Andrew Jones 'Measurements won't tell us if we'll like the sound of the music' 

Andrew Jones in your house Bucket list: check!

Awesome interview. Learned lots. That moment when you realize "everything is a compromise".

Steve, thanks for the great interviews. Andrew Jones and Nelson Pass are great ambassadors for the world of audio. I appreciate your interview style because you give your guests time to answer your questions without interruption.

From 2ch and home-theaters to large scale pa systems, I have owned and used a few hundred different models of speakers over the last 40 years. I love Andrew Jones perspective, especially how he combines the statistical view of an engineer with the subjective view of a music lover. I own a pair of his B6's and UB5's and think they offer an enormous value, terrific sound for a BARGAIN price. I have spent a lot of time in the studio as a musician and producer.... his comments about mixing are SPOT ON! I giggle when people claim they are reproducing what the engineer intended. You know what I have never seen in recording studios? $1000 AC cables and $500/f speaker cable :-) That said, buy what YOU want and ignore every person who says it is "wrong".

It is refreshing to hear the honest truth that is not muddied up by marketing tactics from audio manufacturers. Thank you.

Wonder full interview ! What I love about these interviews is the wisdom you guys share ! That's priceless !

That was great. You are both willing to share so much. Thank you.

Interviews with Andrew Jones and Nelson Pass within days... - My favourites , Thanks

Awesome series of interview videos. Jones really makes you think about your whole attitude towards speakers.

near, mid & far field listening explanations should end many arguments about what's best. great interview.

WAY too many variables.. even the human brain is a variable. Some days my system sounds better than other days simply because of my mood/stress levels.

This guy is a great interview. "....from divergent to convergent....." as price increases, but it doesn't, making us all hypocrites. Good Stuff Steve

As a musician I can agree 100%, somebody tells the truth without marketing bullshit, very good.

Thank you both for the great discussions.

What a charming and articulate man Mr Jones is. I am grateful to see to him speak about his design challenges and passion for good sound and music. If anyone here knows, did he participate in the design of the LS50s?

Quality content. Thanks for the video Steve. Perhaps, my next speakers should be ELAC!

Speakers are like art. Go find some art you love.

Good discussion! Some are too caught up with measurements only. Even BMW M cars are finalized by their ‘po po meter’, the test driver’s butt!

G'day Steve Andrew is a bona fide genius love listening to that man speak. I've enjoyed all your chats with him Steve very very informative.🎧😁👍

Brilliant! Refreshing!

Absorbingly interesting - learned heaps. Thanks S & A

Best Andrew Jones interview I've seen and I have watched a lot of interviews regarding Andrew! A LOT!🤪🤯🤓🤗 A lot of people think these speaker designers try to strive to obtain the most realistic sound possible and as we just heard that's not always the case regardless of price point!🙄🤑 I myself look for Imaging more than anything else because what does Taylor Swift or Sam Smith really sound like in the recording studio or even better yet EDM music!🤔🤓

Excellent content! Loved it, thanks.

Good stuff. Love this series.

Synergy is very subjective. Go for what you like.

Listening to Andrew Jones was awesome. I like the way he approaches sound and its reproduction.

A very honest evaluation of loudspeaker to room intergration

Amazing!

You touched on many interesting aspects of the process. I have always been of the mind that ones listening environment is the largest contributing factor in what any system would sound like. One can take the same sound system to 5 different locations, and it will sound different in each of those locations.

Great interview. I bought my JBL 4333a Speakers in 1978 based on the rational that these were the actual speakers, or some variant of the actual speakers, used in many of the West Coast recording studios of that period. They sounded great, and still do. But I prefer my Infinity Speakers today, based on the rational that why would I limit myself to only what the engineer had, when I could sound so much better?

Interesting discussion. You should also interview people at Harman, they have a very precise idea of what a speaker should measure like and what's their take on what they call the "Circle of Confusion".

True Natural sounds are created by natural instruments and once recorded and reproduced though electronic devices and the manipulation by artificial means creates an approximation of those sounds that are no longer natural but now an interpretation of a natural sound created by a technology. Granted sometimes the technology gets very close to the original natural timbre of instruments and voices but it’s still not truly natural but a simulation of what a “natural” sound is like. With the reproduction of electronic instruments and their timbres then it’s a different process involved in the method of reproducing of those timbres because that original timbre is electronic to begin with. So we chase an elusive set of sonic parameters and it’s difficult to find equipment that is capable of accuracy of reproduction of both natural and electronic timbres. The elusive search has been ongoing since the science and technology of recorded sound and sound reproduction has been evolving. We may be closer but not there yet. The closer we can get is directly limited to our pocketbooks. Then there is the issue of our listening environment. A story for another time....... 🤦🏻‍♂️😂👍🏻

Fantastic

Great interview, now do one about mr. Jones experience at Kef, the Ls3/5a and why Kef never bought the license? And maybe some details on the Kef RDM3, but thats a stretch.. Keep em going!

thats mostly speakers tuned bright rather than tuned being natural to masked those imperfections and to make the music sound good..andrew jones prefer the true natural sound.

