Dr. Robert Dean
Dear Audiophiles;
In response to your question, what represents a good speaker (or its sound), allow me to shed some new light on your question.
Before I start, let me say while I am a pretty good doctor, I can't spell worth a darn or rearrange verbs worth spit, and I don't have the time to edit or spell check this audiophile epistle you are about to read. With that said, enjoy!
First of all, if you had all of the world's best audio and acoustical engineers, plus speaker manufacturing engineers come together and they took 10 years to develop and produce the most accurate sound reproducer in the world...something that might cost nearly $1,000.000.00, they will end up sounding no better than the room in which they are installed. Therefore, what is a good sounding speaker can best be answered by putting your horse before your cart. Get your listening room acoustically correct first, otherwise, you are whisteling dixie. If you think your Maggies sound good, put them in an accoustically corrected room and they will sound magnificent! Put them in a room which is an acoustical nightmare and you'll beat them to death with a sledge hammer.
Many falsly judge the sound of a speaker because what they are hearing is bad room acoustics, electronics, software, etc. Before you judge any speaker, you must first examine what's going on in the chain of events from the moment the recording of a piano's middle C note resonates from the C string of the piano after the piano's hammer has struck it to the split second you heard it from your speakers.
Strike a middle C key on a piano with a quarter pound of pressure. A hammer strikes the C string. The C string resonates (vibrates) pushing molecules of air at a specific frequency (vibration) which a muscian would call middle C (sorry, I do not have the exact mathmatical frequency number to give you handy). Vibrating air is being moved omnidirectionally. The moving air bounces off the piano sound board, the walls of the facility in which the piano is placed, and numerous other objects, too. At the speed of sound this confused mass of moving molecules (air) funnels through holes and slots of a microphone and strikes the microphone's diaphram, which, in turn, generates minute electrical signal through a resistive and capacitive wire until it is picked up by an analogue to digital converter (turning an analogue electrical wave into zeros and ones), then on to a small amplification stage, which in turn makes the signal stronger than it originally was in a digital format.
Now, follow me on this... a small applification device (called a digital pre-amplifier) sends this stronger signal (more zeros and ones) to a control center. The zeros and ones tend to misbehave (jitter) as they are moved down their respective paths of wires to a full bank of filters, amplifiers, and other electron modifying devices (equilizers, compressors, volume controls, polarity inverters, etc., all of which ad to and magnify distortion). In other words, we no longer have a sound which approaches the real sound. Once the zeros and ones (rearranged electrons) have been minipulated by the sound engineer (who decides what the piano C string should sound like...which, incidently, is not what it really does sound like), they get burned into a mastering disc or tape used in the mass production of digital discs. You now have a recording of a greatly distorted middle C piano note.
Okay, wonderful! Now what? Assuming the mass production of the compact disc is bit by bit perfectly matched to the master disc or tape, you take the disc and play it back through a Compact Disc Player. This player's laser beam determines how high or low thousands of these pits are which then, by electronic values, determines the C note's pitch, volume, overtone, and numerous other audio side effects). This data (clusters of zeros and ones) are sent racing down a cable at the speed of light to a preamplifier. The preamplifier (a distortion producing device in its own right) converts the zeros and ones to an analogue signal, which inturn sends that signal (electrons) to an amplifier (another distortion causing device) which greatly amplifies and exagerates the analogue signal it received and sends it at the speed of light down another capacitive and resistive set of speaker cable wires to a noise producing device called a loud speaker. So, even if your speaker could reproduce sound exactly as the original sound sounded, the processing of the original sound has, at this point been dramatically distorted.
So, my dear audiophile friend, does it matter if your speakers are accurate? If they are, you are simply reproducing the distortions caused in the recording process, room acoustics and many other variables to be reproduced accuratly. Just what every audiophile dreams of...accurately reproduced distortion!
After your noise maker (loud speaker) has responded to the distorted electrical signals it receives the walls and invionment within the walls in which the speaker is housed now compound the distortions and add to them. In other words, you are hearing (1) a distorted recording of the first wave of sound molecules which reached the microphone. (2) A millasecond later you hear the reverberation of the original sound of the C note caused from reflection of the C note sound bouncing off the recording venue's walls. (3) Next you hear a compounded distortion of the originally distorted C note as it comes forth from your speakers...we call this the original wave launch (mass movement of molecules headed toward your ears). Next, the middle C note hits your ears. (4) A millasecond later, those same molecules bounce off the walls of your room and room objects, and come back to your ears. Now you are hearing the sound again, a millasecond later, distorted from its original pitch, volume and timber. You no longer are hearing the original sound of the middle C piano note. So why does it matter if your speakers are accurate?
Now, are you ready for this...here comes the hypnotics! Audiophiles when listening to the piano's middle C note played over their he-man hi-fi will swoon and declare how "real" the sound is. With great enthusiams they proclaim, "My God, it sounds like a real piano playing a C note in my living room!" Now, I ask you, how could this be in consideration of what really happened to the C note?
What is going on is psychoacoustics and audiophile hypnotics.
I am a board certified clinical hypnotherapist. I have a Ph.D. in Clinical Hypnotherapy. I have 32 years of practice experience. I teach clinical hypnotherpay to psychologist, M.D.'s and dentists. I have written many scientific papers on the subject of modification of human behavior with use of hypnotics (see web site
www.newlifeclinics.org. I can tell you that much of what you observe, and read regarding subjective audio experience regarding hi-fi gear and the like is purely placebo, and hypnotic in nature..
You must realize that the sound you hear over your loud speaker system, in reality, cannot approach the sound that took place in the original recording venue. What is an audiophile to do?
If you want me to write a rather breezy S.A. on audiophilism which will advise you as to what a good listening room, electronics, and speaker system should do and sound like, then simply e-mail your request to me and I will respond on this site in this section.
My best regards to you and all audiophiles.
Robert *. Dean, Ph.D.
