Larry B
Screenwriter
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2001
- Messages
- 1,067
Eric:
Here's something I just happened to come across from Hary Pearson, regarded by many as the guru of audio reviewing. I have added emphasis to certain parts:
"Absolute Sound HP’S Workshop Review:
The Wisdom Audio M-75: Planar/Magnetic Hybrid System
Introduction
This review has turned out to be an investigation of the Wisdom Audio Model 75 speaker system...Complicating matters and causing us to go off the track and on intriguing side trips were so were some underlyingissues that, until the last day of our listening sessions, made us fear that we
had come up against one of audio’s most fundamental dichotomies: would we, as pursuers of the absolute, rather have an honest and uncolored speaker that tickled the intellect, or a more colored simulation of the real thing that moved the soul?
That question is one we have danced around without even reaching a resolution, because our unspoken assumption has always been that we couldn’t have both.
Speaker systems have, historically, always been the most highly colored players in audio’s chain of components. Each has its own quite distinctive personality- a concatenation of character "traits" that interact in surprising and
quite often flattering ways with those parts of the chain that precede the speaker.
Let me come at this from another perspective: Consider the speaker as the narrator of the audio system. The teller of the tale. The question then becomes: How reliable is this Scheherazade? We have accepted, in principle, the notion
that the narrator should tell the truth and nothing but, like the Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in Strange Land. But do we ever know better: Speaker systems have been widely unreliable narrators since the dawn of
recorded sound..."
Larry
Here's something I just happened to come across from Hary Pearson, regarded by many as the guru of audio reviewing. I have added emphasis to certain parts:
"Absolute Sound HP’S Workshop Review:
The Wisdom Audio M-75: Planar/Magnetic Hybrid System
Introduction
This review has turned out to be an investigation of the Wisdom Audio Model 75 speaker system...Complicating matters and causing us to go off the track and on intriguing side trips were so were some underlyingissues that, until the last day of our listening sessions, made us fear that we
had come up against one of audio’s most fundamental dichotomies: would we, as pursuers of the absolute, rather have an honest and uncolored speaker that tickled the intellect, or a more colored simulation of the real thing that moved the soul?
That question is one we have danced around without even reaching a resolution, because our unspoken assumption has always been that we couldn’t have both.
Speaker systems have, historically, always been the most highly colored players in audio’s chain of components. Each has its own quite distinctive personality- a concatenation of character "traits" that interact in surprising and
quite often flattering ways with those parts of the chain that precede the speaker.
Let me come at this from another perspective: Consider the speaker as the narrator of the audio system. The teller of the tale. The question then becomes: How reliable is this Scheherazade? We have accepted, in principle, the notion
that the narrator should tell the truth and nothing but, like the Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in Strange Land. But do we ever know better: Speaker systems have been widely unreliable narrators since the dawn of
recorded sound..."
Larry
