New NHT Classic line to replace Super Audio - Page 52

Well, probably with the new crossover upgrade. I'm just saying overall. If I had to have a system to play loud (rather than simply fill a large room), Xd is it.

That being said, I want a 4-way Xd so bad I am close to designing it and building it myself. Jack is probably already dreading CEDIA because he has to talk to me in person

My my, someone is a bit krabby


Correct
Admittedly, that *could* be an urban legend, but the circumstantial evidence is strong
Yeah, unfortunately true, but it is getting much better. They're actually starting to get an idea of this newfangled marketing thing and we're getting lots of stuff arriving weekly.
Don't remember anyone claiming *that*.
Ummmm, I think we covered the bases here. The new speakers are equal or better than Super Audio in just about every way and sort of are better than/not quite as good as the Evolution series depending on the parameter.

SuperOnes, BTW, still great speakers. A little unrefined compared to the new ones, but lots of fun.

Now stop being krabby!

"tivo1" is looking for used SB3s!

Now, how do you actually test this? Harman tackled the inherent reliability problems in a typical speaker comparison -- which include effects of difference in position, and effects of sighted bias on preference -- by building a million-dollar facility that included quick-switching 'turntable' to bring pairs of speakers into the same position for blind comparison. IIRC they also do some sort of level-matching, and they also train listeners to hear various kinds of defects. I'm just wondering why they went to all the bother if it's possible to get such reliable, unbiased results from the comparisons as described here.

Cool. I've always wanted a turntable.

You've got a point. It would be best to do these comparisons under ideal circumstances. But circumstances are never ideal, and keep in mind that sometimes you just have to make do with the tools at your disposal. Add to it that there seems to be a consensus as to what the Evolution monitors do better and what the Classics do better.

It sounds like what your'e really after is an argument about blind testing, which, I would venture, is really out of the scope of this thread.

Have you ever asked Nousaine why he uses the method he uses? He was online for years and years, you know. I still exchange emails with him now and then.



Bob Carver also famously showed that he could replicate the sound of various amp topologies favored by 'golden ears' , in a single solid state amp, to such degree that the 'golden ears' (at Stereophile, as it happens) couldn't tell his amp from their favorite audio jewelry. Not bad for a 'deaf' guy. Perhaps you are extrapolating far too much from the Sunfire subs, which are aimed at a particular market (one that highly values compactness)?


It may be an urban legend, but circumstantial evidence on this very thread suggests it's a common enough method.


Thanks, but actually, I'm quite jovial. It's hard not to smile at some of the stuff written here.

While you may have found this setup works well in your particular room Tony, it should be noted that such placement can actually create more problems with modal response than it solves. Further still, Harman Intl. Research Acoustician Todd Welti found in his much noted Subwoofers: Optimum Number and Locations white paper (see: this link) that one of the best results for two subs was found when locating them at wall midpoints (on opposing walls). For corner sub location, much better results were found by locating the two subs in opposite corner of the room -- not in the front corners.

As Mr. Welti noted in his white paper, "The modal behavior sound... is often oversimplified or misunderstood." "There are some aspects of room modes which make "eyeballing" expected room responses from generalized standing wave plots risky." The point is, getting subs placed correctly may result in placement that is unexpected. Be prepared to experiment a bit for best results in your room. Measurement tools are helpful. You may also just have to accept the fact that in some cases furniture placement, poor room dimensions (and WAF for some) may ultimately force you into less-than-ideal sub placement. Just do the best with what you have to work with and consider offsetting less-than-ideal placement with room treatments and/or EQ tweaking.

For those considering either U1 or U2 subs, do understand there are some inherent differences in these two dissimilar design approaches. The U1 has two woofers mounted back-to-back in one cabinet. This gives it the unique advantage of having a sub cabinet that doesn't vibrate like a normal sub cabinet does, as well as creating a sub with greater efficiency. The down side of two speakers mounted in one cabinet, is that you don't have the placement flexibility that you have with two separate cabinets (like the U2). When you stack (or place side-by-side) two W2 cabinets (a W2 being a single sub cabinet from the U2 system) you do increase the effective output by 3 db. Both are excellent subs; but I would suggest that those trying to decide between these two subs, first give some serious thought to where you can place sub cabinets in your room.

Great point. Now, to extend it to the logical conclusion, how much faith should one put in the 'consensus' arrived at by use of these tools -- or even one's own judgements? What caveats might one want to keep in mind, or even include in one's reports?


