I always like to listen to a combination of classical strings including cello when reviewing gear. I spent a lot of my life playing in classical ochestras and have a pretty decent steer on the cello tone. When I am listening to strings including cello I am looking to hear a sound that is as authentic as possible so clearly hearing decent harmonic content and particularly body with the cello.
Strings really can very quickly teach you whether a system is totally anywhere near it should be imho. I find it a great test for digital in particular as many DACs can make strings sound very wrong indeed. For me the best string authenticity is with Decca SXL vinyl.
Cello is good for testing driver integration and has complex timbre.
Cello is good for testing driver integration and has complex timbre.
Through the years I have heard a number of people bring up the cello when discussing quality systems. Is there anything to judging high-end systems by playing a cello? Thank you
It is well known that many speakers were designed with their mid range driver(s) and woofer(s) wired in opposite polarity to each other.
The cello is smacked right in the middle of their transition point.
At any moment, 1 half of the cello sound is going this direction and the other half is going the opposite direction. How are the resultant 2 halves ever going to sound like the real thing...?
Jerome
This question has been asked almost since the beginning of modern speaker (and crossover) design and appears to have been mostly answered. In short, the ear does not appear to be as sensitive to this sort of timing error (hence phase error) as you might have guessed. Apparently our brain seems to be able to integrate musical signals arriving within a few milliseconds quite well. The following is from a seminal 1998 article by John Atkinson in Stereophile on measuring loudspeakers:
"Acoustic Phase Responses
Does a loudspeaker's time coherence matter? A "perfect" speaker, of course, would have both a perfect impulse response and a perfect frequency response (at one point in space). Another way of looking at a loudspeaker's time-domain performance is to examine its acoustic phase response, the phase angle between the pressure and velocity components of the sound plotted against frequency.
Again, this is an aspect of loudspeaker behavior that has proved controversial. One school of thought holds that it is very important to perceived quality; another, which includes almost all loudspeaker engineers, finds it unimportant. Floyd Toole, now with Harman International but then with Canada's National Research Council, in his summary of research at the NRC into loudspeaker performance that is described in two classic 1986 papers [32, 33], concluded thusly: "The advocates of accurate waveform reproduction, implying both accurate amplitude and phase responses, are in a particularly awkward situation. In spite of the considerable engineering appeal of this concept, practical tests have yielded little evidence of listener sensitivity to this factor...the limited results lend support for the popular view that the effects of phase are clearly subordinate to amplitude response."
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