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Verso Filler Page
COVfR ffATURf
Why &paal(ers with idantical &pacitic:atioM sound
be usual methods
of speaker testing
yield a mystery, one
that }Qu're certain to
have rome across in
the hili press: if two
similar speakers
from different man-
ufacturers have identical
distortion, tone burst and
frequency response
specifications, why does
each speaker have a uni-
que sound? Writers
struggle to describe these
differences, coming up
with such terms as stri- .
dent, veiled, or muddy in
an attempt to capture the
subtletiesofsound
One term tbat
seems to work is "trans-
parent". Tbe accepted
meaning is that a trans-
pare.nt speaker adds
Bill MARKWICK
nothing of its """ to the Mike Wligllt ill tile RkiU1lood HiU, Gilt lab alld SOl/lid room.
sound, producing natural
audio that just seems to come out of thin air.
In the early years of the hili booni, this was
usually described as "an orchestra actually
playing in your 1Mng room", an elusive goal
for all but the best of systems. A speaker
Vthich is not transparent immediately tells
you that you're listening to the music
through a machine, and this is true whether
or not the speaker does well in the standard
tests.
Stand.d T .... '"
Before the advent of affordable oomputer-
controlled test gear, there were a number
of metbods used to quantify speaker
response, and despite hi-tech advances in
equipment, they remain the mainstay. The
most popular, and one that gives a great
deal of informatioo; is the frequency
response test A calibrated micropbone is
used to measure the output from the
speaker as it is swept over the audio fre-
E&1TDlc.,_'.
quency range. Unless you have an
anechoic chamber which preven.1s any
reflected sound, this test is plagued with
the peaks and dips of the room response
itself. Some of the ways around this in-
clude the averaging of several tests from
different directions and the use of rapidly
swept frequencies to avoid stimulating
room resonances. .
. TeSta. soon realized that steady-state
frequency response wasn' teIling the whole
story, and the tone burst test was used in an
attempt to measure the spcal='s ability to
respond quickly without overshoot; the test
frequency is switched on and off rapidly,
1ctting through a desired number of Ojdes.
The difficulty oomes in trying to interpret
the imJJClfect tone burst 1MJich. is picked up
by the miCropbone.. Sometimes the. "'l'ults
. have 00. apparent ixmnection with the per-
ceived sound.
DiStorfun seems to be an important
parameter, measured
with the usual notch fiJ-
ter or with a spectrum
analyzer that can sum
tbc value of tbe har-
monies, but again, the
difficulty lies in trying to
explain wby a speaker
with high distortion
sounds better than onc
with im peccable
specifications.
Adding to the tech-
nical difficulty is the
processing of the sound
by the listener, a subjec-
tive variable much we'll
come to in a later sec-
tion.
P .. tocIcIty
In the mid-l97Os, Bell
Laboratories published
papers on the use of the
Fourier transform in
sound analysis. The
Fourier analysis is a
mathematical tool used to find the various
components that make up a complex
waveform; a spectrum analyzer displaying
the harmonics of;t sound is doing a Fast
Fourier Transform (FFT). By doing
another transform on the new-found rom-
ponents, you can find the periodicity; such
anomalies as reflections or speaker
shortoomings show up clearly.
The method of analysis was used to
analyze the noise signature from Con-
corde jet engines; previously, the tests had
been affected by sound reflections from
the runway, but the periodicity tests al-
lowed engineers to separate pure engine
noise from the total sound The method
was later used by Bruel & Kjaer in their
industrial.failure-prediction equipment to
separate undesired machinery noise froin
the tOtal sound, allowing detection of im-
P"'iding faults without the necessi.tY of
shutdown.
9
PariocIcity ani Perc BIJtion
t
AMPLITUDE
AMPLITUDE
r
TI ME
SQUARE WAVE (TIME DOWJN)
AMPLITUDE
1111111 I I I I
TIME DOMAIN
t AMPLITUDE
COMPONENTS OF SQUARE WAVE
AFTER FOURIER ANALYSIS
FREQUENCY
FREQUENCY

