JCBRUM ....
Let me get something out in the open straightaway.
British designed HiFi led the world on the basis of re-producing a recording as closely as possible to the original live performance, and provide excellent technical equipment to do it. Particularly loudspeakers. The whole world demanded our products, on the back of excellent research done by the BBC and others.
However things changed for the worse with the introduction of hype, smoke and mirrors, and dubious claims for "magic" components, simply designed to part gullible enthusiasts from vast quantities of their cash, and with little real merit in hifi terms.
Companies which came to prominence in the 1980's and are now struggling to maintain interest, have ruined the reputation of British HiFi, with their silly and misleading sales techniques, and the equipment they make often sounds awful because it distorts the sound, and followers call it "musicality". They even typed out special sales scripts for their silly salesmen to learn, and re-gurgitate to the punters, complete with foot-tapping and head nodding actions. I am told some salesmen still use these techniques today at shows and other places.
None of these firms is a patch on the excellence of Radford and Quad in their day. Although technology has now advanced hugely and is still advancing at a blistering pace. There is almost no area of hifi where something designed competently in the last 12 months, won't beat something 5 years old.
However "HiFi" and recorded music go back a long way. Well over 100yrs, in fact records were on sale in 1895. I have played some old records on my kit and the songs are delightful.
However back to hifi. Mostly it's about playing pre-recorded music, and unlike Linn said, it's principally about choosing good loudspeakers. You may take it for-granted that in this day and age you can provide a good signal to the amplifiers.
So how do we decide which is a good LS, well some would say by listening to it. But that is not the best way because our perception and judgement is heavily influenced by all the junk we have been listening to so far. We are far too prejudiced, at least initially.
Instead lets try and work to a specification and lets see where that leads.
Many people think the bass response is crucial for various reasons. Well the truth is that there isn't much deep bass, in most live music. Consider the available instruments, the commonest of which is the "double bass". The lowest note of which is about 40Hz. The human voice goes down to about 80Hz even on "Ole Man River" stuff.
There are only 4 instruments which can go lower:- the harp and the bottom 3 notes on a grand piano = 30Hz. A Church Organ = 20Hz. And an Octocontra Bass Clarinet = which goes much lower, but only two have ever been made in the whole world, and they're not portable or working at the moment.
So by setting a lower requirement of say 60Hz flat and just a bit of fall off at 40Hz you aren't going to miss much most of the time, and there are ways to add what's necessary anyway.
The sort of requirement is met today by a recently designed 6" or 7" drive unit in a good enclosure, BUT NOT BY OLDER DESIGNS, because the drive units just aren't up to it.
Lets now look at the higher frequencies. A "soprano" can hit around 1kHz. No real instruments operate above 4kHz. And no-one over the age of 30 can hear anything above 10k anyway.
You can see now why a 78rpm record from 1930 can sound really good, with a frequency range of 150Hz - 5kHz, if it is played correctly. (which is very very difficult to do)
Accept it ! even if you include harmonics, an upper frequency response extending to 20kHz is adequate, and probably overkill. So we have to employ a tweeter to supplement our bass driver. In that respect a good tweeter, correctly designed and implemented will do all necessary.
The critical bit is the crossover , so lets dump it and use separate amplifiers to drive the bass and the tweeter units. We can now use an up to the minute active filter/crossover using very sharp and steep separators to provide very clean signals to the amplifiers and drive units.
As long as we provide a nice well designed cabinet, which helps the above specs rather than hinders we have a beautiful and comparitively small loudspeaker, which does everything required to play music perfectly. You just don't need big or old designs.
Aahh, you say but what about the Octocontra bass clarinet enthusiasts amongst us ? Well the answer is easy, just add a sympathetically designed Sub-Woofer, specifically designed to operate 60Hz and lower, using the same active technology. I've tested it down to 10Hz and it works.
So big loudspeaqkers are totally un-necessary and all you need is a perfect signal to feed them.
If you listen to the recordings of the "Vienna New Years Day Concert" which are available for about 40 yrs and probably more, you may notice that in 1975 irrc the changed from analogue to digital recording, with considerable benefits. Today it's possible for us to listen to the exact same recording that the producer hears when he is making the recording. No analogue copies, it's the same digital file. So nowadays we can all possess the digital "masters" if that's what they want to release.
Modern computer equipment can play that "digital master " perfectly without any faults at all ! and all we need is a dac that's up to the job and we have reached Audio HiFi Nirvana.
You would think a competent and thoughtful loudspeaker designer would design an appropriate dac and put it in his Loudspeakers ready for our use together with a remote volume control wouldn't you ?
"Big - Old - Legacy - Separates"
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Originally Posted by Steve Toy
