KEF LS50 disappointment :(

[shkumar4963]

Jack... that explains it. In one dealer set up R300 were so superior thar I wondered what the fuss was all about for LS50. But at another dealer LS50s were in a different league and I bought them on the spot.

But I do have a question that has been bothering me.

Does amplifier have to march the speakers?

Other than having sufficient current to handle low impedence and power to compensate for low speaker sensitivity, what else is there that makes one amplifier match with a perticular speaker.

Your thoughts on this speaker to amplifier matching will be much appreciated.

 

[Native_bon]

*stop* who said Reference means accutare & neutral. To many it sounds thin & bright. Sound no were near a real instrument.

You've just proven my point.

And what exactly sounds bright and thin? And in comparison to what? Your Boston Acoustics?

All things being equal.. to the sound of real instruments.

 

[Native_bon]

New tech & marketing is all I see, I dnt see improvement to sound, actually the opposite. Many people are coming on these pages unhappy with their systems. Either its too bright, too much bass, unreliable products left right & center. HIFI PRODUCTS ARE LOOKING NICER BUT PERFORMANCE IS GETTING WORSE. Every time your told the next thing on the market is the best.

Personally I have losted trust in the hifi world dnt know about others.

 

[CnoEvil]

New tech & marketing is all I see, I dnt see improvement to sound, actually the opposite. Many people are coming on these pages unhappy with their systems. Either its too bright, too much bass, unreliable products left right & center. HIFI PRODUCTS ARE LOOKING NICER BUT PERFORMANCE IS GETTING WORSE. Every time your told the next thing on the market is the best.

Personally I have losted trust in the hifi world dnt know about others.

People are generally unhappy when they throw 5* products together without any understanding of the final outcome (or even worse, without listening to them)....also (imo), trouble comes if you think that blowing most of your budget on speakers, while giving little thought to the amp or source (but especially the amp), is the way to go

IME. The products are better than ever, you just need to know where to look.

Finding a good dealer is the key, as DDC and others wisely advise.

 

[Freddy58]

New tech & marketing is all I see, I dnt see improvement to sound, actually the opposite. Many people are coming on these pages unhappy with their systems. Either its too bright, too much bass, unreliable products left right & center. HIFI PRODUCTS ARE LOOKING NICER BUT PERFORMANCE IS GETTING WORSE. Every time your told the next thing on the market is the best.

Personally I have losted trust in the hifi world dnt know about others.

Can you have too much bass? *biggrin*

As long as I can remember, the latest product has always claimed improvements, so it's nothing new. My own impression is that modern products aren't that much better (SQ-wise) from those produced say 20 years ago, if at all. I suppose the real improvements have come from modern listening formats - connectivity.

 

[shkumar4963]

Thanks Jack.

This did give me a great perspective from the time I had bought Allison speakers 25 years back that were designed for wide dispersion to now LS50 that are more of a nearfield monitors.

I felt that Allison speakers (from Roy Allison who used to be at AR Inc.) were great for whole house listening but their Bass was not as defined in nearfield listening.

Anyway, enjoyed your summary of last 30 years of innovation. Three things you did not mention and I was wondering if you felt that they are not significant in improving the sound quality or just did not think about them.

1. Use of Digital Room Correction to "fix" problems with the room and speakers

2. Use of separate Sub woofers to add the bass rather than having a bass driver (like in R300 and R500) in the speaker itself.

3. Use of active cross over and separate Class D amplifiers for each driver within the speaker cabinet.

Love to hear your thoughts and science behind them.

PS: I am still trying to get my head around sound diffraction. I mean I now understand the basics but still not sure how it actually impacts todays speaker design. I have ordered Toole's book and may be that will help.

 

[Vladimir]

I sold my refurbished AR-11B speakers when I got my small unimpressive, dull, overpriced, uncool, badly measuring, hatefull B&W CM1. These small milk cartons simply sounded better.

I have no doubt speaker design has progressed.

 

[shkumar4963]

I sold my refurbished AR-11B speakers when I got my small unimpressive, dull, overpriced, uncool, badly measuring, hatefull B&W CM1. These small milk cartons simply sounded better.?

I have no doubt speaker design has progressed. 

Did not understand your link to "truth about cables". It was actually a Christmas song?

 

[BigH]

Thanks Jack.

This did give me a great perspective from the time I had bought Allison speakers 25 years back that were designed for wide dispersion to now LS50 that are more of a nearfield monitors.

I felt that Allison speakers (from Roy Allison who used to be at AR Inc.) were great for whole house listening but their Bass was not as defined in nearfield listening.

