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New Loudspeaker Eliminates Distortive Influence
fejrskov writes "The Danish audio/video company 'Bang & Olufsen' announced a new loudspeaker which promises to eliminate the bad influence from walls, floors and ceilings on the sound. This is achieved by using two technologies: ALT (Acoustic Lens Technology) uses sound dispersing lenses to make sound travel equally in all directions. ABC (Adaptive Bass Control) involves sliding a tiny microphone out at the base of the speaker, playing a series of test sounds, and adapting the bass according to the measured acoustic response. Each active loudspeaker contains amplifiers for a total of 2500W (!) output using B&O's patented ICEPower concept. The price? Approximately 55.000 Danish kroner (8.000 Euro) each."
Yeah, it'd be a shame if you spent that kind of money on, say, the homeless.
I detest companies that use trademarked phrases as if they are scientific principles.
'ALT (Acoustic Lens Technology)' and 'ABC (Adaptive Bass Control)' sound like marketing buzzwords. Where's a peer-reviewed paper describing the phenomenon?
The technology might be cool, but this sounds like a verbatim fax from Bose or similar hype marketing outfit.
I've been hating Stereo Salesmen since first encountering the snide ignorant critters during my connector quests of the 70's. I stomached being in their presence a few years ago to replace my ailing Harmon-Kardon tube integrated amp with a new Yamaha unit, now I'm free of that B$ for 20 more years.
I'm having a hard time swallowing this.
Acoustic lensing has been used for quite some time. I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing. With the traditional sound cone, most of the sound is directed at the listener. With equal dispersion, a lot the sound is being reflected. This means it's being muddied on reflection, and you have delay issues.
Regarding ABC: One of the biggest problems in bass is the standing wave. A standing wave is inaudible at one part of the room, but overpowering in another. One aspect of a standing wave is that it has no effect at the speaker.
Now, using a mic for calibration is a good thing. The Pioneer Elite VSX-45TX reciever, for example, can be hooked up to a mic that is placed at the listening position. It can then calibrate itself for delay, levels, and per-channel eq. That accommodates most room dynamic problems as well as they can be, at least by preprocessing. But if your subwoofer seems to have a screwy response curve, then no preprocessing is going to make it right-- you have to actually stand up and move it.
Ever notice how the large majority of speaker companies have speakers that look like a box?
Ever wonder why after decades of research they're still a box?
Ever notice that B&O likes to make non-conventional looking stuff and then charges an arm and a leg?
They're selling you functional art at really high prices folks.
If you want speakers that actually sound good, then try an electrostatic or planar speaker. Magnepans aren't a kajillion dollars and are a damned good place to start looking for planars.
> Re:What does this do that a serious audiophile can't?
It looks fancier and thus the wives can accept them in a living room.
I had a feeling this troll would get modded up.
What part of "it's sounds awesome" do you people fail to understand? I really don't care how "cool" Bose is or isn't. Their systems sound great. They fit in my living room.
Yes, compared to some others they're expensive. Cambridge Soundworks has better sound for the money, IMO.
But compared the these new B&O speakers Bose is practically free. Instead of two big (3' high, 135 lbs each) speakers I get a complete home theater system (5.1 Dolby Digital, amp, AM/FM, DVD, etc.) that looks and sounds great in my living room.
And with the money I saved I've got almost enough left over for a pair of those new B&O speakers I recently read about on Slashdot.
Oh, and my Bose AM-5 speakers are 15 years old and in perfect condition. More of that "crap from China"?
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
There is a movement wherein old analog synthesizers are highly saught after by musicians, and they are adding synthetic "old record" sounds (scratches and pops) into their songs.
It seems some find digital music too clean and pure. The "dirt" adds personility, and this is even from the young croud, not just nastalgia seekers.
Perfect reproduction and esthetic enjoyment are not necessarily the same thing. A lot of it is one-upmanship. Then again, some get entertainment from listening to music, others get it from playing with and comparing the machines of music.
Table-ized A.I.
Just so you know, Bose speakers (or at least most of them) are manufactured in Framingham, MA, in the good ol' US of A (toured the plant a few years back). Now, whether you like their sound or not is a personal preference, and depends somewhat on the music to which you listen. Bose doesn't worry too much about the audio forums--in fact, he speaks of them pretty derisively. He's confident in his engineering and scientific analyses of the speakers he's making.
If they can make a killing by good marketing, kudos to them--it's not like they're trying to bully companies with competing technologies.
Before you flame me: I think Bose subs suck.
--A former student of Professor Bose's
They sound better then most of what people listen to which really is crap. By this I mean, background music in places like malls, $100 boom-boxes, $10 headphones, that sort of stuff. So when people get a chance to hear an OK system, it sounds pretty damn good, if only in comparison.
Bose are small, they are incomspicuous, they are easy to have in a space without them dominating that space. For most people, I guess this is more important.
For example, I have three relatives with Bose sytems, I'll take my father as an example. He has a lifestyle 25. It cost him about $2500. This is what it does for him. . .
Small
Inconspicuous
Easy! There is one small silver box that sits on top of his TV
Sounds better then the TV speakers or a cheep stereo
Gives him surround sound
I on the other hand have a system I put togethor for myself. Speakers from Paradigm, a reciever from Onkyo, and a Sony sub (gonna be the first thing to go when I can afford it). My system cost about $1200 total (all components and cables, etc.). It was build to give me the best sound quality I could find within the limits of my budget and the time I had to devote to it.
It sounds better then the Bose system, a lot better. It can play louder, quieter, go deeper, higher, everything I've ever played on both systems sounds better on mine.
