As always, take the content of these videos primarily as entertainment and a source of inspiration. These are not comprehensive tutorials and not all of the pertinent details or safety procedures will be shown (or followed).
Thank you for your story. I have been working with acoustic design for more than 20 years (mostly with mobile phone development and headphones). The last years I have started to work on hearing aids. I think there is a major misunderstanding within the hearing aid world. According to my opinion, the equalization curve should not be set after your hearing threshold. (The hearing threshold is normally tested by letting you say when a tone disappears when they lower the amplitude. By testing a certain amount of tones you get the hearing threshold curve by connecting the dots.) Your hearing threshold may be affected by interfering tinnitus (which can be descrete tones or noise appearing in your ear), but that does not necessarily mean that you hear higher frequencies on a lower level if the amplitude is raised above the masking effect of the tinnitus. My theory is that every patient should be presented an equalizer and have a personal control over the compensation curve. Only then, you will be able to compensate the spectrum correctly.
I've gotten a few comments to that effect: let the user adjust the device. Problem with that is that in most countries (like here in Canada) hearing aids are classed as medical devices and highly regulated. That means only a professional can adjust them. A few years ago hearing aids were deregulated in the US and that has opened the door to the user having the ability to make his own adjustments.
Have you considered using two or three full wall curtains of sound absorbing material, the hidden curtains could be patchwork and 100% butt ugly so probably pretty cheap to do. Maybe even big Harbor Freight shipping blankets.
Hi John, I enjoy your videos and the information you have shared. I was wondering about alternate materials like old terry cloth towels rolled up and stuffed into areas of the speaker to do the damping, also using a bunch of old cut up tee-shirts and denim pants could also give more or less of a damping effect. These kinds of material are just sitting around in everybody's house, so why not try it eh? One material I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is a tight celled sponge. I just opened up my set of NLA Advents to do a re-cap, and encountered five large yellow sheets of sponge (12" X 12" X 3") in each box. Upon closing the boxes up with new sealing tape and adding a whole bunch of extra poly fill the advents sound better than new. I bought a ten pound box of poly-fil at Wal-Mart for $30, I might have been able to re-cycle old clothes and towels and saved the $30 for more capacitors for my next project.
Totally agree with this video. There is not perfect speaker. No matter what you have, you have to make changes. Placement, EQ whatever you can within your means.
Even when you are in a decent hifi shop look at the room, equipment. Follow the wires. Everything in that shop will sound different when you take it home.
I'm finally considering getting back into building speakers, and build my own speakers for the first time in many many years. I want to use peerless elements and i want to build a speaker that won't have to rely on a seperate subwoofer to reach the low ends, which made me look at some of their 12" subwoofer elements. My plan is to use 24mm playwood, dual layered all sides and braces to make the box completely dead, i'm also going to have 1 softdome tweeter and i might use a Scanspeak 6" with a phaseplug for that midrange. The box will be about 8" wide, as narrow as possible without choking the 12" woofer which will be placed sideways . Currently doing my research on how much it impacts the base with narrow boxes .
Never tapper a subwoofer much smaller than 1/2 SD if you gonna give them full power. Modern woofers have alot more Xmax than Martin ever expected. His math is awesome for PA drivers Hornresp don't lie Thank you for the video :-)
There is a very important fact regarding the two woofers facing each other that is overlooked. One of the drivers has the input signal reversed in relation to the other. This arrangement cancels the back EMF generated by a single driver or two drivers facing in the same direction in an isobaric arrangement. Eliminating the back EMF reduces distortion.
Hi John, Very well put. Your feelings/explanations make perfect sense. I listen to music. My recording of Quicksilver Messenger Service "Just For Love" is not a good recording, harsh. But it has been a favorite, and I listen to it often. Thanks
As a person who actually read the book this is a classic click bait video that unfortunately I have clicked searching for something else.... I've listened to this video and my first thought was why are you making a video about someone's work and book that you clearly don't know nothing about. You haven't read the book and you are commenting on 500 pages of it and years of work by watching an short interview with him. Are you ok? So no, he is not giving easy answers to complex questions quite the opposite. Bass performance (above 300hz) according to tests and predictions participates with 30% in speaker evaluation. So it is an approximation and it is supported by tests not chatting on youtube. And again BIG NO, he was not doing his work for an average consumer. He actually points in its book the difference between trained listeners and average listener, producers in the studio and hearing loss with age on all people. I am sorry to say but this is a really bad video full of completely wrong information. A video that emphasizes the modern age and the internet, where individuals discuss topics they don't fully understand and refuse to listen to those who are more knowledgeable or who have done the research.
