History of the Nautilus loudspeaker
bowerswilkins.com
bowerswilkins.com
For anyone interested in buying speakers (or other audio products), it’s a fantastic resource and an essential one to avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming products; sadly, the high fidelity speaker space is crowded with such products (many of which are borderline scams), using a ton of pseudoscientific marketing babble to push products ranging from “snake-oil” bunk, to mediocre garbage that still costs the price of an exotic car for no good reason.
If you’re curious to cut through the garbage, and learn how to achieve the best sound quality for the best price with a no-nonsense approach, AudioScienceReview is the place to go. They have the highest quality objective measurements on many speakers (that goes far beyond frequency response, before you brush it off thinking that’s what I’m talking about) and tutorials on the well-established science of what makes a speaker sound better than others, and how we design and evaluate this.
It turns out you can get sound quality ~90% as good as it gets for just a few hundred dollars, and ~95% as good as it gets for a few thousand dollars (obviously just rough numbers here). Beware of speakers sold for exorbitant prices and exotic visual designs that tout how they are built, rather than what measured performance they achieve objectively.
B&W speakers are not bad, and I enjoyed mine very much when I had them. But there exist far better speakers at a fraction of the cost, and this includes their high end (like the Nautilus).
Yeah, you need to whip off the rose tinted glasses. ASR is a step in the right direction, but there are no shortage of issues with the quality and consistency of Amir's testing, or his ludicrous hyperbole.
Otherwise, let me know your price range and size constraints, and I’ll refer you to the best engineered (with subjective impressions that back it up) speaker you can get. Note that generally to get good bass response you need larger speakers due to the laws of physics, but more exotic construction can push these boundaries, albeit at the expense of greater cost and electrical power demands.
If you want to know what is objectively far better (and subjectively according to most, as the science predicts), look to the Revel F328Be, Genelec 8351B + Genelec W371A, Kii Three + BXT, Dutch and Dutch 8C. These are very expensive, but even in the worst case they are half the price of the B&W Nautilus and perform far better according to what the state-of-the-art science tells us. And subjectively, this is easily confirmed.
( ASR measurements + review of the Revel M106: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... )
There are possibly better quality speakers to pick from in this price range (e.g. Genelec 8330A, however this trades off some bass power which you probably don't want unless you have a subwoofer), but to connect these to your TV and streaming music simultaneously requires a more expensive AVR (Audio Video Receiver) that supports unamplified audio outputs, costing around $1K (e.g. Denon AVR-X3700H). It’s ironic because the Genelec 8330A have built-in amplification and digital inputs but don’t accept power-amplified signals, which is significantly more advanced in many ways, yet this advanced nature makes it harder to integrate with TVs and streaming audio simultaneously simply because most AVR products for TV-speaker integration are geared towards “passive” style speakers like the Revel’s for complex and historical reasons. (For some strange reason buying an AVR that allows you to bypass its amplifiers via preamp outputs ends up costing more than AVRs where the amplifiers are always on.)
So for best connectivity in this price range, I’d recommend the Revel M106 along with a Sonos Amp. The Sonos software experience is by far the best at seamlessly and automatically transitioning between wifi streaming music and TV use modes, works natively with Spotify and almost every other music app, as well as having a good app of its own.
However the Sonos Amp (and Sonos Port product which produces unamplified outputs, but for some strange reason omits the HDMI audio input the Amp has, unfortunately, so doesn’t integrate with a TV well) both lack the ability to calibrate bass to your room, which is very important if you plan to upgrade to speakers and/or subwoofers with deep bass, where EQ calibration to the room’s resonant frequencies is essential for best results.
If you want to be a little more future-proof and feature rich, and also be open to multichannel home theater in the future, a modern Denon AVR receiver with Audessy room calibration capability and “HEOS” Music streaming is also really good, but it gets complex as there are a lot of choices and depends on how “future proof” you want to be. And they tend to be fairly bulky.
Note that I’m assuming you want to be able to use the same pair of speakers for both TV output, and for music streaming when the TV is off. This significantly complicates the electronics, and few products get the user experience here right. If you’re willing to manually use a remote or buttons to switch modes, or dedicate the speakers to either exclusively streaming music (controllable from your phone of course), OR TV audio output (which via Spotify TV app can sometimes be sufficient for music too), then much simpler and cheaper options are available.
One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly.
That while a loudspeaker pair or headphone may measure or perform objectively well, it may not pair up well with your particular taste, or with your music.
As an example Sennheiser’s HD800 is a well regarded high end headphone that does particularly well with the fine details of orchestral music, but lacks the low end punch required for Hip-Hop or other styles of bass heavy music, and it’s elevated treble can make the heavily distorted guitar of Black Metal incredibly grating on the ear.
Of course everyone is different. If you know the equipment you like, and how it’s sound signature translates to graphs you can use the measurements and commentary on ASR to discover other equipment knowing how it differs within that context.
If you read ASR’s materials on headphone science and the HD800S review in particular, it will become entirely clear why it sounds the way it does, and what you need to do to EQ it to fix its tonal character issues out of the box.
I own the HD800S and if it wasn’t for the scientifically derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound.
I should add though that headphones are definitely more subjective than speakers. This is because we are shoving a speaker 1 inch from our ears and hoping it will sound like the music is in the room around us instead of actually shoved right up against our ear — and the way this sounds actually does differ from person to person due to different ear canal geometry!
This limitation is not the case for speakers, though! The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people), whereas for headphones this number is not as high (though I don’t know that number off the top of my head).
And you know what’s great about ASR? They explain all this! All you need to do is read their resources and understand what the science does and does not help with.
I hope you’re not thinking I’m advocating a crude N-band equalizer to broadly boost the bass and reduce the treble to fix the HD800’s thin-ness and brightness. I’m talking about very precise filters that the community has optimized mathematically to fit the measured response to the ideal Harman target curve: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...
There is no reason scientifically to believe this wouldn’t work, other than the maximum driver excursion and distortion limits of the headphones. Fortunately the HD800S bass is extremely clean and undistorted, and they respond really well here. I’ve tried this with other headphones, and most cheaper headphones do struggle greatly, while the HD800S sub-bass is extremely impressive, clean, and powerful when EQ’ed in this way. And even more importantly, this works wonders to smooth out peaks in the treble that sound too harsh to be prior to EQ.
Even if it couldn’t be fixed with precise EQ though, this is still something we can measure objectively via max SPL and distortion vs frequency tests. For example, another highly regarded headphone is the Focal Clear, and it unfortunately has severe bass SPL / driver excursion limits that rules it out from being corrected in this way.
Of course it’s a fair criticism that such expensive headphones should require EQ at all! And the HD800S are indeed criticized in this way on ASR! Sadly though, it seems virtually all headphones do require EQ to sound remotely near their maximum possible sound quality potential, in terms of their physical capability. I personally love the HD800S for a number of reasons, but one of them is extreme comfort (which definitely is subjective), but I will be the first to admit their sound is painful to my ears until corrected with EQ.
(1) We have an objective science that disambiguates and understands differences that are subjective versus universal preferences in speakers (to some reasonable threshold of population universality; e.g. maybe you find some 0.0000001% population that prefers horrible screeching noises added to any audio content, but arguing for this as an important dimension of subjective variability that we need to incorporate into hardware is I hope clearly absurd).
(2) The vast majority of subjective variability relates to differences in frequency response, which are extremely easy and cheap to adjust in software -- no need to cycle through many multi-thousand dollar headphones or speakers just in hopes of finding one that suits your preferred frequency response target.
(3) Almost every kind of imperfection that can't be corrected via frequency response tuning (e.g. undistorted SPL capability, THD, IMD, off-axis smoothness and similarity to on-axis for speakers, power handling and dynamic compression, etc.) turns out to be almost universally disliked versus when that imperfection does not exist.
(4) Once frequency response balance is factored out either via custom EQ or a "mass market" target curve (which for headphones is indeed more of a compromise, but for speakers is not even remotely a subjective matter, since there are mountains of scientific evidence over decades proving over and over again that the preferred anechoic frequency response for speakers is flat, i.e. the mathematically perfect identity function), which naturally yields a preferred in-room target curve of a smoothly declining slope -- very little (if any) subjective variability remains (e.g. bass boost or treble tilt to taste is one such example).
(5) To be clear, some subjective variability does remain, but it mostly relates to head fit and comfort (for headphones), and for speakers is much more nuanced and tends to relate to beam width and height differences. In both cases, the science is capable of examining these precisely, not in some kind of vague or hand-wavy woo woo sense. Lastly, there is always some need to make some coarse adjustments to bass and treble when listening to older recordings or recordings which were mastered to a non-neutral reference curve (as they should be, else it's impossible to ever reconstruct what was intended) -- but this is not so much a matter of listener preference as it is correcting for mixing/mastering errors in older or lower quality tracks.
That's why I prefer flat, little coloured gear (IEMs in my case) and do minute adjustments in EQ if I really must. I've got enough of a wide range of styles I listen to in any given time frame that I would get more bad than good from gear with a strong signature. I've been happy with my Etymotic ER4.
Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of your head as examples?
But you really don’t need to pay this much unless you want the absolute best quality AND quantity (capable of going extremely loud, which is an engineering challenge that requires expensive solutions). You may find the “Speaker Attr Comparison” tab here useful to explore the price vs performance spectrum: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe...
I would recommend learning to read the individual reviewed speaker measurements though, since there definitely is some information lost when compressing these incredibly rich measurements down to a single number, and the science still has some room to improve since there are some dimensions (e.g. the importance of low distortion at high SPL, or beam width) that this fairly old aggregate score model does not currently incorporate.
There definitely is some subjective taste involved, but the important thing is that we can measure these dimensions objectively and understand which is subjective (and why), and which is not a matter of subjective personal taste. We can explore these personal preference tradeoffs without completely surrendering to the subjective nonsense that ‘anything goes’.
For example, it looks like the most subjective factor remaining in speakers is the overall beam width — whether you want a more directional sound, or a more omnidirectional one that fills the room more broadly. This topic is at the edge/fringe of the established science, but the general consensus here is that the objective best would be a multichannel surround sound system of medium beam speakers, where you can either replay recordings meant for multichannel systems, or for traditional stereo recordings at least dynamically select how frontal vs surround you want a particular stereo recoding to be reproduced (just as you can e.g. easily adjust bass boost to taste depending on what you’re listening to, if it wasn’t recorded/mixed the way you like). But given that most people want to minimize the number and size of speakers in their room, there does tend to be a practical challenge of preference here if you can only pick one style (wide vs medium vs narrow beam) for stereo recordings (which while not an ideal format, constitute 99.999% of all music people enjoy).
As a 58-year-old, the sound I like when listening to music is probably a bit off from "accurate". It's a combination of trying to match the sound I grew up hearing (which admittedly was colored by the way records were mastered in the 70s!) and the fact that my high-end hearing isn't what it used to be. I think considerations like that are what drive "audiophile" audio.
Plus, when you get to be 50+ and have some money to spare, there's a cool factor. A preposterous turntable is just like a luxury wrist-watch. You don't buy a $80,000 watch because it tells better time....
But for example, there is no magical difference between a good studio monitor and good audiophile speakers. The differences are well understood and easily measurable. Studio monitors are often more neutral and flat, but also may tend to have a narrower beam, while audiophile speakers often have wider beams and perhaps some coloration like bass boost and treble boost or reduction.
What’s great about the science is it removes all this subjective guesswork. For example, my Genelec 8351B’s out of the box sound too bright for my tastes. But thankfully their built-in DSP allows me not only to calibrate them to perfection to my room, but tune the overall sonic signature to my preference (a gentle downward slope, for a warmer sound). The beauty of good speakers is you can do this in software, rather than buying a different pair of speakers.
About the only thing you can’t tune in software with good speakers is the beam width (assuming there are no flaws like directivity mismatches, distortion, etc. which can never be fixed in DSP). And that’s why e.g. my Genelec still sound different from my Revel speakers: the Genelec are medium width beam, while the Revel are very wide.
Depending on the music genre, this matters. I prefer the wider beam sound on older music and more traditional “audiophile” style music, so for that I tend to prefer the Revels. But for newer music, I and almost everyone else prefers the Genelec’s presentation. It’s important that this is not some subjectivist mystery: it completely makes sense, and through this understanding we are empowered to engineer or select the best speaker for the job without making it unattainably expensive or impossibly convoluted via subjective claims.
Yeah, I'll probably be in the price point of B&W, Totem, or Kef. :)
Also Kef has a slightly higher directivity than Revel which I believe means that the room makes less difference to the sound than it would with a lower directivity speaker, so therefore it should sound better in worse/smaller rooms. I prefer the aesthetics of Kef over Revel/Genelec as well, but that's a matter of taste.
Very happy with my decision.
We do in fact know how subjective preferences correlate to objective measurements. Here's the paper to start with: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794
> In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.
This article made me (1) never worry about "lossy audio encoding" again and (2) ignore everyone starting about "better equipment" wrt compressed audio.
Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801 in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in the listening test.
[Anecdotal] One example of the difference between MP3 and lossless: the "image" [1] on 256kbps MP3s is worse compared to the the original uncompressed, lossless, versions (but the listening room must be appropriately prepared to reproduce a good image).
This is a highly subjective topic. IMO we'll never reach full agreement. Personally, I listen MP3 while on-the-go and lossless music at home.
Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:
> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
> It's true that the data we collected does not support watertight conclusions, but they do provide interesting insights.
>> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
It's a mistake to apply vanilla statistical thinking here. The 12 participants were not randomly drawn from the German population, they were extremely skewed towards enthusiasts/professionals: audio engineers, an owner of an actual Nautilus 801, someone who worked on MP3/AAC at Fraunhofer IIS, someone who works preparing masters for Deutsche Gramophon. If these are the people who have enormous difficulty distinguishing 256kbps MP3 from the CD original, I'm certainly not going to worry that I am going to miss out on anything with 256kbps MP3.
If 12 Grand Slam participants tell me they can't tell the difference between a standard $100 and a $1000 high end tennis racket, I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that it's going to make any difference for me.
It is still undetermined if having 12 highly-skilled professionals in the experiment is enough to have a conclusive experiment.
Also, this subject is so difficult to get right that the authors of the article themselves hedged by saying that experiment "does not support watertight conclusions".
The only one who was significantly able to tell if something was mp3 encoded or not, was a guy with a hearing damage who loved punk music. In fact, mp3 was developed for persons with normal hearing. So it is well possible that he was able to tell differences where other people were unable to.
It's quite easy to overprocess a digital audio file and wind up with something that is pristine as far as frequency response, but flat and 'pod people' like as far as emotive cues and intensity. Aliasing and cumulative losses to word length issues have a lot to do with it.
It's VERY easy to make digital stuff accurately represent frequencies like 2 Hz or 35kHz that our ears don't hear. It's a lot harder to make the digital stuff perform in the midrange when our perception can go, inconsistently and irregularly, waaaay beyond what we're used to thinking of as the limits.
By the way, the lossy compression algorithms don't try to produce exact frequency response but to leave out stuff that humans wouldn't hear anyway and compress the rest.
In my experience, headphones always yield the best results, and surprisingly it doesn't matter if I use the stock earbuds from my phone or a nice set of AKG over-ear headphones. It's not a matter of absolute sound quality, just the fact that you cut out room interactions and get the sound straight to your ears makes a big difference.
MP3 has some built-in flaws that no encoder can completely cover up, short sharp sounds like castanets really expose the pre-echo, harpsichord shows similar issues. It also has a tendency to make cymbals sound "washy" or "underwater", which all lossy codecs do to some degree, but MP3 is especially bad.
Still, at 192kbps I have to really focus to hear it in normal listening, but it's more or less always there even at 320kbps in problem tracks, if I really focus in on short sections. It just sounds subtly "off". But I hope no one actually listens to music like that, in short repeated sub-1 second sections to narrow in on a specific castanet snap ;-)
As for more modern codecs like Opus and AAC, it's generally completely transparent for me at 128kbps, and that's with a bit of playing it safe, I'm pretty sure I could drop Opus down to 96kbps. Modern codecs are really impressive.
I keep my music library in FLAC, both because I know it's CD quality and because it's an archive. I want to be able to convert the tracks to any new codec that may come along, if I need to.
My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap :-)
I understand the sentiment. But the reality is, if the re-encoding is not likely going to happen within the next 10 years, your hearing will probably have deteriorated so much that you probably won't hear the difference anymore anyway (assuming you can hear a difference today, which is a big assumption).
Thank you for confirming this! I record my analog synths that I play through headphones off an old mixing board, however when it comes through my ADC->iPad, stuff seems to get lost and I spend time adjusting the mix and ADSR for recording. Have been seriously mulling a reel to reel, but many others have had the same idea and the market prices are astronomical.
Recording should be done at 96kHz 24-bit or higher, to not have to meticulously optimize recording levels and to allow room for mixing and effects, without raising the noise floor to noticable levels.
Convert to normal CD quality as the last step before distribution.
That’s around ¾ the amount of music I carry on my iPhone :-)
However, obvious encoding artifacts abound on Spotify. Do I have a superhuman hearing?
Probably not. My hypothesis is that not everyone authors lossy files as meticulously as Fraunhofver. Also, the performance of mp3 depends on a highly linear and faithful reproduction after decoding. Mp3 is painfully obvious on crappy, processed-to-hell speaker systems like the iMac.
I think the real question is, why bother with lossy codecs? FLAC streams are lightweight by today's standards, and it's just so much simpler.
Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, except the lowest bitrate on mobile, which is HE-ACCv2, and on Chromecast/similar devices, which get AAC (because they can't natively decode Ogg Vorbis).
It is a significantly better codec than MP3, and doesn't suffer from the pre-echo, washy cymbals and badly-encoded high frequencies. At least not until you severely decrease the bitrate.
The most common problem is when the master is hot and encodes clipped waveforms. It sounds even stranger on lossy. In fact I'm not sure if the codecs' filter banks still have perfect reconstruction in this case or if it's just a borked master. In any case, it always tends to be quite clear when I switch between lossy and lossless on Tidal.
