Please note the interpolations

On Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 1:06:19 AM UTC-4, wrote:
"Well - this is a horse of an entirely different color. "

You an AKer ?

I am not from Alaska, but I do own several A****er Kent radios made nearby. Otherwise, I do not get the reference?

Anyway, in response, speakers run 5, 6, 7 dB off, microphones about the same. Amps, tuners, whatever, consider them good within 3 dB. And people are afraid to use tone controls ? Where is that in the Bible ? Where is that in the Constitution ?

Some do, some are better than that. Most of mine are in the "better" category. Most (not all) speakers that are in the better category are also power pigs. All of mine are in that category - which leads to having to have relatively high-wattage amps based on speaker type, expected volume and room size. My least powerful amp is a 12-watt EL84 based homebrew, my most is 225 watt solid-state beast.

What's more, when turned all the way up that bass control is doing what it is supposed to do. Or all the way down. It was endowed by its creator with that ability. It is your free will to use it or abuse it. Like a gun, well at least as far as some woofers are concerned but they are just paranoid....


Have you ever looked at a 'full/min.' curve on a typical amp tone control? One runs out of words past "ugly". Not even the first cousin of the input signal.

Bose had no shame in using a permanent EQ. Neither did I. Years ago I had speakers used to have a small woofer and like an 8 or 10 inch passive radiator which I replaced with a four ohm woofer.

On Bose - there is a very accurate descriptive phrase: No highs? No lows? Must be Bose. Of all the "popular" and/or mass-market "Name Brand" speakers out there, Bose were and are perhaps the worst of the lot. Their singular virtue was that they sounded just as wretched anywhere in the room due to that equalization. Which Bose managed to turn into a selling point. But, if that is your 'reference' speaker, much of what you have to write is justified, and heroic use of equalization is probably necessary. Generally not so much with decent speakers and sufficient power to drive them.

ASIDE: one day, I will fasten upon a set of Klipschorns - and retest my theories using fixed-location highly efficient speakers. Until then, I am quite happy with what I have, have no fears, constitutional, biblical or otherwise using equalization, bass, midrange or treble controls but just not having much of a need.

It was not good, but using the full range off a Soundcraftsmen ten band EQ I got them to sound good. And when I played a few other things on them I started liking them better and better. Damn that bass was smooth.

The settings were 31 Hz at +max, 62 at 0, 125 Hz at -max (min) and the rest gradually up to the center from there to about the sixth band. It sounded fantastic, but was inefficient as hell. First of all it was 2.3 ohms, poison to at least half of the amps known in existence, or not actually...

Good sound, especially Bass is a matter of moving air. It takes a certain amount of surface area to move sufficient air to get clean, smooth bass. In my direct experience concentrating mostly on vintage equipment (my most recent amp other than the homebrew is c. 1980) is that every one of them is perfectly happy down to 2 ohms, and my two front-line devices are stable to 1 ohm if short-term, and will shut themselves off if long term. I drive nominal 4-ohm AR3a speakers and nominal 6-ohm Maggies as the two extremes - no worries. The rest of the lot are much more conventional nominal 8-ohm devices.

The lights dimmed when I cranked these babies up. Eventually they became the rear channels in my quad system. Fed them with a supposedly low power Sansui 771. I scoped it once and don;t remember the reading but it was well over a hundred a channel into that 2.3 ohms. The front was the Marantz 4270 running into speakers I put together. A 12 inch three way system, decent dome tweeters, noting fancy ad did not sound perfect, but I had an EQ for them as well. Separate EQs for front and back. Yup.

If you *needed* equalization with decent drivers in a homebrew speaker, I suspect that your crossovers may have needed work as well, and you were overcoming their limitations - no shame in that, but it also makes your fascination with equalization more reasonable. And a good thing that using such means did get you where you wanted to be in the end.


Once set, I believe the sound was damn hard to beat. Nobody did back then, at least in the current crowd. And I had it with the Advent five foot silver screen job with the mirror out front, AND MINE WAS CALIBRATED. Someone has just changed all three CRTs but it had another problem nobody could fix.. Nobody else that is.

You understand that Henry Kloss began to go deaf with increasing rapidity right around the time he moved away from speakers and audio to TV. His projection TV was a tour-de-force, with its biggest problem after the expense was in keeping it running, much less setting it up in the first place. Like the little girl with the pretty curl. When it was good, it was very, very good. When it was bad, it was just awful.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA