ARC VT80SE with KT170 tubes: audio art without artifice

[Kvali1]

It's funny to hear you say that. Alan Shaw, who designed the highly praised Harbeth line of speakers, said you get the voice right, and everything else falls into place. Legend has it that his breakthrough in cone design came about as he was trying to accurately reproduce his daughter's voice.
I think most loudspeaker designers feel that the midrange is where the music lives. Of course, bass is profoundly important. But, to me, bass quality is far more important than slam or physical presence. I tend to get a little sick if I hear too much bass. I don't like it personally.

I think different loudspeakers tend to have distinct radiation patterns. You react differently to them. Some folks love the sound staging you get from mini monitors. There's a reason the original Kef LS 3/5A's sell for 5-7 grand on eBay. This is a shoebox sized loudspeaker. Some folks swear by horns, which never had much bass to begin with, but they have crazy dynamics and you can drive them with 1 watt.

I used to own B&W 800 Diamonds, and drove them with a big Krell 700cx monster. Those do produce crazy slam and dynamics, but ultimately I felt the sacrifice to the midrange and coherence was too much. The tweeters on those stick out like a sore thumb.

Large-scale dynamic speakers can be fun to own and listen to, but unfortunately, as I said, there's no free lunch. You have the crossover coloration, the fact that different drivers are producing the sound that needs to be tailored into a whole, and the ear quickly latches on to the cabinet coloration, the crossover coloration and the energy storage in the cabinet. Once you hear that, you cannot unhear it. It's like an aftertaste that is on every recording.

So, I'm happy to trade all that away for the sheer coherence of the large SL, with one panel that produces all the frequency spectrum from deep bass to high treble. Here's a writeup of the SL G9-7c from CAF 2024. The reviewer uses the word "natural". That sums it all. There's no need to divvy up the sound into pieces. It simply sounds like no other loudspeaker does to me. There's a veil that is lifted. As to deep bass, well, as I said, I'm happy to trade that away for so much in return. I can always plug in my big REL G1 Mk2 subs, if I feel the need to rattle my walls.

Sound Lab G9-7C ESLs | CAF 2024

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pt.audio

100000% , natural , I use the word real .
Nothing else comes close to.

 

[Steve williams]

I get everything you say but I totally disagree with your saying you get deep bass on your speakers. Yiou dont. It's simple physics.

WE will agree to disagree on this one., Put your speaker up against a cone speaker and you will easily hear the difference . Once again it's physics. Panels dont move air. I Love your speakers Burt they aint full range. You keep talking slam as if you need to be hit in the gut. It's not that .

 

[Steve williams]

I guess the best way to summarize is that your so called deep bass with your speakers is 2 dimensional, not three dimensional

 

[WillBthr]

Define please: "2 dimensional, not three dimensional".

 

[treitz3]

Musical wallpaper versus a sonic soundscape explosion in all directions.

Tom

 

[Kingrex]

The only time I have been highly perceptive of bass was in a competition car.

In front of a home stereo, felt bass is very minimal. If at all. And if your really feeling it, its probably not musical bass. A woofer can not move far enough to exite the room and at the same time, capture fine detail.

If you want bass thats tactile and felt in the room, you probably need subs. But then again. Many times subs are set up wrong if you feel them.

I have investigated subs for years yet never pulled the trigger due to the vast issues. Until a couple days ago. In my talks with a speaker designer, a horn loaded sub makes sense. A horn amplifies the movement of the driver. A horn driver need only move about 1/8 the excursion of a boxed cone driver. That means it can retain micro detail and sound natural like real instruments.

I see not reason to say a panel speaker can ot have as good or better bass than a boxed driver. It comes down to, what bass do you want. The Magnepan 20.7 driven by ARC Ref 250 amps was some of the best bass I heard. Very natural and real speaker. That showing at my local store turned me away from box speakers permanently. I never looked back.

 

[Steve williams]

Interesting as it was Magnepans with which I started my journey and the bass was polite but 2 dimensional. I love the sound of panels but I gave up due to the above mentioned reasons

 

[Kingrex]

Room may have a lot to.do with it. It was in maybe a 20 x 26 x 9 room with a lot of treatments. Maybe a flat panel speakers has more issues in a living room playing with force and power. But in a purpose built room, the ones I heard were very dynamic and alive.
I have head Magnepan 3.6 at shows and they didn't have that robust power.