Anyway, it's complicated and brittle, and lossless 44/16 is only something like 2x bitrate and bit-perfect (so you can write proper regression tests for codecs very easily) shrug, I think I'll go that route.
disclaimer: occasionally get paid for mastering music, so I'm wired to prefer simplicity, transparency and don't mind some redundancy in ensuring signal integrity.
What struck me though was that I couldn’t tell which was “better”.
In the track there was a section where the background drumming on one setting sounded like aluminum drum sticks while the other like wooden drumstick. Very subtle effect, and took some intense concentration to pick out.
I didn't know that was the case. Do you know why that somehow accentuates MP3 artifacts? It's not obvious to me why it would, since all the processing iMac speakers might perform is high-quality (no recompression involved). I mean, obviously the iMac isn't going to improve the MP3, it just tries to improve the speakers. But why would that make artifacts more noticeable?
If anything, don't "crappy" speakers hide MP3 artifacts, because they're not good enough to expose them?
Now if the masking sound disappears or changes, the crap is no longer masked.
In other words the psychoacoustic principles work only when we don't alter the signal too much after the codec.
Many diminutive speakers make use of techniques like multiband compression (dynamics, not entropy) to produce "larger" sound. That wreaks havoc on the psychoacoustic model of lossy codecs.
e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if you've listened the piece live or performed it inside an orchestra. However, that's a pretty edge case. There are always differences if you know where to look for, otherwise it's pretty insignificant.
Can you explain this a bit more? How is having heard a piece live, which by definition means a unique performance, going to affect whether or not you can pick out whether the recording of (likely) a different performance has been put through lossy compression? Or do you mean a recording of that same live performance?
I mean I'm used to subtle differences coming and going depending on room/speakers/crappy compression, but only because I use the same source as reference (say, the same CD). Using a live performance as reference sounds strange, because there I would be able to here one of the musicians doing something different, but difference isn't there on another recording so not usable as cue for hearing differences in sound reproduction.
As you know, classical music is layered. It can be scaled for different sized orchestras, which can be akin to tessellation in graphics. You can add more nuanced scores or details if your orchestra has enough members. Of course this has a limit, which is the full score written by the original composer. Similarly, you can remove some layers or simplify the piece if you're smaller orchestra without compromising the piece.
What I tried to say is, if you've listened the piece from or performed with a relatively big orchestra, you'll know that which instrument shall be there, where the small optional triplets are, how the piece should sound or where's that little oboe shall come in, where the little cymbal adds that little crash, or how the harmonics affect each other and create that atmosphere.
So, you'll notice something is missing or off or not as it should be especially in the high end. Classical music has a lot of perceptual tricks under its sleeves to create a specific ambiance and sense of space and most of this lays in the higher end of the spectrum, and they get shaved off first with lossy compression.
Hope this helps, because it's something more felt than can be said with words, how you can't really hear the double bass but feel how it's there. It's that kind of perception.
Edit: Just wanted to add that one musician's or orchestra's specific style of course will be different, but a good orchestra is very faithful to the original score of the piece. Even if an orchestra is playing a little fast or more aggressive, or a simplified version, base instrumentation and atmosphere is the same (as long as the orchestra is not doing Metallica S&M style play the right thing with wrong instruments kind of deliberate arrangement).
Another extreme example would be the band Pink Martini. They have an on-stage audio magic which allows them live with the exact sound of their studio recordings, albeit live. It's surreal to experience.
The thing I'm looking is musical dynamics rather than details itself, but it's equally lost with poor recording and mastering as you say, since they're also captured by the microphones. The thing I'm trying to explain was they are not "finer details" like "oh! I hear the bow of that player", but a bigger feeling that the orchestra creates by playing together, and that effect is independent from individual instruments, most of the time.
It's a somewhat difficult concept to put into words and explain. It's more about feeling the music and decoding the brain, and I think it needs some experience. Being unable to translate this into words makes me sad, because it carries music to another dimension IMHO.
Don't worry I understand what you mean wrt dynamics etc, it's just that I'd never thought of linking it to lossy compression, because there are so many other things which make it hard to reproduce that live sound.
How does a live performance that you hear with your ears at a specific place in a room help you pick out missing parts in a different recording, played by different people in a different place, recorded with multiple mics and then mixed and mastered?
Of course, this might be utter nonsense, and I will bow to bayindirh's judgement on that!
That'll definitely help with hearing differences between two tracks. But i don't think you can compare live music to recorded tracks. Especially acoustic instruments, the room is such a big factor with those.
I guess that also teaches your ears to identify differences in other situations more clearly.
That's what mixing and mastering engineers practice their whole career and get really good at.
In a proper concert hall, sound is expected to be homogenous, so you should be able listen to the orchestra equally well, with the same sound balance (or mix) regardless of the place you sit. Similarly, recordings are done from suspended or positioned (and ideally tuned) mics, so you can capture the orchestra as someone sitting in the audience. At least this is how our performances were recorded.
The mastering is then done to match the recorded sound to the hall's sound, and balance any imperfections or clean the orchestra's inner talk between pieces (yes, we communicate a lot :D ).
When you listen an orchestra live, you will have a lossless blueprint of the piece in your mind (track by track if you can separate the instruments). If you can get a recording of the same performance, you can compare it with the live performance. That's absolutely correct.
But if you listen to a recording of a different orchestra playing the same piece, the arrangement and instrumentation will be same (you may have 8 violins instead of 12 but, violins won't be changed by violas most of the time). So, the atmosphere of the piece will be the same. Assuming the recording is done by competent folks, the spectrum would be the same (~20Hz -> ~20Khz roughly).
After some point, even if you're listening to a different orchestra, you can start to point to the things that should be there. It's very hard to describe, but every instrument has a base sound and details on top of it (you can tell they're all trumpets, but different brands or models. Similarly you can tell they're double basses but they're different in some ways). That base sound starts to erode too when you have a lossy compression, and in turn it affects the sound of the piece, regardless of the finer details (which are mostly affected by resins, bows, styles, etc.).
It's a "these two instruments shouldn't interact like this in this piece. Something is missing!" kind of feeling. This missing part is either something at the high or low end, almost an harmonic. It's not noticeable unless you're looking for it, but it's there.
