do the ultra-wide dispersing speakers like the Allison triangular models and the AR-LST, and even omni models like the dbx Soundfield line designed by Mark Davis sound so good? (Hey, Zilch probably thinks they do not, even if he has never heard any of those models in a good room, with good recordings.) And for that matter, if the AR approach in the old days was all that far off the mark just how did Villchur manage to get a pair of AR-3 systems (with huge diffraction effects and anything but a symmetrical driver layout and modern crossover network) to even come close to holding their own against a live ensemble playing the same material? Zilch calls those concerts a "stunt," but if the AR-3 was as bad as Zilch has implied in the past it and Villchur would have been laughed out of the room by the audio buffs in attendance at those concerts. Obviously, a lot of people were impressed.

Howard Ferstler

There is a little bit of bait-and-switch going on here. I have never been critical of Allison speakers or criticized your preference for wide dispersion speakers for their imaging properties. The only thing I have objected to is the notion that nothing matters but the radiated power into the room and that the perceived balance of the speaker is tied primarily to the in-room reverberent field. This is not the case as has been explained by numerous researchers in the last 3 decades (as acknowledged by Roy Allison). As it should be, through study and experimentation, new theories replace old ones.

If some people like tightly focused precise imaging speakers, that is an acceptable choice. If others like a broader more spacious sound and don't mind giving up a little bit of precision for it, that is equally an acceptable choice. Some will go to a concert and sit up close, others will prefer the sound from farther back in the hall. I do think it makes more sense for the system to be able to replicate any kind of sound field and think that is more possible with a larger number of more directional speakers. That takes more that two channels.

This is a site for enthusiasts of the New England speakers in general and AR specifically. I think AR made some truly classic designs, invented some unique concepts and should be commended for quality engineering. Ditto for Allison. Where the debate always comes from is between those that think they were "fine in their day" and those that think they were the "best products ever made" and that its been all down hill since.

(You know which side I'm on.)

Sincerely,

David

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Where the debate always comes from is between those that think they were "fine in their day" and those that think they were the "best products ever made" and that its been all down hill since.

Either way, from a design perspective, the reasonable question is, "Why," and it's not miscreancy to seek the answer(s).... :unsure:

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Wide dispersion, with lots of room reflections for a spacious feel, with the added benefit of great flexibility in listener seating placement.

Or…

Tightly-focused, narrower-dispersion designs that engage the room less and thus deliver great imaging localizability, but also restrict listener placement to some degree.

I’ve always liked the wide-dispersion types. I just found their more relaxed, non-placement-critical sound to be more appealing and pleasant to listen to. Even in my cousin’s very small room, I loved the sound of his 3a’s. They never sounded like they were ‘shouting’ at you, even when you were pretty close to the speakers. Some of that quality, I’m sure, was due to their ‘polite’ spectral balance, but much of that, I’m equally certain, was because they weren’t beaming their sound directly at you like ‘acoustic flashlights.’

In any event, listening to old Verve recordings in the early ‘70’s of the John Coltrane Quartet on my cousin’s 3a’s was a major influencing factor in shaping my speaker likes and dislikes.

Now, of course, I have AR-9’s. The 9 is not a wide-dispersion “room-engaging’ design like the 3a, LST, et al. With its vertically-aligned drivers and baffle reflection-absorbing Acoustic Blanket, it is intended to ‘image’ and eliminate the deleterious effects of cabinet diffraction to a far greater—and more intentional—degree than any previous AR speaker. (Yes, I know the individual drivers in the 9’s have at least as wide dispersion as those in the 3a or LST, but they’re deployed quite differently, for the purpose of intentionally-sharper near-field “imaging” than in the 3a or LST.)

As I said in my write-up on my 9’s, (http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Board/index.php?showtopic=5813)

my listening room is medium-small (about 17 x 13) and I have extensive acoustic treatments on the walls to tame what had been a fairly bright room. We’ve also added nice custom ceiling-to-floor drapes to the two front windows, which is behind the main listening position. The 9’s are about 1 ½ feet away from the adjacent side walls (meaning about 9 feet of airspace between them, after allowing for the actual width of the cabinets themselves), and toed in just slightly. I sit about 9-10 feet away from the speakers.

