Why on earth do speaker wires sound different?

[clive heath]

As we've moved entertainingly and informatively on to the topic of binaural recording, for more entertainment I have a binaural recording made many years ago with an actual person's head. The consequence should be, it is suggested, that nobody else will get a sense of sounds outside of the head. This is checkable on

http://www.cliveheathmusic.co.uk/things.php

if you scroll down to the lowest heading. Along the way there is another binaural related section.

[johnb]

.......
1. Some of us really can't do accurate spatial localisation.
2. The hall has an ambience (echoes, reverberation etc.) which make this hard, or can mislead.

Try doing this in some venues, such as the RAH. It is perfectly plausible that spatial awareness can be compromised in venues like that.
......

IMO, in the overwhelming majority of concert halls, the clarity and spatial accuracy with which you can locate instruments is decidedly poor, but we compensate for that with our eyes.

Most recordings work it the other way round - the spatial accuracy is much greater than you get in a concert hall but this compensates for the lack of visual clues.

Taking Dave's point about concert halls - I once was at a concert in Birmingham's Symphony Hall, seated on the front row of the circle, very close to the side. In that position there were some unsettling mismatches between the aural and visual locations, particular instruments at the back of the orchestra. (I don't think this materially affects the on going discussion though.)

(Which reminds me. On that occasion I had arranged to meet a friend who I hadn't seen for many years. We decided to go to hear Gergiev and his, then, Kirov orchestra and when we got to the box office there were two returns and we were offered the seats free of charge, much to our surprise and delight.)

[jayne lee wilson]

With imagery, let's not overlook the simple things - with a few rare exceptions, even good imaging through speakers tends to fall away as you move away from the centre seat.
In the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, I hear good spatial location from a favoured central circle position - as you get further out, that too becomes much more approximate, with some of those strange effects mentioned above, doubtless due to laterally uneven wall/ceiling reflections etc. Solo instruments can often seem dislocated from where the performer is standing, though not by a drastic amount in this hall. All the same, the "block" location of instrumental groups remains reasonably correct.
So there is this at least this simple parallel between hifi and concert-halls!

(A-I-C - your point about ATC Speakers and low distortion is well made.. BUT it still didn't mean I could live with them (even though I admired them and REALLY wanted to...) - still thank goodness that the ATC/Harbeth combination was a heaven-sent match).

[An_Inspector_Calls]

- still thank goodness that the ATC/Harbeth combination was a heaven-sent match).

What is the ATC/Harbeth combination? Do Harbeth really expect us to be taken in by the use of Radial technology (i.e. selection of the 'right' cone (?) material) in 2013? My bullshit antennae are working overtime here.

[Gordon]

I'm usually suspicious of bovine excrement BUT in the case of speaker driver cones it doesn't take long to realise that the cone material, shape, mechanical properties etc etc lead to a difficult design challenge; some of the factors are hard to reconcile - one being the weight - mass, transient response - and the other the stiffness - break-up resonances, non-piston-like multimode vibration. The suspension of the cone in its frame/surround is also a delicate area of design along with magnetic circuit design etc etc. One is tempted to think that it's a wonder it works at all rather than it does as well as it does.

However, one only has to think back to the GEC metal cone driver from the late 50s and a number of other innovations since then to see that this approach - the importance of the cone design and hence the material - is still going on. Dudley Harwood cut his teeth on these design issues whilst at the BBC and so many of the ideas including the cone design ended up in the BBC monitors LS3, LS5 etc.

Go here if you are interested in his various BBC papers:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/people/h-d-harwood

[Gordon]

Not dummy head stuff but this might be of interest to the debate on binaural/headphone listening and its ability to render spatial effects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/binaural-broadcasting

[Nevalti]

....Try doing this in some venues, such as the RAH. It is perfectly plausible that spatial awareness can be compromised in venues like that.

I can certainly accept that acoustics (echoes) could disturb the 'location' of an instrument. By coincidence I'm at the RAH on Friday so will try your experiment. It should be a good test as I have never been there before and I know it is said to have poor acoustics.

God yes, I used to hate those TVs. I haven't heard that awful screech in a while.

[Nevalti]

.... I have a binaural recording made many years ago with an actual person's head. The consequence should be, it is suggested, that nobody else will get a sense of sounds outside of the head.