That difference can be clearly heard by re-encoding a FLAC as a high bitrate MP3 and taking their differences. It's a hiss-like sound by contains a lot of the said harmonics and you can almost listen to the piece just by listening to it. Someone did that and published the differences, but it was some years ago. I'm not sure I can replicate or find the article. That article took differences of the exact same recording but, it can be applied by your brain to different recordings after some time.
Hope I've succeeded to clarify it somewhat. It's something very hard to describe by words. Please ask more questions if you want to. :) I'd be happy to try more.
Comparing two orchestras can be similar to comparing a recording in MP3 to FLAC.
I think i get the point in that learning to listen to those details and recognize frequencies can enhance your ability to spot differences in encoded audio.
In turn this creates a vast network which allows you further decode the music you're listening. This is how one learns to feel the music.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with compression. All that would matter is whether you're missing the "nuance" or "layers" that are there on an uncompressed CD, but that you would perceive to be gone in MP3.
I've performed and listened to a ton of classical music in my life, and I've never heard a difference in what you're talking about between CD's and MP3's. It doesn't really make any sense in terms of how MP3 compression works, either -- the compression artifacts it introduces are pretty orthogonal to nuance in classical music. at 128+ kbps
It sounds to me like you're describing the difference between a live concert and an uncompressed stereo recording, no matter how well it was mastered.
It is a very physically beautiful headphone but in terms of sound, it's kind of warm with a slight haze and indistinctness in the treble. That might be pleasant for some people, but I think any modern electrostat like the L700 or SR009 would outperform it significantly if you put them side by side. I assume its value is due mostly to its rarity.
I half believe it was the presentation - dramatic, but also extremely clever choice of SACD source content with some theatre thrown in for good measure. However, that 12 minutes in a room in conference hall in London with the Nautilus speakers was something I will never forget for a "this is what money buys you" experience. Warm, huge dynamic range, concert hall experience - comfy chair and dim lights helped as well :)
At Tag, we built the "tag mclaren speakers f1" that had a lot of elements I feel borrowed from the B&W industrial design (but made F1 grade) - I used these daily for several years, but was never able to convince myself they were as good as that one time experience.
The recordings themselves don't capture a lot of that information or have it mastered out, so the loudspeakers can never put it back in.
The soundboard of a piano or the top of an acoustic instrument for example just don't work like a loud speaker. Drums pack a ridiculous punch in the room that speakers rarely capture. Guitar amps do all kinds of strange things in the room due to purposely designed in imperfections that are often missing in the recordings.
My takeaway from the several years as a hobbyist building and listening to these: full-range was the one commonality that made all the difference in the world. The two-way, three-way speakers I grew up with were crap for "sound stage" (never mind the loss in efficiency with all the crossovers).
A pair of good quality full-range drivers will sound like you are wearing headphones when you are not. Throw in a sub for the bottom end that "full" range drivers cannot carry — possibly add super-tweeters for the extra brilliance of a cymbal crash.
Fortunately low frequencies are not "spatial" since our ears are not physically very far apart so the sub does not step all over the phase information coming from the full-range. Super-tweeters are so far up in the audio spectrum that there is little competition with the full-range drivers in that regard either.
There really was not much reason, to my ears, to spend any additional energy or money on speakers at that point.
A 2x10 band eq is better, but I prefer to listen pure-flat instead. In my setup, only vinyl needs loudness + tone circuits, the rest is happy with pure flat.
Of course music and sound is a subjective taste, but 90% of the road can be traveled with just basic, but good components IMHO.
but 90% of the road can be traveled with just
basic, but good components IMHO.
I strongly believe a really good "90% of the way there" system can be put together for well under $500 retail, or even less if going DIY or used.
So setting a limit, reaching it and leaving it there is good IMHO.
I run an entry level HiFi CD player with iPod interface through a vintage amplifier to a pair of bookshelf style speakers (which are pretty big for their class though).
If my friend is confusing whether his phone is ringing because a similar sound is present in the playing track, then it's good enough. Similarly, if you're enjoying the sound you're getting from your system, you've accomplished your goal IMHO.
I'm neither looking for loudness, nor for that ethereal sound. If I can hear everything in relatively clear manner, and I'm enjoying it, that's it. I'd rather enjoy it instead of sweating over smallest details.
For context: I used to play in orchestras.
Spend whatever you have left over on a second hand CD player or DAC for your phone, depending on what you want to use as a source.
Or this excellent DIY kit and basically, any solid 50-100W ish amp. Might push you up to more like $600. But you get the idea.
https://www.parts-express.com/Amiga-MT-Tower-Speaker-Kit-Wit...
I have a generally very high opinion of Wirecutter's bookshelf speaker and receiver recommendations - any recommended receiver and any recommended bookshelf speaker, basically. Although, most retail bookshelf speakers in this range might be more like an 80% experience not 90% lol.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/electronics/audio/
Another thing you can do for a very legitimate hi fi experience on a budget is to turn modest speakers into excellent performers with DSP EQ. Either automatically with a receiver that has e.g. Audyssey auto correction or with a MiniDSP etc.
Audio reproduction is, well, signal reproduction/amplification. Whether a driver produces objectively correct sound via excellence in physical driver construction and engineering, or via a DSP assist, makes little difference.
I've got a pair of Monitor Audio Bronze 2s, a Denon AVR-1911 receiver and two Dali SWA 12 subwoofers.
As I wrote above, I bought the speakers new, because I wanted relatively large bookshelf speakers with front ports and living room-friendly looks, and nothing presented itself second-hand. With a bit of patience, you should be able to find a solid pair of speakers in mint condition for $2-300, no problem.
The receiver has 90W per channel (for real, no tricks), Audyssey room correction and was just $80 second hand from a guy who had upgraded to a 4K-capable receiver. I have it hooked up to my TV and so on, but at that price I would be perfectly happy just using it as a stereo amp, since it has good power, digital inputs, room correction and bass management for subwoofers.
The subwoofers were ~$200 each second hand, years and years ago. I'm sure they're even less expensive now, or you can just do without subs.
It has a Burr Brown DAC and a Class D 2x30W amplifier on board. It has delicious sound.
But this system would cost you know 1-2k. But I was lucky and bought the speakers for 100 USD not long ago.
You'd think that a cinema would know how to tune their speaker set up correctly. Yet even at a brand new cinema the audio is just blown out in loud scenes. Like they've got the speakers turned up too high.
It's all about headroom, dynamics and being able to move air. Audiophiles may laugh, but a speaker like the Cerwin-Vega XLS215 one of the best choices you can make for reasonably affordable speakers, provided you have the room for them. They do look somewhat low-rent, but CV have taken some important lessons from PA speakers to heart, so they're surprisingly efficient and have large drivers that can effortlessly move significant amounts of air. Combine them with a powerful amplifier with plenty of headroom and you have a setup that can handle serious dynamics with very low distortion, better than 99% of concerts I've attended[¤].
For an actual PA speaker that can do much of the same thing, the JBL SRX835 is a similar powerhouse, but it has horn-loaded midrange and tweeter drivers, for those who prefer that sound. They are also effortlessly dynamic and I want a pair for my living room, despite the very utilitarian looks.
Unfortunately logistics and space constraints mean bookshelf speakers are the only practical setup in this apartment, so I picked ones that were as big as I could reasonably get away with, and supplement them with two reasonably well-hidden 12" subwoofers. I should have never sold my JBL 4410s, I'm sure I could have made space for them somehow.
[¤] The best sound quality I have ever heard at a concert and honestly better than most home setups, was when Opeth played in DR Koncerthuset here in Copenhagen in 2016. The sound is always insanely good there, but the combination of prog metal, an outrageously well-designed acoustic space, a seriously impressive sound system and world-class people behind the scenes, elevated everything to a completely new level.
It was the cleanest and most pristine amplified sound I have ever heard, and what really impressed me was how clean and deep the bass reproduction was, with absolutely no distortion or wooliness. It is my measuring stick that all other concerts are compared to.
I like the sound of old 60's-70's acoustic suspension speakers with large (11-12") woofers. In particular, I find them to produce a much more satisfying deep bass when played at low volumes. I won't say they're "the best", since I haven't had the chance to listen to much modern high-end equipment, but certainly they're good enough for me to be happy with. Currently listening on a pair of 1970 Advents (OLA), for the curious.
I appreciate that passive speakers are nice. I prefer listening on the Polk T15's I own over the desktop speakers I have, a logitech Z323 paired with the subwoofer from a Z-2300, despite the superior bass of the latter.
Anyway, my point is that I don't personally need all that much (expensive) innovation; I'd be pretty satisfied if these companies wanted to produce product lines that already exist (or bring back older designs, which are increasingly more expensive/difficult to find, these days. I admit to ignorance here, and I get that solid wood is expensive, but I have difficulty understanding why this type of speaker can't be manufactured and sold at a couple hundred bucks a pop, vs several thousands for the models the grandparent comment mentioned.
Anyway, something was playing, it was (sounded?) really quiet but it was crystal clear at the same time; normally I feel like I have to turn the volume up to hear the whole music.
They are a bit underpowered, rumble with Bluetooth, and you need to turn the bass and highs quite a bit down to make them sound flat, but I bet that something like 100x times more expensive studio speakers will be the cheapest setup that matches them in the clarity.
A pair of JBL 305P MkIIs will absolutely wipe the floor with discount speakers like those, with such a huge margin, that it's not even remotely fair.
$300 for a pair, certain a lot less than 100x price difference.
The JBLs are some of the most well-regarded studio monitors, routinely besting competitors at four times the price. They are JBL's crowning achievement in sheer performance per dollar, no joke.
I can only conclude that you have literally never heard a decent set of speakers in your life, or you're wasting everyone's time with an extremely low-effort troll.
If you're genuinely serious and believe these tiny speakers are truly amazing, please do spend the $30 yourself and send a set to Amir at audiosciencereview.com, so he can put them through the same set of tests and measurements that he uses for HiFi speakers and studio monitors. He doesn't mince words, he will rip apart manufacturer claims if they don't deliver on them, even if they're a well-regarded brand.
All I can see is that he lives in Seattle, and I don't really care that much.
Please provide your research or the sources you base your conclusions on.
You cannot get low-distortion bass at any usable volume out of a 3" speaker in a small cabinet, no matter how much DSP trickery you add, it is physically impossible. The driver simply doesn't have enough membrane area nor excursion to move the required amount of air. On top of this, the type of DSP tricks you are proposing require significant additional amplifier power and heavy-duty speaker drivers that can withstand it. Even then, what you're going to get is massive amounts of distortion, especially as the driver tries to reproduce anything under 150Hz at any sort of volume.
From my experience in hifi and electronics, what they're probably doing is using an off-the-shelf BT+amplifier module, with standard low-power amplifier modules. On top of this there is probably some standard EQ and maybe a "bass enhancer" module of the sort that generates overtones based on low bass frequencies, which uses the "missing fundamental" principle to fool the ear into perceiving bass that is too deep for the speaker to actually reproduce. Some bluetooth speakers make good use of this trick, but it is very much adding a bunch distortion in order to fool your ears.
I'm glad you like your speakers, but you are utterly delusional if you think they offer sound quality that is even on the same planet as a decent set of studio monitors.
I think they might actually be doing the opposite of what you suggest - they generate overtones that cancel out the overtones produced by the speaker itself.
I have been listening on studio monitors for years, as I prefer the sound over the typical consumer audio sound.
Sure, they won't shatter your room, and they are really only powerful enough for listening from close distance, but the thing is how the bass sounds like real bass, rather than loudspeaker bass, it sort of adds weight to other sounds, rather than being directly heard and the whole sound often almost sounds like if it wasn't coming out of speakers.
That sort of statement needs to be backed up by serious, verifiable facts.
So please go right ahead and back up your extraordinary claims with some verifiable proof. Distortion measurements would be a good start.
As I previously mentioned, Amir at audiosciencereview.com has the necessary tools for thorough speaker measurements, and he accepts shipment of speakers for testing.
Then tell that Amir guy to test them. I don't know him.
