eeyep'An Interview with Andrew Jones of Pioneer/TAD' (http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue30/andrew_jones.htm)
Positive Feedback What about audiophile type parts? Any advantage? Wire, caps, etc. Andrew Jones We have high quality parts certainly, mostly manufactured by ourselves or to our specification. If you mean name brands of audiophile parts, then no. We do not put in such parts as a means for listeners to think "Oh, it contains brand X capacitors, it must be good" for example. We select our parts based on engineering, not marketing. Positive Feedback So then, is it all about engineering? Andrew Jones YES! Positive Feedback What role is listening involved in with respect to the design/measurements or does the actual design/measurements take precedent over what you hear that is, if I can hear it, who cares how it measures? Andrew Jones First comes the measurement. There are a lot of parameters in speakers that can be measured that are known to correlate well with listening. The problem that I see so often from those who doubt such correlation exists is that they don't know how to measure accurately! I see their curves and I see the artifacts in the curves that are the result of measurement errors and nothing to do with the behaviour of the speaker itself! Accurate measurements and a sufficient set of measurements go a long way to revealing the performance, and allow us to get towards the final result very much quicker than with just listening alone. My approach is to set a design goal for the measured performance, meet this as close as possible, then evaluate the result by listening, but ONLY once I believe I have met the initial design objective. Then I try and honestly evaluate the result, and if (when ) I hear something wrong I go back and see if I can correlate this to the measurements. Maybe I was too enthusiastic in my evaluation of having met my target. Maybe my target is just wrong. I go back and make changes based on the re-evaluation, then re-listen. But I am always cross referring to the measurements. Positive Feedback What shortcomings or limitations are there as to what one can measure versus what can hear? Andrew Jones I am not implying that we can measure everything that we hear. But we can measure a lot so we can shorten the design process. We can also however hear a lot of what isn't actually there! We can be easily misled in our hearing evaluation and attribute things that don't really exist. With too many variables during the design process we can also become confused. So we have to be as careful in our listening as we have to be in our measuring. -- ''Audio Amateur' interviews Peter Walker at the Quad Factory in 1978' (http://www.onethingaudio.net/FOR/QUA/GEN/9512-QUA-GEN-HIS-PW.htm) The Audio Amateur What do you consider to be the important goals of a good audio reproduction system - what ought a good audio reproduction system do? Peter Walker Well, perhaps this reflects my age (62 at the time of the interview), but I am still in favour of documentary type reproduction - an orchestra plays on a stage or in some auditorium and we try to get a real, believable picture of it. This is becoming out of date, of course. It's now thought that a completely new type of sound should be produced. I can't argue against this. I can't say there's anything wrong with this. Perhaps if Bach were around now he'd do the same thing, hit you on the head and do all sorts of things to produce an effect. But my own personal preference, my own goal, is to create a true sound picture of some acoustic event which is taking place somewhere else. The argument against that is that it had to be produced in a concert hall at one time, because there was no other means. But why should one stick to the concert hall? I stick to that, but that's just personal prejudice. TAA You don 't like to sit in the middle of the orchestra, then? PW I sit in the middle of the orchestra twice a week, in the local group, playing the flute with the trombones and French horns behind me. And very nice it is too, but, no, I don't like sitting in the middle of the orchestra. I don' t think one likes sounds from behind one particularly, I think you want to turn and face it. An alarm calls from behind. TAA Well, does that mean you're not taken with some forms of four channel? With quadrophony or whatever? PW I think there are two faults with it. One is that in a concert hall you have the reverberation all around you, but all the reverberation from the back comes from a whole lot of sources that are not coherent with one another; if you sat in the Albert Hall and all the back reverberation was brought into two coherent channels, from two points, you wouldn't like it at all. All four channel must do this. This is one failure. The second thing, I think the listener has a "cone" of concentration in listening, which is located in some 60 degree or arguable angle in front, and one's main concentration is on that. The back sounds you tend to ignore. This is what your ear-flaps are for. In a concert hall you reject this back sound. It is there, and therefore it's part of the reproduction, but it is of very small importance. As long as the reverberation is not coherent with the actual program, this is really all that is necessary. The Queen will sit in a box in a concert hall, and a wall is six feet behind her, a delay of 12 milliseconds there. She hears a pretty good reproduction of the orchestra in front, she doesn't really worry about this wall, but if you sat in the middle of the concert hall and someone produced a thick blanket 12 feet behind you, would you lose very much of the music? I don' t think so. -- TheOctavist Vortexbox>SBT(stock(TT failed dbt)>>Forssell MDAC-2>>>Klein and Hummell 0300D Sota Sapphire/Lyra Kleos>>Bespoke Valve Phono Stage>>Mastersound Due Venti>>Link Audio K100 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TheOctavist's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=52700 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93542
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