spkr-adv

Advice on speakers.

Cat Stevens Wants to Know How You Like Your Congas: Light, Medium or Heavy?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

During the shootout for this record a while back [the late 2000s would be my guess], we made a very important discovery, a seemingly obvious one but one that nevertheless had eluded us for the past twenty plus years (so how obvious could it have been?).

It became clear, for the first time, what accounts for the wide disparity in ENERGY and DRIVE from one copy to the next. We can sum it up for you in one five letter word, and that word is conga.

The congas are what drive the high-energy songs, songs like Tuesday’s Dead and Changes IV.

Here is how we stumbled upon their critically important contribution.

We were listening to one of the better copies during a recent shootout. The first track on side one, The Wind, was especially gorgeous; Cat and his acoustic guitar were right there in the room with us. The transparency, tonal neutrality, presence and all the rest were just superb. Then came time to move to the other test track on side one, which is Changes IV, one of the higher energy songs we like to play.

But the energy we expected to hear was nowhere to be found. The powerful rhythmic drive of the best copies of the album just wasn’t happening. The more we listened the more it became clear that the congas were not doing what they normally do. The midbass to lower midrange area of the LP lacked energy, weight and power, and this prevented the song from coming to LIFE the way the truly Hot Stampers can and do.

Now I think I understand why. Big speakers are the only way to reproduce the physical size and powerful energy of the congas (and other drums of course) that play such a big part in driving the rhythmic energy of the song.

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Speaker Placement — The Room Coupling Method

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble efforts to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love the sound of music reproduced with the highest fidelity and, more importantly, are serious enough to be willing to spend a great deal of their money and their time in order to make that happen.

If you aspire to great things in audio, Robert’s blog is for you, as is the one you are now on.

SPEAKER PLACEMENT: The ROOM COUPLING METHOD

An excerpt:

[A] few months ago I came across an article on a Room Coupling Method for speaker placement. Encouraged by finding some common ground with author Richard Mak’s thinking, I started trying it out, and it has helped me make some meaningful progress.

One thing I particularly appreciated in Mak’s article was his assertion that “measurements” and “analysis” are not a substitute for “listening.”

“Charts, graphs, room nodes, reflection coefficients, or even a Ph.D. in room acoustics won’t get you there. Many who are armed with an arsenal of scientific knowledge do not even know how or what to listen for on a reference test track.”

To Mak’s point, as I attempted to apply his approach to my speaker and listening chair positions, I realized in the process that even though the placement of my speakers and listening chair have been suboptimal for some time, that time was far from wasted.

Because in that time I’ve done A LOT of listening, and that listening has led to a special kind of knowledge, which for a long time was without a clear application. Mak’s methodology has since given me an outlet for this knowledge, and all that listening is now paying off.

In his article, Mak walks us through a process that begins with how to determine the distance of the speakers from the back wall. From there he describes how to determine their width, then their toe-in angle, and finally how to dial in the position of the listening chair.

For those of you who would like to tune and tweak the location of their speakers, the article seems to have some good advice for doing that, with plenty of tests to challenge both your setup and your critical listening skills. (We have some great test records you might find useful as well. The more difficult ones to get to sound right can be found here.)

This subject is so complicated that to say much more might send me down a rabbit hole I’d have a hard time climbing out of, but here’s a thought or two.

I’ve had many different big speaker systems set up in a number of good-sized rooms over the years, starting in 1975. When I moved into the house I bought in Thousand Oaks in the early 2000s there was a “great room” with a piano on the far end (where the speakers are now) and a dining table at the opposite end. It measured 15×30 with about a nine foot ceiling.

I was hoping to use my Legacy Whisper speakers in this room so that I could audition records all day (my desk can be seen there on the right). I spent about two years trying to make the speakers sound good where you see them in the picture below.

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Money Down the Drain

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

Readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of big speakers, but in a room that’s as bad for sound reproduction as this one is, these monsters would qualify as a form of torture at anything above a whisper.

There is an ideal balance between absorption and reflection that must be found for every room. The balance this fellow has chosen is 98% reflection, which will lead to 100% awful sound.

I don’t even like the picture between the speakers. If you must have something there, in my experience rarely will it sound good unless it is five or more feet off the ground. (See picture below.)

Note that sidewall absorption in our listening room is never more than about five feet high. For some reason that seems to work the best. We tried lots of different heights over the course of years and we always came back to nothing over five feet.

The back wall has 4 inch thick 4×8 sheets of styrofoam across most of it, leaving the corners empty (which always seems to work the best, again, who knows why).

A small piece of absoptive material in the middle up high seemed to help, but more than that was too much and less did nothing.

These may be the most wonderful speakers in the world in the right room, but in this room there is no speaker that could possibly reproduce music properly, which means this guy spent a lot of money and got nothing for it. He’s not alone.

He could get some carpet and pull his speakers well out into the room for starters, but then the whole thing just won’t have the elegance it did, so what on earth would ever make him do such a thing? His favorite music? Hah, that’s a good one.

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A Few Quick Thoughts on Correctly Sized Instruments

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

Something I rarely take time to write about on this blog is the sizing of instruments.

Some speakers — typically those with smaller drivers — create images of instruments that are too small, smaller than you would picture them in your mind if you were sitting in the audience with your eyes closed.

