passive set up v active set up

[Ashley James]

Is a bi-amped 2-way speaker active or passive?

i presume the definitive bit of "Active" is a crossover at line level?

Not necessarily. To be active the crossover must be before the power amps and they must be connected directly to the drivers. Electronic crossovers have far lower distortion than passive ones too.

 

[thewinelake.]

Are you saying that sq is not a matter of opinion?

Maybe the results of a survey of a large group of people doing the test you've got planned would be some kind of fact?

 

[Ashley James]

There are people who believe that Elvis is still alive, Darwin was wrong, Climate change isn't happening and Katy Price is a worthwhile celebrity.

These people have no facts to support their belief......

Sound familiar?

That is an absurd analogy because the scientific "evidence" in favour of active speakers predicts their absolute superiority. There is absolutely no question that they are better and this has been understood since the fifties. Also hey've been in widespread use since the seventies, it's just hi fi left to catch up.

honest guv! And all this "evidence" has been appearing on this and other forums for ten years now at least since we announced the ADM9s.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

I agree with you lpv.

So, do you think it would be misleading marketing / miss-selling for anyone to claim that AVI actives sound better than any passive speakers ever made?

no, I don't think so.. cause ANY marketing if full of sh!t, no exceptions. never heard any truthful salesman, and "if honesty were suddenly introduced... the whole system would collapse!” ( george carlin)

but then, every stage of DM10's development from drivers, amps, crossovers to cabinet, connections everything is there on their forum.. fundamentally marketing is what it is: bullsh!t, no more no less..

I disagree 100%.

But then I work for a company that sets high standards of ethical and moral conduct.

Any salesman making misleading marketing statements for my company would get re-training / disciplinary action / the sack.

I never give misleading statements to any of my clients. 100% honesty and integrity 100% of the time.

It's about building trust, respect and a good working relationship. That makes very good business sense.

very true words honesty goes a long way in my book . The world full of bullshiters

 

[radiorog]

I truly believe that we've made speakers as good as they can be, thanks to Sinar Baja.

Hi Ashley, I have heard reports that the dm10's whilst being very good, with exceptional clarity, might sound lean, and don't delve right down into the lower frequencies, because of the limited size of the drivers. Wouldn't a similar speaker with a larger mid/bass driver sound better?

Thank you.

 

[thewinelake.]

Well, they do a sub

 

[davedotco]

Are you saying that sq is not a matter of opinion?

Maybe the results of a survey of a large group of people doing the test you've got planned would be some kind of fact?

It is my personal view that the quality (or otherwise) of a pair of speakers can be judged in terms of accuracy by a knowledgeable listener.

There are good recordings to be found of voice and acoustic instruments, recorded in a real 'natural' acoustic that can be used as a reference. Of course the listener would need to know in some detail what these instruments actually sound like and it might well help if he was familier with the acoustic of the recording venue.

Given that, then I believe that it is possible to make a judgement that is, to all intents and purposes, "some kind of fact". Of course the assessment is subjective and personal but if the listener is sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable then these assessments are, in my view, viable.

Of course most modern (popular) recordings have no basis in reality, so it has become the convention that evaluation of sound quality in these cases is purely an opinion. Again personally I have no issue with this, though where I do have an issue is with the suggestion that all such opinions are equally valid.

In my experience they are not, not by a long way.

 

[thewinelake.]

Yes, maybe a group of concert hall designers or suchlike might be a good start.

However, the notion of scientific proof of anything in this area seems a little irrelevant to me when what matters is what the owner feels about it. A bit like art and wine, really. There is generally accepted view of what's good, but there will always be a sense of subjectivity.

When is round 2 of this thread?

 

[davedotco]

Yes, maybe a group of concert hall designers or suchlike might be a good start.

However, the notion of scientific proof of anything in this area seems a little irrelevant to me when what matters is what the owner feels about it. A bit like art and wine, really. There is generally accepted view of what's good, but there will always be a sense of subjectivity.

When is round 2 of this thread?

We have been down this road before, and it really depends on your definition of 'hi-fi'.

If you are old school (like me) then the old definition of 'the closest approach to the original sound' is what it is all about. The moment you bring 'preferences' and 'feel' into the equation you are not talking about hi-fi.

Needless to say, this is not, generally, the view of this forum.

 

[Infiniteloop]

Prediction and end result are two very different things.

