Some tantalizing rumors about Wilson and Magico
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Granted about Siegfried. But his AA speakers never did anything for me. So does the innovation translate into practical?
Wow, you hit so many good points here.
A shiny paint job is not innovative, unless there is something special about the process that makes it more consistent, more durable, etc. A good auto-quality paint job is skill and labor-intensive, not innovative -- I agree.
Someone brought up Vandersteen and the use of wood and carbon fiber not being innovative. I spoke with Richard at CES and the innovative part is not somethng you see: it's the way the two are bonded together -- in a way that does not increase mass -- that is the innovative part. And it required original thinking.
Measurements are a great way to "see" innovation. When you see a tweeter extend out to 40kHz without breaking up, then there is something advanced going on with materials, etc., and that makes for an audibly better speaker. Conversely: When you see a baffle free of diffraction-inducing hard edges, that is simply applying a well-known solution to a long-known problem. I'd say that is even more mundane than skill -- that's competence. Some still screw this up.
Companies like Rockport, Magico, Tidal, and Vivid display great skill and innovative engineering to achieve the results they are getting.
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Have you seen how B&W creates their diamond domes using artificial diamond and a process that deposits it on a substrate, then carves away the substrate leaving a pure, smooth diamond dome that doesn't break up till way, way out of the audible band?
Innovative? It sure was when it was developed. How about the manufacture of beryllium?
I think it is hard for any small high-end company to be truly "innovative." They simply lack the resources to really push the state of the art. How is that for a controversial statement? 
I created a thread about which are the most innovative companies a while back. My definition is simple: how often do we read papers from them at AES? How often do we see proper studies of consumer preferences?
Speaker design today is half science half black magic. We just don't understand fully all the perceptual aspects of a speaker going into million different homes with million different configurations. To me, companies that dig into the black magic part and convert it to science are the ones that win my vote. Many high-end companies instead, push to make the black magic part bigger by emphasizing nebulous things they can't quantify as being good. That is not innovative.
Myles talks about factory tour. The tour you want to take is to Harman factory and see the scale these guys have to do proper R&D. I have worked for small companies and big. Boy, do you suffer when you work for small companies and compete with big. I once wanted to buy a machine that simulated electronic IC in a computer system. It was $250K. I complained to the vendor about the cost and how anyone could afford it. The man answered they just sold 20 to Intel! Needless to say, Intel could try 20 alternatives in the time I could do one.
Spending a ton on material gets you exotic parts to be sure but if you don't have the proper resources and science foundation to quantify their advantages, it all turns into a gray haired guy's idea of best sound and marketing speak.
I created a thread about which are the most innovative companies a while back. My definition is simple: how often do we read papers from them at AES? How often do we see proper studies of consumer preferences?
Speaker design today is half science half black magic. We just don't understand fully all the perceptual aspects of a speaker going into million different homes with million different configurations. To me, companies that dig into the black magic part and convert it to science are the ones that win my vote. Many high-end companies instead, push to make the black magic part bigger by emphasizing nebulous things they can't quantify as being good. That is not innovative.
Myles talks about factory tour. The tour you want to take is to Harman factory and see the scale these guys have to do proper R&D.
I have worked for small companies and big. Boy, do you suffer when you work for small companies and compete with big. I once wanted to buy a machine that simulated electronic IC in a computer system. It was $250K. I complained to the vendor about the cost and how anyone could afford it. The man answered they just sold 20 to Intel! Needless to say, Intel could try 20 alternatives in the time I could do one. Spending a ton on material gets you exotic parts to be sure but if you don't have the proper resources and science foundation to quantify their advantages, it all turns into a gray haired guy's idea of best sound and marketing speak
.
OK, I wrestled with the idea of innovative being a "total" speaker design vs. using a new type driver. Certainly there are some different type drivers introduced over the years; Maggie's ribbon to the way YG now carves its drivers out of Al to that "strange" looking supertweeter on the Trenner and Frendl speakers. But "one" driver seldom makes a speaker eg. what about the Jordan drivers.
Guess Dan D'Agostino hasn't been reading The SoundStage! Network.
When he got ready to launch the first product from his brand new company at CES 2011, he didn't choose a speaker from Rockport, Magico, Tidal, or Vivid.
http://www.youtube.com/user/wilsonaudiospeakers#p/u/1/wTfig-wHTWk
When he got ready to launch the first product from his brand new company at CES 2011, he didn't choose a speaker from Rockport, Magico, Tidal, or Vivid.
http://www.youtube.com/user/wilsonaudiospeakers#p/u/1/wTfig-wHTWk
I think it is hard for any small high-end company to be truly "innovative." They simply lack the resources to really push the state of the art. How is that for a controversial statement?
