Agree, Chris does well complementing Paul on some deeper topics with great competency.

Back in 1985, when I first started hi-fi, I thought that a "zero distortion system" would make AC/DC guitarist Angus Young sound like Terje Rypdal. 😄

Laurentz Duba i was just talking with my church’s head sound engineer today, we’re both hifi nuts. I play guitar there, and we were discussing how angus used a deceptively clean tone to make his guitar sound crushing. It worked!

Then you need a system that replicates/reproduces that distortion without adding its own.

Distortion is fine if it's intended. Then it's not distortion, it's an audio effect intended to evoke a certain emotion. Speakers should have low distortion, unless of course you enjoy a particular type of distortion signature which will appear on all your songs you listen to. Most don't like this, but a few do. The reason most hate this is vocals will always be compromised and held back.

KZfaq Curates Content, algorithm is a lie Yes, a speaker distorting is not likely to benefit a broad range of music. Usually speaker distortion is very frequency dependent. I prefer purest sound possible.

Thanks!

I agree!!! He's a prickly pear at times and I don't agree entirely with him (but what do I know). Overall though, he's right up there with Floyd Toole and where they disagree, I often find myself siding with Earl.

again, speaker specs are advertise what is good. distortion figures can be distorted too.

Ultimately your ears will answer every question you could have about this stuff. LOL except for how am I gonna afford this stuff??

grant jonsn Well, you can’t just rely on ears. Measurements are extremely important also. But of course any compromise between options should serve what sounds best to our ears rather than what looks best on an instrument.

ThinkingBetter I agree that measurements will definitely give one access to options one could not normally have found/thought of without. Of course if a measurements-only-based setup sounds like shit then there will always be our ears.

@@graxjpg Speakers can not be optimized through measurements only. Listening tests are vital. Great audio engineers do both.

After thinking about things said in the video and your comment, I think I have a very good idea of the things being discussed here. I build speakers as a hobby mostly to see how good I can make a cheap speaker sound by going overboard on the box. I have seen some very interesting things where the box is very easy to reduce or increase distortion just by changing the placement of supports and bracing. Thanks for giving more incite into the strangeness I was seeing.

@@99Duds The issue of cabinet resonance (and its occasional contribution to the final sound we hear from a speaker) constitutes an age-old debate as well. Today I tend to believe that a cabinet would better be either very stiff or, if allowed to resonate by design, produce good sounding harmonics, ones which blend in well and imperceptibly with the music (mainly 2nd harmonic and higher even order harmonics). Good choices for the positioning of bracings are mandatory (usually avoiding symmetry and applying bracings at 1/3 or 1/5 lengths from ends). Another good idea are baffles made up of noble solid woods allowed to mildly vibrate, supporting only the immediate area surrounding the cone, while making use of either MDF or plywood for the remainder of the box where bracings apply. In fact, resonances are not bad in themselves; but as long as they are beautiful resonances, carefully applied to enhance and embelish the main sound produced by the driver (No, I'm not speaking a heresy here!) Just think of a violin's hollow body. (And yes, speaker cones can be thought of as being musical instruments as well, since they will always produce some form of unavoidable harmonic distortion, and will never be neutral transducers in real life, regardless of what textbooks may tell you). Since harmonic distortion is always present, you better channel it in order to make it sound beautiful as you wish it to.

Wram Accorsior better yet,planar or baffle less speakers!!

@@johnwhite2576 Open baffle and planar speakers are indeed interesting alternatives, but they present typical problems of their own too. Usually the problem with these is extracting good bass response; open baffles have to be carefully calculated so as to work well, and planar speakers must have large areas and be suitably positioned in rooms. (The large Magneplanar MG-20's are a good example, seeing that they are power-hungry speakers at about 400 or 500WRMS in order to work really well)

The problem with THD is the T for "Total", meaning it's a value that doesn't take into account psychoacoustics, i.e. that we're extremely sensitive to some types of higher-order distortion, but, as you mention numerous times, barely at all to 2nd order, for example.

The did a lot of things that are innovative now (that AD9710 from the 60's also had a copper sleeve over the pole) but they where horrible at marketing.

The new Purifi woofers have solved the "long thrown no no" problem -- they have distortion numbers at least as good as best big drivers from the pro audio companies and they're small enough for bookshelf speakers.