Perhaps you could furnish us with a frequency response curve from your speakers showing how accurate they are to the input signal?

http://en.devialet.com/expertpro/#sam/

http://en.devialet.com/sam-ready-speakers/page/focal/focal-electra-1008-be

http://en.devialet.com/sam-ready-speakers/page/sonus-faber/sonus-faber-cremona-auditor-m

 

[thewinelake.]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

 

[davedotco]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

With modern recording there really is no reference point, so I guess tweeking to taste is generally acceptable to most people.

I have my own views on what sounds 'realistic', and would back my judgment on this, but there is no point in telling people they are 'wrong' or 'misguided' because they think differently.

When I was a dealer I could be a little more forthright in my views, primarily because I could 'prove' what I said by demonstration.

 

[lpv]

If you are old school (like me) then the old definition of 'the closest approach to the original sound' is what it is all about. The moment you bring 'preferences' and 'feel' into the equation you are not talking about hi-fi.

Needless to say, this is not, generally, the view of this forum.

a good test for any loudspeakers is a well recorded violin.. on many ( too many) speakers sound is unnecessarily shouty.. it tells me straight away what kind of speakers are in front of me..

 

[davedotco]

If you are old school (like me) then the old definition of 'the closest approach to the original sound' is what it is all about. The moment you bring 'preferences' and 'feel' into the equation you are not talking about hi-fi.

Needless to say, this is not, generally, the view of this forum.

a good test for any loudspeakers is a well recorded violin.. on many ( too many) speakers sound is unnecessarily shouty.. it tells me straight away what kind of speakers are in front of me..

I find a piano particularly useful in that respect, years of experience in recording, setting mics, fitting pickups or just being around when the piano tuner is doing his thing.

 

[Ashley James]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

As you may be aware, quite a few AVI forum members are professional sound men, primarily on the broadcast classical side. Rolo began with the BBC Wildlife Unit in Bristol working with Attenborough in the late sixties and worked his way through most of the different disciplines. They had a training school at Wood Norton in the old days too. He's done every sort of sound recording you can imagine and has a Nagra digital recorder and Sennheiser Mikes that he uses in M&S configuration matrixed digitally by the Nagra Mike preamps.

He does all sorts of concerts, some for the BBC and of things like the Three Choirs and Cheltenham Festivals. Often his first port of call is me where we listen to the original unedited, un-processed recording straight from the SD card. We listen to DM10s/DM5s and HD650 and 800. We can take the headphones off and on while listening to the speakers. You cannot get closer than this and if there was artificial warm or colouration of any aspect of the music in the speakers, memory or the headphones would show it. It's what they've always been used for.

As I've previously explained, pop producers work differently and treat every part of the process as part of the musical result. They prefer old microphones with colouration, they might use elderly equalisers or effects units, they might prefer analogue tape recorders and sadly they usually treat monitors the same way. They may not be as accurate as AVI, but as long as the mix sounds good in the car or on a midi system, they must be good. Gearslutz is a pro audio forum where you can learn more if you're interested.

We can offer modern music producers more accurate replay of their work, but they may not care. However they do in Bollywood and a top sound man has just bought ours and is endorsing them.

However, from a speaker designer/manufacturer's perspective, absolute accuracy and neutrality must be the goal. Put another way, all a Hifi system can do is distort further what it plays. Therefore the one that distorts the leases gets you closest to the original recording and the music. Therefore I don't think a wine analogy works.

 

[Infiniteloop]

If you are old school (like me) then the old definition of 'the closest approach to the original sound' is what it is all about. The moment you bring 'preferences' and 'feel' into the equation you are not talking about hi-fi.

Needless to say, this is not, generally, the view of this forum.

a good test for any loudspeakers is a well recorded violin.. on many ( too many) speakers sound is unnecessarily shouty.. it tells me straight away what kind of speakers are in front of me..

I find a piano particularly useful in that respect, years of experience in recording, setting mics, fitting pickups or just being around when the piano tuner is doing his thing.

I usually listen to strings, piano and clarinet for this purpose. Mr Mozart comes in very handy in this instance.

 

[lpv]

two most popular instruments and natural reference to what speakers should sounds like..

 

[Infiniteloop]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

As you may be aware, quite a few AVI forum members are professional sound men, primarily on the broadcast classical side. Rolo began with the BBC Wildlife Unit in Bristol working with Attenborough in the late sixties and worked his way through most of the different disciplines. They had a training school at Wood Norton in the old days too. He's done every sort of sound recording you can imagine and has a Nagra digital recorder and Sennheiser Mikes that he uses in M&S configuration matrixed digitally by the Nagra Mike preamps.

