Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wow, the BeoLab 5 is one unique speaker. Aside from the price tag I couldn't afford if I wanted, I wouldn't have anywhere to put it. It's much more intrusive than the BeoLab 6000, but then, if you can afford 16.000 Euro for the speakers, you can probably re-design the room to match.
Additional note: the first B&O page linked has some display issues on Safari.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I hear they make 'stereo' equipment as well.
Seriously, though. I listened to some very, very expensive B&O speakers in their showroom, and I was astonished at how awful they sounded. No midrange and bass everywhere. Maybe it's just my ears, but it would take a vast improvement for me to ever consider spending that much money on their speakers.
Then I remembered that European countries have the odd habit of using decimal points to seperate thousands rather than commas... blah.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Thats $8,494.07 USD.
http://xe.com/
What would REALLY be neat is if they could make microphones that weren't affected by room dimensions, walls, etc. Doing home recordings can be a giant pain, especially when recording drums... the room contributes so much to the sound, and since most home musicians can't afford gigantic rooms, you wind up recording in a tiny room which, for those of you that know acoustics, makes things very boomy and difficult to control. Then we have to go and spend hundreds of dollars on bass traps for the room corners, which still don't fix the problem, they just make it less noticable... sigh.
evil adrian
Seriously, "acoustic lens" is just a fancy term for a horn, something that has been used for years to control dispersion and distortion. Also, a mic extended from the base to measure the low-end response? Has anyone heard of a Real Time Analyzer (RTA)? Linear X makes a PC based RTA for around $900 (PCRTAjr). If you can afford a $16,000 pair of speakers, you can afford to buy an RTA to set it up, or find a dealer that has one.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Are these loudspeakers designed for use in say, a PA system? Or for use in home theater, or theater theater? Perhaps for DJing purposes? What exactly is it intended to do that a well equalized set of JBL speakers can't produce?
Seems like it's only prominant feature is the ability to produce 360 degree sound, but for that price, you could easily get 5 or 6 high quality speakers and arrange them in a circle.
The flash based site doesn't yield any useful specs either.
I'm surprised they got a patent on this, the military has been studying this for years. Edelman's recent work uses inverse functions to counter multipath interference in sonar with security applications. The only difference here is application as far as I can tell, the technique appears similar.
Drug addicts will at least leave you in peace, shooting their arms up in abandoned alleyways and passing out with friends around the bong.
Moreover, when drug addicts throw their money away, they're usually pumping it back into the local economy instead of shipping it off to hardware manufacturers overseas.
Audiophiles, in contrast, aren't content to waste their money in private or among other like-minded individuals. Oh no. They have a compulsive need to prosthelitize about their audiophilia. As if there weren't enough of their kind in this world as it is, they will openly moan and complain about the quality of others' audio equipment and wax on end about the relative merits of whatever their latest hobbyhorse format is over mp3 which is far too lossy or whatever they're bitching this week.
In all my years of knowing dope smokers and heroin addicts, I've never known any to spend half as much time trying to justify the benefits of their drug of choice as audiophiles do about their wares. It just isn't done. Drug addicts are content to enjoy their recreational substances and leave it at that. Audiophiles feel a need to go so much further.
The other day, I was reading about the US Supreme Court's latest court case upholding the constitutionality of religious groups' use of public school space for after-school bible classes. But what I think was left out of the debate was how religious groups are such a small threat when compared to other secular groups. Whereas the liberals would like to bar the Good News club from coming to elementary schools, they would happily and cheerfully admit an audiophilia club. Whereas the Good News club is just trying to save your soul, the audiophiles are both trying to steal your soul and bilk your wallet at the same time. That is the true threat in our society today.
I'm glad someone is finally casting the light of public scrutiny upon this pestilence in our midst. Audiophilia must be banned and criminalized as it has no place in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our forefathers did not give their lives to found a nation where we could scamper around with our goldplated headphones and 10 megawatt amps in one giant aureal masturbatory frenzy.
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.
Check out the latest Bose Lifestyle systems with Adapti-Q(sp?).
They include special "headphones" (microphones you wear on your head). You sit in five locations where you normally listen to music/movies and play the special CD. It listens to itself and adapts the system to your living room. Yes, the change is clearly audible.
It also means your speakers don't have to be in a perfect rectangle. Place them anywhere you want and it will adapt.
I got the Lifestyle 35 (integrated DVD/AM/FM) for $3000 US. RF remote, sounds awesome and the speakers are *tiny*.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Eight Thousand Euro???
Wow.
That's what I call getting a Bang for your bucks.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Sounds like you need some bumperstickers for the cause!
Here's my first contribution:
Use vials, not tubes!
Jory
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.
Exactly. However, it doesn't mean they aren't good speakers. It just means that marketing departments don't aim at techies. The "ALT" buzzword rubs me the wrong way because "accoustic lens" actually means something - an array of parallel plates mounted in front of an exponential horn to diffuse sound. They lost relevance in the mid-70's when the constant-directivity horn was developed. There are still audiophiles using, and swearing by, accoustic lenses. Since I can't view the website, I don't know if B&O has resurrected this antique technology, but I doubt it. More likely their marketers didn't bother asking an audio engineer if the term was already taken.
In all fairness, there's a legitimate marketing reason for assigning names to "technologies", however trivial those technologies might appear to an engineer. Let's say this speaker takes off, and the manufacturer wants to make a smaller, cheaper one with some of the same ideas. They can say "the model 5000 has ALT and ABC". This helps them rub off some magic from the flagship product to something more affordable. I still don't like it, though.
> 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.
That's $4.8 million Canadian
Sad that such a topic shows up on Slashdot without mentioning open source solutions which are cheap to free. Check out Digital Room Correction and BruteFIR for instance.
tcboo
B&O kit is for people with more money than sense (sense of hearing that is). The amount you pay for it, you can get the same results with kit a tenth of the price. You are only paying for the design.
IMHO, all this crap that companies like B&O and Bose spew about their R&D and the latest gadget they've come up with to "shape" the sound or whatever has little basis in reality at all. Audio reproduction is not a mystery. It is well known how to get good results. There's no secret to it and B&O have not made any breakthroughs.
So if you have the cash and the inclination, instead of spending 8 grand on a pair of these speakers, get yourself some kit from Quad, TAG McLaren Audio, Arcam, Mission, etc. I'm willing to bet you could put together an entire system that'd sound ten times as good as these for a quarter of the cost of these speakers alone, without any of this nonsense they're putting in them.
Having said all that, I'm currently listening to a pair of B&O speakers, although they are about 30 or 40 years old. Obviously they had a bit more of a clue back then as the speakers sound amazing, although they were marred by the very long and very thin cables they came with. A bit of modification of the terminals to accept a thicker cable made them sound like a completely different set of speakers. It makes me wonder, if B&O were prepared to completely ruin the sound for the sake of the design of the cable, of all things.. what else are they doing?
B&O have historically targetted a certain demographic, and done very well by doing so. Namely, the wealthy who want an obviously expensive and gorgeous sound system, but who don't really know or care much about the sound itself. B&O is one of the fashion trend setters for speakers. For example, Sony's chrome metal column home theatre systems were designed to look very similar to one of B&O's older systems.
B&O's spiel on audio lenses, etc. really is a bit of a smokescreen. There's no new technology here, and probably not a particularily good implementation of existing tech. However, it has great packaging, glossy magazine ads, and you can bet your arse those B&O store salespeople are smoooooooth!
Bose is sort of a low end version of B&O. Bose has the most effective and innovative marketing department of any speaker company out there. High margins for dealers, salesperson training, you name it. Watching a bose demo is as entertaining as watching a carnival sideshow. They'll play those little plywood boxes with paper cones through PVC tubing, inside other much larger "Speaker boxes", and a plethora of other gimmichs while gushing about how great they sound. You'd be surprised at what people will believe if they're told to. White Van speaker companies like Dogg Digital or Nuance are but pale imitators of the origional master, Dr.Bose. Truly a master.
While I respect them as highly profitable and effective companies, would I buy B&O or Bose myself? Probably not. When you want better sound for your dollar it is best to go elsewhere.
I see what you mean. I look at rain turning into hail and I immediately say "it's so obvious, it must be... 32 degrees!". Or I look at water in a pan, and when it starts boiling it just screams "212 degreees"! Amazing how well it adapts to daily experiences.
What relevant thing happens at 0 F...? Or at 100 F, for that matter?
The centigrade scale is based on water, which is "just" one of the most common (and arguably the most important) substances on Earth. Do you know what the Farenheit scale is based on? Let me quote from a History site:
"For seven years Fahrenheit worked out an alcohol thermometer scale based on three points. He chose the freezing point of a certain salt-water mixture for zero. He used the freezing point of water for 32 degrees. And body temperature he called 96 degrees.
Why the funny numbers? He originally used a twelve-point scale with zero, four, and twelve for those three benchmarks. Then he put eight gradations in each large division. That's how he got that strange 96 number - it was eight times twelve. Body temperature is actually a tad higher than 96, but it was close. Later, Fahrenheit made mercury thermometers that let him use the boiling point of water instead of human body temperature for the high mark."
