Recent content by hg

Not in my experience or following the laws of physics. Tiny speakers plus room boom can sometimes be considered loud enough because they sound sufficiently distressed not to want to play louder. If you remove the room boom (and the modulation of the midrange) then the main speakers will sound...

As far as I am aware, distributed subs are the only practical way to get high quality bass in the home. A single sub or large drivers in the mains excites the room modes in a manner that cannot be controlled. Equalisation can improve things by knocking down the peaks but it cannot fill in the...

Small speakers with bass (i.e. small subwoofers) will be inefficient. This follows from Hoffman's iron law (Hoffman was the H in KLH). Fortunately these days low frequency power amplifiers are cheap and efficient. They will situated out of the way in the cupboard under the stairs. Below a few...

Are tiny speakers with inadequate SPL and no bass really the solution to reproducing music in small rooms? I hope not because in a couple weeks I am moving to a small house and will be listening to music in a small L-shaped room. It will almost certainly be a challenging project to get decent...

The UK market for traditional hi-fi has been shrinking for a long time and there is rather a lot of unwanted second hand traditional hi-fi knocking around eating into sales of new products. The market is indeed very small compared to what it was and unlikely to be worth any significant...

At the crossover frequency, say 80 Hz, the phase of the main speakers and the subwoofer will be different relative to the input signal and significantly so if the main speakers are small and close to the driver and box resonances. In addition, if the distance from the listener to the mains and...

That will drive the axial modes strongly. Does you subwoofer have an adjustable delay knob and a gain knob? If so, we can perform an experiment to greatly reduce one or other of the 40 or 80 Hz axial modes so you can hear if that is the problem. If it has a set of filters we can do both.

If the problem is the room then why not address it along the lines I outlined in an early post? It doesn't usually take much money to turn a bad room response into an OK one although it does take a bit of effort to identify what the issues are in order to reduce them. A good room response in a...

You will know if you measure your room and work out which peak and dip is caused by which room mode for a given speaker and listener location. It is not a lot of effort but it is some effort. The free REW room simulator can help with a fair amount of the insight. Equalising a single subwoofer...

Distributed subs will fix the response of a small room below 100 Hz just as well as a large room although they will take up a larger proportion of space. A single monster sub is not a good idea. The room response above 100 Hz in a small room is a bigger problem to fix. Full passive room...

Cables do sound different for many people but I suspect not for the reasons you believe. The different sounds of a cable can also be present in a blind test which may confuse some cable-bashers. Here is a very rare example of a cable believer having the grace to honestly report what happened in...

That is not quite right. It tests if one can distinguish components from the sound they emit. This is not the same as a person hearing a difference. For example, if a person has trained themselves to hear different sounds with two different cables they are likely to hear one or other of these...

A while ago a German importer was not bothering to peel off the labels of imported Asian drivers and was simply sticking their label over the manufacturers one. There is an obvious risk in doing this if you go big on the markup.

Interesting post. This is the standard driver and I will leave it as an exercise whether it looks more like the one on the right or left and perhaps to work what the marketing is seeking to do. As a further check one can compare the frequency response with the one shown in the DM10 specs. The...

Ashley is claiming the tonal balance of the DM10s are on par with that of headphones? Intriguing. Presumably he considered the tonal balance of headphones to be good, some form of reference and not to vary from person to person?