FREQUENCY DOMAIN
FOUJieranalysis tkals MiD, 0", frequency dcJmain flztherthan the.mfNfl Fourier analysis aOows compler wavelQmlS to be separated into Oleir
lamiIiI1rlimL domain. freqlll!1lC)' r:cmpotwlts.
Part of a cepsUwn response plot of a DO)1on Wright speake. 2fJ48 samples /uJve been taken lorlimL rorutanJs from .5 to 133 mil-
liserauls. The large spikes at the rili,t indicate room response, and the area cirr:Jed in pen indiaztes an anomaly.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V
I-"
\
-
I
.
""'\
V
'-
f-'
COUpl EX WA\{ffORM
ffi A
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .

. . . , . . . .
. . .... .
. . . . - . . .
1 OF 1 Q SAMPt INC SINEWAYES
III I I I I I I I I I I
RfSU! T IS fREQUENcy SPECTRUM
. the sampIing.silteM<rne is multiplied by die ekmmlln etJCh Mindow 01

:' 10
.--

..

&cause of differmas in 0 .. _ padlkngtllS, the periodicity will
/uJve a ccmponmI dlle to the reflection.
Here in Canada. the method was
adapted to speaker analysis by Mike
developer of the Dayton 'Wright
loudspeakers and Stabilaot 22, a liquid
semiconductor used as a contact enhancer
(see the review in our October issue).
testillgolIered the posstbility of
easy removal of room effects from a
respoose plot, as well as the detection of
unwanted reflections from the speaker
construction itself.
Pawcepdol.
One year during large trade show, Mike
noticed that his awareness of speaker
quality wasscriously affected by the noise
and associated fatigue of maintaiDing the
display booth. Speakers. which had pre-
viously sounded fine were becoming a
chore to listen to, a phenomenon which
was easily interpreted as the brain's reJuo-
.tance to accePt any morc input
. However, that night hMvenl to a sym-
phony concert and discovered that the live
sound had none of the expected
shortComings. The conclusion he arrived
at was that all speakers were introducing
small. oddities of Uleir own, anomalies that
the brain filtered out. This extremely com-
plex filtering allow.; you .to listen to desired
sounds in the middle ora noisy party, and
lack of it is: why tape recording; of that
party will later sound incredibly clattery
and jumbled, since the required important
information (phase relationships, visual
cues, etc) is not present.
The 'periodicity tests seemed like the
. bes( way to analyze speaker output and
fmd whatever . faults were occupying so
mucb of the brain's audio processing.
Tasting
The present test setup in the Richmond
Hill plant consists of a soundproof room
which is finished inside to represent a typi-
cal listening and even in-
cludes easy cbairs. A calibrated' AKG
microphone picks up the speaker
which is .a swept-frequency pulse train.
The signals are processed by a Hewlett-
Packard spectrum analyzer can be dis-
played on its'CRT as a standard frequency
or as a spectrum of com-
ponents (using the FFl). It also has a 16-
bit 9utput whicb is .captured by an HP
6&JOO-based computer.
'. The software, which consists of 17,OOJ
lines in HP Basic, can then process the in-
fO!1')8tion to plot response, phase, and pe-
riodicity (the advantage in the spectrum
analyzer lies in its speed the computer
takes mucb longer to derive tile FFl).
. '.
. E&TT o-l1b .. 1.
When Bell Lab; published their ideas
on using Founer anaJysis, someone whimsi-
cally labelled Ule various parameters using
anagrams of familiar terms, and So the peri-
odicity whicb looks something like a
frequCIICY spectrum. becomes a cepstrunl.
The periodicity is formally defined as the in-
verse FFI' of the log power spectrum of the
components of the sound, and the cepstrum
is a plot of the ripple in'a waveform for eacb
time constant of the components causing
the ripple.
For instance, if the cepstrum reveals a
spike with a time constant of about =,
then some two surfaces in the speaker en-
vironment" are causing 3 . reflection, . and
they'll be about 2 feet apart (taking the
velocity of sound as 1ft/ms): As to why this
information is not revealed in siandard
speaker testing: the information is there,
but the test format may not be, ideai for
displaying as a ,soope display of a