The two most important steps to a great sounding audio system. Step 1 - spend more on your speakers than anything else Step 2 - spend the next highest amount )money AND time) on the room. To get REALLY great, make that #1.

15:34 "I like seeing when people post pictures of their setups." - Andrew Jones So think about that you folks who say there is no value in showing good pictures of gear, or even a sound clip, in your RU-vid review. I think any information we can get about a piece of gear is good. Do I think listening to a pair of speakers on a RU-vid video is going to be really close to hearing them in person? No, obviously not. But I don't think it's useless! Andrew Jones likes to SEE how people set things up! He isn't even hearing an imperfect audio clip! He's literally just LOOKING at people's stereos! It's interesting info for people who like this stuff.

That would be super cool to have that special version and the commercial version on an A/B toggle

Such a nice guy and so knowable

Love my Elac b5 the drums sound so alive.

Brilliant, straight into the murky world of measurement uncertainty! How about we establish a set of recognised standards for testing and evaluating components, just like 'real' industry, and make the process traceable to a known reference artefact!

For those who may not know Andrew Jones, he is one of the truly great speaker builders.

My opinion is that a studio recording engineer records and mixes the music to taste on his/hers high end studio monitors. And home speaker designers have to design to best replicate the sound that came out of those original studio monitors

Excellent conversation with AJ. I would hate to go down the rabbit hole of a 48 track mixer with every set of speakers. It’s just too fiddley. Listening to music is such an emotional experience and part of what is happening is trying to recapture a previous event. For some it is the sound of hearing an orchestra at Lincoln Center and for others it is hearing Frampton Comes Alive, just as they remember it coming from their first stereo set up.

That's a great question! How do you know when it's done?

I really like the Elac debut 2.0 F6.2 , but I boost 16k and add a subwoofer.

Voicing ..love the discussion

From microphone on through to the speaker or headphones, it's all part of the playback experience and aesthetic decisions are made at every step. These days, since the invention of the phonograph, listening to music isn't as much a matter of reproducing a live experience as it is the experience itself. Most people don't listen to live music even 1/10th as much as they do recorded music. (I don't care which ONE or 7 of you listen live a lot more than that. You are not typical.) The playback IS the performance when the music was made for a recording. There is ultimately no "accurate" and no "right." I like how Andrew J. says what probably a large majority of us have found out - when we were young we thought in terms of accurate and inaccurate. Then with experience we realized how flawed that approach is and we shift toward pleasing, and even just toward practical. I love HiFi and my enjoyment of it has only improved with the abandonment of the goal of perfect accuracy. To be clear, I do still like full frequency range and relatively flat response, low distortion and high dynamic range. I do personally still like things that sound better to audiophile nerds than they do to appliance store shoppers.

Hang on please. What was Andrew saying about an elliptical room? Is there a previous conversation or experiment? You seemed to get his reference...

it may sound trivial but are the transducers that translate an electrical impulse in sound. The selection of transducers is the most critical step for me. The process to select the very best ones is not a easy one. Then the x-over design ... then the cabinet construction.

I could listen to Andrew Jones all day; what a great resource of knowledge.

The NS10s are said to be used because they sound so crappy regularly that, if your mix sounds good on them, the chances are that it will sound good on most other systems, but there’s no replacement for actually going and listening to the mix on as many other systems as possible and taking notes. NS10 are an open sight, mid-field is the telephoto lens/scope.

Great interviews Steve with both Andrew and Nelson.. My question is why are equalizers not popular as say as in the 70s. I would think it would help to maybe correct some of the problems with the wide range of rooms systems are listening in..

Do you know who manufactures the driver's he designs. You can make DSP or ASP active, if he designs it to work in a certain size room sparse or cluttered with certain materials like solid walls or plasterboard walls, where the speakers are placed near the wall or further in the middle distance apart distance to side walls, the consumer can adjusters this back at home by just selecting the size of room if it's cluttered or sparse where his speakers are pleased and material of the room should get virtue the same representation as he did when designing the speaker and program it for these scenarios.

Sounds like Jones need a refresher on speaker engineering.

I've said it before... I'll say it again: The best sound for each individual is in the mind. The sound that pleases me may very well not please you, or anyone else for that matter. Find the speakers that sound as close as that sound in your mind sounds. Simple!