I created a thread about which are the most innovative companies a while back. My definition is simple: how often do we read papers from them at AES? How often do we see proper studies of consumer preferences?
Speaker design today is half science half black magic. We just don't understand fully all the perceptual aspects of a speaker going into million different homes with million different configurations. To me, companies that dig into the black magic part and convert it to science are the ones that win my vote. Many high-end companies instead, push to make the black magic part bigger by emphasizing nebulous things they can't quantify as being good. That is not innovative.
Myles talks about factory tour. The tour you want to take is to Harman factory and see the scale these guys have to do proper R&D.
Spending a ton on material gets you exotic parts to be sure but if you don't have the proper resources and science foundation to quantify their advantages, it all turns into a gray haired guy's idea of best sound and marketing speak
Thinks that's true for any research. Try getting a piece of research equipment in academics. OTOH, try getting that product if you work for a pharma. No problem, since the pharma will depreciate the cost of the equipment on their taxes
To my way of thinking, innovative is when an engineer and/or scientist invents something new that requires and is granted a patent. Some of the processes that speaker manufacturers are using in manufacturing are applicable to that theory, however, a lot/most are not.
In most cases, the standard technique is used with perhaps a modification...resulting in a technique that has been used before and is already patented to somebody else
IMHO, Magico and Wilson and not really innovative designs...they are both using dynamic drivers in a box. Vandersteen is doing the same thing, as are most of the known speaker manufacturers today. I don't know of anyone who is really thinking "outside of the box" Is anyone aware of a totally new theory/design that will end up as a audio speaker
BTW, I totally agree with amirm's post above, that has been my experience also.
. Some of the processes that speaker manufacturers are using in manufacturing are applicable to that theory, however, a lot/most are not.In most cases, the standard technique is used with perhaps a modification...resulting in a technique that has been used before and is already patented to somebody else
IMHO, Magico and Wilson and not really innovative designs...they are both using dynamic drivers in a box. Vandersteen is doing the same thing, as are most of the known speaker manufacturers today. I don't know of anyone who is really thinking "outside of the box"
Is anyone aware of a totally new theory/design that will end up as a audio speakerBTW, I totally agree with amirm's post above, that has been my experience also.
Stereophile liked them ...
"1998 Stereophile Loudspeakers of the Year
"The single most impressive audio component I have yet encountered"
-Shannon Dickson, Stereophile Nov. 1997" ...
http://www.audioartistry.com/
Practical, like innovative, depends on context and contrast.
I don't find five-figure or six-figure loudspeakers that weigh hundreds of pounds each, practical.
But that's just me. I do find loudspeakers at 60 lbs each that do all or most of
their big box similars do, and do some things much better, and at a fraction the price, practical: Orions.
Jeff-I understand your points. And no, I haven't seen B&W make their diamond domes nor have I seen Focal stamp out their Be domes. Although these are all improvements to basic dome tweeter designs, we can certainly argue they are innovative and resulted in improvements to the sound. Be has been around for a long time in the industrial world. Micro Acoustics and I believe Shure used to make their cantilevers from it. The U.S. no longer works with Be as it is a carcinogen. In the microwave tube world that I'm in, our source for Be now comes from Scotland.
I was going to put that my list of signs of innovation tooTo my way of thinking, innovative is when an engineer and/or scientist invents something new that requires and is granted a patent
. But didn't. The issue for patents is that they disclose your know-how so it is not the best option for some companies. Also PTO grants patents for anything unique and not necessarily good or useful. When I worked for large companies we would patent 40-50 things in my group per year. But only one every other year would be important enough to generate revenues or give us a tool to stop someone else from doing something useful. The rest were so specific to what we were doing that didn't matter to anyone else. These so called "core patents" are pretty hard to get but once you have them quite valuable (think Amazon patent on "one click" purchasing).I don't know that you have to think outside the box to be innovative. Look at cars. They still have four wheels. There is no flying car. Yet cars today are exceptionally innovative. Fuel injection doesn't change how an engine works but was quite an innovation. ABS brakes were too. DSC, etc. I am fine with small innovations when they can be quantified to be goodIMHO, Magico and Wilson and not really innovative designs...they are both using dynamic drivers in a box. Vandersteen is doing the same thing, as are most of the known speaker manufacturers today. I don't know of anyone who is really thinking "outside of the box"
.
