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astrallite

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Posts posted by astrallite

  1. It's a great headphone, really follows the Harman curve closely and has some of the lowest distortion numbers and maybe the fastest driver in a headphone yet.

     

    Unfortunately it's kind of heavy, and lacks soundstage for a top of the line headphone, due it's use of a traditional dome driver. Domes produces spherical sound waves which compress as they approach the ear cavity, which reduces the size of the image. This was actually the reason that Sennheiser went with a ring radiator with the HD800, as the flat sound wave it produces gives a massive sound stage, similar to the flat waves produced by large electrostatic or planar drivers.

     

    It's very close to being the perfect headphone, but I feel the Hifiman HE1000V2 checks more boxes and I've been enjoying it a bit more than the Utopias. The much lighter headphone also is great. Also planars do have a leg up over dynamics (even with Focal's fantastic beryllium driver) in terms of bass texture.

  2. http://www.soundstageav.com/speakermeasurements.html

    Take a look at the impedence curves. Tweeters take almost no energy to drive. 100hz-1KHz (the range that the woofers produce the most output at) look like 5-6 ohms nominal in most speakers measured here. There are very few speakers that are true 8 ohms in the critical midrange area.

    There is no such thing as 8 ohms receivers or 6 ohms receivers. The receiver is the amplifier, not the resistor. The speaker is. Amplifiers produce amperes. If it can't supply enough amps for a heavier load, it will overload. If it overloads easily, it's a cheap receiver.

    There are two ways that you can blow speakers. The first is to overload the amplifier, which sends a square sine wave that will blow out the tweeters (woofers have greater heat dissapation so they will typically survive this). The second is to surpass the excrusion limits (xmax) of a woofer (tweeters generally are less likely to blow from this since high frequencies do not require large excursion).

    A satellite speaker will is not going to present a heavy enough load to clip/overload an amplifier because you will reach the xmax limits of the woofer/midrange driver LONG before you drive the amp to clipping. Ohm rating is not worth even thinking about.

    Posted Image

    Here is the typical impedence curve of a 3" midrange driver. It's not going to present a problem for an amplifier to drive.

  3. During normal use, the Qts and fs of the speakers have shown to measurably return to equilibrium once the speakers are put to rest (Audioholics has an article on this). This is with "well-designed", drivers with modern materials in the last ~7-8 years used in commercial speakers. Some older designs will certainly change over time but this is due to driver detioration (foam surrounds rotting). I can't speak for PC speakers though.

  4. It only takes ten seconds to make a "permanent" equilibrium change to a drivers performance parameters, which some manufacturers do before shipping their speakers. After that, equilibrium performance will not change unless the speaker happened to sustain damage.

    But a speakers FR is dynamic, and speakers performance parameters do change as they are played over time, however the change is temporary, and the driver's performance will return to an equilibrium state once the speaker returns to rest. People who play their speakers for 80 hours over the weekend to "break them in" before doing "critical listening" will indeed find the speakers sound different, but it's a temporary state that will quickly dissapear, and the next morning it will sound "un broken in."

  5. The Bose multimedia speakers are terrible. Untreated paper 2" drivers, cheap thin plastic (resonating) enclosures. You should just totally scratch it off the list.

    The Promedia 2.0 Ultras have a tweeter and a pair of 2.5" mids. The Groove 2.0 is just a single 3", so all things equal, it won't be to play as accurately as the Ultras.

    The T-40 is probably out of your price range (retails for $250!--total ripoff), and as far as I know it just doubles up the midrange drivers.

    I also forgot to mention the Logitech Z-520s which is a pretty neat dipole speaker, it has front and rear firing tweeters and a 3" midrange; designed to improve dispersion over standard satellite speakers. They are at the high end of your price range though ($100 on provantage).

  6. There's no need for 7.1, first of all, there are only 17 movies with 7.1 sound (all on blu ray), all of them obscure, most of them really old, and lastly, they don't have 7.1 sound, it's 6.1 with a mirrored surround. Discrete 7.1 does not exist. Dolby Digital HD and DTS-Master are 5.1 and 6.1.

    How about

    1) 4 x Energy C-300 fronts ($520)

    http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=ENC300%20%20%20%20SBLK

    2) 8" subwoofer

    http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=ADPROEVI%20%208BLK

    You can just run a phantom center...it's almost impossible to find a space to put a center channel anyway.

  7. Try Ascend Acoustics CBM-170SE

    http://ascendacoustics.com/pages/products/speakers/cbm170/cbm170.html

    Or Tweakcity Audio WAF-1

    http://tweakcityaudio.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=21&category_id=7&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1

    Energy RC-10.

    http://www.vanns.com/shop/servlet/item/features/542469405/energy-rc10?v_c=GoogleBase&ne_ppc_id=914&ne_key_id=6349809

    They are the most linear and accurate speakers you can find under $40. Energy is a Klipsch brand if you feel strongly about supporting Klipsch.

    If you want floorstanders you might have to go slightly above $400 (after shipping):

    Polk Monitor 70

    http://www.jr.com/polk-audio/pe/POK_MONITOR70BK/#productTabShipping

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