shivohum
Keeper of the Quotes
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- Jun 21, 2001
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I found an excellent review of the Reference 3A speaker. Not only is the article well-written, and surprisingly, actually balanced in its reporting, it also seems to me to describe very well many of the key differences between good dynamic and electrostatic speakers. In the quotes below the CLS is the author's electrostatic reference.
From my narrow experience with a pair of Stax headphones & quite a few high-end dynamic headphones, some of this stuff definitely seems to apply to dynamic and electrostatic headphones (the below quotes go from earlier in the article to later), and the way he describes the 3A remind me in many ways of the Senn 600:
"Compared to the CLS II Zs, the Royal Masters were audibly slower on transients, less transparent and detailed throughout the midband (and everywhere else), and less adept at low-level resolution."
"[The CLSes] don't sound boxy. Box coloration alone, however, is only one "tell" that reminds us we are listening to speakers. ... [The CLSes] constantly, naggingly remind us that-despite their boxless, massless, crossoverless, see-through transparency- they are still there. brightening up the upper midrange rolling off the bass, thinning out lower midrange body, collapsing the "stage" at the high SPLs, and breaking up on really hard transients at high SPLs."
"The Royal Masters also have this kind of acoustical presence...Cymbals...are at low to normal volumes somewhat softened in texture and impact--losing some (not all) of their metallic sheen and radiant shimmer."
"The Royal Masters deliver in the low end with power and extension...What they don't do...is reproduce...the midbass with the astounding clarity of the CLSes. "
"[the 3As] do not have the kind, of mid band transparency and resolution that the CLSes (or, for that matter, that the WATTs) have. This is not just a question of some slight residual box and cone colorations; it also relates to the amount of work that the woofer is required to do and the relative mass of that item. While the References do not lack at all for an abundance of musical: detail, don't expect them to deliver X-ray inner detail or electrostatic-like immediacy in the midband; don't expect, particularly at lower levels, to be able to count the strings in the string choirs...with the effortless ease that you can on the CLSes (or other similar panels). Don't expect to hear the very spit in a vocalist's mouth or to sense the minute vibrations of his throat as clearly as you can do on the CLSes with say Aaron Neville's Warm Your Heart (A&M 75021-5354-2) Don't expect ambient reflections or the "blush" of hall color on, say, the lively Intaglio Shostakovich Piano Quintet disk (INCD-7561) to be reproduced with all the "you- are-elsewhere" transport that 'stats produce. And do expect to play your music somewhat louder than you're used to playing with CLSes (or similar speakers). You've got to goose these royal things a bit to get them to articulate."
"...what can you expect from these speakers [the 3As], outside of their remarkable disappearing act and consequent superb staging, that could possibly justify their near $4300 (with stands) price tag? Well... let me put it to you like this I listened to Mischa Elman's Favorite Encores (Vanguard Classics OVC8029 and thought he was in the room with me."
"The 3A Royal Masters do not have the snap, transparency, resolution, or speed of panels. But they do have an astoundingly high measure of the coherence, the balance, the relative seamlessness of sound of a crossoverless, single- driver speaker. ... Given what I said about the (amplifier-dependent) sound of the lowest bass and the upper midrange/treble, the Royal Master Controls play with terrific integrity and--and this is the best part--with exceptional musical realism."
"It is a funny thing with cone loudspeakers how their mass works both for and against them. From the bass to the middle midrange, the added weight that mass itself supplies-- while slightly masking the articulation of the finest microphonic detail—also adds lifelike body and color to the sound. Thus, where you may not be able to count each individual violin in the Chicago Orchestra's first violin section on Pictures, your sense of what those violins are made of--the lacquered wooden bodies, the gut strings, the rosined bows, the flesh-and-blood hands that hold them--is considerably heightened by the 3A's balances. Ditto on brasses and winds, like those hair-raising whooping trumpets on Witches' Brew or the heavy-as-a-doubloon brasses on the charming Vaclav Neumann/Czech Philharmonic recording of Janacek's masterpiece The Cunning Little Vixen [Supraphon 103-471-2] and From the House of the Dead [Supraphon 10-2941-2-612]."
"Even the 3A's stripping away of microphonic detail can work in the music's favor, for in stripping it away cones are also stripping away some of the things that make records sound like records (as opposed to like the real thing). Microphones "hear" analytically and indiscriminately: Whatever makes a sound, whether it is a musical sound or not, is picked up in their pressure-differentiated patterns and reproduced in pressure-staggered arrays. What we end up with is a mixed metaphor of sounds, some of which belong to the music and some of which belong more properly to the recording process itself. Cones tend to weed out these analytical, non-musical sounds, simply because these sounds are invariably recorded at much lower levels than the music itself is, and cones don't resolve this very low level information or integrate it as prominently in the overall sound-field. In short, cones can reduce the "presence" of recordings (the "presence" that tells you, you are listening to a recording by a considerable margin over panels. It is what I think people generally mean when they say cones sound "musical." "
"The trouble with cones comes in when this stripping away of low-level information starts affecting the music, and it inevitably does. One pays this penalty with cone drivers: a bit of the baby with the bathwater. Thus, in the case of the Royal Masters, above the middle midrange and below the middle midbass one begins to sense slight losses of the musical values of pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre. In addition, the Royal Masters have some "intensity" limits (which is to say, dynamic) regardless of where they play. From piano to fortissimo they are better than competent: they are superb. Below piano down to pianissimo, above fortissimo to quadruple forte, one senses an increasing loss of dynamic shading (complicated by the softness of the tweeter). Their added mass, that thickening of their tongue, slows their speech and, finally, stills their voice on the truly largest-scale dynamics and the truly smallest ones.(In addition the very size of their drivers becomes a limitation--I mean how much bass impact or low-level articulation can you expect from an 8-inch cone that is also doubling as a midrange source?)"