If your looking at a woofer driver and its jumping out of its skin to exite the room, how is it supposed to capture subtle details. If you can feel it, that means the air is fighting the driver and damping its response. And if the cone isn't incredibly stiff, it means the core may have moved through its full travel and the edges are still somewhere behind trying to catch up. Thats smearing detail and causing phase issues.

Making good.bass with a driver is a difficult task. Not only does it take a special speaker. It would take a special amp with a lot of quality power control over the drivers. Not saying it can't be done. But there is a lot to overcome. The speaker is probably the most critical component in the chain. They all have a very distinct voice. I bet most people would prefer 50 hertz and up done really well over 25 hertz and up done good.

 

[Steve williams]

So you’re telling me that a flat plastic panel not moving air reproduces good bass .

 

[Kvali1]

So you’re telling me that a flat plastic panel not moving air reproduces good bass .

Room may have a lot to.do with it. It was in maybe a 20 x 26 x 9 room with a lot of treatments. Maybe a flat panel speakers has more issues in a living room playing with force and power. But in a purpose built room, the ones I heard were very dynamic and alive.
I have head Magnepan 3.6 at shows and they didn't have that robust power.

If your looking at a woofer driver and its jumping out of its skin to exite the room, how is it supposed to capture subtle details. If you can feel it, that means the air is fighting the driver and damping its response. And if the cone isn't incredibly stiff, it means the core may have moved through its full travel and the edges are still somewhere behind trying to catch up. Thats smearing detail and causing phase issues.

Making good.bass with a driver is a difficult task. Not only does it take a special speaker. It would take a special amp with a lot of quality power control over the drivers. Not saying it can't be done. But there is a lot to overcome. The speaker is probably the most critical component in the chain. They all have a very distinct voice. I bet most people would prefer 50 hertz and up done really well over 25 hertz and up done good.

10000% , drivers inherently present an impossible challenge . Zellatons come close , but the word close still applies

 

[treitz3]

In the words of a deceased friend of mine. "There is no replacement for displacement". That said, omitted bass or lower registers isn't bass. It's simply omitted.

Tom

 

[WillBthr]

Low frequencies in a room are not directional due to the wavelength.

 

[godofwealth]

Bass peaks are notoriously hard to correct. There have been innumerable solutions over the past few decades, from passive bass traps to active room equalization. What electrostatic loudspeakers try to do is fix the problem at the source. Don’t excite room modes in the axis parallel to the loudspeaker, only in the perpendicular direction. That gets rid of many issues that plague moving coil dynamic speakers. It always cracks me up to see audiophiles that install huge hulking dynamic loudspeakers in relatively tiny rooms, or even worse, position the loudspeakers at the far end of the room while they squat at the other end. All you’re doing is making the problem worse. You’ve got to eliminate as much of the room as possible, either by design or by active or passive equalization. Otherwise all you’re doing is listening to either a huge bass peak or a bass null, depending on where you sit. The room is the biggest source of distortion in high end audio, next to your speakers. All else is vanishingly small in comparison.

I mentioned this experiment by Amar Gooal Bose in his famous acoustics class at MIT. Play any recording on your loudspeakers and record the sound of your loudspeakers in your room at the listening chair. Now play that back on your loudspeakers and repeat. Do this half a dozen times. What do you get? Astonishingly pure noise. You absolutely cannot hear any music after a few iterations. The distortion from your room and loudspeakers is so high that it obliterates any musical signal. Needless to say, if you daisy chain a set of ten identical amplifiers, level adjusted, you can’t even tell a difference from one amplifier unless you listen very closely. So, the 800-pound gorilla in high end audio is the room and the way your loudspeakers interact with it.

 

[godofwealth]

And let’s not forget the other great source of nonlinearity: our own hearing. Our ears are not like a microphone. What we hear is greatly influenced by the volume we hear music at and of course the frequency and our age and our sex. The famous Fletcher Munson curve shows the problem with bass. You don’t hear bass well at all at lower volumes. Notice at low volumes our sensitivity to bass drops off sharply. That’s why the older stereos from the 1970s had a “loudness” control. The idea was that at low volumes, it adds a bass bump to equalize the apparent loudness of bass. As the sound gets louder, our ears start to linearize in bass response. But at high decibels, room distortion gets worse. It’s a catch-22 problem!