As a kid, I loved Kellogg's Rice Krispies for breakfast with the sound of snap, crackle and pop coming out of my cereal bowl. But not so much these days coming out of my speakers.
when I was a kid in the late seventies , I bought four Biederlak blankets and tacked them in every corner, My Pioneer sx 980 and JBL 110s sounded better
I'm with you 100% on this. I have one word that describes the way I like to hear music: clarity. Being a musician who's played and heard real instruments there's nothing better to me than to hear each individual instrument clearly. Not much worse to me than listening to a wall of mud.
Even if this video is two years old, I would still like to ask about an idea that I had some time ago to dampen or at least move higher the resonance frequency of the speaker box. That is using long 1/4" thick threaded rods, preferably brass, running between parallel walls/sides, and to tighten the side bolts as much as possible, also adding tightened bolts on the inside. That should "contain" the vibration. Do you think it might effective? The advantage they have is they use very little internal space, and they could be easily added to an existing speaker box, bought recently or not. There's a RU-vid series by GR where people send their flawed speakers they are not happy with, and the usual suggestion they get (besides buying better, more expensive parts for the crossover) is to use an expensive damping material they sell, and sometimes to add wood damping plates or crossbars to the inside, which would modify the internal volume somehow.
There is a doctor here on youtube that has a very effective treatment for tinnitus and hearing loss , I had tinnitus for 8 years after which I started using treatments from him .I used his treatment and tinnitus program and my tinnitus went away completely. I also have my hearing back 80 % It’s been a few months now and any symptoms are gone. His channel is DR LIAM OGBEBOR HERBAL CENTRE
I was supplied with my first and only ever pair of hearing aids, Phonak ones, three years ago. They are not just useless: they are worse than useless. Apart from being uncomfortable to wear after a couple of hours, I have to take them out if someone is speaking to me. They function more like ear-plugs than hearing aids.
What have you done?! If it is D2905/950000, it has almost flat characteristics (on-axis) between 2 and 20 kHz. With horns, you have 6 dB difference between 3 and 10 kHz. It is even bigger (~14 dB) between 3 and 18 kHz. It is tragedy ;)
I did the same thing by purchasing small domes for prescription hearing aids "from amazon" and turned a pair of $200 hearing aids into nearly as good as the $7000 prescription hearing aids that finally failed from old age.
Man, that looks good! Wish I had the tools, or 1/2 the talent ... lol. Ive been thinking of something like this to replace the vinyl covered case on my otherwise gorgeous silver faced Sherwood S 7650 CP. Make one for me... lol
My best audio player is a quad-core, powerful i5 chip computer. All my music is on terabyte drives. One digital file is a recording of an LP playing "Tracy" by the Cufflinks. That song sounds great on an LP and the band sounds very good, even though it is a digital recording of an LP. But I heard a digital recording of "Tracy" from a new master of the same song that was not pressed to an LP, and it sounded like a bunch of amateurs that really couldn't sing at all. Very unimpressive and not nostalgic. So yeah, I understand why people like playing from LP's, but it's not realistic sound. There's definitely distortion and harmonics added and it makes some music and musicians sound a lot better than they really were. You have to be really good to sound good with a pure digital recording. But hey, guess what? People like me, musicians, composers, singers. We use tube preamps in microphones and in other preamp devices before the signal ever gets to the digital domain. So there you go. You can still use analog to mix with digital signal processing. That's what I do. But don't tell anyone. I still don't have any LP's. Thanks for the video.
Theres a formula that uses diameter and tsps to correctly achieve wave timing. Its not rocket science just use the formula its in the loudspeaker cookbook avail for download by robot underground link in every video of his. Much better than shooting blanks tring n wasting time n material.
Hey from Australia. I'm was a club DJ with 30 years under my belt and I have studied pysco-acoustics and engineering (I'm 63 Now) and I was listening to the usual for or against stuff! I have a lot of vinyl 12" singles and I bought a brand new Technics SL-1200 MK2 fitted with an Ortofon Black cartridge. I have many 12" singles that I adore that excited me then and excite me now. I have a sugar cube unit installed and this is the only thing that really gets rid of vinyls downfalls. You can adjust it and listen to the record normally, filtered or listen to noise it gets rid of which is amazing. I fooled a few friends I had over for brunch and after I told and showed them it was a record and not a CD, it was funny watching them listen to a record. DJs have a reputation of using records like old socks.....finger prints or worse. My work records only have cueing noise on them at the begining and my personal collection have no noise at all. The one thing that I kinda disagree with is that after a few plays, the record wears. That's true of course but the stylus is only in a groove for a millisecond and I've heard AB tests using two copies of of a boring record as the medium. My hearing is excellent and after 100 plays on one disc and ten on the other, I heard a smidge of distortion but nothing that would be a deal breaker. The RIAA curve. Essential for playback of all vinyl finally sorted out that problem in 1958. As for the warm feel of vinyl, I don't feel it and CDs solve so many problems like listening to the whole album without getting up or using a high quality CD carousel in the order you like. Once again the rumours abound about these players. Any HIFI equipment depends on how you treat it and I've never had any problems with these players. I never handle the playing surface of both formats but sometimes, I like to play a record unfiltered because it reminds me of the past. Cheers from OZ Andrew Collins.
