The value of a mm.
We all have words that we commonly use to survive day to day life.
Rickshaw guy has no change? Chalta hai. Boss asks if the project is completed? Unees bees, boss. Ran a red light? Chalta hai. Teenage son took your car? Bhagvan bharosa!
We all have words that we commonly use to survive day to day audio life.
It’s not sounding right. Speaker has no bass only. Amplifier has no power. It is too bright. Imperfect recording. Cricket match is on, everyone is watching and polluting my power. LED lights in the house are giving out EM waves! Full moon nah. People go mad on full moon nights. Audio system will of course be affected then.
Man is a funny animal. We inhale imperfect air, eat imperfect food, survive in a grey space and yet we expect our audio system to be 100% perfect. Yet we do not spend enough time, nor do we have the knowledge on system placement. I can assure you that at the end of this article one will be able to improve their system sound by a large factor by following some of these experiences.
One day when I was selling my CD player, a fellow forum member brought by a fellow called Prem to come and check the player. I didn’t know who this fellow was but overtime we began talking. He shared that he had tried out various setups, be it Rethm, Tekton and now some vintage JBL’s. One day he invited me over to his home and hence the journey began (no, this isn’t a Kati Patang kind of story). Read on.
In front of me stood a mammoth speaker, the JBL4343. If it fell on me, it would have killed me for sure. It was a 4 way design with a 15 inch bass driver, a 10 inch mid range, a horn plus secondary tweeter for the highs. All of this driven by a 10W SET amp.
The source was an EMT 950. Originally used by the BBC and now restored and sitting in his apartment. The table has its own phono stage built into the base which then sits on four metal legs. No wonder it looked like something from an arcade.
I even pulled on the joystick before I was told that it was a light that shone on the vinyl.
So here I was. Staring at a 1976 speaker that seemed like it belonged in an August mandal. We played a couple of tracks and I didn’t think much of it.
Prem is a Bollywood vinyl champion and he was playing some Lata music. It sounded hard, one notish but maybe it was the age of the vinyl or the amp hadn’t warmed up. Then Prem said we were going to have to position the speaker. Step by step he began to move each speaker 1 mm ahead or behind at a time and he played the same track again and again. Guys, for every mm he moved the sound changed. For every mm forward the sound got hard and strident. Details were thrust out at you. It was as if you were hearing more of the rising edge of the note. As he took the speaker behind, the sound mellowed and it was as if you were listening more to the falling edge of the note. Lata changed from an old lady to a young one and then back again depending on where he had placed the speaker. Please note that all this was within a span of 6mm. Yes, 6mm, 6 choices, 1mm each. No chalta hai. No unees bees.
I realized that he was onto something here. Sometime ago, I had written an article that spoke about categorizing systems into three different levels. Level 2 was a system that was technically correct but didn’t pull you into the music. Level 3 was the highest level I could think off. At that level music just flowed. You could tell the mood of the singer, musicians played off each other, you could just sit back and listen. Highs, lows, mids stopped mattering. You just got lost into the music.
Description of level 3 from the last article:
https://www.hifivision.com/threads/...great-systems-tell-a-story.69694/#post-766987
Level 3:
“Wow. So you decided to read on! Great systems deliver everything that Better Systems do and they go beyond category 2 parameters. When you listen to a song, you not only get engaged into it you also feel as if one is watching a movie or hearing a story. You get what the song is all about. You can hear the singers singing together, or singing off, or whether they were enjoying singing together or engaging in playful banter while they performed. You get the seriousness of the performance or whether it was a light hearted one or whether the singer was trying to impress the listener with a particular part of his/her voice. You can almost tell what mood the singer was in when this performance was made. Here the performance is delivered while the system just gets out of the way. Bass, treble, mids, soundstage, nothing matters anymore.”
As Prem was going through the 1mm choices, I noticed that his system would alternate between level 2 and level 3. Two different humans, who had never really met much before and yet we both were pursuing the same goal! Could Prem have somehow stumbled onto a formula for something that I so far had been trying to voice by ear? Read on…
We then tried to voice the flute. A properly setup speaker should pressurize the room as if one can feel someone blowing into a wind instrument. You should be able to feel the null and excess pressure as the musician inhales and exhales. Too much in front and the sound got hard. Leading edge dominating. Too much behind and the sound got thick boring, trailing edge dominating. Just right and the speaker would couple with the room. Now there was no hint of hardness, nor was the sound too thick. It was just right. So level 3? Yes of course. But there was more.