He does all sorts of concerts, some for the BBC and of things like the Three Choirs and Cheltenham Festivals. Often his first port of call is me where we listen to the original unedited, un-processed recording straight from the SD card. We listen to DM10s/DM5s and HD650 and 800. We can take the headphones off and on while listening to the speakers. You cannot get closer than this and if there was artificial warm or colouration of any aspect of the music in the speakers, memory or the headphones would show it. It's what they've always been used for.

As I've previously explained, pop producers work differently and treat every part of the process as part of the musical result. They prefer old microphones with colouration, they might use elderly equalisers or effects units, they might prefer analogue tape recorders and sadly they usually treat monitors the same way. They may not be as accurate as AVI, but as long as the mix sounds good in the car or on a midi system, they must be good. Gearslutz is a pro audio forum where you can learn more if you're interested.

We can offer modern music producers more accurate replay of their work, but they may not care. However they do in Bollywood and a top sound man has just bought ours and is endorsing them.

However, from a speaker designer/manufacturer's perspective, absolute accuracy and neutrality must be the goal. Put another way, all a Hifi system can do is distort further what it plays. Therefore the one that distorts the leases gets you closest to the original recording and the music. Therefore I don't think a wine analogy works.

So show us some frequency response curves from your speakers.

 

[Ashley James]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

As you may be aware, quite a few AVI forum members are professional sound men, primarily on the broadcast classical side. Rolo began with the BBC Wildlife Unit in Bristol working with Attenborough in the late sixties and worked his way through most of the different disciplines. They had a training school at Wood Norton in the old days too. He's done every sort of sound recording you can imagine and has a Nagra digital recorder and Sennheiser Mikes that he uses in M&S configuration matrixed digitally by the Nagra Mike preamps.

He does all sorts of concerts, some for the BBC and of things like the Three Choirs and Cheltenham Festivals. Often his first port of call is me where we listen to the original unedited, un-processed recording straight from the SD card. We listen to DM10s/DM5s and HD650 and 800. We can take the headphones off and on while listening to the speakers. You cannot get closer than this and if there was artificial warm or colouration of any aspect of the music in the speakers, memory or the headphones would show it. It's what they've always been used for.

As I've previously explained, pop producers work differently and treat every part of the process as part of the musical result. They prefer old microphones with colouration, they might use elderly equalisers or effects units, they might prefer analogue tape recorders and sadly they usually treat monitors the same way. They may not be as accurate as AVI, but as long as the mix sounds good in the car or on a midi system, they must be good. Gearslutz is a pro audio forum where you can learn more if you're interested.

We can offer modern music producers more accurate replay of their work, but they may not care. However they do in Bollywood and a top sound man has just bought ours and is endorsing them.

However, from a speaker designer/manufacturer's perspective, absolute accuracy and neutrality must be the goal. Put another way, all a Hifi system can do is distort further what it plays. Therefore the one that distorts the leases gets you closest to the original recording and the music. Therefore I don't think a wine analogy works.

So show us some frequency response curves from your speakers.

Believe it or not you'd learn absolutely nothing from an amplitude response plot. When he was chief engineer at Wharfedale in the fifties the great Raymond Cook, who later became chief engineer for Kef, probably world leaders in their day, would produce ruler flat amplitude responses for the speakers of the time. How do you suppose they'd sound next to the speakers of today.

We're not sensitive to quite large variations in amplitude, our ears don't even have a flat response and they vary from person to person.

Therefore I cannot imagine why you keep asking for one or what you think it might tell you.

We're sensitive to phase changes, we can hear and be irritated by wide areas of bass/mid tweeter overlap, we're sensitive to the distortion produced by cones breaking up at the top end and tweeters distortion at the bottom, we can hear the loss of control in passives as boomy bass and so much more, but certainly not a plus or minus 2dB variation in amplitude response of a typical pair of competent speakers.

 

[Infiniteloop]

I've not yet decided on that matter! One feels that fidelity to original sound is a safe bet, yet sometimes a bit of "warmth" or perhaps fake bass boost might make something "better" than the original in the eye of some beholders. Higher than Hi-Fi, 110% realism ;-)

As you may be aware, quite a few AVI forum members are professional sound men, primarily on the broadcast classical side. Rolo began with the BBC Wildlife Unit in Bristol working with Attenborough in the late sixties and worked his way through most of the different disciplines. They had a training school at Wood Norton in the old days too. He's done every sort of sound recording you can imagine and has a Nagra digital recorder and Sennheiser Mikes that he uses in M&S configuration matrixed digitally by the Nagra Mike preamps.

