Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Distortion Question (Dave Matthews disc)

Laingn2,
What Alan suggested is a very effective way to determine if what your hearing is in the speakers or in the audio track.

I have not swapped my tweeters yet (it was my son's bday and we had company all weekend), however I did manage a quick listen on my W's and with my in-ear head phones.

I learned there is definitely distortion in the 'Some Devil' track using the DolbyHD audio track on the Blu-Ray disc. My guess is that it's purposeful distortion that Dave is using on his guitar and that it's not added in the studio mastering. However it still sounds different (more distorted) on my W's vs. the headphones. I am still trying to track this down.

Back to your question - listen to the same source through your speakers and with good headphones as Alan said. Just watch that your receiver doesn't try to automatically switch modes when head phones get plugged in to try and keep it as fair an A/B comparison as possible. Mine (a Pioneer SC-05) automatically downmixed the DolbyHD to stereo for me when the headphones were plugged in. To make sure what I was hearing was real I also checked the stereo mix on the BR disc with my AVR in stereo mode so it would not switch modes when the headphones were plugged in. Good luck!

The 22s ARE known as being a very revealing speaker. I'm not surprised that some stuff - good or bad - isn't more evident on the 22s...

Good heads up for me on RockBand Murph. I'll try not to let that scare me further as we also play both RockBand and GHWT. Thanks.

I hear ya Mark. There's still something that doesn't sound quite right however - plus i don't think this disc would be getting such rave reviews everywhere (including this forum ) if there was bad mastering in the mix.

It could still get rave reviews because we are all getting so used to poor recordings that a disc with very minor flaws can still get rave reviews, especially since everyone has different tolerances to such things.

I don't have Dolby HD, so I won't chime in on that track, but I have fried a tweeter before. No pop or other drama, just stopped making highs. But it was dead, not just on some material. If your tweeter is bad, its bad. Just play some other music and listen closely. You can't hide a dead tweeter on a two-way speaker very easily.

That very same thing happened when Tommy Chong got sent to prison!

Hi cb919 and all,

Thanks for your follow-up, and yes, the Axioms are indeed very revealing speakers.

If we assume for the moment that the distortion is inherent to that track on the Blu-ray disc, there could be a number of reasons why it was included. Since it's a live recording, that may have been the only "take" available, and the producers and artist figured that most people wouldn't detect it.

It could be that the control-room monitors during the mix didn't reveal it, or that the mastering guys didn't hear it. For example, I have some CDs that have audible rumble from the air-exchange system in the concert hall, only audible when you play the disc on a system with a really excellent subwoofer. Most control room loudspeakers do not use subwoofers so the recording engineer would have been quite unaware that there was low-frequency garbage on the master. I have another that has audible foot sounds from a pianist using the pedals. The mike used for the piano wasn't isolated enough and the floor in the studio conducted the vibrations up the mike stand into the microphone--again, it's only audible when played on a system with a good sub. There are other examples of mike input clipping that I own. In one case, even though the recording engineer heard the distortion on the vocal mike, the artist (the blues singer, Joe Williams) refused to do another take, so the Cd was issued as is. The late John Eargle, a highly respected recording engineer who wrote one of the seminal texts on studio recording, told me that anecdote about that Cd of Joe Williams when I inquired about the audible distortion on a vocal peak.

Regards,

Alan

I listened briefly to that part of the Dave matthews and tim reynolds bluray through my m80's, and then flipped back to some previous songs on the bluray. It definitely seems to be recorded with less quality... but maybe I'm just hearing things.