Axiom Home Page Forums Thread Like Summary - Another tune rendered unlistenable

The ALFRs, with their high accuracy, have rendered many of my favorite tunes unlistenable. I wanted to believe the most recent example of this was a nasty resonance with the ALFRs but it turns out this was just another latent defect in a tune I've always enjoyed.

The offense starts at 3:29 into Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene Part 2. The on and off ringing from that point on is unmistakable. Once you've heard it, you never want to play that song on the ALFRs again - at least not at room-filling sound levels. The ringing is there on all of my other Axioms at a significantly attenuated level but I never tuned into it until the actives shone light on it.

As I discovered, this tune uses high Q settings on analog synthesizers for some of the effects. Q is a measure of resonance. As the Q becomes very high, "...a whistling sound is heard at a frequency exactly around the cut-off point and, on some filter designs, going to the highest possible resonance makes the filter begin to act as an oscillator, creating its own (sometimes very loud) whistling sound."

This is the price you pay for more accurate sound.

I look for three qualities in a recording when I devote time to just listen and do nothing else: soundstage, imaging and fidelity.

I should point out that when I'm listening as I graze around the house or yard, I don't care about any of these qualities. I am in no position then to listen to "stereo" and so I'm perfectly content to listen to my Air or $40 transistor radio to recordings of all kinds.

Out of these qualities, the most offensive one for me is imaging. I'm fine with just a centre image. I'm also fine with just three images: centre, inside left and inside right. What I can't stomach however is left and right images that are mixed just into the left and right speakers and sound like they're coming from the speakers themselves.

I don't know how some recordings do it but they have hard left and right images yet they are diffuse and sound like a right or left mist or cloud surrounding the speaker. Many go well beyond the speaker boundaries. I think these might be recorded on a stage where reflected sounds are also picked up or maybe they are studio-recorded and the engineer had tricks up his sleeve. I think the bad ones, Iike a lot of AC/DC, are so bad they are missing wide swaths of higher frequencies. It's the higher frequencies that add dispersion and the highest that add air.

I find the bad ones are less offensive on the M3 and M50. I think it's that dedicated mid-range that really brings out the worst in bad recordings. I therefore can't absolutely say that 3-way is better than 2-way. Technically, yes; practically, no.