Prem was able to get the speaker to couple with the room, so that the room worked with the speaker rather than the speaker and the room fighting each other. There was no hint of stress in the sound. It felt as if you could turn the volume up and it wouldn’t get hard. The point I am trying to make is that we often spend money upgrading to a bigger amp thinking that our system is sounding hard or noisy due to lack of power. In reality the room and speaker are most likely fighting each other.
We could sit anywhere in Prem’s room. There was no sweet spot. The entire room was the spot. It sounded as if there was a band playing in the room. Hence this coupling of the speaker with the room perfectly forces me to introduce a new category – level 4. It has all the fun factor of level 3 but here the speaker and room play as one. No narrow sweet spot, no hardness, nothing negative sticks out. It is as if all the bad resonances are somehow nullified. LEVEL 4.
We played Kishore Kumar’s Ye Shyam Mastani. Compared to Lata, Kishore tends to banter along while he sings. The system brought that childishness out. You could tell that Kishore was having fun singning. It was as if he knew he was gifted. He didn’t care if it was Sa Re Ga Ma or not. He just delivered. Lata on the other hand was more conscious and tried to be technically correct. On Lata’s Ajib Dastan there is a dialogue at the beginning of the song. You could almost tell as if the artists were reading out of a script, rather than speaking ex-tempo. I told Prem, it sounds as if these artists are reading a script. And then suddenly a few seconds into the dialogue and we can hear them turning paper. The JBL conveyed that emotion before we even heard the page turn!
This was by far the best system I have heard once it reached level 4. The JBL could deliver highs that were clean, honest, integrated superbly with the mids and sounded like a ribbon tweeter without the crossover problems with the mid woofer that a ribbon could have. It could pressurized the room when needed, was fast, NEVER got hard and decayed beautifully. The mid range was clean. It had no artificial bloat nor was it lean. Voices sounded beautiful, be it male or female.
At level 4 - The heavens opened...Hark now hear, the angels do sing! A King was crowned today! And man will live for evermore because of this beautiful day!
(Forum members who read my review of Audionote will understand the angel reference - https://www.hifivision.com/threads/rotm-march-2018-award-audio-note-system-review.69613/#post-789047)
Guys you have to listen to this to understand what I am trying to say. Many speakers either make the male or female voice sound decent, but fail to make both sound great. Either the male voice is too thick or the female voice lacks differentiation or sounds compressed. This JBL delivered both voices cleanly and honestly. Superb crossover integration. Bass was present when it was called upon. You didn’t know that you were listening to a 15 inch driver. It created an atmosphere of bass. A good woofer sets the foundation of sound. It is like the canvas to a painting. This is exactly what the 15 incher did. It created a beautiful white canvas for the mids and highs to paint a picture on. You could feel the tension in the air on Steve Ray Vaughn and Bruce Springsteen. Image size was perfect. Not too thick or bloated nor lost into the hash.
As said before, the goal of the earlier article and even this one is that we need to stop getting taken in by marketing and match and position the system well. The day we do this we will all save money and most of all be happy with our systems. I feel very bad and cheated by magazines when I see fellow forum members upgrade components cause they are not happy with the sound. This is a restored 1976 product sounding stunning. No fancy Berrylium or Diamonds. Just honest engineering.
Prem’s formula for placing the speakers.
My advice:
(I have Prem's consent to write an article on his setup and the experience).
We all have words that we commonly use to survive day to day life.
Rickshaw guy has no change? Chalta hai. Boss asks if the project is completed? Unees bees, boss. Ran a red light? Chalta hai. Teenage son took your car? Bhagvan bharosa!
We all have words that we commonly use to survive day to day audio life.
It’s not sounding right. Speaker has no bass only. Amplifier has no power. It is too bright. Imperfect recording. Cricket match is on, everyone is watching and polluting my power. LED lights in the house are giving out EM waves! Full moon nah. People go mad on full moon nights. Audio system will of course be affected then.
Man is a funny animal. We inhale imperfect air, eat imperfect food, survive in a grey space and yet we expect our audio system to be 100% perfect. Yet we do not spend enough time, nor do we have the knowledge on system placement. I can assure you that at the end of this article one will be able to improve their system sound by a large factor by following some of these experiences.