squarewave gives no hint that n's the sum
of a long'series of odd harmonics.
. The process ' can be used to detect .
small reflections in drivers and cabinets. For
example, speakers often sound better with
the griI1 cloth removed; it's not just a case of
sound absorption by the cloth - reflections
from the frame itself can cause audoble ef-
fects. The speaker on the cover is being
tested with a fibreglass pad to elirninate sur-
face effects; in production this would be
replaced by acoustical foam, and the
speaker is constructed so that there's no
fr<lIlle protruding past the front surface.
Standard speaker testing in combina-
tion with periodicity plots allows. rapid
analysis of the. speaker drivers, enclosure,
crossover, and 1!stening environment. nle
, result of investigating and correcting is a
speaker that approaches the ideal of
transparency, one that never lets you know
it's there.
noises behind the curtain indicated that the
speakers had been changed, and the test
. was repeated The listeners liked the first
'and said that the second set were in-
ferior to it In the speakers were ncvcr
touched What had happened is that the
room .aooustics dominated the sound en-
vironment when the people first entered for
. . the first t6st By the time of the second
they were used to the room 'and began to
judge differently. There's also the fad that
novelty affects perception; musicians ollen
prefer. someone :else's instrument-for a
while. When the novelty wears off, theyre
more oojective about deciding.
The curtain in the above tests is also
used in other testing because visual cues are
so important to sound perceptiOD, par-
ticularIy the 'localizing of a sound Mike said
that additional speakers placed at either
side of the listener will cause them to """"'
that the stereo image is much wider, even
though the side speakers are not even con-
nected. .
Level settings are extremely impor-
tant during comparison testing of
speakers. The usual wisdom is thal one dB
is the minimum.sound level difference we
can detect, but the ear. is much more sensi-
live to chanie in the 'midrange area; if
speakers.are tested with alevel difference
of-about 05dB, the higher level gives the
vague impression. of brighter response. If
the speakers arc switcbed using the same
amplificr; the morc efficient speaker
sounds louder and brighter.
There's also evidence that the right
ear perceives high frequencies in a dif-
ferent marmer than the left, a fact which
may be due to the partitiol)ing of the brain.
The speakers under test .C3?Dof oc-
cupy the same space, so room acoustics
will cause. a different soWld response even
if the speakers are identical- If the test is
interrupted and the speakers are inter:
ABlT8II1Ing changed, the delay may not let the listener
The above discussion on speaker improve- retain accurate impressions of the sound
ments .is somewhat oversimplified; since . . ' To sum up, the NB test must be done
there's a great deal more to- speaker under .e;<tremely well"l controlled cir-
analysis than watching 'a plohmd tinkering ' cumstances in order to reveal anything
here and there. The tester may . use meaningful Like statistics, they can be
periodicity to disoover some small ripple made to prove anything you want.
in tJle response, but the decision as to .. .. . .rAnd .how well did .this. research
whether or not this isalIecting the sound. benefit the Dayton' Wright line of
depends on the listener, and most listeners. . speakers? They can definitely. have a right
are almost . unbelievably flexible in their to the claim of transparency, their sound
perception of sound.ln mosl.cases, .theire indiCateS meticulous care in design. so
unaware of howtheir own mental process,. much);o.that StereQfVidco guide of Oc-
ingis fooling them. , . ..';: : . tohei',.1987 rated them as the number-one
Mike Wright held a.speaker Iisterung ' :' speaker.. .
test in whicb listeners-carne into the room. ; ._, .:Special thanks ta Mike Wright for the
wbile a set of speakers were playing Then .' . /in,,; -<PetIt explaiJluog<peaker testing.
11