Upgraded to Audio Note J - and other musings.

[skeptic]

Thank you for your extensive listening notes. I felt like you were someone at the audio equivalent of a wine tasting describing your sensory reactions to what you heard and the differences of the different models. Unfortunately, a recent visit to Audio Note's web site revealed that there is no longer a dealer anywhere near me so I will probably not have an opportunity to hear them for myself for the forseeable future.

"The dealer said that this is because the cabinet is not created to work AGAINST the driver like virtually all other box designs. It is indeed designed like a violin or guitar box were the entire cabinet is involved in creating the sound "

It is this kind of absurd rhetoric which makes me highly dubious of the claims made for A/N products. This is rediculous. The science and art of designing speaker enclosures has been developed for about 75 years and every conceivable type of enclosure has not only been tried but many of them have been extensively modeled mathematically in conjunction with drivers of different types. Among the more efficient enclosure/speaker combinations are horns and folded horns. Virtually every other speaker manufacturer besides A/N regards any resonances from the enclosure itself to be spurious because they are uncontrolled in amplitude. They take every conceivable step to eliminate those unwanted resonances by bracing the enclosures or making them from materials which do not resonate. It is hard to accept claims for a loudspeaker system which fly in the face of the otherwise universally accepted goal of non structural resonance of the enclosure by comparing them to musical instruments where the thinness, shape, induced stresses, and materials are deliberately chosen to enhance these types of resonances. The type of blanket put down of all other loudspeaker enclosures besides the ones employed by A/N is the kind of hype not usually associated with advertising for high end audio equipment. This accompanied by an unusual lack of technical details about the design philosophy or construction of these products is very disturbing, especially given their cost. The manufacturer seems to lose the distinction between the "machines" he makes and sells, and actual musical insturments other people make.

[RGA]

Is he really flying in the face of everyone else - since the well proven design has been there since the 1940's - and modified once by Snell and then by PQ?

Your assessment was similarly asked on AA:

"The reason violins, guitars, etc. have boxes is because they PRODUCE music. Speakers don't. They REPRODUCE music. The box is a big, heavy, distortion producing artifact. The best box is either no box, or a silent box. The only silent box I've personally ever heard were on the Wilson Audio X1 GRAND SLAAM...$65k. 2 inch thick synthetic marble.

So the previous poster is fairly correct. Speakers do NOT need box resonance to operate, look at any dipole.
Read up on speaker design theory, and you'll understand a lot more.

-tal"

"Dear Tal,

Let's put this to bed once and for all, Mount Everest has a resonance frequency, low yes, but it still resonates.

We can therefore reasonably conclude that everything resonates, there is no such thing as a speaker with no box (popular as the concept may seem, you have to mount the drivers in something, even if it is a panel driver), so we have essentially two choices,

1.) Build a box that minimises the resonant behaviour by applying mass, which does nothing useful in most cases, because whilst a lower resonance frequency at lower amplitude may look great on a waterfall graph, the reality is that it prolongs the amount of time the resonant energy is present, which leaves it present for long enough to disturb the replay.

In addition, damping is "stupid" in the sense that it removes both the sounds you want and the ones you are trying to get rid of.

2.) Build a cabinet which has a fast enough recovery time to stay within the human ear's time constant, that is, be close enough to the original note, to be indistinguishable by the human ear.

Method no. 2.) is much much harder to apply, as working out how to RAISE the resonance frequency and shorten it towards inaudibility requires hundreds of hours of experimentation AND does provide beautiful waterfall graphs with which to present your latest resonance removing technique as another breakthrough of "innovation" with which to sell next years crop of speakers with.

All our measurement methods and conventions dictate that making the cabinet heavier is better, unfortunately the truth is that it is a convenient, but poor way of solving the problem.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup "


Dear RGA,
It should say - 6 dB at 23 kHz, the problem with this kind of information is that it largely depends on how far away it was measured and in what kind of environment, anachoic or reverberant, so you need a whole load more information to be able to determine what the speaker actually does.

Given that most software, whether LP or CD does not have much energy above 15kHz and also considering that many of the recognised best recordings don't either, I think it is a mute issue whether bandwidth above 15kHz matters that much to the musical hearing experience, I think, as with most paper specifications, that they are designed to impress the less knowledgeable consumer into believing that they are making a choice based on "solid" information, which is important when they are making a buying decision.

