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Paul's Posts — 07 February 2012

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Who cares?

Why do some speakers sound like music while others sound like anything but music?

My chief engineer Bob Stadtherr was trying to find a problem in one of our DACS and was having trouble hearing the issue on his bench setup which uses one of our GCA power amplifiers and a small set of Mirage loudspeakers.  I brought my $500 powered B & W desktop speakers and connected them to the DAC and within minutes both of us could hear the problem – turned out it wasn’t the setup but the choice of music that prevented us from hearing the problem.

I have a copy of Anne-Sophie von Otter singing a Handel aria on one of my libraries and we used that piece to hear the problem in the DAC. Whenever she starts to sing and the small ensemble that is backing her up starts to play, my heart flutters.  I just love it!  Put a smile on my face and this from a set of self powered $500 loudspeakers.  Lovely.

Once the problem was identified we took out my speakers and reconnected the Mirage loudspeakers to make sure Bob could still hear the problem – which he could – but when Anne started singing again the hair on the back of my neck went up in horror.  This was no longer music!  It was total crap.  The strings sounded as if they were produced by a synthesizer, the beauty of her voice all but ruined and I found myself turning it off.

I am not picking on Mirage as they have made many a fine loudspeaker – just not in this case.  But how is it that between two similarly priced loudspeakers one sings and the other grunts?

My guess is that in one case someone who cared about music did the final voicing and in the other, someone who clocked in at 9am and clocked out at 5pm approved the product.

If we cannot produce products that honor the music then we should go get a job in another industry.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(8) Readers Comments

  1. Dmitrylo

    February 7, 2012 at 3:38 am

    Small remark: Anne-Sophie Mutter is a violinist, not a singer. You had in mind probably Anne Sophie von Otter – she really have a record with Handel arias.

  2. February 7, 2012 at 6:09 am

    Oops, you’re absolutely right. Blush. Thanks.

  3. Terry Franklin

    February 7, 2012 at 8:31 am

    This is Paul’s quote: “I have a copy of Anne-Sophie von Otter singing a Handel aria on one of my libraries…”

    It looks to me he got it correct. Paul, stand your ground!

    • February 8, 2012 at 7:04 am

      Thanks Terry but as soon as the mistake was pointed out I went back and changed the actual post itself to be correct – but alas the emails are gone and cannot be changed.

  4. Ballisticman

    February 7, 2012 at 8:37 am

    Choice of vendor is important as is the rest of the set up and perhaps most importantly, the proper setup of the room.

    I learned long ago that starting out with steak makes a better meal than adding all the hamburger helper in the world.

    Giving up fine wines and Eoropean vacations delivered state of the art Martin Logans and now Maxxs, hmmmmm.

    Still, every new piece of gear will show a gremlin in the system here and there, but as Paul states there is some shall we say less than acceptable performers out there.

    Making the sacrifice to get the best product in a category is the sensible way to go in my opinion…..

  5. Steve Parry

    February 7, 2012 at 8:38 am

    Some speakers may not work because a designer is dedicated to the use of a component or design criterion that may not be optimum for ultimate musicality in the end product. Synergy is crucial!

  6. Soundminded

    February 7, 2012 at 10:24 am

    “Why do some speakers sound like music while others sound like anything but music?”

    Here’s another question, why do you always find something in the last place you look for it? The answer is of course that once you find it you stop looking for it. How many different models of “high fidelity” speaker systems have been offered commercially in the last 75 years? 20,000? 50,000? 100,000? More? To one degree or another all of them strove for the same goal, to convincingly reproduce music from recordings. If any of them succeeded, the only further rational effort would be to get the same results cheaper, smaller, more efficiently, or more reliably. On a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 represents even a casual listener with normal hearing able to tell he is listening to a recording played by a machine immediately, not a live musical performance and 100 represents experienced concert goers who listen critically being fooled practically every time what is the state of the art today? IMO if it isn’t 0 it’s close to it, certainly much closer to 0 than 100.

    When you hit your head against a brick wall over and over again and it doesn’t budge, it’s a good idea to step back and see if there’s another way around or over it. Instead what people have done is to try to perfect the same failed strategy endlessly? Why? Because it’s much easier than going back to basic assumptions and supposed knowledge trying to find out where the real mistakes are. That’s hard work and the results are uncertain at best, fruitless at worst. It won’t get product to market in any commercially acceptable time frame, maybe never. But that’s what needs to be done, the basic pertinent knowledge about sound, acoustics, and psychoacoustics just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem yet. So my answer to the question “Why do some speakers sound like music while others sound like anything but music?” is that they don’t sound like music, not any that I have heard. The inevitable response that audiophiles and speaker manufacturers always come back with is “that’s because you haven’t heard…….(you fill in the blank.)” There’s always a new and improved model with a silver bullet that solves all of the shortcomings the prior model now admittedly had and it inevitably costs more. I’m not planning to buy an Greek government bonds anytime soon either.

  7. February 8, 2012 at 5:29 am

    I have a pair of B&W 804S loudspeakers and I know exactly what you’re describing: the start of Stan Getz playing Here’s That Rainy Day is something else on my speakers, but nowhere else around the house.

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