This is a listening environment and experience unlike any I’ve ever had before. It’s very tightly-focused, very immediate, very (pardon the bad pun) definitive. Although the triangular, multi-directional AT4400 SR’s do add exactly the reflective three-dimensionality they are meant to, the way the 9’s themselves perform in this room, at this distance, in these acoustics, is quite unlike 3a’s or 2ax’s on bookshelves or ‘x’ stands in a large living room.

It took me a while to get used to it, but I have to admit, I like it a lot. Very much, in fact. Yes, the sweet spot is limited to my seat and perhaps the one right next to me, so when I have a friend over and I’m showing off (What? We show off our systems? Us?), I give my guest the ‘sweet spot’ and I move around the ‘L’ of the sectional to a non-optimal seat. (Where it still sounds pretty darned good, believe it or not.)

The upshot of all this, the ‘takeaway,’ if you will, is that in my experience, both wide-dispersion, non-imaging-centric systems and tightly-focused, image-oriented systems can be extremely satisfying.

The underlying common thread to both, in my estimation, is clean distortion-free sound (that means no amplifier-induced distortion, ever), smooth FR of some kind (whether it’s smooth far-field power or smooth first-arrival on-axis FR) and good source material played on a good player.

The final product of my 3a-based system upstairs is quite different from my 9-based system downstairs, but both are very satisfying. One system isn’t ‘right,’ and the other ‘wrong.’ They’re both ‘right.’

Steve F.

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Sorry to be causing some degree of strife here. However, "motives and personalities" are tricky topics, and I must say that if one were to, for example, be offering up a discussion of, say, the "prophecies" of Nostradamus and how they relate to science and technology, it would be proper to bring in the topics of motives and personalities.

Not in a forum where they've been specifically cited as off-topic. Talk all you want about whether some audiophile prophet's predictions are right or wrong and why you think so. Discussion about whether the prophet was motivated by virtuousness or was a laying SOB should be taken offline. Especially if the prophet is a participant in the discussion.

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All I ask is that those making strong claims about sound-quality absolutes provide info in both areas. Otherwise, all we have are preferences. I have no problem with those, but some people here are raising the status of their preferences to the level of absolutes.

My own listening impressions bear no more validity than anyone else's, so I don't post them.

HOWEVER, it might be reasonable to assume a perspective on such matters from what I do, and the subjective evaluations of the hundreds of others that have done similar, including several members of this forum.

EconoWave now has 627,375 views and 10,440 posts in the main thread alone, and there's easily over a million views total spread across several forums, not to mention well over a hundred systems built by other DIYers according to these designs worldwide.

None of that confers credibility beyond reproach, of course, but it does provide context within which readers may objectively evaluate the validity of my contributions here.

You've long since lost #1, Howard, and now attempt to bolster the significance of #2 according to your own prescription. I'm not buying it, and suggest that Toole & Olive have a far better handle on this than you could ever hope to achieve.... :unsure:

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I have no idea what EconoWave is doing (I do not even know what it is), but as I noted, very few listeners (or even product reviewers) do proper, level-matched A/B comparisons between any components, including speakers. They do single-presentation analysis and then let their moods or, if they built the speakers themselves, let pride of accomplishment dictate the impressions. In any case, it is unlikely that many of those evalations involved doing what I said was necessary to prove your contentions about narrow and focussed dispersion.

We are each arbiters of our own preferences, Howard. You cannot seriously propose to establish your own standards and criteria as controlling for anyone but yourself. Your elitism is showing again; it's the stuff of reviewers contriving authority in a subjectivist realm, most worthily relegated to the recycle bin after having been accorded minimal due consideration.

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We are each arbiters of our own preferences, Howard. You cannot seriously propose to establish your own standards and criteria as controlling for anyone but yourself. Your elitism is showing again; it's the stuff of reviewers contriving authority in a subjectivist realm, most worthily relegated to the recycle bin after having been accorded minimal due consideration.

Z-

Please consider that there is a subtle point, but one that is very important to many fields of science, including this "debate":

- While >measurements< and >experiments< may be conducted to arbitrary standards of objectivity, as soon as the particular term "Accuracy" is used, subjectivity is necessarily invoked. There is no way around this problem; no amount of data that can overcome it. There may be concensus definitions, but it is still a matter of opinion and judgement to evaluate and prioritize which departures from a standard are the lesser evils. In other words, it is simply impossible to validly assert any finite set of measurements as being objectively "more accurate" than another, as surely as one cannot objectively assert simultaneous position and momentum.