Other speakers — typically screens of one kind or another — produce larger-than-life images of instruments and vocalists. In the 70s, I heard a lot of screens and full-range electrostats — these come to mind, and there were plenty of others like them, Magneplanars and the like — but the images never seemed right-sized or real enough to be taken seriously.

I opted for a big dynamic system in the mid-70s and over the course of the next fifty years never heard anything that would give me reason to doubt that choice.

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In the Market for New Speakers? See How Well They Handle the Energy of Far More Drums

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

The drum solo Joe Morello lets loose on Far More Drums is one of the best on record. I was playing that song recently and it occurred to me that it is practically impossible for a screen or panel speaker of any design to reproduce the sound of those drums properly, regardless of how many subs you have.

Most of the music is not in the deeper bass anyway. It’s the whack of instruments whose energy is in the lower midrange and mid-bass that a screen speaker will struggle with.

A good large-driver dynamic speaker fed by fast electronics can handle the energy in that range with ease.

This is the album you need to take with you next time you head to your local stereo store to audition speakers.

It will help clarify the issues. Screen speakers do many things well, but drums are not one of them, at least in my experience they aren’t. If drums are important to you, do yourself a favor and buy a dynamic speaker, the bigger the better.

brubeck in the studio733

Time Further Out, like most of the classic Brubeck albums, is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

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Find a Copy with Drums that Punch Through the Mix on Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many pressings are compressed, murky, veiled and recessed. To find one that is transparent, clear, present and punchy is no mean feat.

Proper cleaning is essential. The early Orange label CBS pressings (the only ones that have the potential to win shootouts) too often just sound like old records until they have been properly cleaned.

There are two tracks to play to hear how well the drums punch through the mix.

Mick Fleetwood is banging the hell out of his toms on Black Magic Woman. If it doesn’t sound like he’s really pounding away, you need a better copy.

Or a better stereo; one must always be open to the possibility that the system may not be up to reproducing the punchiness of the drums.

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Every Picture Tells a Story Is a Big Speaker Recording Par Excellence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with Demo Disc sound.

If you have a system with big dynamic speakers and can drive them to seriously loud listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.

You know what album this one has the most in common with? Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Every Pictures Tells a Story is the Nevermind of its day, twenty years earlier.

It has that kind of power in the bass and drums. Off the charts energy too.

But it also has beautifully realized acoustic guitars and mandolins, something that virtually no recording for the last twenty years can claim. In that sense it towers over Nevermind, an album I hold in very high esteem. 

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers, live-in-the-studio sound, this is the album for you.

The opening track on side one has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded. The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. Got big dynamic speakers? A concrete foundation under your listening room? You are going to have a great time playing this one for your audiophile friends who have screens or little box speakers. Once they hear what big well-recorded drums can sound like on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.

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Bose Salutes the Sound Of Mercury Records (and Some Audio Lessons Learned Long Ago)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

This Bose / Mercury Demonstration LP is autographed by none other than Amar G. Bose. The autograph reads “To EMI, with regards and best wishes, Amar G. Bose.”

Bose may not have ever made very good speakers, but they sure knew good recordings when they heard them. This LP has excerpts from some of the top Mercury titles, including music by Copland (El Salon Mexico), Kodaly (Hary Janos Suite), Mussorgsky/ Ravel (Pictures At An Exhibition), and Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian Easter Overture).

I played one of these Bose records years ago and was surprised at how good it sounded. The transfers of the Mercury tapes were excellent. I guess that makes sense — if you want to show off your speakers you had better use a well-mastered record for the demonstration.

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording.

To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

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In the Market for New Speakers? See How Well They Handle the Fat Snare on Dreams

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Rumours is a record that is good for testing your speakers’ lower midrange and mid-bass reproduction.

What do the best copies of Rumours have that the also-rans don’t?

Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you should pay special attention to: the sound of the snare.

When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to its sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the analog stuff we adore about the sound of the best copies.

Now if your speaker is not capable of getting the snare to sound that way, perhaps because you have screen speakers or a small boxed design, or a lousy copy of the album (anything without KP in the deadwax), this is still a handy test. Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare.

That’s probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to Rumours, and The Beatles, and Zuma, and lots of other favorite records of ours, and we hope favorites of yours too.

The speaker you see to the left is probably not the right kind of speaker for a record such as Rumours. Three 6.5 inch woofers are just not going to be enough to get that snare to sound big and fat.

Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.

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This Is Why We Love Pablo in the 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

For years we have been including the followinig commentary in our Hot Stamper listings for Farmers Market Barbecue:

Musically FMB is a top Basie big band title in every way. This should not be surprising: many of his recordings for Pablo in the 70s and early 80s display the talents of The Count and his band at their best.

Sonically there’s more to the story. Based on our recent shootout for this title, in comparison to the other Basie titles we’ve done lately, we would have to say that FMB is the best Basie big band title we’ve ever played.

Since so many Basie big band recordings are so good, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves; after all, we haven’t done shootouts for all of Basie’s Pablo large group recordings. To be safe we’ll just call this one first among equals.

Having recently done another shootout, our first in two and a half years, we would have to say that the album still sounds every bit as amazing as we thought it did when we wrote the above comments more than fifteen years ago.

Our notes for a shootout winning copy get right to the heart of what makes the recording so special.

For those who might have trouble reading our scratch, allow me to transcribe what Riley, our main listening guy, heard and noted as he played the two sides of this copy.

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