What is the most highly resolving speaker you have ever heard?

The Lansche's are very resolving... that PLASMA is FAST.

From the limited exposure to them I had at RMAF, these plasma tweeters are not for me. Way too piercing and thin sounding. I like my Dynaudio soft dome, thank you


alexandre

The Jon Iverson Force Field. Nothing has ever come even close. Not only was he weird with is down drum corp, but he was brilliant, possibly the best speaker and electronics designer of all times.

I couldnt definetively say yet , i would have to connect up al the contenders to the (zanden) 300 B amp and then decide , i still think its mostly the amp that is the limiting factor for the last bit of resolution
Possible contenders : kharmas first : exquisite and the enigma series , 1.3 diamond enigma being the winner by top to bottom coherene , resolution being about the same
Q7 second place not far behind

AudioExplorations said:

Hmm perhaps a wrong/confusing choice of words on my end. Not really sure how I can otherwise describe it. Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words.

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I guess I would call that focus. I would think that fine micro detail would be the ability to hear some low-level information in a recording that ordinarily gets glossed over with lesser gear vice everything being out of focus.

AudioExplorations said:

How would you define resolution then?

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I thought the discussion was centered on "fine micro detail."

I was greatly impressed with the new Avalon Compas, but the most resolving ones has been a pair of WE series A single drive (lacks both extremes, but the midband is scary!)

AudioExplorations said:

Right, which to me (and most others I suspect) = resolution.

If to you fine detail = focus, then what is your interpretation of the term resolution? (I am also just honestly interested to know what you mean by this).

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Look, you are the one that tried to describe "fine micro detail" by posting a picture of a cat that was taken out of focus and the same cat in focus. That is why I said I would call your description of "fine micro detail" focus. It's not my definition of what "fine micro detail" means. I wanted your description of "fine micro detail" and the out of focus and in focus pictures of a cat are what you gave me. I already explained what I thought it might mean, I was hoping for an audio example from you and not two pictures of cats.

<Apologies in advance for not reading the whole thread before posting and thus replicating earlier post(s).>

IME "micro detail" and similar undefined verbiage can be related to the ability of a speaker to start and stop cleanly, with emphasis on stopping. Ringing caused by the speaker's inability to accurately follow the waveform causes transients to blur a bit,leading edges to be less clean, trailing edges dwindle away instead of cutting off cleanly. If I were to use pictures, I would follow Mark in that for me the difference is between a clear photo and one a little out of focus -- the edges are blurred. The lack of time resolution, transient distortion, whatever you want to call it can sort of "smear" the sound. This is also a function of the amp drivings the speakers, natch.

On-topic: I would place electrostats as most "highly resolving" to me, though I might be hard-pressed to single out one from the many I have heard. The old Apogee ribbons are in there, and of course my beloved Magnepans. I find full-range electrostats less "resolving" than more narrow-band models. The trades to reach into the lower frequencies makes a bigger panel that is harder to drive and harder to keep clean at high frequencies and high volumes. I have heard a few conventional speakers I thought did well, like the old B&W 801's and the IRS II's I had (though their EMIT mids and tweeters take them out of the conventional category). All IMO, and I have not heard enough new speakers to say much about today's top models.

YMMV - Don

I thought my original full-range Apogee ribbons were pretty special....

Lee

Apogee Stages Lee?

RBFC said:

I thought my original full-range Apogee ribbons were pretty special....

Lee

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flez007 said:

Apogee Stages Lee?

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I thought the Apogee Stages were not the full-range ones...superb as i recall and i nearly bought a second hand pair a long. long time ago. I thought there were the Apogee Grand, Divas and one other which were 'full range'?? Boy, its been a long time...and they are still amazing speakers.

microstrip said:

It will depend on what people consider a resolving speaker. You can have resolution related to detail, dynamics, localization and nuance. Sometimes a loudspeaker which excels in one of these aspects is not the best in the others.

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AudioExplorations said:

Micro, could you expand on your interpretation of resolution? What I had in mind was the ability to resolve fine micro detail across the spectrum.

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Sorry for the delay in coming back to this sentence. The main question was resolution - the minimum change that the system must experience to generate perceivable output difference. The thread quickly degenerated in a detail oriented debate, especially after the (IMHO!) misleading image analogy was introduced.

Again IMHO speaker resolution is very strongly dominated by psychoacoustics - our brain recognition capabilities play an important part in this task. A high resolution speaker should have characteristics that make us focus with less effort in small changes that make us perceive something different.

Decades ago, most box speakers were so colored that electrostatics and panel speakers easily created the myth that they had intrinsically better resolution because of the lower mass of the membrane and lower stored energy in it. Although most panels have high resolution, we find that their resolution is very variable with the level they are playing. Although I have owned (and still own ) several specimens of Quad ELS57 and ESL63, and agree they would easily deserve the epithet of high resolution, they were not the more detailed speaker I have owned – this epithet is by far deserved by the Swiss mini monitor Ensemble Reference loudspeakers with the matching stand. But their resolution in micro and macro dynamics gradation was not on par with the Quads or the Wilsons. Surely the electrostatics had limited dynamic range – but if you accepted the risk of pushing them, they had great macro dynamics before dying. The capability of the speaker to separate the natural occurring layers in the music can also be considered resolution. Some speakers make an amalgam of sound – everything seems mixed together, although detailed and with good image. Other excel in depicting that separate entities have intrinsic properties – either by directionality, decay or power they emit. Excellent imaging can also help a lot in speaker resolution – my short experiences with MBLs have shown that when everything is perfect with these speakers have unique properties in this zone of defining the zone of influence of each performer.

My suggested tests for resolution:

1. Detail resolution – the horse flies and water flow noise in track 10 - 4’26’ of Gregorio Paniagua La Folia.

2. Dynamics resolution - Iannis Xenakis Pleiades - Les Percussions de Starsbourg – each of the six percussion instruments has different dynamics

3. Localization – Claudio Monterverdi Vespro della Beata Vergine, La Petite Bande, Sigiswald Kuijken – you must feel the stage and everyone on it. When the singer sings to the tuned back to you, you should feel it – it is not only muted.

4. Nuance – Shostakovich Piano trio nº2 Glinka Quartet. The connection between the performers is established by the subtle nuances of the players of this mono close milked performance. Most speakers can deliver a boring performance.

Just one concluding remark – the resolution is a system property, some times created by the synergy of the system. Changing source, electronics or cables can strongly affect our perception of the resolution of the speaker.

AudioExplorations said:

Thanks for taking the time to put that together, I will look up the music suggested.

To me the image analogy works, but then I may be on a different page to everyone else. Hopefully the listening examples will help to further clarify.

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My problem with the image analogy is that using a lower resolution image you loose detail definitively. The information about the waves in the lake is lost forever in the 72 dpi picture - you can use magnifier devices, glasses or imagination, you will not recover it. This is not what happens usually with speaker resolution. After you listen to some music with a "higher resolution" and find details, you will notice that they still exist in the lower resolution speaker - perhaps not as accessible as in the better one, but they are still there. But if you listen only in the "lower resolution", even several times, and are not warned about them, they will stay unnoticed.