Dynamic vs Estat Round 15

So the conclusion is that the tension of the driver is enough to actively resist the motive force of the signal below a certain level?

 

My T2 still have not arrived, but as a former owner of the KGST, 007, 009 and SRM-600, i think i can comment a little on this issue.

Like i've written somewhere else before, the stax is an absolute detail monster. Nothing plays ambiance /micro-detail /plankton better than it. I've had multiple TOTL rigs, and no setup does it better. My non-audiophile sister is very used to my gear, and the stax rig is the only ones where her eyes were constantly wide opened and where she just kept mouthing "I have never heard that in the song before". That's coming off a HD800 - Master 9 combo and what other head-fi gear i had.

However, that unbelievable rendering of detail is only one aspect of the whole experience. As much as i loved the Stax, it only works best when playing un-amplified music. Ie Classical.

For normal music which have gone through copious amounts of post processing while being tuned by an engineer using some dynamic driver headphone or speakers. Or live music, which is essentially recorded sounds of shitty concert speakers. It just sounds boring, and sterile. The slam just isnt there. And it sounds too airy for tracks that are technically supposed to be a wall of sound (pop etc).

I think the microdetail that Marv and OJ speaks of is a "Pseudo Natural Decay". I doubt most mics have the ability to record the full decay of instruments. Therefore, there is no signal there for the stax to play. However, given that a dynamic or planar is by nature slower than the stax, it adds its own decay / low level distortion to the sound, which in turn makes it sound more natural.

While this slowness/decay is quite nice, its in turn hampered when playing highly complex music. When using the stax on concert music, i was initially quite disoriented on how each clap of the audience seems so distinct despite the huge chorus of it. But after a couple hours, the effect wears off and im stuck noticing the absolute lack of dynamism or slam or "Shitty concert speaker" quality that the transducers just cant do.

Having said that, i have not tried the Holy Grail (Carbon, T2 or BHSE) so there is quite a bit to go before im familiar with the subject.

 

So shouldn't that be measurable? CSD? Minimum SLP produced at a frequency?

 

Okay, so it is neither distortion nor added signal. Then the data in question must be present in the recording, and a solid DAC or turntable will extract it and send it to the amplifier. Dynamics will play these sounds, and electrostatics and planars will not. Right?

In that case, it should be possible to synthesize a test. In a recording studio, play and record a single note on a decent (preferably grand, but an upright will work) piano. That instrument has really long decay in its notes, much longer than most. Continue recording for at least 15 seconds after silence. Measure silence with an SPL meter if possible. This is the test recording.

Play the test recording on the best HD800 rig available at reasonable volume. By ear, note the exact time when all "plankton" disappear from the decay. Down to about 100ms precision should be pretty doable. Maybe even 50ms.

Ideally, volume-match the best electrostatic rig available to the HD800. Note this should be optional. If electrostatics don't have this level of resolution, then just playing louder than the HD800 would be sufficient. Now play the recording and see when decay ends. If it ends before the HD800, case closed — at least for that one test subject.

 

I don't get the metaphor. But you're second point might be right, i'm not too familiar with microphones.

If your theory that "Tension of the driver is enough to actively resist the motive force of the signal below a certain level" is true, one could argue that the weight of the dynamic drivers also resist the motive force of signals below a certain level and that it over exaggerates the motive force of signals about a certain level (which is where 99% of the music is) creating low level distortion and artificial decay.

Im in the diamond tweeter camp. Aint nothing stiffer and lighter than those.

 

I don't see why it would need to be so complex. Just play tones at a few different frequencies and gradually decrease the amplitude. If the premise here is correct, the planar/estat should stop at a higher amplitude than the dynamic. Seems like that should be measurable and audible. For by-ear testing, intersperse the tones with 0dBFS pink noise as a reference level or whatever.

 

I don't think it's easy to measure. I'm sure transducers have perfect level linearity by design (which cannot be said for DACs and turntables) up to a certain max level where they start compressing (Measuring this for headphones would be interesting. Maybe this is why I don't like planar tweeters in speakers?) and as OJ said, the ear can pick up sounds that get lost by a spectrum analyzer. I think that in very complex sounds, very low level sounds will get omitted by transducers, like the 3rd and 4th echo of a few of the claps between the 1m50 and 2m30 mark of Hotel California. Still, I don't know how I would construct a test for this. Would it work to play a few tones at one level while reducing another tone? Probably not. Another interesting thing to measure would be IMD and sub-harmonics. I'm pretty sure dynamics have no sub-harmonics, unlike maybe some planar drivers. Still, I don't think plankton is an effect of low distortion most of the time.
The suspension theory sounds more realistic, but I've not had enough experience myself to confirm this. This also doesn't seem to explain why the HD800 gets the plankton award and other more efficient, more pliable surround drivers don't. Maybe it does work for differentiating between otherwise very similar drivers like the Accuton midranges?