It's difficult to know what "high end" is because there are speakers in glass boxes that sell for a lot of money despite having no internal sound deadening, and there are omnidirectional speakers that cost a lot to build blaring rap music (2 Chainz) in reverberant rooms where omnidirectional speakers work best in acoustically dead spaces and the driver technology might not sound as accurate as a simpler dynamic loudspeaker and how was the rap music recorded and what is it supposed to sound like? I'm not saying we have to reduce our playlist to smooth minimalist jazz, but it is easier to evaluate sound quality on than rap, hardstyle and metal which is more the domain of "fun" speakers in my opinion - speakers that get loud and are crisp and clear but not necessarily even - example, things made by Cerwin Vega and even Klipsch to a lesser degree, anything with the name "Beats," or "Punch Plugs" in the headphone department. I've never heard a high end speaker demonstrator blare Kanye West, or DJ Mad Dog to show off the sound quality of their system through high end tube amps (actually another source of pleasing distortion) and magnetically levitated turntables. Perhaps the systems Steve Meade makes and also the PA speakers in my house and videos are all the definition of "fun" speakers. I might have even blasted "fun" speakers enough that my hearing can't evaluate the accuracy of speakers with tweeters playing evenly into the ultrasonics and thus my ears are limited to lower end things. Ears are not a flat and even representation of true sound power levels - needing a lot less power in the upper midrange and lower treble to sound the same level, and more power in the bass. There are speakers I would like to hear a wide range of stuff on - Danley Hyperion for example, but if I only brought house music and not binaural recordings of orchestra, would I appreciate all they can do? Or what about Ildjarn or Merzbow? Things that are just noise to the majority of people and have inbuilt clipping in the recording. Do they sound any better than they do on £50 boom box? Things like a vocal - we hear voices every day straight from the source, but even then, what we like - maybe we want the vocal to sound deeper and more "masculine", maybe we want to bring out the consonant sounds for that V-shaped FM DJ sound. The capture of vocals can be unnatural as well with excessively popped out P, B and F sounds.

Fantastic! Cheers 😎

Great interview Steve, your interviews with mr. Jones & mr. Pass have been excellent. I also really enjoyed everything you have done with Herb, can you do more stuff with him?

This is a great undermining of one of the claimed advantages of mqa ... giving you what the engineer intended. But it is also so much more, getting into philosophy, with Andrew's exposition of his dialectic method. No wonder Andrew is so successful, he has a strong intellectual framework to support his work. Great work Steve.

So if you like 60s and 70s rock, pink floyd, hendrix etc, get yourself a pair of vintage Tannoy Monitor silvers in a nice big cabinet.

I wonder if it would be better to design speakers for different types of music - eg classical, vocal etc - rather than all generic music types? Has any manufacturer ever done that?

Good interview. Steve, I would have liked to have heard Andrew's take on engineers that go out of their way to intentionally add compression to otherwise open, spacious, dynamic content. You touched on this @11:00, and Andrew said that if that is your personal reference point and you want to hear it, then why should he say no you can't. His answer, however, implies that compression is a force of nature, which he has accepted as a given. Not addressed, specifically, is whether or not Andrew agrees that compression is good, or if he feels that compression is the Kryptonite of audio recordings. If he found a bottle with a genie, and could wish compression away, would he do it? What, if anything, does compression contribute to quality playback equipment. Or is compression, on a good system, a 100% negative attribute? Is compression sometimes good, on a quality playback system? If so, when? Does compression ever serve any positive purpose on a good playback system? @5:21 And yes, it would be fantastic if we were given the X number of tracks so that we could properly mix the levels for our listening environment (and to ensure that we never, again, have to lower the volume when, for example, the mixing engineer has the vocals, or a guitar, so loud, that it hurts your ears -- or the drums, so low, that you have to strain to hear them and they have no oomph to them).

This series is fantastic at demystifying high end audio: High end speaker sound does not converge.... interesting. Love his conclusion. Get the speakers you like the presentation of. Be happy!They are more art (or musical instruments :-)

Each individual audiophile should know frequencies and what numbers they like and do not like, before searching for audio components that ARE frequency based.

Very insightful interview Steve a lot going on there.... So throwing the measurements out it comes down to the setup and weather or not the speakers sound good to you the consumer am I hearing that right? Because there are No perfect speakers and each one has there own flaws so the higher the price the less flaws they would have is that correct? So also if they are in collaboration with another company to sound good with there Equipment then as a consumer your forced in a sense to go with there electronics that don't seem fair. Great interview Andrew Jones is a ROCK STAR!!

I've heard Andrew talk a lot about speakers. What I want to know is, what speakers does he have at his house?

