GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: About Boiling Micro Response.

Post Subject: Audio Boiling PointPosted by Jorge on: 10/17/2010

There is a very scarce effect in nature I will try to explain, a sort of sense explosion. One of this happens sometimes in food tasting.

When you have a very tasty, very good cheese and you take a couple of bites and it grabs your tongue and its good, and you sort of get numb of all the strong taste, after that you take just a tip of a spoon of say orange marmalade and all of a sudden there is this taste explosion in your mouth, the cheese combines in a wonderful way with the sweet of the marmalade and maybe the acid of the orange and your taste buds vibrate. This happened to me just the other day for the first time with wine and food at a good friends house, we were having some good wine, very nice but not really special, when we sat for dinner, very good ravioli pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil with a wonderful simple salad, when I tasted the wine again this explosion of the spices combining with the wine flavor and alcohol was there, everyone at the table experienced the same thing.

It just happened to me with audio, I had hooked up a wonderful JBL 2490 driver to a 120 hz horn and was playing around with all the channels volumes and Xover points trying to make a cone speaker in a horn sound like the JBL driver, I kept getting up from my chair and rearranging the volume here and there and going back to listen until I noticed, it sounds good here, then all of the instruments sort of receded into one midrange sound, the extension sort of disappeared the highs were not present, they were there, but not evident, not shouting in your face, the bass seemed to be gone, it was not dragging around like a lot of systems I have heard, what is left is an Extended Midrange sound, I imagine it like Spherical, when the midrange is the center and the highs and lows are the poles, they are still there but part of a whole and only jump at you when they are called in, what is left is instruments resonating on all their chords and harmonics, vivid instruments just jumping out of the speakers. If we use the same Spherical analogy, you can visualize looking thruogh a lens and seeing evrything more clearly, but not bloated.

I got this just on one side of my playback, where the cone driver is, the side with the JBL driver is not explosive, it is not boiling, It does sound very nice, dynamic extended transparent any reviewers mumbo jumbo apply, but it is not explosive. I am pretty sure it is mainly because it is not time aligned, the JBL driver was and add on to an existing system and in order to make the throat of the horn smaller, some inches were added to the length and thus it is not aligned with the other drivers…. Such a ptiy! The components are there, the Nitroglycerin, the Gun powder the TNT, are mixed in waiting for the spark, but not aligned properly for the explosion sequence.

I was lucky enough to listen to Romys old system before the move, the system was in continual explosion, like a nuclear power plant just waiting to be excited by the music. It was the first time I ever heard such effect in audio, the boiling micro response, he describes it perfectly, I am just relating it to other senses, food, so it can be comprehended, it is so rare and it has such a force that I do believe it transcends the barrier of the senses…

I will take very careful measurements and notes of the set up in order to be able to keep it sounding, try to get the other channel to do it, and hopefully someday reproduce it again if it is lost!

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site