Based on what, exactly? Do you have any sort of verifiable information to back up that claim?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you are making some very extraordinary claims. You seem to be very firm in your beliefs, but completely unmotivated to actually put them to the test.
Do you really honestly and seriously believe that a $25 set of gimmick speakers can match a set of $2500 studio monitors for sound quality, on even a single performance parameter, let alone overall clarity and low distortion?
I can only conclude that you are utterly delusional and that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, which a cursory glance at your comment history confirms.
By providing objective measurements, as I have written in multiple previous comments already.
If you do not have measurements at hand, or the necessary gear to undertake them yourself, Amir at audiosciencereview.com has the gear, skills and experience to perform in-depth detailed speaker measurements. He accepts speakers shipped to him for review.
It's not very complicated: You made claims of extraordinary performance from outrageously cheap speakers. I ask you to provide evidence of this very hard to believe claim, and I even provide you a way of doing this.
Of course, Occam's Razor says you're just full of BS, which is a perfectly fine conclusion for me.
I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music. These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever worth anything" bucket list.
I'm going to make a vast oversimplification here, but a rule of thumb is that a lot of the well-regarded DIY kits on the market compare well with retail speakers that cost 2-3X as much. Some examples:
https://www.parts-express.com/speaker-components/speaker-sub...
https://www.diysoundgroup.com/home-audio-speaker-kits/home-a...
https://meniscusaudio.com/product-category/speaker-kits/
etc.
Those speakers being the old-school big boxes with 12-15" woofers, sometimes multiple and usually 3-way designs, sometimes 4-way. Large, heavy, imposing and punchy, big speakers for big music. I know modern speaker drivers have come a long way, but you just can't get that from 6" or 8" drivers in the same way.
DIY PA speaker designs do provide some of this, but I'll have to tweak the aesthetics more in a "living room-friendly" direction, because nobody seems to want big beefy speakers anymore.
https://billfitzmaurice.info/David.html
There's a series of PA cab designs called fEarFul, that incorporate the newer 12" and 15" woofers from Eminence. You might have to dig around to locate the actual design data, but I do know that the designs were carefully tweaked and are stoopid loud.
In my own case, I worked out what SPL I actually need for my listening tastes, and chose a suitable woofer by keeping an eye on the close-outs at Parts Express. The drawback is that my designs are irreproducible because the parts are sold out. But they're also not worth publishing. The benefit is that the prices are often pretty compelling.
Lower specs also reduce the requirements for the tweeter and any other components such as crossover.
I consider a 10" woofer to be the smallest size for a speaker to be considered large, and 12" or 15" is preferred.
But I agree that PA plans are a viable alternative can be Hifi, too.
If my dad was still alive, that would have been a perfect project for us to jump into and spend countless weekends working on. For now I'll have to wait until I have my own workshop to build a set of beasts like that.
https://www.diysoundgroup.com/home-theater-speaker-kits.html
Now I just need the room to build them, and not have them take up my entire living room.
I will say that there was a lot of treble. Stereophile's measurements (which I did not see until after the demo, so please don't think they colored my impressions!) show some big 5dB humps in the upper treble which I would say correlates to what I was hearing. https://www.stereophile.com/content/bampw-800-diamond-loudsp...
I think this boosted treble is generally a part of B&W's secret sauce across their product range. I really believe their speakers are tailored for middle-aged and elderly guys with some degree of high frequency hearing loss. Makes sense; those are the guys with enough cash to blow on speakers like these.
I am one of those guys (well, the hearing part... not the cash part) but I prefer maybe 2-3dB of boosted treble and not a full-on tweeter assault. =)
This make me curious about this whole situation: speaker change equals physical location change, would that have played a part in it? Because what you describe here is exactly what (at least for me) is the effect of proper speaker placement vs suboptimal placement. I.e. this 'you don't hear the speakers anymore, instead it sounds like you're sitting in the sound' effect. Which definitely isn't there if placement is off, no matter how good speakers are. Then again, I'm not really an audio engineer so maybe you're talking about a different level of soundstage..
On the other hand this is why the hi-fi hobby is dying.
With products like this, we promote the idea that high fidelity audio requires all sorts of exotic equipment that few can afford.
The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money; certainly less than a modern game console.
One example would be JBL's excellent entry level studio monitors. While they don't play super loud, they measure nearly impeccably and sometimes go on sale for as little as $200/pair. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
Any dumbass with a table saw, glue and a bunch of clamps can make speakers that rival the highest end for pennies on the dollar. There are lots of online resources for this sort of thing.
If you think this hobby is about the most precise listening experience (bit rates, conversion, etc), you would be wrong in my eyes. It's more about the presence/power you get from a system that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients. The effective dynamic range in a real world listening room. Having your walls rattle a bit when the depth charges explode is an experience. You don't get that with sound docks/bars, headphones, etc.
If you think this hobby is about the most precise
listening experience you would be wrong in my eyes.
It's more about the presence/power you get from a system
that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients.
The research done by Floyd Toole and Sean Olive and others tells us that all other things being equal, listeners prefer speakers that accurately reproduce the input signal.
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo...
But, I also agree 100% that gobs of power and accurate reproduction of those transients is also key to listener enjoyment and that this is something that is currently (no pun intended) undervalued by the objective audiophile world.
In a modestly sized room one can have their cake and eat it too, with regards to studio monitors. My den music room is about 200 ft^2 / 19 m^2. In this room I have studio monitors crossed over to a pair of subwoofers and it's able to push some very satisfying output levels.
There is the magic part of the whole equation. Everything comes down to the room. Small/medium rooms can be easily pressurized by reasonable setups. I am currently cursed with a gigantic open concept living room, but will be moving my gear into a better home very soon.
A lot of people miss the environmental factor. It's the biggest one. The various room modes will have the most impact on your listening experience. No amount of equalization or other DSP hackery can defeat the laws of physics.
The best listening environment is in an open field in the middle of nowhere, but you need a ridiculous amount of power to make that sound really good.
A lot of people miss the environmental factor. It's
the biggest one. The various room modes will have
the most impact on your listening experience. No amount
of equalization or other DSP hackery can defeat the
laws of physics.