Not hardly. No one can deny that the reasons for a preference can be a tricky thing..and might not be what the listener thinks they are. I've even seen allusions to this in the thread...where at least one or two contributors seem to take a more skeptical view of the enthusiasms expressed here, than others.

Of course, you want to normalize that person's opinion, either to a reference point (a speaker you've both heard), multiple reference points (more ideally), or (most ideally) by deriving a set of paramaters you can use (i.e. person A likes a bright speaker, doesn't care about bass precision as much as volume, and prefers a soundstage with pinpoint imaging to a wide/tall soundstage).

Doing so in a scientific sense, of course, is pretty difficult. Finding a particular someone whose opinion you trust goes a long way toward helping if you can consistently hear that person's opinion.

And then there are some other issues, i.e. associated equipment, room acoustics, source. But in the end there are too many variables to account for, and with someone you trust, you put some faith in their ability to listen through those things.

Fuzzy logic and intuitive stuff like that is something that people are surprisingly good at. It's when we try to completely formalize things that we tend to get lots of unintended artifacts.


There are also lots of people out there who like nothing more than being critical of people's enthusiastic opinions. They're not any more trustworthy than the enthusiastic group.

They're trying to be scientific rather than anecdotal. Nothing wrong with that, but if you asked my grandmother how to live, she'd have told you "all things in moderation". Then "science" came along, spent $millions of taxpayer money ($billions?) to destroy every food known to man, then come back around 20 years later to "all things in moderation". Gee, thanks. Anecdotal evidence told us that long ago.

If Harman wants to build a facility for me so I can do DBTs for my customers, I'll do it. But if I have to do it, my speaker prices are going to start at about $100,000/pr. How *precise* does "I like this better" have to be to be valid? If you think your wife is more attractive to you than another woman, do you need a scientific test to validate that for you? I wouldn't

Oh, I e-mailed him a lot. I finally just gave up on him. He is who he is, he does what he does. He measures the "speaker/room" which is fine because it can give you some data, but I don't have is room, nor does anyone else. Moreover, it makes the FR as far as the speaker goes *completely* useless. In reality, measuring the "speaker/room" is really just an interesting thing, since we don't hear the room the way a mic measures it at all. So, he's misleading people by implying that he's measured the speaker. He hasn't.
Maybe But he actually managed to make electronic gear that bothered my ears. I don't know how he did that.
Hey, I'm laughing at your posts right now

Still, at least you have good speakers, so you've got that going for you. But you might want to just enjoy things rather than getting all "Scientific America" on anything related to music!

I have to prove to myself that I like something now?

Crap, I just bought a car without a DBT!!! Well, I tried that, but kept crashing

I wonder if it fits as much as I think it does or whether I just imagined it

For many people, it isn't that hard.

In my case, I have listened to quite a bit of my music collection thru the SB3s for some time and have come to some definate conclusions regarding the strong and weak points of that speaker in the context of my setup and the music I listen to. So, it wasn't too hard to listen to my music thru the Classic Threes this time and see if those strong and weak points had changed some how. After going thru that exercise, it was very obvious the Classic Threes were a better speaker - again, in my context.

Now, if I were evaluating speakers in an unknown situation - unknown music, uncertain equipment - I would definately have a hard time coming to a conclusion and that's why I'm rather skeptical of reviews in general. But that's not the case in this thread. Most of the people here have lived with their music habits and equipment for a long time, enough to notice a change for the better or worse. I don't think you need "golden" ears (I hate that expression) to do this either.

John, as a dealer, do you have any idea why there seems to be plenty of Classic speakers on the grey market; but not enough on the dealers' hands?

Since you obviously must have forgotten if you actually did read it the first time, allow me to refresh your memory:







We might not have Harman's multi-million dollar facility with a turntable, but we do the best we can.

Based on your logic though, what's the point of even demoing different speakers in dealerships, or anywhere for that matter, even one's own home. Should no one decide between a set of speakers without first flying with them to Harman's facility to compare? I mean, after all, unless I'm with them in Harman's facility, I can't even trust my own ears that a set of NHT XDs really sound any better than a Bose Acoustimass system.