He does all sorts of concerts, some for the BBC and of things like the Three Choirs and Cheltenham Festivals. Often his first port of call is me where we listen to the original unedited, un-processed recording straight from the SD card. We listen to DM10s/DM5s and HD650 and 800. We can take the headphones off and on while listening to the speakers. You cannot get closer than this and if there was artificial warm or colouration of any aspect of the music in the speakers, memory or the headphones would show it. It's what they've always been used for.

As I've previously explained, pop producers work differently and treat every part of the process as part of the musical result. They prefer old microphones with colouration, they might use elderly equalisers or effects units, they might prefer analogue tape recorders and sadly they usually treat monitors the same way. They may not be as accurate as AVI, but as long as the mix sounds good in the car or on a midi system, they must be good. Gearslutz is a pro audio forum where you can learn more if you're interested.

We can offer modern music producers more accurate replay of their work, but they may not care. However they do in Bollywood and a top sound man has just bought ours and is endorsing them.

However, from a speaker designer/manufacturer's perspective, absolute accuracy and neutrality must be the goal. Put another way, all a Hifi system can do is distort further what it plays. Therefore the one that distorts the leases gets you closest to the original recording and the music. Therefore I don't think a wine analogy works.

So show us some frequency response curves from your speakers.

Believe it or not you'd learn absolutely nothing from an amplitude response plot. When he was chief engineer at Wharfedale in the fifties the great Raymond Cook, who later became chief engineer for Kef, probably world leaders in their day, would produce ruler flat amplitude responses for the speakers of the time. How do you suppose they'd sound next to the speakers of today.

We're not sensitive to quite large variations in amplitude, our ears don't even have a flat response and they vary from person to person.

Therefore I cannot imagine why you keep asking for one or what you think it might tell you.

We're sensitive to phase changes, we can hear and be irritated by wide areas of bass/mid tweeter overlap, we're sensitive to the distortion produced by cones breaking up at the top end and tweeters distortion at the bottom, we can hear the loss of control in passives as boomy bass and so much more, but certainly not a plus or minus 2dB variation in amplitude response of a typical pair of competent speakers.

So you cannot provide any scientifically measured reasons to back up your statement that your speakers are superior to everyone elses other than it's obvious by listening?

And you expect to be taken seriously? - You sound like the Iraqi government's information minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf.

http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com

I'm sorry, but I can only conclude that you're clearly on here to peddle your company's wares through marketing BS and hearsay. That you personally profit from this directly is abhorrent.

I'm disappointed and surprised that WHF even allow you to continue.

 

[Ashley James]

What a load of old tosh.

You're welcome to pop along with your old passives and compare them with the DM5s. That would be a bit of a shock to the system *crazy*

 

[Infiniteloop]

What a load of old tosh.

You're welcome to pop along with your old passives and compare them with the DM5s. That would be a bit of a shock to the system *crazy*

How professional.

Class D Amps? - No thanks.

Still no scientific or technical back-up to your comments I see.

Fact is that you cannot back up any of your claims at all. - Even the testimonials on your website are completely anonymous.

Shameful.

 

[CnoEvil]

If you you prefer what the AVIs do, more than eqivalently priced passive speaker systems...great.

If you prefer how they sound to more expensive passive systems...better again. If you don't, then all their "superiority" means little.

There's little more to say really....but don't let me get in the way of another 30 pages of "discussion".

 

[thewinelake.]

Infiniteloop - you're part of the round 2 aren't you? So you'll be able to compare your system with Hegel+ATC and DM10+sub, right?

Roll on that day! Maybe this thread should be locked until then.

However, why are you not letting anyone see DM10 frequency-response graphs, Ashley? It might be humouring the wrong question being asked, but it does across as somewhat ungenerous. Mind you, why don't reviewers do their own graphs? Surely it's easy and would give them more credibility (to those that haven't "twigged" that they're meaningless at best and misleading at worst)....

 

[lpv]

However, why are you not letting anyone see DM10 frequency-response graphs

I've seen you're on AVI Forum.. the graph is there.. check it out