Subjectively I think it's perhaps a little more complicated since our brains already do a lot of "room correction." When we completely remove the room from the equation via absorbers etc. we essentially create a headphones-like experience which feels a little artificial to many people. It's like the music is happening inside my head instead of on a stage in front of me.
So, I typically don't really worry about room treatment, other than rugs and bookcases and furnishings. This is personal taste and I won't say you're wrong if you do otherwise!
Incidentally it's worth noting the living room of Floyd Toole who wrote "the" book on a lot of this stuff. https://www.thescreeningroomav.com/single-post/2019/03/06/th...
The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space. That's why these days good speakers often part of home theater or computer setups, with a screen in between instead of standalone systems just for music listening.
>The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money;
Indeed. But people often buy for social reasons, to boast in forum threads or to belong to a circle of elitist in those communities, it's also a status game.
The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space.
But, I do think that perception is one of the biggest issues.
I've since replaced the Adams with a set of Monitor Audio Bronze 2s, because I wanted something with a bit more living room friendly looks. Finding an AVR with outputs for active speakers is surprisingly difficult, so I had to go back to passive speakers, and I compensated a bit by getting the largest practical model I could fit.
Studio monitors are as varied as any other speaker design. There are ones with really small sweet spots and others with extremely huge ones, the JBL LSR series is a great example of the latter, their horn loaded tweeters have really impressive horizontal dispersion.
Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different categories and use cases to me. .
To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be positioned well.
Thanks to the waveguide on the JBL 3-series and 7-series monitors, you get nearly perfectly constant sound over an unbelievably wide 120-degree swath. You won't find anything approaching this in the consumer hi-fi market segment. This is nearly as true for Genelec studio monitors as well. Check the dispersion graphs (the rainbow colored ones) for these models:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/g...
Which makes sense given the use case: you might have a few people sitting at the mixing desk and you'd like them to be hearing the same thing.
HiFi speakers should fill the room
https://www.boesendorfer.com/en/pianos/disklavier-edition
If you do not have the time and talent to play it yourself, you can listen to Horowitz or others playing live in your home on a real piano.
I would have to wonder if a high quality recording of a piano in a proper setting would be more compelling to certain listeners than a live performance in a less ideal location.
I have an upright piano at home that I play on occasion, but I much prefer how the full-size concert grands sound in the big concert halls. I certainly enjoy the act of reproducing music with my own hands more than listening to someone else do it, but from a purely acoustic standpoint there are tradeoffs.
Also see Glenn Gould's Goldberg variations:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/arts/music/12conn.html
https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/archives/yamaha-disklavier-and-zenph-restore-goulds-1955-igoldberg-variations
https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-13701/Moreover, these kind of show pieces allow technology creep to lower levels, allowing the know-how to practically improve other products down the road. I think it's necessary to have products like these.
Another important part is that the speaker itself is only a part of the overall acoustic system, the room that it is placed within forming the other part, equally capable of changing the sound. Very few people have the luxury of designing the listening room with as much consideration for acoustic performance as the speakers have.
Also, to be able to create the same crossovers in the digital domain, you'd have to go pretty high end again, because, passing through a single DAC at the end of the chain is not same as a DAC -> ADC -> Crossover -> DAC chain at the end of the day.
All in all, you'll come pretty close but you won't be able to create the exact same device at the end. Also, some stuff's (like good drivers built in small numbers) price doesn't come down that easily.
Yes, dedication and tuning of a special room with 8x 500W mono amplifiers requires a hefty sum and these speakers are may not be expensive when all the price is factored in, but throwing in modern plastics and a couple of DSPs cannot replicate all that, all the time.
Then VW decided they'd buy the brand and do whatever it takes to make it work, result being that it's sold at a loss. Even at a million bucks. According to Wikipedia the production cost is 5 million and "Volkswagen designed the car merely as a technical exercise"
A false analogy, at best. The sound is produced entirely by the speaker, which sits at the front of the speaker; the "nautilus" shape is simply a resonant chamber.
From what I've read, it's the opposite of a resonant chamber, it's filled with wool to absorb any sound which could be reflected from enclosure. It's special shape ensures that each frequency emitted by driver is absorbed at different place to ensure no harmonics, THE only sound emitted from this speaker is made by front of membrane.
I have a pair of B&W 683s, not even that fancy or anything but they are more than good enough for my 40+ year old ears.
Once you get something like that there's no reason to ever look at anything else again unless you've got issues.
I've spent a ton of time listening to them. They're really amazing.
Funny thing is he spent so much money he never could figure out what to do about home theater when that became a fad. Now Home theater is pretty much gone but his setup is still fantastic for music.
Never have I owned a surround set, I really don’t care about that.
The 683 were bought for the same price in euros I paid for my (not so great) 202i bookshelves 25 years ago in Dutch Guilders. Felt great.
Maybe this link is more ergonomic to other users as well.
(Could have something to do with the shop being a somewhat noisy environment and these being the only headphones without active noise cancelling that still shut out most noise, so YMMV.)
The importer first claimed they fixed this issue mid-production, they did not. I went through FOUR pairs. Every. Single. Time. the glue melted.
I wrote to B&W about them having a systematic problem in their manufacturing process, they advised me to contact the importer for a replacement pair.
Then came the P5 series 2 which the importer said would fix it. Finally... Except, it did not.
When I contacted the importer about the problem being still present, they flat out refused to replace the headphones, but instead offered a discount for PX headphones. I told them I would've annulled the purchase like the Finnish law allows me, had I been made aware it would never be fixed. I also told me I wouldn't pour another cent in B&W products.
Also I found an entire site dedicated to the design flaw in the PX, which I alas, can't find now.
To conclude: Do NOT buy B&W headphones / consumer loudspeakers. The company does still manufacture high-quality high-end loudspeakers, I've been satisfied with the CM1s and no complaints after 10 years of use.
Despite it probably being as much an issue as my care as the product packaging, B&W replaced them rapidly without complaint and I've had no issues since.
Also the carbon composite construction of the PX7s is one of the best I've seen. I tried a pair of AirPods Pro which felt premium but were so uncomfortable due to the weight and design causing huge pressure on the contact points with my head. PX7s feel very solid but don't have the weight penalty to go with it.