 

[Steve williams]

And let’s not forget the other great source of nonlinearity: our own hearing. Our ears are not like a microphone. What we hear is greatly influenced by the volume we hear music at and of course the frequency and our age and our sex. The famous Fletcher Munson curve shows the problem with bass. You don’t hear bass well at all at lower volumes. Notice at low volumes our sensitivity to bass drops off sharply. That’s why the older stereos from the 1970s had a “loudness” control. The idea was that at low volumes, it adds a bass bump to equalize the apparent loudness of bass. As the sound gets louder, our ears start to linearize in bass response. But at high decibels, room distortion gets worse. It’s a catch-22 problem!

View attachment 151533

I suggest you do another experiment where perhaps you listen to a song playing organ music using sound lab speakers and the same song using organ played through dynamic speakers. I think that you might understand the difference between hearing bases response through panels versus bass response through cone drivers. the facts are the facts panel speakers do not move air and the response is completely different. I will say again in my opinion The bass response may be there but to me it is two dimensional and not three dimensional the way, we would normally hear it. At any rate I’m done trying to make sense for you Let’s just agree to disagree

 

[Ron Resnick]

there is some thing palpable with realistic bass and panels do not have this.

This is false. It depends on the panels.

I don't hear impactful bass from Sound Labs. I do hear impactful bass from Alsyvox and Clarisys. The power and extension of the bass from the Clarisys Auditorium (which I have heard for a total of seven days) easily rivals any box speaker with two or three 8" or 11" or so drivers.

Rather than two dimensionality one of the things I find most attractive about planar dipoles is the openness and naturalness and depth and three dimensionality of the soundstage.

(I've said many times I would add subwoofers to a ham sandwich, and that is true. That means for hobby purposes I would add subwoofers to every one-tower speaker, unless the listening room couldn't handle it.)

 

[Ron Resnick]

So you’re telling me that a flat plastic panel not moving air reproduces good bass .

Sound is a mechanical wave. If a panel speaker did not move air we would not hear any sound at all.

 

[Paul1960]

The only time I have been highly perceptive of bass was in a competition car.

In front of a home stereo, felt bass is very minimal. If at all. And if your really feeling it, its probably not musical bass. A woofer can not move far enough to exite the room and at the same time, capture fine detail.

If you want bass thats tactile and felt in the room, you probably need subs. But then again. Many times subs are set up wrong if you feel them.

I have investigated subs for years yet never pulled the trigger due to the vast issues. Until a couple days ago. In my talks with a speaker designer, a horn loaded sub makes sense. A horn amplifies the movement of the driver. A horn driver need only move about 1/8 the excursion of a boxed cone driver. That means it can retain micro detail and sound natural like real instruments.

I see not reason to say a panel speaker can ot have as good or better bass than a boxed driver. It comes down to, what bass do you want. The Magnepan 20.7 driven by ARC Ref 250 amps was some of the best bass I heard. Very natural and real speaker. That showing at my local store turned me away from box speakers permanently. I never looked back.

I own Magnepan 20.7s and their bass is dramatically better than the 3.7s and competitive with many box speakers but they definitely don't have "some of the best bass" I've heard. My Final M35s have much better, more natural and more detailed bass than the 20.7s and they still don't compare to a very high end box speaker for bass. But they do offer a tremendous amount of clarity, detail, and depth of soundstage and tonal purity that exceeds most speakers I've heard. I've never had the pleasure of hearing Sound Labs so I have no idea how they compare.

 

[bonzo75]

I don't hear impactful bass from Sound Labs. I do hear impactful bass from Alsyvox and Clarisys. The power and extension of the bass from the Clarisys Auditorium (which I have heard for a total of seven days) easily rivals any box speaker with two or three 8" or 11" or so drivers.

Haven't heard Clarisys, but I always preferred the midbass and bass of well restored Apogeees like Henk's Grands and his Scintilla to most cones. There are rare cones like Stenheims which do good bass that's as integrated. Maggies or Analysis weren't similar to Apogees though.

 

[PeterA]

This reads like a contentious discussion about quality versus quantity.

The other night I heard a very nice musical presentation at @Al M. ’s house from his new digital gear, but only after we made some minor changes and turned off the subs. Too much woofage.