Ugghh, Carver.
I know there is good and bad in every manufacturer's models, but
I bought a Carver M400 Magnetic Field Amp in 1980 and paired
it with a NAD 3020 Integrated amp as a preamp.
That thing must have had a S/N ratio of about 60 because the hiss was audible all the time.
And it made this putt putt sound.
I hooked it up to my friend's Klipsch Heresy's which were really efficient and
the hiss was so loud that the music was unlistenable.

When i tired of the Carver Amp I used the NAD 3020's amp section and it was a sonic revelation.

Thanks for the thoughtful post. However, Malcolm Gladwell notwithstanding, I have to disagree about the utility of 'fuzzy logic' and 'intuition' for generating *trustworthy* results in a consistent fashion. Scientific method, with its obsession with controls, is predicated on the demonstrable fact that such 'fuzzy observation' tends to generates artifacts, and is therefore inefficient. Dogged *formalization* of methods is what gets us results which hold for more than one time, for one person. Which isn't to say the methods you cite couldn't bring you to the same result -- but it's something of a crapshoot.

In the particular case of preference for speakers, Sean Olive at Harman ran an interesting study, using lots of trained and untrained subjects (including audio industry people and reviewers) that found that listeners tend to converge on preference for speakers that happen to measure well in certain parameters (e.g., off axis response, for one) when they were compared *blind* -- but when compared sighted, there was no correlation. In sighted comaprison, people are unavoidably influenced by things like brand/model reputation. , fit & finish, size, etc as well as sound.

The kicker of Olive's study (published in the JAES some few years ago) in particular was that one of the speakers rated *worst* when the comparisons were blinded, was a speaker that one of the audio mags had voted 'product of the year' previously. (It measured rather poorly too.)

One has to also consider that simply moving one's head a few inches to either side often significantly changes the 'sound' heard from the same speakers in the same room. We;re all aware too of the hobby lore that says optimal speaker positioning comes down to adjustment in *fractions* of inches. So even with direct comparison of two speakers in the same room, speaker position is arguably going to have a critical effect on sound...one which could influence 'preference' even though it's not really an intrinsic aspect of the speaker performance. Couple that with the rather poor performance of audio memory for anything other than relatively gross differences (as documented in the psychoacoustics literature), leads one to suspect that a typical speaker comparison is fraught with opportunities for mistakes in judgement.

Which is why I say of my dear SuperOnes: I likes 'em fine. And that's all.

"The best you can is good enough' makes for a good Radiohead lyric, but not necessarily for reliable data... I did read it the first time. Your method is not terrible , but also not, shall we say, immune ot critique.



This reads like an argument from despair, not reason. There's lots of things in life that we can't know as well as we'd like -- so is the best response to IGNORE that we can't know (or to assert more knowledge than is warranted), or to ACCEPT, and adjust one's claims and beliefs accordingly? Do we ignore possible sources of error, or acknowledge them (to ourselves, to our correspondents)?

I say: acknowledge them, and realize that my preferences for 'sound' might have other components. Perhaps try to minimize such factors where possible. Perhaps try to find out what has been discovered by people who HAVE been able to set up more rigorous comparisons. Perhaps investigate work on correlation between measurement and perception of quality. That's the best *I* can do. I like my speakers, I might like others better, or worse, but in every case I'd have to agree that my preference is unlikely to be purely based on sound, even if I want to believe it is.

(We're talking about preference here, remember. Based *entirely* on measurements, I could predict that most people will find the Xds to sound *different* from the Bose Acoustimass. You could make a case based on things like Toole/Olive that they'll find the Xds better sounding too. Some things do fall into the category of no-brainers; a subwoofer will tend to be (correctly) perceived as more bassy than a mini-cube. Duh. Some 'perceptions' are predictable from laws of physics and acoustics, even without listening tests.)

This 'matching claims to evidence quality' is a *radical* idea in the audio hobby, I know....I guess in the end it's about not fooling *yourself* or being overconfident about the *why* of what one hears. I think the idea that one's self is easily fooled, that we tend to overestimate the accuracy of our own subjective experience (which science, alas, has demonstrated again and again in various fields) offends some people.

Tell you what then, why don't you set us all up a comparison in Harman's lab between the Three and M5 with the same sub for both to save us all from our despair?

hmmm...loud hiss plus putt-putt sound...is it possible that the amp was defective?

I'd love to...but I'm not sure how to arrange that with Harman. Can you hook me up?

I agree with everything you say. I have read the Welti's article several times. Unfortunately, I don't have a dedicated theater room and placement options are restricted as there are bookcases in the way of sub placement. One of the compromises I had to make.