One day when I was selling my CD player, a fellow forum member brought by a fellow called Prem to come and check the player. I didn’t know who this fellow was but overtime we began talking. He shared that he had tried out various setups, be it Rethm, Tekton and now some vintage JBL’s. One day he invited me over to his home and hence the journey began (no, this isn’t a Kati Patang kind of story). Read on.
In front of me stood a mammoth speaker, the JBL4343. If it fell on me, it would have killed me for sure. It was a 4 way design with a 15 inch bass driver, a 10 inch mid range, a horn plus secondary tweeter for the highs. All of this driven by a 10W SET amp.
The source was an EMT 950. Originally used by the BBC and now restored and sitting in his apartment. The table has its own phono stage built into the base which then sits on four metal legs. No wonder it looked like something from an arcade.
I even pulled on the joystick before I was told that it was a light that shone on the vinyl.
So here I was. Staring at a 1976 speaker that seemed like it belonged in an August mandal. We played a couple of tracks and I didn’t think much of it.
Prem is a Bollywood vinyl champion and he was playing some Lata music. It sounded hard, one notish but maybe it was the age of the vinyl or the amp hadn’t warmed up. Then Prem said we were going to have to position the speaker. Step by step he began to move each speaker 1 mm ahead or behind at a time and he played the same track again and again. Guys, for every mm he moved the sound changed. For every mm forward the sound got hard and strident. Details were thrust out at you. It was as if you were hearing more of the rising edge of the note. As he took the speaker behind, the sound mellowed and it was as if you were listening more to the falling edge of the note. Lata changed from an old lady to a young one and then back again depending on where he had placed the speaker. Please note that all this was within a span of 6mm. Yes, 6mm, 6 choices, 1mm each. No chalta hai. No unees bees.
I realized that he was onto something here. Sometime ago, I had written an article that spoke about categorizing systems into three different levels. Level 2 was a system that was technically correct but didn’t pull you into the music. Level 3 was the highest level I could think off. At that level music just flowed. You could tell the mood of the singer, musicians played off each other, you could just sit back and listen. Highs, lows, mids stopped mattering. You just got lost into the music.
Description of level 3 from the last article:
https://www.hifivision.com/threads/...great-systems-tell-a-story.69694/#post-766987
Level 3:
“Wow. So you decided to read on! Great systems deliver everything that Better Systems do and they go beyond category 2 parameters. When you listen to a song, you not only get engaged into it you also feel as if one is watching a movie or hearing a story. You get what the song is all about. You can hear the singers singing together, or singing off, or whether they were enjoying singing together or engaging in playful banter while they performed. You get the seriousness of the performance or whether it was a light hearted one or whether the singer was trying to impress the listener with a particular part of his/her voice. You can almost tell what mood the singer was in when this performance was made. Here the performance is delivered while the system just gets out of the way. Bass, treble, mids, soundstage, nothing matters anymore.”
As Prem was going through the 1mm choices, I noticed that his system would alternate between level 2 and level 3. Two different humans, who had never really met much before and yet we both were pursuing the same goal! Could Prem have somehow stumbled onto a formula for something that I so far had been trying to voice by ear? Read on…
We then tried to voice the flute. A properly setup speaker should pressurize the room as if one can feel someone blowing into a wind instrument. You should be able to feel the null and excess pressure as the musician inhales and exhales. Too much in front and the sound got hard. Leading edge dominating. Too much behind and the sound got thick boring, trailing edge dominating. Just right and the speaker would couple with the room. Now there was no hint of hardness, nor was the sound too thick. It was just right. So level 3? Yes of course. But there was more.
Prem was able to get the speaker to couple with the room, so that the room worked with the speaker rather than the speaker and the room fighting each other. There was no hint of stress in the sound. It felt as if you could turn the volume up and it wouldn’t get hard. The point I am trying to make is that we often spend money upgrading to a bigger amp thinking that our system is sounding hard or noisy due to lack of power. In reality the room and speaker are most likely fighting each other.