That makes sense to me. I thought that was how the Dallas ones were made but perhaps I just imagined reading that.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

BUT in the case of speaker driver cones it doesn't take long to realise that the cone material, shape, mechanical properties etc etc lead to a difficult design challenge; some of the factors are hard to reconcile

I'm aware of the importance of cone material, but then everyone and his brother has been aware of this aspect of design for an age. Briggs touches on this in 1948; Leak had their sandwich material cones; we even had a university second-year lab experiment on aspects of cone design, so I would have thought it had been done to death by now. Harwood/Harbeth - any connection?

[Gordon]

.... so I would have thought it had been done to death by now.

Quite so!! There's nothing so new as an old idea.

[OldTechie]

Harwood/Harbeth - any connection?

Certainly. The UK loudspeaker industry has quite a few BBC origins. If you look at the reports Gordon linked to, you will find one S.A. Hughes as well. That was Spencer Hughes who set up Spendor with his wife Dorothy. I recall a very early demo of their product-to-come given to his colleagues by their son David in the TV news studio at Alexandra Palace. Most of us thought it was much better than the BBC LS5/1, except that we did not want to listen to it for too long. Changes in the cone plastic were made before it reached production.

[jayne lee wilson]

What is the ATC/Harbeth combination? Do Harbeth really expect us to be taken in by the use of Radial technology (i.e. selection of the 'right' cone (?) material) in 2013? My bullshit antennae are working overtime here.

ATC Pre/Power (sca-2, spa2-150) driving Harbeth Compact 7ii ... er, Dudley HARwood's wife was called ElizaBETH... don't knock those Radial Drivers!* I've been living with one in the C7s for a dozen years (and like most Harbeth owners would'nt have anything else....)** Anyway, great Prom on, I need my Coffee...

*product of intense research by Alan Shaw following an SRC grant...
**oh, alright, never say never...

[Gordon]

Certainly. The UK loudspeaker industry has quite a few BBC origins. If you look at the reports Gordon linked to, you will find one S.A. Hughes as well. That was Spencer Hughes who set up Spendor with his wife Dorothy. I recall a very early demo of their product-to-come given to his colleagues by their son David in the TV news studio at Alexandra Palace. Most of us thought it was much better than the BBC LS5/1, except that we did not want to listen to it for too long. Changes in the cone plastic were made before it reached production.

And another BBC person from that group was Dave Stebbings whom I knew for a while when I was at Kingswood in the mid-60s - he left in 1977 - like many others mentioned. He was part of Chartwell who had an LS3 licence which passed to Rogers [I think] when they acquired Chartwell in the early 80s. I did a lot of speaker measurements for Dave!!

[Nevalti]

Not dummy head stuff but this might be of interest to the debate on binaural/headphone listening and its ability to render spatial effects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/binaural-broadcasting

From that BBC web-site: "Our hearing system appears to be sensitive to inaccurate cues, it is common for binaural filters to create an unconvincing spatial impression as well as poor sound quality. Every person has an individual pattern of hearing cues that are created by their unique body shape, also these cues change as a listener moves."

That, and earlier cliveheathmusic examples (#121), would seem to explain why some people say they CAN hear spacial information via dummy head/headphones listening but I, for one, can not. Not at least on those Dallas recordings. He did in fact put the mics in his ears so only someone with the same head/ear shape should be able to hear even remotely what he heard.

Are you the same shape as Mr Dallas - Mr GG?

[MrGongGong]

That, and earlier cliveheathmusic examples (#121), would seem to explain why some people say they CAN hear spacial information via dummy head/headphones listening but I, for one, can not. Not at least on those Dallas recordings. He did in fact put the mics in his ears so only someone with the same head/ear shape should be able to hear even remotely what he heard.

Are you the same shape as Mr Dallas - Mr GG?

The dummy head is effectively the same as the in ear microphones that many people involved in Phonography and field recording use
i've never met anyone before who is unable to perceive the binaural cues in binaural recordings

This evening I went to hear Mahler 3, I was in the third row , dead centre. The spatialisation of the orchestral sound was, to my ears, much less than in Aquapump even though I was in a relatively dry acoustic (a huge tent on the side of a mountain) ..... sure the offstage trumpet was over to the left but most of the sound was a homogenous entity. I also noticed that the front/rear image was much much less than in other musical contexts. The folk who really know this stuff are IMV the folks like the Acousmonium, BEAST, Denis Smalley , Trevor Wishart and so on.
Trevor's On Sonic Art has much to say about spatial perception in an electroacoustic context.