Comment by mrlambchop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrlambchop | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago when I had younger ears, I heard these at an audio show in London, in a "sound proof room" and I will never forget the experience. I was working for TagMclaren at the time, having just left dCS Audio and I thought I had heard a lot of high end speakers by then, but these blew my socks off and left a lasting impression.

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.

I am a firm believer that you can get too hi-fi. Listening on B&W cans as we speak and they are undeniably hi-fi but not what you call meaty for drum & bass. There is no such thing as the sound of an electric guitar; the pick-ups amp and choice of speaker and cab are what makes it rock. Ortofon recently made this mistake with a full new range of carts and needles with higher range, volume and spec all round. Nobody likes them with their existing records because they don't sound "fat". Maybe new records will be produced that presume new needles but I ain't sure that any of this is progress over hitting your favourite tree trunk with your favourite stick. I have different speakers for different music, until B&W give these cabs out free to the yoot in Brixton there aint gonna be any good music to play one them. They will always be adequate speakers for the fabulously rich.

Excellent points... almost no hi-fi no matter how high end actually captures what instruments in the room sound like since instruments just don't act the same way.

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.

I started building speakers some years back, using high-end drivers and rather esoteric ... topologies: Voigt pipes, back-loaded horns, etc.

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.

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