We could sit anywhere in Prem’s room. There was no sweet spot. The entire room was the spot. It sounded as if there was a band playing in the room. Hence this coupling of the speaker with the room perfectly forces me to introduce a new category – level 4. It has all the fun factor of level 3 but here the speaker and room play as one. No narrow sweet spot, no hardness, nothing negative sticks out. It is as if all the bad resonances are somehow nullified. LEVEL 4.
We played Kishore Kumar’s Ye Shyam Mastani. Compared to Lata, Kishore tends to banter along while he sings. The system brought that childishness out. You could tell that Kishore was having fun singning. It was as if he knew he was gifted. He didn’t care if it was Sa Re Ga Ma or not. He just delivered. Lata on the other hand was more conscious and tried to be technically correct. On Lata’s Ajib Dastan there is a dialogue at the beginning of the song. You could almost tell as if the artists were reading out of a script, rather than speaking ex-tempo. I told Prem, it sounds as if these artists are reading a script. And then suddenly a few seconds into the dialogue and we can hear them turning paper. The JBL conveyed that emotion before we even heard the page turn!
This was by far the best system I have heard once it reached level 4. The JBL could deliver highs that were clean, honest, integrated superbly with the mids and sounded like a ribbon tweeter without the crossover problems with the mid woofer that a ribbon could have. It could pressurized the room when needed, was fast, NEVER got hard and decayed beautifully. The mid range was clean. It had no artificial bloat nor was it lean. Voices sounded beautiful, be it male or female.
At level 4 - The heavens opened...Hark now hear, the angels do sing! A King was crowned today! And man will live for evermore because of this beautiful day!
(Forum members who read my review of Audionote will understand the angel reference - https://www.hifivision.com/threads/rotm-march-2018-award-audio-note-system-review.69613/#post-789047)
Guys you have to listen to this to understand what I am trying to say. Many speakers either make the male or female voice sound decent, but fail to make both sound great. Either the male voice is too thick or the female voice lacks differentiation or sounds compressed. This JBL delivered both voices cleanly and honestly. Superb crossover integration. Bass was present when it was called upon. You didn’t know that you were listening to a 15 inch driver. It created an atmosphere of bass. A good woofer sets the foundation of sound. It is like the canvas to a painting. This is exactly what the 15 incher did. It created a beautiful white canvas for the mids and highs to paint a picture on. You could feel the tension in the air on Steve Ray Vaughn and Bruce Springsteen. Image size was perfect. Not too thick or bloated nor lost into the hash.
As said before, the goal of the earlier article and even this one is that we need to stop getting taken in by marketing and match and position the system well. The day we do this we will all save money and most of all be happy with our systems. I feel very bad and cheated by magazines when I see fellow forum members upgrade components cause they are not happy with the sound. This is a restored 1976 product sounding stunning. No fancy Berrylium or Diamonds. Just honest engineering.
Prem’s formula for placing the speakers.
- Measure the width of the room. Divide into 3 equal halves. So if the room is 9 feet, place the inner wall of your speaker 3 feet from the closest side wall. The distance between speaker inner walls should be 3 feet as well.
- Measure the length of the room and divide it into 1/7, 1/5 or 1/3 depending on what is possible. Prem prefers the 1/3 ratio. The speaker should be placed here with no toe in. The magic spot would be within 3mm+- of this spot.
- Remove all forms of room treatment when doing this because the goal is to position the setup to remove/ reduce room resonances by making the speaker work with the room. Otherwise you are compensating for whatever the room treatment is doing.
- Once you find a magic spot let the setup settle down for a day or so.
My advice:
- Please do not buy a speaker that is too big for your room. A floorstander feels lovely to own, but positioning it in a 100 sq feet room is almost impossible.
- Do not buy very difficult to drive speakers. You will end up spending a fortune trying to power them. The amplifier and speaker need to behave as one.
- Keep your system simple. Prem and I both have small 10W amps and yet we are able to play our setups loud and achieve level 4 and 3 respectively. This is partly achieved because our speakers are very sensitive, amps are simple circuits and most importantly the amp and speaker are well matched. A simple 50W SS amp can sound beautiful with the right speaker set up well.
- Placement down to the last mm. finally determines whether one reaches level 3 or 4, but the process is easier if the components are well matched.
- Chalta hai? Unees bees? Trump ne tweet kiya na. All those excuses can be pushed aside if one spends time on placing a matched system well.
(I have Prem's consent to write an article on his setup and the experience).