A number of magazines and audio companies use our speakers, as do several mastering studios, we do not advertise this generally, because I do not feel that it is right to influence people's judgement of performance this way, I have the same view of specifications, they tell you little or nothing about the real world performance.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup"



The comparison to musical instruments is for the layman in that they actually use the cabinet itself like a musical instrument does, to create the sound. Most box speakers don't - which is why so many of the speakers you hear in a given price range say sound nearly identical - different treble and one might have more bass etc but they sound almost identical in the dyamics room filling kind of weightyness aspects.

In the end though I am forced to simply go by what I hear - you have way more of a technical background and have the right to question his approach. But right or wrong it sounds right to me. And I know you are not impressed with a LOT of speakers currently available yourself because you have oftened mentioned that "Brightness" that I also complain about.

Thus does it not make sense that an entirely different approach would or at least "could" be better. If the New accepted designs are not exactly getting you to sell your old designed AR9's then maybe other old designs are also better than the new ones. His master speaker is the Snell AII I believe. I can honestly say that take away all other considerations I would take the J ~3k over the N801 at $14k. So yes things at AN may be overpriced but to me then what is the N801? The point is to make you feel something when you listen for me that is AN for you may leave you totally cold and another it's Quad etc. I don't think this is rocket science.

Also:
Why not ask him some technical questions - He spends time on AA, he answers people's questions but has to dumb it down for less technically minded people - he's at every show, runs the company puts the stuff together designs and still takes the time to frequent AA and admittedly come under the gun on occasion. His digital products took a lot of flack too - I wonder if people actually heard and compared though.

The guy is pasionate and thinks he's right - and if he's right then to him everyone is less right to outright wrong - presumably Peter Walker felt that way about electrostats and whoever runs Magnepan feels that way too...and the people who buy those speakers because they genuinely love the sound will believe that those designers were dead right - even though someone like yourself can easily come along and find the "technical" flaws or weaknesses in planars and stats - nothing is perfect.

[skeptic]

The "box" in a loudspeaker system serves one or more of several useful purposes, most having to do with low frequency reproduction. Since vibrating membranes like loudspeaker cones produce sound from both the front and the back, and since sound from the back is 180 degrees out of phase with sound from the front, if the speaker has no enclosure, the sound from the back will cancel the sound from the front and the bass will be very weak. Ported enclosures cause the wave from the back to invert in phase and emerge in phase with the wave from the front. Unfortunately, they are very frequency selective and usually have a series of resonance and antiresonance nodes. Infinite baffles try to just prevent the back wave from reaching the front. Acoustic suspension speakers use the air pressure trapped in a relatively small box to control the cone motion in additon to preventing it from emerging out of phase and canceling out the front wave. Horn enclosures are the mechanical equivalent of electrical transformers efficiently coupling the energy from the front of the speaker to the room by providing a suitable back pressure at the narrow end of the horn to load the driver efficiently while providing a transition to a low pressure end which couples efficiently with a large room. Enclosureless speakers like Magnepan magneplanar types have to take special measures to overcome this out of phase problem. They are probably effectively back to back drivers in a bi polar configuration having the back wave emerge in phase with the front wave instead of out of phase. There are many others clever enclosure ideas like isobaraks which have an inner driver to effectively increase the effective size of the enclosure for loading purposes without increasing its physical size. I don't see how you can glibly dismiss the role of a loudspeaker enclosure. One thing all of them have in common. The guy who builds them does NOT want them to add spurious resonances to the sound of his speaker.

"In addition, damping is "stupid" in the sense that it removes both the sounds you want and the ones you are trying to get rid of."

Once again this kind of statement flies in the face of accepted and well proven facts. This should be especially evident to anyone who tries to design an acoustic suspension speaker system like A/N K. Of the three parameters which control the frequency response of a loudspeaker; mass, springiness, and damping, the internal damping material used to control overshoot of the cone is the only thing that prevents it from exhibiting boomy undamped resonances. This is a direct application of Newton's second law of motion applied to the phenomenon of forced resonance. It is presented in every freshman college physics textbook along with its solution and explanation. BTW, it is one of the most widely used equations for analyzing and designing mechanical systems including for example the suspension on your car. For ported systems, the driver suspensions are usually much tighter so the damping can be done mostly by the driver itself. The box can be "tuned" to any frequency desired given the right dimension and internal configuration. I'd like to see a cutaway view of the A/N J and E series which are two way 8 inch ported designs. The extremely low claimed low frequency cutoff suggests a kind of transmission line loading to tune the relatively small cabinet to such a low frequency.