I found early in my salvage of speakers to reuse in reused kitchen cabs as speaker cabs that fiber fill is ineffecient for adding enough mass in th enclosure to increas bass tones fron the box.. my silution was to use foam rubber from old couch cusions.make a cup of foam just large enough for the speaker then fill the remaining space with more foam, the result is no internal sound reflection and deeper bass. making a 2 cubic ft box sound 2 or 3 times its size. at first I used cotton upholstry fill then found that the foam rubber worked much better,
Flat? No! Detailed? Yes. True to the original performance? Sure, I just don't want my gear to add or omit anything! But great point, we all hear a little differently! Personally I want my system to perform very well with no mustard or ketchup(Pure Direct mode), but every recording is a little different, so it is already an up hill battle, so yes, tailor your system to your own preference! I build my own speakers like you, and I "voice" them to my preference, this really helps with not touching the tone controls.
Here's a question I've asked myself: "what does this music truly sound like?" The answer I came up with is: "no one knows." Why? Because the "original performance" isn't what's on the record. It was engineered by a producer to sound the way he thought it should sound while listening to it in his studio through his speakers. And since I can't replicate that, there is not "faithful to the original" that can be achieved. Best we can do is set up our systems to sound the way we like it, regardless of "purity", because "purity" is an illusion.
Listening to the opinions of a self proclaimed audiophile when you are a true music lover is one of the biggest wastes of time a non audiophile can engage in. On many visits to a good friends old high end home theater and audio install shop they always had a display behind their large acoustically transparent screen and they catered to the wealthy many of whom proclaimed themselves to be audiophiles. I can't tell you how many Klipsch Heritage series based systems so called horns haters had installed not just for their theater but their main listening system after they raised the screen and showed them the sound they had been mesmerized by was produced by a horn speaker. They had always been TOLD they were terrible but never actually heard a good one. Not every one of them picked the Klipsch but Focal was the least chosen of all the brands they offered. Golden Ear was second to last. It was Klipsch, B&W, Paradigm, Revel, Golden Ear and Focal. After witnessing that multiple times and hearing about it happen on countless other occasions we both concluded that people like what they like if they are not otherwise influenced against it and what someone else's opinion might be is completely irrelevant. Audiophiles hate being irrelevant but they are to the typical buyer. My question is always, did you listen to a lot of different brands? Did you like one over another? Okay, then use the brand you liked. Stereophile Magazines review is meaningless because they aren't you and they aren't buying you the gear. Mike2491-L the AudioAvenger on RU-vid's ideas and opinions on the brand are totally meaningless despite what Mike wants to believe because he isn't you and he isn't buying you the gear. You see how that works? Older guys understand (unless they're audiophiles) younger guys though often struggle with the need for acceptance and approval.
Great video, John! I've strived to achieve a flat measurement in my room for years and never factored in my own hearing perception, now at age 71!! Now I have to start all over again but thanks for letting me off the hook, John 🤣.
You’re coming to the realization the “science” guys don’t get. Flat speakers have a job, but we aren’t listening for work. Speakers with some flavor are always going to be more fun and more interesting. Yes your use case is related to hearing loss, but it applies to anyone.
Why do science guys don't get this. Al speakers alter the origin all microphones change the origin what is there not to get. Science is just looking objective. It has nothing to do with what you like. Concerning this vid. What John did was to eq the music so it gives a correct response in his head. Same would you do with a microphone with a boost in a certain frequentie. Its al scientific. No mumbo jumbo at all.
I do agree, tone controls or EQ are not something to be afraid of, and every system should have them. Its worth remebering that every recording almost without exception has already been EQd and adjusted a heck load to sound a way the artist or producer thought good.
Some good points made on this video. I've always not understood why there are some people who only swear by only using pure direct, to me it sounds bad, I've always added some treble and bass etc .
Totally on board with this. As a young kid I lost 60% of my hearing until some surgery sorted me out. Since then I’ve been very aware that we all have our own aural frequency response. All of the argument in audiophileland ignores this. People argue pointlessly over which reviewer they think is great and which is rubbish without stopping to think “hey… maybe the reviewer I like just has ears like mine but the other guy doesn’t.”
100%. Listener perception is everything. All the charts and graphs do not equal a great experience... They'll get you close, but the EQ is the salt and pepper of the recording world.