My solution for different speakers excelling in reproducing different sounds is to run two different (manufacturers) sets of speakers at the same time (i.e.4 speakers). No matter what speakers you have, you tend to get a richer sound because one is compensating for the other's weak spots. And if they have similar signatures, you still get a fuller sound. People seemed to discover the latter in the 70's when it was popular to run two sets of Large Advents, or so I've been told. I'm sure my solution isn't news to most people, but I can't remember it ever being mentioned much, if at all. P.S. Fun talk Steve. I'm sure it was like having a movie star in your apartment.

just bought definitive tech sb45's and now music sounds horrible. I need distortion because I have bad taste :(

Moby Dick - search for impossibilty, a great metaphor. (The book is behind him.)

💙🔊👍🖖🏻

Really like these videos with Jones. I've been playing around with a speaker virtualisation tool, Impulcifier (github.com/jaakkopasanen/Impulcifer) that can simulate speakers using binural mics. I've taken multiple measurements of me sat at 0.8m away, 1.5m away and 2.2m away. With headphones you can A vs B the virtualisation instantly so you notice the differences immediately. The lesson I took is that I really like reflections for most stereo music. The near field is good for proper Dolby Atmos movies that have a good mix. But all in all the difference in your room and seating position MASSIVELY outweigh any small issues in the frequency response. Harman's research has shown that listeners really struggle to hear dips in the frequency response - I myself do. When A vs Bing that it's really tough to tell them apart. But with seating position and rooms - it's really obvious. The headphones just make the entire process much simpler because it's a struggle to move speakers in real life.

Great interview! As an aside, I notice that your camera is focused on the background and Mr. Jones is slightly out of focus. Maybe you can turn autofocus off? Still, I love your interviews!

AWESOME!! Is Andrew a Yorkshire lad???

Imperfections aren't going away. Just have to do our best throughout the chain. You should angle the camera so we could see you in the mirror.

Moby-Dick (red book) in the background. An accident or a silent joke and reminder that being an audiophile is a slippery slope?

So, why not go for absolute accuracy? If engineer A in studio A sounds like X, why not try to mimic whatever they were hearing? Shouldn't a certain piano recorded on certain mics sound exactly like that piano recorded on those mics? Why try to flavor the sound at all? Appreciated his discussion of the masking threshold and its effects regarding near-field, far-field, and horn loaded speakers.

Before I watch the video, let me already comment on Jones's remark "'Measurements won't tell us if we'll like the sound of the music.'" It means, Mr. Jones, that you are measuring the wrong things. The problem with people in physics, maths or engineering is they have no solid basis in validity or relevance as guiding principles and tend to confuse repeatability of measurements, predictive quality of their formulae, with proof of validity. Let's think back of our ancestors who could predict solstices, a solar eclipse, and more, in a geocentric model of the cosmos. They had excellent formulae already. Repeatability, and experience, are in themselves no proof of validity. The statement in the title makes that lack of validity explicit. Let's also go back to scientists who got killed because the people of their time could not believe the earth was a sphere, not the center of the universe, or most leaders were corrupted idiots. First we need to work on a better understanding of human hearing. I would also add that Jones's telling us in another interview how he designed a then-new speaker in a process combining his experience with his engineering formulae without iteration between prototypes and refinement. The quote in the title, to me, makes that design process a chutzpah and almost invalidates (sic) any desire to listen to that design, when it looks attractive on paper. Still, the man's track record, and Steve, deserve some listening time from me.

Andrew continues pushing the boundaries of loudspeaker engineering efficiencies. I bought a pair of his B6.2's to see what the fuss was about, after listening to them for about a week felt compelled to active bi-amp them crossed at about 60Hz. Excuse me...how much did you say these things cost again? Ridiculous.

One day they will let AI design a speaker by designing millions in simulation. Would it sound good once perfect? What is perfect?

AJ sounds chesty here (if you know what I mean).

Take heed, those of you who like to wave around charts and graphs and form opinions of superiority when comparing other speakers’ charts & graphs that don’t look as “flat”, or worse, those who think that just because your speakers cost 10x more, that they’re 10x “better”. It’s all subjective. Peace to those who really understand that!

I want Andrew Jones and Nelson Pass to adopt me.

Guttenbergs comments are continuously trying to steer AJ towards subjectivity. It’s obvious that AJ knows his audience and tries to indulge without taking it so far as to destroy his credibility. Very interesting watch.

So, I saw the video and according to what I understand speakers are an EQ machine. Also amps and other electronics also offers some kind of EQ. According all that above instead of buying numerous sets of speakers and electronics why not buying an active monitor with DSP and flat response and a DAC with digital EQ and calibration to have the same and even better results? Even like this you can setup many different EQs as you like per kind of music or artist. For me old style audio sets (speakers, cables, amps etc) these days is totally waste of money and time. You can have way better results faster and cheaper. Ps: for years now I said that speakers are an EQ machine. Cables aslo and other electronics also.

He had a big fail with his Platinum Quatro speakers which had a flawed midrange - recessed and colored. While I couldn't agree more about the limitations of measurements, perhaps he should have double checked that midrange!