I do not and will not post on AA. For me the site is unacceptable. As I said on the cable message board, I posted there for a short time many years ago. I was not thrown out, I left on my own but had I stayed, the outcome would not have been in doubt.

[RGA]

With the E anyway apparently the cabinet is tuned nearly a full octave below the driver midbass driver cuttoff - well according to an advert I was reading.

The Audio Note Absolute Zero floorstanders are essentially Transmission line speakers from what the dealers were saying. The back of the speaker about 3/4 the way up was cut completely out and you could look down inside the speaker. AN calls it [Two-way folded, parabolic, rear-loaded, quarter-wave quasi-horn-loaded floor-standing loudspeakers] instead of transmission line I guess.

Way back when I was looking at the AN/K specifically - Peter told me exactly where to get info on them:

"You may find this even funnier, they are actually 1940's cabinet shapes, read L. L. Beranek's Loudspeakers and you will find the calculation for all our speakers, cabinet shape, driver position etc.
What you will not find is how we match the drivers to each other to maximise efficiency, dispersion and overall tonal balance."

This L.L Beranek guy - I've seen his name a lot in acoustics even for car companies to control vibration and B&W referred to him in their FAQ section - you would likely be WAY more familiar with him than I.

RE: the K
"As to the drivers, they are both from Vifa in Denmark, the tweeter is a highly modified version of the TD19, no ferro fluid, no damping and a special ferrite magnet, the woofer is also a Vifa which is a derivative of the original standard driver.

But really if you want to know exactly what is inside the speakers and all there other products why not go to that AudioAsylum board - they now have a dedicated Audio Note Kits forum - can't get into trouble if you just read through what the builders are saying http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/au...ekits/bbs.html - I can't find the picture of the inside of the E kit but they had all the parts all sitting there ready to placed in the box.

[92135011]

RGA,
why not go for a kit2 with preamp kit.
I know that the dealer advised against a preamp, but probably means he is against using a pre with the A48b. Plus the kit2 with preamp kit are both tube so it should be ok.
The 2 units will run you 1700US (probably a notch less after negotiation) Plus you can sell off your Sugden for a little bit. Save 7% on taxes, which is another 150 or so. So at the end you are looking at about the same as the soro.

Good thing is that you can easily upgrade it when you get more cash. If you are uncomfortable with kit building, I can help you build it if you would like and if you can trust me of course. Light electronics is sort of a hobby for me anyways.

[RGA]

Yeah it's going to be at least a year before I could do something like this. I'm already WAY over budget in going with the J's in the first place. Thanks for the generous offer though. You are right they were not against the preamp kit or preamp but they didn't feel it was a worthy move to use my amp as power amp as it is solid state.

I'll probably wait until I come back from Japan - roughly 4 years from now before I make a move - unless I marry a rich girl by then who loves music too. Or a lottery happens my way.

I will probably keep the Sugden and run it as a power amp for my Marantz receiver. Of course this assumes the receiver lasts five years.

Sugden has pulled themselves from north America apparently - probably because people here buy based off of looks and features over actual sound quality and build construction. .

I also noticed that Soundhounds was selling some of the AN amplifier Kits which they assembled for $3000.00. UGLY freakin things with a lot of tubes and uncovered transformers. - Definitely pay extra to get the covers - I mean there is acceptable ugly and then there is UGGGLY. From the looks of it they were very well built.

[92135011]

Actually, check out Audionotekits.com
The new kit1 is larger and has a stainless steel chassis. Looks better than the old one.
And yes...the covers are a MUST.

I'm going to build myself some of those kits in due time.
When I'm done you are welcome to drop by to give them a listen to see if its your cup of tea. Then it will give you a good idea what you getting yourself into if you do decide to invest. The kits are undergoing a lot of change. The preamp kit right now looks like the M2. But in a few months time they will look closer like the M3 (to accomodate more transformers and such). The excellent thing about kits is that you can upgrade it bit by bit rather than buy a whole new unit (OPT, caps, atteunators, etc.)