Anyway, enjoyed your summary of last 30 years of innovation. Three things you did not mention and I was wondering if you felt that they are not significant in improving the sound quality or just did not think about them.

1. Use of Digital Room Correction to "fix" problems with the room and speakers

2. Use of separate Sub woofers to add the bass rather than having a bass driver (like in R300 and R500) in the speaker itself.

3. Use of active cross over and separate Class D amplifiers for each driver within the speaker cabinet.

Love to hear your thoughts and science behind them.

PS: I am still trying to get my head around sound diffraction. I mean I now understand the basics but still not sure how it actually impacts todays speaker design. I have ordered Toole's book and may be that will help.

Your point 3 needs to be split I feel, many actives do not use Class D amps. So active crossovers has nothing to do with class D amps I think. But actives do have an amp for each driver, but don't need to be inside the speaker cabinet.

 

[Vladimir]

I sold my refurbished AR-11B speakers when I got my small unimpressive, dull, overpriced, uncool, badly measuring, hatefull B&W CM1. These small milk cartons simply sounded better.

I have no doubt speaker design has progressed.

Did not understand your link to "truth about cables". It was actually a Christmas song?

Yeah.

 

[lindsayt]

Jack,

At the budget end of speakers I'd take a 30 year old pair of Heybrook HB1's over B&W CM1's any day.

Well designed and well engineered speakers are well designed and engineered speakers. It doesn't matter what era they were made in.

Heybrook HB1 speakers cost £127 new in 1983. That's about £390 in todays money.

If what you said about speakers improving over the last 30 years had any merit whatsoever, speakers like the £600 CM1's would sound significantly better than the HB1's. They don't. They sound significantly worse.

 

[shkumar4963]

Jack,

At the budget end of speakers I'd take a 30 year old pair of Heybrook HB1's over B&W CM1's any day.

Well designed and well engineered speakers are well designed and engineered speakers. It doesn't matter what era they were made in.

Heybrook HB1 speakers cost £127 new in 1983. That's about £390 in todays money.

If what you said about speakers improving over the last 30 years had any merit whatsoever, speakers like the £600 CM1's would sound significantly better than the HB1's. They don't. They sound significantly worse.

It is Ok to have a different opinion.

That was his and this is yours. There are always individual speakers that will be exceptions. But I hope you will agree that in general speakers have improved.

Merry Christmas...

 

[ID.]

Just wanted to add my appreciation to Jack for taking the time to contribute to this thread. It is always enlightening to hear from someone actually involved in developing the products rather than the guesses, assumptions, and accusations that often pour from the keyboards of amatuers like myself. It's been enlightening.

 

[lindsayt]

It is Ok to have a different opinion.

That was his and this is yours. There are always individual speakers that will be exceptions. But I hope you will agree that in general speakers have improved.

Merry Christmas...

How many more examples do I need to come up with before I dispel this myth that speakers have improved ove the last 30 years?

For sure there were plenty of poor to mediocre speakers around in 1984. Just as there are plenty of poor to mediocre speakers around today.

Another example: Original Linn Isobariks sound better than modern day Majik Isobariks.

Quad ESL 57's sound better in the midrange than modern Quad ESL's. The modern ones are better in the bass. So you've got differences but no overall improvement there.

At the top end, compare JBL Hartsfields or EV Patricians to modern high end speakers such as KEF Blades.

 

[Vladimir]

I owned the Herbrook HB1's and can't say they were that impressive. Nice, but nothing to write home about. *unknw* If anything, they are comparable to the CM5, due to cabinet and woofer size (even though the HB1's have a larger 8" woofer). They are a simple box with 2 stock vifa drivers that were popular in that era.

 

[steve_1979]

How many more examples do I need to come up with before I dispel this myth that speakers have improved ove the last 30 years?

Thats just an opinion. Yours.

There are many other poeple (myself included) who think modern speakers are generally quite a bit better than speakers from 30 years ago.

 

[Jota180]

New tech & marketing is all I see, I dnt see improvement to sound, actually the opposite. Many people are coming on these pages unhappy with their systems. Either its too bright, too much bass, unreliable products left right & center. HIFI PRODUCTS ARE LOOKING NICER BUT PERFORMANCE IS GETTING WORSE. Every time your told the next thing on the market is the best.

Personally I have losted trust in the hifi world dnt know about others.

Go on any forum or support page and you invariably find people with issues. Those with no issues or who are completely happy with their product generally do not feel the need to sign up for a forum to tell complete strangers they are happy with their product.

One of the most important things about speakers is their interaction with your room and no two rooms are the same and you can often make a bigger change in the sound by moving speakers than buying a different pair.

