It’s hard enough to know what loudspeaker to purchase but with the shrinking dealer base, how does one go about making any sort of intelligent decision these days? Watch Now
Speakers / Transmission line
Found 25 results
What Hi-Fi? write: Stereo speakers are the heart and soul of a hi-fi system, and we’ve sifted through 17 years’ worth of Awards issues to pick the top pairs since the turn of the century… Continues HERE
PS AUDIO / Paul McGowan In my post about Dr. Suess and HiFi, I mentioned the work on loudspeaker enclosures by British engineer Leslie Bucknell while at the company my father worked for, Stromberg Carlson. Bucknell’s approach to loudspeaker design was to create a speaker enclosure that would eliminate distortions that occur because of cancellations […]
Now i am not on the expensive range of gorgeous gear many have on here… but i am happy with the set up i have. I run Monitor Audio BX5’s as my main stereo speakers & as many they are bi wire. I have tried doing bi-wire wires from the Yam Aventage amp & could […]
The center image of a two-channel system is known as the phantom channel for a good reason. It is an illusion. It doesn’t actually exist. Once you realize the center channel is completely dependent on setup, room, and speaker placement, it becomes a lot easier to purposefully do whatever it takes to enhance the palpability of your […]
May need to live with some speakers that are good at low volume for a while, due to an ear problem. My room is 15 x 12 and the speakers fire from the 12 foot wall. I use Harbeth C7’s. They have been a reasonable compromise for some years now, but they work a good […]
PS AUDIO / Paul McGowan One of our readers emailed me asking about proximity to his speakers. It was an interesting question. “As I move around the room I find the sweet spot to be 2 feet in front of my 8 foot separated speakers. Am I too close?” First, let me say I admire […]
PS AUDIO / Paul McGowan Their excitement comes from understanding the challenge of making an air piston (which is what a speaker driver is) that can start and stop in perfect synch with the instructions from your power amplifier. To accomplish that feat one would prefer a cone (the piston part) that had zero mass […]
Paul McGowan The notion of using one amplifier perfectly matched to the tweeter and another to the woofer made such elegant sense. Tubes for the top end, solid state grunt for the bottom. Brilliant. That was at a time when the choices in amplifiers were limited. Big, powerful solid state amps sounded pretty poor reproducing […]
A member writes: My new Class D GaNFET amp (Starkrimson Ultra) has dual mono SMPS that are deadly quiet (very black backgrounds), provide tremendous headroom (1000wpc clean peak power-4 ohms), and produce sonic realism and presentations that are jaw-dropping Live…all with a Total package weight of just 18#! 😉 —//— A member writes: Almost every […]
A member writes: I think in order to store a DSD recording onto a disk it has to be stored on a SACD disk and played back on an SACD capable player otherwise if played on a standard CD player you would only hear the standard pressing and not DSD. —//— A member writes: SACD […]
A member writes: Damping Factor(DF) is equal to the impedance of the load divided by the out put impedance of the amp. For example if an amp has an output impedance of say0.1 ohms and the speaker is 8 ohms the DF is 80. If you have 2 8 ohm speakers in series the total […]
Paul McGowan … If you’ve done your system setup homework your chair sits at a comfortable distance from the loudspeakers. With the precision of a ruler, you’ve tweaked and adjusted the speaker’s position for best imaging. Though we call it the sweet spot, it’s certainly not the perfect spot. Within the boundaries of most rooms, the perfect […]
PAUL McGOWAN / PS AUDIO I was recently asked an interesting question. Is it better to have the loudspeaker crossover inside or outside the loudspeaker? At first, the answer seemed rather simple. Inside, of course. Shorter wires, fewer binding posts, etc. Yet, in thinking about it, I can see at least one advantage to an […]
PS AUDIO: It is not difficult to imagine left, right, and center imaging on a stereo system. It’s also likely not too much of a stretch to understand depth. After all, a proper stereo recording reproduces depth as a measure of how far away from the recording microphones the instruments or performers are. Harder for […]
VIEW HERE
CF writes: On balance, I’d say yes. But it’s not an easy question to answer because it depends on so many factors. Which speakers are we comparing? Are we taking the used price of old speakers against what can be bought new for the same amount, or are we inflation adjusting the old price for […]
PAUL McGOWAN Our rooms are as important as our equipment yet only a scarce few of us have the luxury of choosing our room dimensions. Typically we take what we can get within our home and make the best out of it. With our new building in process, we’re heavy into the architectural tasks of […]
For the most part, a dedicated subwoofer output on a receiver or integrated exists because of old-school habits. Long ago, at the beginning of the subwoofer era, there were no built-in crossovers. Subs came in two flavors: an unpowered or powered woofer in a box. If the first the user had to supply a power […]
There are many multi-driver speakers, but few that go floor to ceiling like the IRSV. Floor to ceiling multi-driver speakers are called a Line Source. What’s counter-intuitive about a line source is how specific the imaging can be. With that many drivers, one would think the image would be tall, rather than lifelike, when the […]
Jim Lesurf writes: “Bi-wiring” is a controversial topic. Some people are quite certain it makes an audible difference. Some others are convinced that it can’t actually make any difference at all. The purpose of this analysis is to try and decide whether it is at least theoretically feasible that bi-wiring can make any difference. To […]
If your room isn’t good enough then investing in a wonderful pair of speakers is a waste of resources. Kind of like the idea that if you’re not a gourmet you cannot appreciate fine food. Poppycock. Of course it is true our rooms play a huge role in helping and hurting our HiFi system’s performance. […]