In Reply to: "Time aligned" speakers (snicker) posted by Wayne Parham on October 26, 2001 at 04:00:01:
I had come across some of these posts in the past but had avoided reading them until now. I'm used to the posts on other websites that are so full of jargon it might as well be Urdu.
My ex-wife's cousin led the team that designed the program that allowed the Israeli's to loft a bomb like a missile into Iraq's Osirak
reactor. When I finally met the great man, I made the mistake of asking what he could tell me about what he was working on. He replied that there was nothing he could say that I could understand. Family trait. My ex wasn't that smart but we couldn't communicate, either.
Hey, I understood that stuff about time align and phase.
Once again, Wayne takes complex concepts and explains them in a way an intelligent outsider can understand.
I bought into that disappearing speaker stuff for years. Painstakingly moved speakers around millimeter by inch. The planar Acoustat's did the best at suspending a sound in the air independent of the speaker and to a lesser extent, the Kestrel's. Done right, even though an instrument is located in the same position as the speaker, it doesn't seem to come directly from it. Better yet, for one who attends a lot of orchestral concerts, good soundstage has the Clarinet and Bassoon behind the oboe and flute, Trumpets outside of the Trombones and both behind the Cello's and Viola's. Tympani waaay back.
But How do you make a 24" wide box disappear? Or cut a woman in half?
The Pi's seem to require a different vocabulary for soundstage. Allowing for the mediocre amplifier I'm using right now, there seems to be a "soundfront" that fills the room more than it hangs in space in a distinct plane. That certainly emulates a hall more truthfully. The sound of an orchestra doesn't "hang" just in front of the stage. But at the same time, the Patricia Barber combo on "Cafe Blue" has the intimacy of being in a club; she is clearly sitting with the piano perpendicular to the audience, keyboard on the left and the upper octaves closer to the room, lower octaves farther back.
How real is that?
I never knew how much bass line I've been missing. There's actually a tuba back there with the trombones! That's not just getting low but getting there with much less distortion than I've heard before. And the JBL drivers would have been better than the Eminence?
I wonder what the guy that dropped 15 large on a pair of Eidolons would say after hearing the 4Pi's? Yikes!
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