Tonally Accurate Loudspeakers

[square_wave]

I am not sure whether the speakers that has appealed me are tonally accurate. There are some that have appealed to me. Like nosortf said, they may all have a flavour.

A full audionote setup. Don’t remember the model names of all the gear.
Cadence Arca on canasya monoblocks
A voxativ speaker on ayon SET at a dealer in Netherlands. I think the model was the 9.87 or the Pi.
A raidho floorstander at the above dealer. Forgot the exact model number. Surprisingly many people say Raidho are clinical. But my experience was the opposite. They were being driven by Ayon mono blocks.
Rethm sadhana on their own amp.
A sonus faber bookshelf speaker ( I think Guarneri Homage series ) running on some crazy expensive tube monoblocks. The name escapes me at this point.

 

[nosortf]

I am not sure whether the speakers that has appealed me are tonally accurate. There are some that have appealed to me. Like nosortf said, they may all have a flavour.

A full audionote setup. Don’t remember the model names of all the gear.
Cadence Arca on canasya monoblocks
A voxativ speaker on ayon SET at a dealer in Netherlands. I think the model was the 9.87 or the Pi.
A raidho floorstander at the above dealer. Forgot the exact model number. Surprisingly many people say Raidho are clinical. But my experience was the opposite. They were being driven by Ayon mono blocks.
Rethm sadhana on their own amp.
A sonus faber bookshelf speaker ( I think Guarneri Homage series ) running on some crazy expensive tube monoblocks. The name escapes me at this point.

Super speakers, all of them. Immensely different too, however most of them are far from accurate. Non of them will ever find themselves as a reviewer's reference or an a high end electronics brand's test speaker.
I suspect squarewave already knows this, but is in the search for accurate speakers which are tonally appealing too.

 

[square_wave]

Yes, you read my mind correctly. Many of these have a slight flavour of their own. But somehow the sound appeals to the heart. They strike this fantastic balance between accuracy and musical bliss. I concur that many engineers or reviewers might not use them to look deep into a recording from a technical perspective.

This is a very interesting quandary. I have also tried listening to some setups whose sole purpose is to disappear completely. Meaning, they are as technically transparent as possible. When you play exemplary recordings, the tone of the instruments and the singers are so much more evident from a very technical standpoint than a system that adds a certain flavour of their own. Bad recordings are mostly unlistenable as well.

For the home listener who wants as much entertainment as possible for all his / her recordings, I reckon a balanced approach is necessary.

 

[Kannan]

Tonality is a culmination of hearing deficiencies and music taste. A head banger would probably call a dynamic and forward sounding speaker as tonally accurate and a jazz enthusiast may decipher it differently.

The only way to define a speaker as scientifically tonally accurate is when it has no peaks and dips and produces a flat frequency response across the entire bandwidth.

There have been quite a few speakers listed in this thread according to the liking of FMs.
Do all these speakers produce a flat frequency response? If not they are not tonally accurate in technical terms as each sounds different.

So though the topic is an interesting one, tonal accuracy is just a myth.
Some like the Harbeths, some the JBLs, some the ATCs and so on and so forth.
Some like ported, some sealed while others prefer open baffles.

 

[flute]

The best way is to use multidrivers and achieve point source .

 

[nosortf]

A well designed 3 way using a 10 or 12 inch woofer is usually successful at meeting the accuracy criteria.

 

[prem]

All mastering is usually done on multi driver speakers with crossovers. Many times the mastering engineer might compensate for the small anomalies that might be introduced because of the crossover. So multidriver speakers may be the best for such recordings.

Just some food for thought

 

[nosortf]

Most mastering monitors are active. They are phase aligned and time offset which is easily possible in active systems. Crossover anomalies of passive systems are done away with.

 

[RaahulT]

Not possible to create a perfect speaker because according to speaker designers themselves a speaker has to be a massless line source or infinitly small point source. I guess plasma tweeters do it, never heard any in person. Perhaps it's time for the science to move ahead and make a completely new way of making audio gear. Just brainwaves that makes us experience music the way it would in real life. No woofers tweeters.

Good one. Quite a high level stuff. May sound from the another dimension. However for mortals, I think that the science is making its way slowly but surely. We may be able to witness it in some form in near future.

 

[nosortf]

We have drifted.
In what Squarewave was asking, I am convinced that a 3 way speaker is the minimum, if all genres of music have to be handled. There are exceptions, very few.
Luckily many such 3 way designs exist, one just needs to choose their sonic preference and adjust their budgets accordingly.
However I don't think you can get a great speaker for below 7 lakh rupees, and keeping in mind Squarewave's point, I think the figure is closer to 10 lakhs or above.
I know some members may not agree with the figures I mentioned, but it is only my viewpoint and not necessarily agreeable to others.

 

[jls001]

As requested by the OP, posts about the future of loudspeakers has been moved to a new thread in the AV Lounge section.

All further discussions and speculations about how loudspeakers may develop in future may be posted on the new thread, and not on this thread.

 

[ravikumar-rotel]

its a recipe you need to work on to get what sounds heavenly to your ears. And thats not absolute. Get the best gear and cables and everything, & no guarantee it will sound good to you. The choice of hardware also depends on many parameters(including cost). And what sounds very good at a friends place will not sound the same when got to your listening room.. There are lots of variables you need to work on to get what you feel sounds the best for you!