ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Oh dear...you've forgotten the first rule of audio engineering...No Whining!
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
@Beolab. I follow this thread with great interest. And I have no doubt on your experience in 'HiFi', so I encourage you with this 'project'.
Beolab:B&O is a quality lifestyle brand with decent performing products, but far from the pinnacle of the upper HiFi scale, with no limit un-compromised solutions and components.
Small correction on this: It's more then decent performing...
Beolab:If you know so much about sound engineering , then my big question is why do you own B&O and hanging around at Beoworld ??
Maybe he suddenly became aware, as I did at a certain point, that we where as a matter of fact intensely listening to the equipment and forgot to listen to the music.
"Believe nothing you read and only half of what you see, let your ears tell you the truth."
Chris: @Beolab. I follow this thread with great interest. And I have no doubt on your experience in 'HiFi', so I encourage you with this 'project'. Beolab:B&O is a quality lifestyle brand with decent performing products, but far from the pinnacle of the upper HiFi scale, with no limit un-compromised solutions and components. Small correction on this: It's more then decent performing... Beolab:If you know so much about sound engineering , then my big question is why do you own B&O and hanging around at Beoworld ?? Maybe he suddenly became aware, as I did at a certain point, that we where as a matter of fact intensely listening to the equipment and forgot to listen to the music.
Definitely much more than "decent" sounding...also, as for the OP coming into a place called Beoworld and insinuating their audio gear is mediocre sounding "Lifestyle" stuff and if I was really into audio I'd own something better is not going to endear him to many I think.
As for your last point, absolutely true, excellent observation. Great sound, without tweaking or drama. I'd also add that B&O knows quite a bit about what things in speaker design truly matter and has for quite a while, for example being interested in such things as power response long before many speaker companies paid attention to it, and too few really care today. As for what passes for important issues in the "high end" I've been lucky enough to be exposed to enough real engineering, and perhaps more importantly enough controlled listening tests that it disabused me of belief in most audio myths.
Thankfully B&O does sound good, as if you're interested in design, as I am, they are about the only game in town. I have a very mid-century modern home and furnishings, and B&O is perfectly suited for such a house.
Slightly OT digression: In college, my roommate had "borrowed" his brother's really expensive stereo speakers (I don't recall the brand, but they were probably high end mass production, not boutique). Anyway, we blew one of the woofers at a party, and didn't have a lot of money to repair. We went down to the local RadioShack (back when they had electronic geeks working there), and the guy recommended one of their store brand (Realistic) woofers as a replacement. We said "what about the specs?", and he said "specs, specs - every speaker has specs, most are not meaningful - I guarantee if you put this speaker in that enclosure, no one can tell the difference. That's a great enclosure, and that's mostly what matters". It was ~$20 and we were poor college students so what the heck. Installed it. Did a blind listening test with the "audiophiles" on the hall, and sure enough, no one could tell the difference. Brother never found out. All was well.
My conclusion - high end drivers are way into the diminishing returns end of the spectrum when it comes to speaker performance. Maybe tweeters are different, maybe RadioShack had awesome technology, maybe we were stupid kids who didn't know any better, but that's my experience...
And you haven't told your brother yet???
It probably won't matter - I guess, that the 'really expensive' pair of speakers is long gone.
MM
There is a tv - and there is a BV
Well, the simple fact is that there is no such thing as a perfect speaker driver or a perfect technology for them. All of them, no matter what the marketing department says, have their own share of issues that need to be addressed in design. Different designers will have different ideas as to what is the most important characteristic but often they are saddled with a particular technology by the marketing dept. I knew a designer who was making his statement speaker for the company he started, and had since been sold to part of a major audio conglomerate. He disliked metal dome tweeters, as do I. But, marketing told him flat out that for a speaker purporting to be very high end the market expected a metal dome. He went thru many examples before he found one that he said he could tolerate, but still would have preferred a damped fabric dome. His words were just that, tolerate, not excitement or WOW I found a holy grail of tweeters, tolerate.
Think of it for a moment. You're a manufacturer of speakers, and as often happens in the consumer electronics world, the market is mature, that is sales are flat because most of your market have already got speakers they like. Hmmm...what to do, I know, let's introduce a new driver technology and material, tell everyone how superior it is, get some good reviews in the press (that's a whole story in itself, paid for reviews), and voila! All the people out there think the old driver material is inferior, old tech junk, and run to replace their now out of style speakers with your new tech product.