 

[Jota180]

It is Ok to have a different opinion.

That was his and this is yours. There are always individual speakers that will be exceptions. But I hope you will agree that in general speakers have improved.

Merry Christmas...

How many more examples do I need to come up with before I dispel this myth that speakers have improved ove the last 30 years?

For sure there were plenty of poor to mediocre speakers around in 1984. Just as there are plenty of poor to mediocre speakers around today.

Another example: Original Linn Isobariks sound better than modern day Majik Isobariks.

Quad ESL 57's sound better in the midrange than modern Quad ESL's. The modern ones are better in the bass. So you've got differences but no overall improvement there.

At the top end, compare JBL Hartsfields or EV Patricians to modern high end speakers such as KEF Blades.

You'll be telling us cars, mobile phones, TV's, CD players, motorcycles and just about everything designed and built 30 years ago are better than todays. Of course it's nonsense and demonstrably so. Your posts are a perfect illustration of the much loathed 'good old days' syndrome.

 

[jackocleebrown]

Thanks Jack.

This did give me a great perspective from the time I had bought Allison speakers 25 years back that were designed for wide dispersion to now LS50 that are more of a nearfield monitors.

I felt that Allison speakers (from Roy Allison who used to be at AR Inc.) were great for whole house listening but their Bass was not as defined in nearfield listening.

Anyway, enjoyed your summary of last 30 years of innovation. Three things you did not mention and I was wondering if you felt that they are not significant in improving the sound quality or just did not think about them.

1. Use of Digital Room Correction to "fix" problems with the room and speakers

Hi shkumar4963,

I only really covered the main changes to the acoustical design, you're right there are quite a few other siginificant improvements that I could have mentioned.

Room correction has great potential. There are a couple of issues. Firstly the room is a 3D soundfield whereas the input to a loudspeaker is a 1D signal. This makes it impossible to fully control the sound in the room with a correction prefilter filter applied to the amp input. With that in mind you cannot expect to fix every room perfectly. However, there are systems out there that work well, particularly if the issue is bass boom. There are also systems out there that are not very reliable, for whatever reason. Part of the problem is that it is tricky to come up with a room correction scheme that you can garuntee will work in every situation. There is also the difficult aspect of implementing the correction filters transparently without introducing some other artefacts. Loss of headroom can be another issue, depending on how the system operates.

2. Use of separate Sub woofers to add the bass rather than having a bass driver (like in R300 and R500) in the speaker itself.

This can work pretty well. The main benefit here is really that you can get a smaller package to have more bass. This is because the subwoofer can be designed to have both built in bass boost matched to the response and also driver protection to prevent this being a terminal problem at high levels. The tricky part is getting the integration between the sub and the main speakers to be seamless. Another issue is that there is normally no high pass on the main speakers, so they still have to handle the bass signal. This might not be an problem, depending on how loud you want the system to play. More headroom would be available with a highpass on the mains but then the integration problem gets even more tricky. To an extent active loudspeakers can have the same benefits of a system like this.

You mentioned that you were considering upgrading your system to this configuration. If you can afford to do it then get a left and right subwoofer and put them as close as possible to the LS50s (directly underneath would be ideal, but be careful about vibration).

3. Use of active cross over and separate Class D amplifiers for each driver within the speaker cabinet.

Active speakers have a number of potential benefits. A non-definitive list, in no particular order:

- Passive filters can generate a lot of distortion (if poorly designed).

- The amp for each driver can be optimised for the required bandwidth and power.

- The amp performance will generally improve because the power bandwidth is lower.

- It is relatively simple to incorporate some form of self protection and avoid damage under heavy use.

- It is relatively easy to provide some user adjustment (treble level control for example).

- Potential for incorporating room correction and active bass boost.

What you have to keep in mind is that none of these benefits mean that you can forget about the acoustics of the design. It is not necessarily the case that an active loudspeaker will sound better than a passive - there are a lot of other important aspects common to both approaches.

Up until recently there did not seem to be much appetite for active loudspeakers in the hifi market. Perhaps that is changing, I'm not entirely sure.

Kind regards, Jack.

 

[jackocleebrown]

Jack,

At the budget end of speakers I'd take a 30 year old pair of Heybrook HB1's over B&W CM1's any day.

Well designed and well engineered speakers are well designed and engineered speakers. It doesn't matter what era they were made in.

Heybrook HB1 speakers cost £127 new in 1983. That's about £390 in todays money.

If what you said about speakers improving over the last 30 years had any merit whatsoever, speakers like the £600 CM1's would sound significantly better than the HB1's. They don't. They sound significantly worse.

