Comment by aljgz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aljgz | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names anywhere on the boxes.

Later that night I asked about the speakers and he went: "What? They sound good?"

It turns out his friend works at "Insert big European brand, not only audio here" and they decided to make a great pair of speakers. Then he brings home a measurement device north of 6 figure €s, and they tune it so that you would not be able to distinguish a person talking behind you, from the recording of them being played with these speakers... Or as close you can get to that.

Then they take their product to the company only to be laughed at: "for anything below 5000€, we don't use any part above 50€. You have parts north of 500, this is not feasible for the market."

    they tune it so that you would not be able to 
    distinguish a person talking behind you, from 
    the recording of them being played with these 
    speakers

That's interesting! I'd love to know more about how your friend did it.

It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP to compensate for the speaker's imperfections.

In professional studio audio this is more or less the norm with monitors from Genelec, JBL, etc.

In nearfield use (ie, you're close enough to the speaker that the direct sound from the speaker dwarfs the sound reflected off of the walls of the room) this will sound eerily good, basically like putting on a pair of headphones.

>It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP

Common digital room correction systems can improve the time-invariant linear components of an audio system's distortion (phase and frequency response) by convolving with an impulse response. The best results are obtained at a single point listening position, not a whole line. This technique cannot restore frequencies that were cancelled out by destructive interference, and may increase noise to unacceptable levels at frequencies where it has to apply gain. It supplements room treatment, not replaces it. It does nothing to improve non-linear distortion, e.g. harmonic and intermodulation distortion from soft clipping or asymmetries in the speaker motor, or time-dependent distortion, e.g. dynamic range compression from the coil overheating, or so-called "Doppler distortion" (better named phase modulation distortion[0]) from significant excursion of the cone.

How much distortion matters depends on personal taste and listening material. Moderate harmonic distortion can be very difficult to hear in some sounds. And as the popularity of vinyl and tube amps show, some people prefer more distortion.

[0] https://sound-au.com/doppler.htm

As @Jolter noticed, I'm unwilling to share information that can reveal the company the friend of my friend worked at. I'm also, not aware of much of the technical aspects of what they did, as my friend was a scientist and the other guy had done much of the hard work, so he did not know most of the details. Hopefully, in another visit there I can see him and find a way to meet the engineer, maybe I can encourage him to share his designs, tuning method, and other insights he has.

I'm confused. So were they actually good speakers to begin with, or was it the measurement device + tuning that made bad speakers sound good? Mind sharing the brand of speaker?

They are obviously unwilling to name the brand.

They used top of the line parts, not parts from his company.

So the friend custom-built these speakers, and then “configured” them when installing them? What company did he work at?

I've witnessed some hard negotiating in the car industry about the price of a cable lug for a 6-figure luxury car. The car maker wanted to bring down the price for one lug from 0.05 Euro to 0.03 Euro at a order volume of about 100.000 pieces.

This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...

It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.

Well, maybe it wasn't the saving on this model, but if the design persists then the savings add up over several generations, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com