Some designers do believe that, say, a rigid, kevlar or fiberglass or metal driver solves problems. My view is they introduce more problems than they solve, requiring a lot of attention to crossovers, notch filters, etc. which still don't usually solve all the issues. My personal preference, and that of a lot of people I know, is for well damped drivers, meaning paper, doped paper, or plastic for cone drivers, and doped fabric for dome drivers. It would appear that B&O feels similarly.
I have no idea why you didn't hear the difference when you swapped the woofers, I would have expected a lot of difference. For one, unlikely the efficiency of the replacement was the same, and you can tell how important this can be by the fact that B&O, even when swapping for the same speaker driver, has adjustments for efficiency to correct for variances from speaker driver to speaker drive of the same design and manufacture. Pink noise would have shown it up I think, music is at times a remarkably poor test tool. But hey, you got lucky and your brother didn't kill you!
Millemissen: And you haven't told your brother yet??? It probably won't matter - I guess, that the 'really expensive' pair of speakers is long gone. MM
This was ~30 years ago... but it is my understanding the brother was never told and he never noticed....
Was that in a 12 liter volume, tube-shaped aluminum speaker cabinet?
Martin
Hi Fredrik
Sorry too see all those stupidt anser.
And yes i done that, tweeter and upper bas from B & W
It was NOT a Big problem
The tweeter is much better, i love B & O but look at the speaker units, there are space for improvment.
Claus Bundgaard
Define "better."
Jeff: Define "better."
If the OP works for B&O, why doesn't he just run upstairs and ask Geoff the question about replacement drivers?!
.
Mark-N: Jeff: Define "better."
Not just a tweeter, a "super" tweeter!
Intresting project :) Will be fun to follow
Beolab 50, Beolab 8000 x 2, Beolab 4000 x 2, BeoSound Core, BeoSound 9000, BeoSound Century, BeoLit 15, BeoPlay A1, BeoPlay P2, BeoPlay H9 3rd Gen, BeoPlay H6, EarSet 3i, BeoVision Eclipse Gen 2 55", BeoPlay V1-40, BeoCom 6000 and so much else :)
Surely, that Radioshack "Super"-tweeter is not what gets fitted, eh??? - By a guy working at B&O???
Why the h**k would anyone want to mount a super tweeter in a system,
that maxes out at approx 20.000 hz???
I actually had a couple of these super tweeters for my very first stereo system! It was a Marantz 2215B receiver and a couple of small cheap speakers. I was a teenager on a small budget! I blew at least one of the tweeters out, and I thought this could be one way to fix it cheaply. I guess it sounded ok, or at least I wanted it to sound ok!
Which brings me to my serious question. I remember watching the videos for the BeoLab 14, and Jens Rahbek said something similar to:
Even if you have 20 very nice measurements, there is no guarantee that the sound will be nice. We still need to listen.
I take from it that when designing a speaker that measurements are important, but so is listening to it.
In the case of the original topic can the contrast be true?
The speaker can sound nice but you have very bad measurements? I doubt that measurements are usually taken when you swap out speaker components...
It's hard for me to take any of these claims seriously since no details are given, just I swapped out the tweeter with a B&W tweeter and it sounds better. I would think if any of this was true there could be plenty of details to provide and brag about. It all seems very trial and error, but I doubt there could be very many options, so it reminds me of my experience when I was a teenager.
Mark-N:I actually had a couple of these super tweeters for my very first stereo system! It was a Marantz 2215B receiver and a couple of small cheap speakers. I was a teenager on a small budget! I blew at least one of the tweeters out, and I thought this could be one way to fix it cheaply. I guess it sounded ok, or at least I wanted it to sound ok! Which brings me to my serious question. I remember watching the videos for the BeoLab 14, and Jens Rahbek said something similar to: Even if you have 20 very nice measurements, there is no guarantee that the sound will be nice. We still need to listen. I take from it that when designing a speaker that measurements are important, but so is listening to it. In the case of the original topic can the contrast be true? The speaker can sound nice but you have very bad measurements? I doubt that measurements are usually taken when you swap out speaker components... It's hard for me to take any of these claims seriously since no details are given, just I swapped out the tweeter with a B&W tweeter and it sounds better. I would think if any of this was true there could be plenty of details to provide and brag about. It all seems very trial and error, but I doubt there could be very many options, so it reminds me of my experience when I was a teenager.
Sorry, I must have phrased it incorrectly. I didn't mean replacing parts with the OEM equivalents, as I am sure those will preserve the original measurements, but replacement parts other than the original part, such as a replacement from B&W or Radio Shack!