-k

BTW- I have rarely seen two people who so closely agree argue so vehemently with each other. I guess all press is good press.

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Wavelet of the future, Howard, wavelet.... :unsure:

http://www.audiomatica.it/download/audaesny2007.pdf

We will consider here a simplified model in which

we include only the loudspeaker and the direct sound

propagation, assuming other components being linear,

the room being anechoic (or quasi-anechoic using

IR windowing) and the air being still and quiet.

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Most of the research I've seen favors a variable time window. Long enough to be essentially the steady state response at LF. Short enough to be the direct response at HF, and (per Soren Bech) just enough to catch the floor bounce at mid frequencies.

Tattoos eh? Sounds like staying at the CES hotel that hosts the AVN awards in Vegas. Always interesting!

David

Yes, I agree. Salmi and Weckstrom, Kates, et al.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=4981

-k

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We will consider here a simplified model in which

we include only the loudspeaker and the direct sound

propagation, assuming other components being linear,

the room being anechoic (or quasi-anechoic using

IR windowing) and the air being still and quiet.

Speakergeek equivalent of Lake Wobegon. :unsure:

There may be concensus definitions, but it is still a matter of opinion and judgement to evaluate and prioritize which departures from a standard are the lesser evils. In other words, it is simply impossible to validly assert any finite set of measurements as being objectively "more accurate" than another, as surely as one cannot objectively assert simultaneous position and momentum.

While subjectivism may also purport to be egalitarian, the conceit of data is surely less insidious.... :D

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EconoWave now has 627,375 views and 10,440 posts in the main thread alone, and there's easily over a million views total spread across several forums, not to mention well over a hundred systems built by other DIYers according to these designs worldwide.

None of that confers credibility beyond reproach, of course, but it does provide context within which readers may objectively evaluate the validity of my contributions here.

I don't get the point of using an approach to fix broken speakers as an arguement against the sound of classic AR's :D

Classic AR's are limited in number and as far as the 3a a pretty expensive and/or laborious venture for top notch performers. Numbers don't mean "better" or more "right" when it comes to audio. That's like saying speakers from Best Buy are better since they sell so many. :unsure:

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I don't get the point of using an approach to fix broken speakers as an arguement against the sound of classic AR's :unsure:

Two points:

1) It evidences that I am not the clueless doob Howard would make me out to be; few have more experience measuring and analyzing vintage loudspeakers, including, specifically, AR3a.

2) Nor is the design approach I advocate as worthless, by comparison, as Howard (and Soundminded) might believe. It was pioneered by our very own Speaker Dave working with Don Keele and John Eargle ca. 1980, and their pioneering design has comprised my mains for 23 years:

http://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=7852

Most importantly, it is not an argument against the sound of classic ARs, a distinction which you STILL do not appreciate despite my having stated and reiterated this to you directly multiple times in these and other pages. We are merely attempting to ascertain how and why they perform as they do, for better or worse, and I have effectively demonstrated that much of the common wisdom regarding the core thesis of how that occurs is now outmoded, and worse, erroneous. Its assumptions, in fact, preclude our effectively getting at the truth.... :D

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Two points:

We are merely attempting to ascertain how and why they perform as they do, for better or worse, and I have effectively demonstrated that much of the common wisdom regarding the core thesis of how that occurs is now outmoded, and worse, erroneous. Its assumptions, in fact, preclude our effectively getting at the truth.... :unsure:

Might I point out that you are are attempting to do more than just ascertain why they perform as they do when you add in pharases like outmoded and erroneous in reference to their design, designers, or theory of design.

The truth is never outmoded.

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1) It evidences that I am not the clueless doob Howard would make me out to be; few have more experience measuring and analyzing vintage loudspeakers, including, specifically, AR3a.

As with assessing the validity of medical journal articles in reference to the authors paradigm or bias (many times financial ties to specific company) I don't doubt your experience with vintage loudspeakers and knowledge of theory and design. On all counts way past my experience.

But a quick review of your posts here and elsewhere leave no doubt that you are biased when it comes to vintage AR's. Ergo I don't think your measurements and interpretaion are the end all on the subject.

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There is clearly no further discussion going on here about Stereophile's attempt to review vintage speakers. Ken's question about the goals for an ideal speaker has been split off to a new thread. If the discussion there becomes personal as well, it won't last long.

Topic closed.

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