I guess I should have said "Sound better to me given my placement options". That said, I don't think that sitting the M6s on top of the W1s in the middle of the room would ever be a very good compromise. YMMV.

I'm a scientist by training, so I know enough about the scientific method that I'm not just full of crap here.

Science is pretty much a crapshoot, too. And this is particularly true in the audio world, where testing methodology is just plain bad. The only thing that's consistently reproducible is measurements, which is why I like them, but even measurements can fool you if they're performed badly, or if certain things are ommitted.

When it comes to listening tests, think of the Pepsi/Coke blind taste test. People consistently preferred Pepsi, primarily because it was sweeter. But that doesn't mean they liked Pepsi better, just that they like it better under those conditions, which, in particular, were brief.

I once was laying down in an MRI for an hour while being given alternating sips of Coke and Pepsi and reporting which I preferred. It was dark. The soda was flat because otherwise it messed up their delivery system. It was diet coke and diet pepsi. Eventually, I lost the ability to reliably descriminate between them, and I have pretty good tastebuds.

The point is that in the quest for consistent scientific measurement of audio equipment, we create artificial scenarios that have nothing to do with how accurately and satisfyingly they produce music.

And we introduce artifacts into the data that are as bad, or even worse, than what happens in non-blind listening.

Nag, nag, nag......

Also, keep in mind that the level of control necessary for an engineer to ensure he is going to put out a speaker that is both accepted in the marketplace and is without major flaw is different from the level of control needed to go in, listen and chose speakers based on their sound, the sound of the competition and your tastes.

This would make an interesting thread of its own, but has nothing to do with the Classic line.

I'm going to guess that it is because most of these grey market speakers don't exist except as a tool for getting people to give out their CC. Then they'll try to figure out how to get a pair. I still can't get enough and I get a disproportionate amount of gear, trust me.

Boy, I guess one of Krabapple's guys (Harman) has refuted the other (Noussaine) on this.

Ouch! That'll leave a mark!

Unless, of course, Nousaine actually has his room in said Harman R&D facility.

Now that you mention it Tony, I do recall reading something you posted a while back about the challenges you faced with your sub placement. Most of us do have compromises of some sort to live with; other than the fortunate ones here with dedicated theater spaces. While useful to consider, I don't think the Welti research was ever intended to provide any absolute answers on placement (too many variables for that), but it can be instructional to those experimenting with sub placement in their own space.

Even if your sub placement is not as optimal for your space as is theoretically possible -- were you willing to refurnish -- I'll bet it still sounds pretty darn good. And really, isn't that what most of us are after? I'm just as guilty as many here are, when it comes to obsessing about things like this, and sometimes that does take some of the fun out of the hobby. Avoiding gross errors is good, but worrying about relatively small differences is mostly an exercise in futility, especially when the required changes are not easily accommodated.


I wasn't trying to single you out for that comment Tony, as much as I was wanting to help the less well informed here to get a better handle on the subject.



I didn't get from the earlier posts, that anyone was thinking about placing W1s in "the middle of the room". In the Moncreiff review, he did play with positioning W1s further in to the room, and running multiple W1s -- even suggesting readers might want to have a W1 for every M6 used (which Welti noted can be problmeatic). He also played with laying the W1 on its side, so that the driver was closer to the floor; and still setting an M6 on top, with the suggestion of using a low slung chair. Not exactly practical advice for most, but he did note relatively low placement (using the W1 as a stand) did provide better than expected results.

While there are some tradeoffs involved with positioning subs away from a room boundary; I have observed that T5/T6 owners will often position their towers for optimal imaging; and most often, the towers end up being positioned several feet from the front wall. Which brings us back to one of the bigger plusses of the sub/satellite concept: being able to position the subs where do the most good. Rarely ever are subs placed in the same spot where the monitors sound the best. Using subs for speaker stands is, no doubt, a compromise where it comes creating the best possible bass. However, it does offer a workable compromise for some situations; and sometimes you just have to go with what works.

just got myself a T6, M6 center and 4 L5s for my new 7.1 HT. Very happy to be in the NHT club and VERY excited to hook them up. I was debating over whether to go the 3s with evo sub route but a $3.3k all in price convinced me not to wait until Mark or Krabapple managed to get some definitive answers from Harman's R&D lab.....

Just had to tell someone!

Piers