Yep, low excursion isn't so bad. A speaker should really only play down to 60hz. Targeting 40hz and below causes a ton of problems. Clarity, distortion, etc all get worse trying get another half octave out of a tower or bookshelf. Besides, around 80hz and below is really a subwoofer's job.

@@thunderpooch great comment, and with a high pass at 80hx and above we can remove the ports and slave drivers to get even more sound quality out of the speakers.

@@sudd3660 For normal sized towers I wouldn't bother with the additional crossover unless it's dsp. But for small 2 way line arrays where you have small mid range drivers playing quite high I would recommend using a high pass filter to filter out the sub woofer range. It cleans up the mids and vocals.

Thank you! I hope that we can get some things that are appropriate for a lot of budgets. What do you consider affordable?

​@@cbrunhaverI wouldnt go over $1000 myself as the whole point becomes moot honestly. Be great to see a certain speaker done but say with different driver configurations based on low/med/high price points and their sonic differences. A "poor mans" wilson watt puppy would be absolutely awesome!

@@AllboroLCD well, you might consider kit speakers. www.troelsgravesen.dk/ has a few designs resembling a WATT/puppy but even those will cost more than $1000 in parts.

@@cbrunhaver Whoah, hey Chris! I was mildly joking, I also caught the vid with Paul talking possible price tiers on the PS speakers too. A set on offer around the $5k mark is certainly reasonable all things considered. I did NOT know about the watt puppy kit, thank you for that! Perhaps once the PSA speaker line gets some traction you folks could offer a kit, that would be very cool! Godspeed Brotha

Bose 😁

I would guess a bunch of diy projects. And then, perhaps some dynaudio speakers. Maybe some focal, kef, or faber's.

@@adr1503 Bose is quality design, but only on the outside 😆

Rubbish, only 6 out of 10 people think that ;)

Creepy, haha

I believe Audiovector do similar.. with their freedom grounding system which involves earthing the driver chassis ... Plus some other things such as titanium voice coil formers are also used to try and reduce distortion.

@Fat Rat -- Better yet, a pair of Selah Audio's new Purezzas at under $3k/pair with free U.S. shipping!

@Fat Rat -- No. Same goes for swapping the Dayton driver into the IRSV.

@Fat Rat -- Meaning I was unaware of both the existence of the mock-up and the IRS-V driver swap.

Lies.

Bruce Morgen interesting would be cool in a servo subwoofer

A 6.5 inch driver is NOT, a woofer...

@@ronbradshaw7404 -- So, you would regard a driver that is, given a suitable small (15.5"h x 8.5"w x 11d) enclosure, down 10 dB @33 Hz and pretty nearly flat starting at 65 Hz through 1 kHz as what exactly, a penny-whistle? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woofer

@@editorjuno Exactly yes. When is the last time you went to a live concert?. Want to try to reproduce the bass with lil 6inch woofas? good luck!.

@@ronbradshaw7404 -- I forgot to mention that it's less than 2 dB down @50 Hz in that enclosure, so by definition it's a woofer. Need deeper bass? Get yourself a sub and turn its low-pass knob way down. I live in apartment, so live concert volume is out of the question here, as are massive floor-standers with 12-15" woofers. Moreover, check out this reviewer description: "...most of the time distortion is an indicator that the volume is too loud. We hear distortion and we turn it down. With these speakers, I was often in the 95-100dB level (at 11 feet, no less) without having a clue it was that loud." If you need more than a clean 100 dB SPL to enjoy music, I guess this isn't enough of a woofer for you -- but it's still a woofer, period. :-)

@Fat Rat Just like with "that not so fresh feeling" walking down the beach....no one wants to hear that....

@Fat Rat lol

Multiplication factor. The distorted signal from an amp will be magnified by the speaker distortion.

@@Enemji That's a good point!

@Fat Rat 🤢🤢🤢 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 That face!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Fat Rat tell me What's wrong about my comment? Are they not using aluminum voice coils on their subs?

Well, depending on the design, copper, copper clad aluminum or aluminum is used. Of those, Copper gives the most number of turns (and resulting force factor)for a given resistance, but has the highest mass, whereas aluminum gives fewer turns but is lower mass. Copper has a more gradual positive temperature coefficient and leads to somewhat lower power compression. Typically, we’re using copper coils in woofers. Well, cooking was invented many years ago but new, delicious recipes are being made all the time. Sometimes engineering doesn’t mean starting from first principles and innovating an entirely new thing, it’s optimizing a type of “recipe”, understanding the inherent design compromises.