But for my dad the Bose was a better choice for him. My speakers are small, 33 x 19.7 x 27.3cm (13 x 7-3/4 x 10-3/4in), and weigh 5kg each, but you could still fit all of the bose cubes into one of my speakers. You could NOT put my reciever on top of the TV. And one look at all the inputs and outputs on the back of it sent my dad packing.
But then again I can turn the music up without their enclosures vibrating, I can low frequencies (most people don't know what those even are, here's a clue, that bom-car that just drove by? That's not low).
Bose are OK, but they can't violate the laws of physics. And really, do you want to buy a product from a company whose focus seems to be on marketing as opposed to research?
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
>All this gimmicky digital signal processing to
>achieve better sound won't improve things if
>you don't have the right kind of room, and
>don't have the speakers in the right places.
That's not entirely true. In theory, you could use signal processing to not only overcome the limitations of the speakers themselves (say, a frequency response that's non-linear relative to the wattage driving the unit, or certain phase issues), but also the environment they've been placed in (room reflections or cancellation effects). In practice though, that would take lots of computing horsepower to do transparently, in real time, without introducing unwanted artifacts that sound worse than the problems you're attempting to address.
It looks like these B&O monsters are just using DSP to help with the bass equalization. They play back some bass tones, have the mic pick them up, analyze which frequencies are enhanced and which are suppressed relative to the input, then boost and cut the signal at the appropriate frequencies. Essentially, it's an automated graphic equalizer for the bass. Nice, but hardly worth $10,000, and not revolutionary by any means.
Revolutionary would be a system that ships with a quality microphone, preferably wireless, that you place at or near your desired listening position (or positions). The system would then analyze the listening environment with a variety of test tones, listening for response irregularities, phase issues, cancellations and other issues. It would then adjust the signal going to the drivers via a powerful DSP, in an attempt to make the signal at the listening position(s) as close an analog to the original signal sent to the speakers as possible.
The technology certainly exists at this point to produce such a device. In fact, I'm surprised nobody is selling one. It would certainly go a long way toward making cruddy speakers sound good, and could make most quality speakers sound fantastic.
Bose systems sound like shit. If you think it "sounds awesome," you were comparing it to $300 junk from JBL or Cerwin Vega at Circuit City, not other $3000 systems from manufacturers who spend their money on something other than marketing.
Just to name an example off the top of my head, check out Energy's $1,500 Encore 5.1 system. Blows the doors off of Bose junk selling for twice the price, without being any larger.
Or audition any of Linn's speaker systems in the $2,000 price range. When I first auditioned a pair of small Linn bookshelf speakers last year, I spent 15 minutes looking for the switch to turn off the subwoofer . . . only to finally realize there wasn't any subwoofer. Amazing what a manufacturer can do when they spend their money on quality instead of on marketing.
I agree with your comments. I too have a home-built system: Paradigm + Denon receiver + Denon player + hand-built speaker cables. It sounds good but it consumes an entire cabinet and the cabling is a nightmare. Neither remote can control all the features despite them both being Denon. I'm happy with it but only in the sense that I'm getting decent sound for the relatively little money I spent.
A friend of my father's spent perhaps twice as much buying a Bose system. Lifestyle unit + satellite speakers + radio remote + expensive "ribbon" cables. I think he got robbed by the slimy salesman but it's hard to argue that his system is sexy. Remote works anywhere in the house. The Lifestyle unit looks gorgeous on his bookshelf. You can't see the speakers and the sound permeates the room. Was it good sound for the price? I don't think so. Was it a good choice for a non-enthusiast with bags of money who wants something that "Just Works"? I think so.
I was answering the poster that said that "Fahrenheit makes way more sense for human-experienced temperatures" and that "0-100 is the range of temperatures in which humans can expect to be able to survive", concluding that "it's quite logical".
First, none of those issues was taken into account when creating the scale (so even if they were objective arguments, they wouldn't make Fahrenheit "quite logical", it would simply be a coincidence).
Second, they are not objective arguments. Different people are used to different temperatures (and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some degree of genetic adaptation). People in central Africa can be comfortable at 45 C (113 F) while people in northern regions (ex., Siberia) probably start feeling pretty uncomfortable at 30 C (86 F).
I doubt anyone will survive for long at 0 F without a very thick coat (meaning they won't actually be in contact with 0 F). 0 F is below freezing point, and the water in their bodies (starting with their skins) would freeze and form crystals. Very nasty. On the other hand, people can swim in water at just above freezing point - 0 C - for some time and be perfectly alright. They'll be cold, and may pass out from hypothermia (which can lead to death if they stop breathing), but will not freeze (no crystallization means no permanent damage to the tissues).
Kelvin is a great scale for physicists, but centigrade is actually more practical for some areas of chemistry and - especially - biology, because water plays a big role in those sciences.
I definitely don't think it's stupid to justify a measurement system on the basis that it's better for scientists. Mesuring something objectively (i.e., in abstract units instead of saying that something is "hot" or "cold" or "big" or "small") is a scientific notion.
And no, it doesn't "bother" me at all that Fahrenheit is based on random values. As I said above, for the purpose of measuring temperatures, any linear scale will do roughly the same job. It's simply a matter of convention and habit.
The Celsius scale has its "key points" (0 and 100) set at temperatures where very obvious, very visible "natural" things happen (water phase changes). And that's why I disagree that Farhenheit is any more "logical" or "makes more sense" for the temperatures we deal with than centigrade. Just because you're used to something that doesn't make it more intuitive, and certainly doesn't make it more logical. In abstract, centigrade is slightly more "elegant". As a tool, both scales are more or less equivalent (centigrade is perhaps a bit more practical for cooking, but most people don't actually measure temperatures when they're cooking).
RMN
~~~