Great
I heard them quite a bit at a fellow reviewers home driven by a wide range of gear including the BEL and cj Prem 8a amps, Prem 7 preamp, various analog and digital sources, etc and the speakers never knocked my socks off. And despite the rave, AA speakers never caught on and they are now long gone.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I would say that the original Dahlquist DQ10 speakers were an innovative design. This design has gone through much refinement since first implemented by a number of companies including Dahlquist both with and without Carl Marchisotto and with Carl's own companies Alon and Nola.
Rich
Rich
Hi
According to the Merriam-Webster Innovation: the introduction of something new
In what way has WIlson introduced anything new in their loudspeakers .. Or Magico for that extent .. I will agree with Audioguy that neither Vandersteen, norThiel have introduced anything new either but Magnepan and MBL did. The Magnepan planar and the MBL Ribbon were innovative, Same could be said about the Dukane Ionovac Ion tweeter but superb execution is not innovation ... One could even push how some companied worked around some limitations of EL Quad, Martin Logan, Sanders ...
So ... I am coming back: According to the defintion of the word innovation, Wilson and Magico are not innovative.
Great
So are Hafler amplifiers, unfortunately.
The question would be: Why?I think most box loudspeaker makers are nibbling around the market-able edges
with driver tweaks and materials, 'revolutionary' box materials/bracing, and on and on.
Nothing wrong with that, all babies must eat. But it's not innovation,
it's a different shade of the same-old same-old. But it's understandable from a practical/business point of view, and all things considered. Just MHO.
"The typical loudspeaker product is designed to make money and not necessarily to provide accurate sound reproduction. Since customers prefer small, unobtrusive speakers and judge sound quality by the amount of bass that they hear and by high frequencies they had not noticed before, there is a staggering number of essentially identical designs on the market that meet these requirements at different price points. No wonder then that there is a generic loudspeaker sound and that you can always tell whether something that you hear originates from a speaker and not from a live source. The marketing departments of the different speaker manufacturers are busy to point out differentiating features and breakthrough inventions when it comes to the highest price points, but in reality box loudspeaker design has come to a the end of a road and all you will hear are slight variations on the same theme. The fundamental problems of box re-radiation and non-uniform power response in a room are at best only partially solved by these conventional designs.
Sound reproduction is about creating an auditory illusion. When the recorded sound is of real instruments or voices there is a familiar, live reference in our auditory memory. The illusion of hearing a realistic reproduction is destroyed by distortion that is added anywhere in the signal chain from microphone to loudspeaker, but the speaker is by far the biggest culprit. Every designer focuses on the on-axis frequency response as if it were the all determining distortion parameter. Sometimes great attention is paid to the phase response in an attempt to preserve waveform fidelity, which at best can only be achieved for a single listening point in space. Ignored usually, though of much greater importance, is resonance in drivers and cabinets and the slow release of stored energy that goes with it. Furthermore, the uniformity and flatness of the off-axis frequency response which we hear via room reverberation and reflections is rarely a design goal. You can check the naturalness of the timbre by listening from another room. Does it sound like a loudspeaker is playing? The imbalance in the speaker's power response between low and high frequencies destroys the illusion.
And then there are the non-linear distortions, the ones that add sounds that were not present in the original. They are easily measurable in the form of harmonic and intermodulation distortion products. Rarely do non-linear distortion considerations enter into the design of speakers. Otherwise, consumer stores and recording studios would not abound with 2-way designs - usually a 6.5" woofer/midrange and 1" dome tweeter in a ported box - that are physically incapable of the sound levels claimed for them and which by distortion often create a unique box loudspeaker bass experience, variously described with slam and speed. Some design attempts for reducing non-linear distortion lead to line source speakers. While successful at this they introduce phantom image distortions and, coupled with a conventional vented woofer of sorts, they suffer the same uneven power response and rich excitation of room resonances as the typical box speaker design."
http://www.linkwitzlab.com/design_of_loudspeakers.htm
Perhaps "innovation" could mean who is pushing existing techniques and technologies to an extreme level. A level of achievement that sets new standards in the art of building loudspeakers. In that vein, if a company is using a 20 year old tweeter or a poor performing midrange driver in their most expensive loudspeaker, now that isn't innovation. Finding new materials to make their cabinets more inert, that can be seen as innovative to a certain degree. These days, the new driver materials and new advanced motor systems seem the way designers are pushing the SOTA. Vivid, Magico, YG, Tidal, and Vandersteen seem to be pushing the limits in this area. Vivid does hold a bunch of patents on their driver technology for the record. They are a company that doesn't seem to get a ton of press, but they have quietly received lots of stellar reviews. Their cabinet designs often over shadow their driver technology and sound. So while there isn't a sea change of ideas that represent true innovation, there have been significant strides made in existing technology that make significant differences in sound quality.
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