Hi lindsayt,

I can only comment from my perspective working on the design side. During our day to day work we are looking for shortcomings in our existing designs and finding solutions. Generally we are doing this in a predominantly objective way, finding problems in the measured behaviour (quite often identified by listening) and then fixing them. On this basis I believe that we are slowly improving the performance, at least in a technical sense. We certainly have a lot more tools and materials available to use now that 30 years ago, and that helps greatly.

I absolutely agree with you that there are well engineered and designed loudspeakers from all eras. As I mentioned earlier, the underlying physics has not changed so you're not suddenly going to get 20Hz bass extension and 90dB sensitivity from a passive standmount. Similarly, although there have been improvements in understanding how people percieve sound one can only generalise, people hear things differently and what sound fantastic to one person can sound dreadful to another.

Kind regards, Jack.

 

[Vladimir]

Jack,

At the budget end of speakers I'd take a 30 year old pair of Heybrook HB1's over B&W CM1's any day.

Well designed and well engineered speakers are well designed and engineered speakers. It doesn't matter what era they were made in.

Heybrook HB1 speakers cost £127 new in 1983. That's about £390 in todays money.

If what you said about speakers improving over the last 30 years had any merit whatsoever, speakers like the £600 CM1's would sound significantly better than the HB1's. They don't. They sound significantly worse.

I absolutely agree with you that there are well engineered and designed loudspeakers from all eras. As I mentioned earlier, the underlying physics has not changed so you're not suddenly going to get 20Hz bass extension and 90dB sensitivity from a passive standmount.

This is exactly why we shouldn't compare apples to oranges. B&W CM1 is a much smaller speaker, cabinet size and woofer size, compared to the Heybrook HB1. The B&W has inhouse designed drivers (R&D), much nicer build quality and vast international dealer network, which explains the higher price. Heybrook just made a chipboard box and wired some OEM stock drivers to a crossover.

 

[chebby]

... and Heybrook just made a chipboard box and wired some OEM stock drivers to a crossover.

I think Peter Comeau might have applied a little more thought to their design than you suggested there.

 

[Vladimir]

... and Heybrook just made a chipboard box and wired some OEM stock drivers to a crossover.

I think Peter Comeau might have applied a little more thought to their design than you suggested there.

I mean no disrespect to Peter Comeau. I'm simply suggesting why the B&W CM1 and Heybrook HB1 are not very comparable design and price wise. All flaws lindsayt might point to the CM1, I confirm without hesitation. However, if we need to find a vintage vs modern speaker design comparison to determine how much speaker design has/hasn't progressed, we need a smaller vintage speaker to compare to the CM1 or a bigger modern speaker to compare to the HB1.

Is there a 2 way mini monitor with a 5" woofer that can do what the CM1 does but in 1970 or 1980, and of course available for the everyday consumer?

 

[BigH]

... and Heybrook just made a chipboard box and wired some OEM stock drivers to a crossover.

I think Peter Comeau might have applied a little more thought to their design than you suggested there.

I mean no disrespect to Peter Comeau. I'm simply suggesting why the B&W CM1 and Heybrook HB1 are not very comparable design and price wise. All flaws lindsayt might point to the CM1, I confirm without hesitation. However, if we need to find a vintage vs modern speaker design comparison to determine how much speaker design has/hasn't progressed, we need a smaller vintage speaker to compare to the CM1 or a bigger modern speaker to compare to the HB1.

Is there a 2 way mini monitor with a 5" woofer that can do what the CM1 does but in 1970 or 1980, and of course available for the everyday consumer?

well I had the mission 780se, they are about the same size as CM1s. I much preferred the 780s, in fact apart from looks I don't think I could live with the cm1s. One speaker designed described the CM1s as some of the worst speakers he had ever heard. OK there are better modern speakers than the CM1s.

I would say generally that modern speakers are harder to drive maybe to give more bass? Older speakers tend to be more room filling sound wise and are better at low volumes. After 20 years I was rather disappointed with some modern speakers, however the ones I have got now are far better than the 780s.

 

[Vladimir]

well I had the mission 780se, they are about the same size as CM1s. I much preferred the 780s, in fact apart from looks I don't think I could live with the cm1s. One speaker designed described the CM1s as some of the worst speakers he had ever heard. OK there are better modern speakers than the CM1s.

I rather enjoy the CM1s. They play all day while I work and I've ditched several deemed better speakers and stayed with the CM1s.

That 3dB dip in the presence region (upper midrange) is a deal breaker for those that listen to music for 1-2 hours per day or per week and expect the hi-fi to blow them away each time with excitement and details.