But of course, by then the "standard" had been defined, so water now had to boil at the lovely temperature of "212 degrees".
In other words, Farenheit is the way it is because of legacy support (what does that remind me of?). Its "design" was shaped by the equipment's limitations and by totally arbitrary things such as "the freezing point of a certain salt-water mixture".
Just because you're used to something doesn't mean it's "better" and it certainly doesn't mean that whoever invented it spent much time thinking about it. Look at some modern "standards" and you'll see things haven't changed much since 1700.
RMN
~~~
P.S. - If centigrade is "stupid" but Kelvin is "smart", then why did Kelvin adopt the same "size" for the degrees? The only difference between Celsius (centigrade) and Kelvin is that Celsius' zero is based on water and Kelvin uses the absolute zero.
Reading this I'm reminded that before the era of the personal computer, it was mainly audiophiles who spent a large percentage of their time writing about things most people couldn't give a shit about.
No. Ethanol boils at 173.12F, freezes at -174.28F (78.4 and -114.6 Celsius respectively). Fahrenheit also fucked up when setting 100F to be body temperature; it is actually 98.4F, and it's not constant anyways. 0F was supposed to be the coldest temperature he could obtain, a water/salt mixture. He was also off on that one, the coldest possible mixture can attain -4F.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
http://home.earthlink.net/~busenitz/bs.html
Linn is a small Scottish company with extraordinary engineering and products. Linn does what Bose and B&O attempt to do but without all the glitz and with incredible performance out of compact electronics. Their speakers are good too, so they offer complete systems. See:
linn.co.uk
For their 'low end' all in one home theatre CD, DVD, Tuner, 5.1 channel preamp/amplifier, multi-room capable receiver, see Linn's Classik Movie System (CMS) and CMS Di[gital] at:
classik.com
You'll also find their entry level Classik Music (two channel amp, tuner, preamp, multi-room capable) System. The newer, more complete Classik Movie includes CD/DVD/Tuner with 5 channel amplifier and component video out. The brand new CMS Di includes all the features of the Classik Movie but adds an even better CD/DVD processor and source input for both video (component video in) and audio (toslink optical 5.1 channel). The advanced CD/DVD sound processing is trickle down technology from Linn's brand new, state of the art Unidisk CD/DVD/DVD-A/SACD disc player.
All three Classiks have the same tiny form factor, except the new 5.1 channel Movie units have more controls and therefore a different face (same diminutive size though).
Despite their diminutive size, these units are better than most separates. Needless to say, Linn is very popular in Japan where tiny, powerful, state of the art electronics are a sign of excellence.
The pricing is under $2k ($1500?) for the Classik Music (CD, Tuner, et al.), $3k for the Classik Movie all-in-one (DVD, et al.), and $5k for the no-compromise movie Di (Unidisk processing trickle down, and component video and toslink inputs). The Di is not exactly cheap but packs amazing capabilities and superior quality into unbelievably compact package.
The units even include multi-room capabilities using multiple Classik units (Linn's "Connect" system), or connecting to Linn's versatile "Knekt" system to connect a variety of Linn components throughout the home/office into one system. Both Connect and Knekt offer keypad controls (e.g., wall-mount units to control the Linn Classik or other (Linn and non-Linn (by IR) components)).
Linn technology is unique in its blend of high technology and no-compromise emphasis on audio quality. For example, Linn uses surface mount technology and switch-mode power supplies which are rare in audiophile products (due to complications Linn has innovated beyond). In contrast, Bose has a reputation for taking cheap components and equalizing the hell out of them to get the semblance of accurate sound (but delivering an essentially synthesized sound on any music). B&O offers a genuine value in style, design, and compactness, but with some significant (but not necessarily critical) sonic compromises. Linn does not take the sonic shortcuts.
Instead, Linn innovates in a variety of ways (the first audiophile quality CD/DVD/DVD-A/SACD transport, innovative FM tuner technology, active speaker amplification, multi-room capabilities, etc.) and trickles the technologies throughout their product line. Few if any other companies even have the capability to pack everything into a single compact box with top flight musical and video quality as in the Classik product line. For Linn, the Classik just takes advantage of a host of their more advanced power supply, amplifier, tuner, multi-room, CD/DVD, and video technology all in one unit.
IOW, what Bose and B&O market in appearance, Linn delivers in performance. Anecdotally, Linn delivers the soul of music, musicians often choose Linn over other audiophile systems, and Linn deliver foot tapping sonic excellence. Linn's byline is "pitch accurate" sound. Let your ears be the judge.