From my narrow experience with a pair of Stax headphones & quite a few high-end dynamic headphones, some of this stuff definitely seems to apply to dynamic and electrostatic headphones (the below quotes go from earlier in the article to later), and the way he describes the 3A remind me in many ways of the Senn 600:
"Compared to the CLS II Zs, the Royal Masters were audibly slower on transients, less transparent and detailed throughout the midband (and everywhere else), and less adept at low-level resolution."
"[The CLSes] don't sound boxy. Box coloration alone, however, is only one "tell" that reminds us we are listening to speakers. ... [The CLSes] constantly, naggingly remind us that-despite their boxless, massless, crossoverless, see-through transparency- they are still there. brightening up the upper midrange rolling off the bass, thinning out lower midrange body, collapsing the "stage" at the high SPLs, and breaking up on really hard transients at high SPLs."
"The Royal Masters also have this kind of acoustical presence...Cymbals...are at low to normal volumes somewhat softened in texture and impact--losing some (not all) of their metallic sheen and radiant shimmer."
"The Royal Masters deliver in the low end with power and extension...What they don't do...is reproduce...the midbass with the astounding clarity of the CLSes. "
"[the 3As] do not have the kind, of mid band transparency and resolution that the CLSes (or, for that matter, that the WATTs) have. This is not just a question of some slight residual box and cone colorations; it also relates to the amount of work that the woofer is required to do and the relative mass of that item. While the References do not lack at all for an abundance of musical: detail, don't expect them to deliver X-ray inner detail or electrostatic-like immediacy in the midband; don't expect, particularly at lower levels, to be able to count the strings in the string choirs...with the effortless ease that you can on the CLSes (or other similar panels). Don't expect to hear the very spit in a vocalist's mouth or to sense the minute vibrations of his throat as clearly as you can do on the CLSes with say Aaron Neville's Warm Your Heart (A&M 75021-5354-2) Don't expect ambient reflections or the "blush" of hall color on, say, the lively Intaglio Shostakovich Piano Quintet disk (INCD-7561) to be reproduced with all the "you- are-elsewhere" transport that 'stats produce. And do expect to play your music somewhat louder than you're used to playing with CLSes (or similar speakers). You've got to goose these royal things a bit to get them to articulate."
"...what can you expect from these speakers [the 3As], outside of their remarkable disappearing act and consequent superb staging, that could possibly justify their near $4300 (with stands) price tag? Well... let me put it to you like this I listened to Mischa Elman's Favorite Encores (Vanguard Classics OVC8029 and thought he was in the room with me."
"The 3A Royal Masters do not have the snap, transparency, resolution, or speed of panels. But they do have an astoundingly high measure of the coherence, the balance, the relative seamlessness of sound of a crossoverless, single- driver speaker. ... Given what I said about the (amplifier-dependent) sound of the lowest bass and the upper midrange/treble, the Royal Master Controls play with terrific integrity and--and this is the best part--with exceptional musical realism."
"It is a funny thing with cone loudspeakers how their mass works both for and against them. From the bass to the middle midrange, the added weight that mass itself supplies-- while slightly masking the articulation of the finest microphonic detail—also adds lifelike body and color to the sound. Thus, where you may not be able to count each individual violin in the Chicago Orchestra's first violin section on Pictures, your sense of what those violins are made of--the lacquered wooden bodies, the gut strings, the rosined bows, the flesh-and-blood hands that hold them--is considerably heightened by the 3A's balances. Ditto on brasses and winds, like those hair-raising whooping trumpets on Witches' Brew or the heavy-as-a-doubloon brasses on the charming Vaclav Neumann/Czech Philharmonic recording of Janacek's masterpiece The Cunning Little Vixen [Supraphon 103-471-2] and From the House of the Dead [Supraphon 10-2941-2-612]."
"Even the 3A's stripping away of microphonic detail can work in the music's favor, for in stripping it away cones are also stripping away some of the things that make records sound like records (as opposed to like the real thing). Microphones "hear" analytically and indiscriminately: Whatever makes a sound, whether it is a musical sound or not, is picked up in their pressure-differentiated patterns and reproduced in pressure-staggered arrays. What we end up with is a mixed metaphor of sounds, some of which belong to the music and some of which belong more properly to the recording process itself. Cones tend to weed out these analytical, non-musical sounds, simply because these sounds are invariably recorded at much lower levels than the music itself is, and cones don't resolve this very low level information or integrate it as prominently in the overall sound-field. In short, cones can reduce the "presence" of recordings (the "presence" that tells you, you are listening to a recording by a considerable margin over panels. It is what I think people generally mean when they say cones sound "musical." "
"The trouble with cones comes in when this stripping away of low-level information starts affecting the music, and it inevitably does. One pays this penalty with cone drivers: a bit of the baby with the bathwater. Thus, in the case of the Royal Masters, above the middle midrange and below the middle midbass one begins to sense slight losses of the musical values of pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre. In addition, the Royal Masters have some "intensity" limits (which is to say, dynamic) regardless of where they play. From piano to fortissimo they are better than competent: they are superb. Below piano down to pianissimo, above fortissimo to quadruple forte, one senses an increasing loss of dynamic shading (complicated by the softness of the tweeter). Their added mass, that thickening of their tongue, slows their speech and, finally, stills their voice on the truly largest-scale dynamics and the truly smallest ones.(In addition the very size of their drivers becomes a limitation--I mean how much bass impact or low-level articulation can you expect from an 8-inch cone that is also doubling as a midrange source?)"