 

While I think this is an interesting theory that Marv has put out there, I'm more inclined to believe that the problem is related to the fact that there is a stator in the way of the driver, causing all sorts of diffraction issues. Imagine taking a protoboard and putting in front and behind the HD800 driver (albeit by necessity). It certainly isn't going to do us any favors. We already know that planar magnetic manufacturers have gone to heroic lengths to improve (or sometimes outright avoid) the magnetic structures that can represent acoustic impediments with all sorts of fazor, flow, flowzer, waveguides.

No one has investigated this in detail, but the stators might very be the cause of the "estat hash" that we see in the CSDs, and might very well correlate to the lack of resolution we hear. Of course, by n3rdlings logic this extra CSD hash is a form of low-level distortion and should make the estats sound VERY resolving

 

I also wonder WTF happens when the stator starts vibrating. Certainly nothing good. Imagine the magnet moving for no reason in dynamic drivers. There's probably a reason why some companies try to make stiffer, less resonant stators for their most expensive $50k headphones or their $20k+ estat speakers.

 

I still contest this point. If you mean the brightness or edge of the HD800 can seem to add a sense of "detail" then I would agree. But otherwise a neutral moving coil does not "add" detail to my ear. There seems to be a confusion between what we hear as detail/plankton/etc. and what we hear as non-related crapola (all those sins of commision)

 

lol seriously? On what basis are you making this claim? Do you have experience recording? Have you experienced a direct hardware monitor loop that somehow removes all the room ambiance and plankton? Do you think mics have some sort of built in noise reduction that just brickwalls everything below some arbitrary level?

Ok, that just confirms you're deaf then. Do you just go for anything that is pricey and has audiophile prestige behind it? Estats and diamond tweeters have like polar opposite treble renderings.

 

This is the amplitude linearity test, which I touched on before.

 

The best classical music has been multitracked like everything else since the 60s. Popular music was actually a bigger holdout and the best classical performances on major labels are all mixed together. The classical music industry doesn't really work like independent and underground popular music genres in rock, metal, and electronica do. The diy crap being sold at speakers shows tends to suck as they can't play and the recordings sound like muddy messes and you usually have to EQ them yourself. It's the exact opposite of the thin but everything's audible on decent setups "old school garage rock / heavy metal sound" you can hear on old hardcore 7"s and the first Megadeth album with the playdough skull. In fact audio engineers working with orchestral recordings have usually been the first to embrace new techniques and technology while you still see many groups in "popular" genres (some of these are totally niche like dungeon synth) recording onto analog tape as they like the sound of it.

The attack and slam isn't there for acoustic instruments either. Beethoven sounds absolutely hilarious on STAX never minding Jon Bonham and Pete Townsend.

It's not that they're slower, it's that the STAX is unnaturally and uniformly fast. Mics can capture Black Sabbath and shitty guitar amps infamous for sounding like "lava" but electrostatic transducers can't reproduce these well.

BHSE adds in some punch (still no real no low end slam or rumble) but nothing like a Speedball crack does to a Sennheiser. BHSE is ultimately a wimpy puncher like Floyd Mayweather that would just get sent flying by a heavyweight dynamic. The BHSE makes rock and Beethoven more listenable but still one dimensional like a mediocre pop-up children's book that's falling apart as some jerk kid squashed it.

With the STAX energizers... yeah they sound absolutely terrible and worse than Koss.

 

Never heard original Orpheus, but the day Sorrodje and me played with stats did highlight tonal balance as well as soundstage. The maybe too much energy around 1 khz most of Stax have does hide some plankton, indeed. That was obvious comparing HE60 vs. SR-009. Even though the latter has moar bass, sounds fullier, extracting more info from recordings, ambiance / cues were ahead on the Senn', no doubt.
Regarding diaphragm tension, Senn stats have a lot of it, more than Stax. I'm not sure of your assumption, though.

Ali

 

Thank you for the clarification. However, why the second paragraph? It makes me wonder whether the outcome of this discussion predetermined and the joke is on non-insiders. I imagine I misunderstood, but please explain.