HEA & Vivid Audio

[TitaniumTroy]

Here is some interesting info from a couple speaker manf. With some of the rationale they use for how they design and build their speakers.

The first one is High Emotion Audio, one interesting quote is: "the ear/brain is more effected by the leading part of the sound than by the trailing part. The brain prefers, so to speak, a continuous stream of first impressions". Then they go to explain how research into human hearing, led them to favor things like, speed, phase, and Group Delay Distortion. http://www.highemotionaudio.com/philosophy

Next up is Vivid Audio, if you want a lesson about cabinet diffraction here you go. BTW I heard their top of the line speakers at AKFest 2010, I thought they sounded very open, definite out of the box soundstage. Their is also a lot of info about rear wave treble dispersion, super flux magnets, cabinet construction...etc. http://www.vividaudio.com/

 

[PaulyT]

The first one is High Emotion Audio...

Wow, $3k for a crossover, what a deal! :roll:

Trying to decide if any of their stuff is real, or all marketing-speak... still reading.

 

[soundhound]

[quote="TitaniumTroy"The brain prefers, so to speak, a continuous stream of first impressions"[/quote]

WTF????????????? :?

The ability to replicate the leading edge of a waveform is mostly defined by the necessary frequency extension being available and the phase of the harmonics which make up the waveform.

 

[DIYer]

cabinet construction...etc. http://www.vividaudio.com/

Did you see this speaker?

 

[TitaniumTroy]

The HEA tweeter reminds me of the old Radio Shack, Linaeum tweeter.

 

[Rope]

Looks as though Sandy Gross & Co., after exiting Polk and Def Tech, has got his cash bag open once more. "This will change every thing."

http://www.goldenear.com/

Rope

PS, love the original name.

 

[TitaniumTroy]

DIYer, mmmmm I thought the same thing when I first saw the Vivid speaker, Dairy Queen, mmmmmmm tasty.

 

[Botch]

...one interesting quote is: "the ear/brain is more effected by the leading part of the sound than by the trailing part. The brain prefers, so to speak, a continuous stream of first impressions".

Anyone who has programmed music synthesizers would agree with this point; getting the first few milliseconds of the sound right is your biggest hurdle. In fact, the earliest synths with both subtractive synthesis and samples (actual digital recordings that played when you pressed a key), most of the samples were short "attacks" (due to limited memory), plus the front portion of a note was the hardest to get right; the decay of the note could be something programmed as the ear was not as critical on that portion.

 

[soundhound]

...one interesting quote is: "the ear/brain is more effected by the leading part of the sound than by the trailing part. The brain prefers, so to speak, a continuous stream of first impressions".

Anyone who has programmed music synthesizers would agree with this point; getting the first few milliseconds of the sound right is your biggest hurdle. In fact, the earliest synths with both subtractive synthesis and samples (actual digital recordings that played when you pressed a key), most of the samples were short "attacks" (due to limited memory), plus the front portion of a note was the hardest to get right; the decay of the note could be something programmed as the ear was not as critical on that portion.

I think though that what the speaker manufacturer was referring to is different than programming the attack of a patch on a synthesizer. On a synth, the object is to create a particular attack enevelope, with a speaker's reproduction of the leading edge of a waveform, the object is to have a wide enough bandwidth to create the steepness of the wavefront necessary, and phase coherency enough to not distort the time distribution of the harmonics.

One of the most difficult waveforms to reproduce is that of a perfect square wave with a perfect 50% duty cycle. Such a wave has a theoretical harmonic series that goes on to infinity, but in practice a reasonable square wave can be reproduced with reproduction up through the 10th harmonic. Any premature cutoff of the harmonic series will cause the leading edge of the square wave to become rounded, with the wavefront becoming more rounded with more attenuation of the upper harmonics.

Likewise, all the harmonics must be in perfect phase coherency in order for the square wave to resemble anything what it is supposed to be.

Speakers are lousy at reproducing square waves, with some systems unable to reproduce anything resembling a square wave. A good 2 way system using electronic crossovers can reproduce a somewhat reasonable square wave, but it will not be anywhere near perfect. Passive crossovers are probably the greatest offender when it comes to allowing a speaker to reproduce a square wave - they all but make it impossible.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that a speaker's ability to reproduce a reasonable square wave is really the Gold Standard. If a speaker can do reasonably well at reproducing a square wave, then the "leading edges", "transients" and all the other ways of describing the beginning of a wavefront will take care of themselves.

 

[MatthewB]

Looks as though Sandy Gross & Co., after exiting Polk and Def Tech, has got his cash bag open once more. "This will change every thing."

http://www.goldenear.com/

Rope

PS, love the original name.

Rope, I like the idea of a ribbon tweeter on what is basically a remodel of the BP towers he designed with Deftech. Have you seen the new redesign of DefTech BP towers, pretty pitiful if you ask me, they only have one mid range driver in the rear speaker as compared to the two forward and rear in a D'appolito design and before the subs in the the towers were opposite each other and now the towers "subs" each face the same way (all speakers have left facing sub drivers) kinda makes placement harder.

I think what Sandy Gross is doing is competing directly with DefTech and part of his depature agreement was that he would be allowed to do that, but if given the choice now between Defetch and Goldenears new line, I would have to choose GoldenEar, that to me appears to be a much better offerin than the new DefTech line.

 

[Flint]

I think the concept they are promoting with the "continuous stream of first emotions" is the fact that our aural memory is close to zero and that we only audibly experience the immediate and not the longer past in memory.

I get the idea, since we don't have a good aural memory (at least very few people do, and those that do have a very short aural memory), but how they are marketing it makes very little sense to me.

After all, the decay time of a speaker is, indeed, core to how it will sound to any listener, so claiming that a speaker can respond quickly to initial movement is only as important to how quickly it can respond to the silence between those movements.

 

[Orbison]

I was very interested just to see what they came up with, but somebody at GoldenEar needs to check the calendar - still no details accessible on their website. :angry-tappingfoot:

 

[Botch]

Folded-ribbon tweeters have been used on the ADAM studio monitors for many years now (extremely popular with some of my friends to do recording, also extremely expensive).