History of the Nautilus loudspeaker • Hacker News Board

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#71

Post by jfrunyon » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

em500 wrote: post #16

Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c't magazine in 2000[1]. Conclusion: > 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,…

Honestly, these days drives are so large compared to even FLAC that it's not worth worrying about if an MP3 would be just as good, IMHO.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#72

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #36

JohnBooty wrote: post #27

On one hand I like spare-no-expense halo products like this. They are fascinating, at least visually. 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 gam…

You can get damn close to the performance of the halo products with stuff as humble as Polk Audio floorstanders and some Emotiva amps. 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, et…

    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.

Both things are true and the best systems nail both.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#73

Post by teknopaul » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

mrlambchop wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#74

Post by mrkwse » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

maqp wrote: post #70

qiqitori wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Bowers & Wilkins P5 (series 1) headphones after having tested every other pair in the shop and found these to sound nicest. Really like the sound, but the discoloring is pretty bad (I got the white ones). (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 P5 suffer from a disgusting design flaw: Under the magnetically connected ear pads, the headphones have a soft fiber-like material that's glued in. The glue will melt and leak between the contact points in a few months, which will stain white t-shirts etc.: https://imgur.com/a/W2i0pPa The importer first claimed they fixed this issue mid-production, they did not. I went through FOUR pairs. Every. Single. Time. the…

To add a contrasting anecdote for balance, the only issue I've had with B&W headphones (I've had P5, PX, and now have PX7) is that the arm of my PX snapped - probably in part due to how I'd cram them into my backpack and that I got them early in the product life when they shipped with a quilted fabric soft case.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#75

Post by teknopaul » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

jfrunyon wrote: post #71

em500 wrote: post #16

Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c't magazine in 2000[1]. Conclusion: > 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,…

Honestly, these days drives are so large compared to even FLAC that it's not worth worrying about if an MP3 would be just as good, IMHO.

mp3 is often better, it removes close frequencies that your ears can't hear baring tricks like very slow phase shifts. Speakers and amps are asked to do less work, so they often sound better, particularly at high volume. The same applies to the air the sound travels through and your ear drum and bio-pickups. You can often tell the difference, but its arguable if before or after mp3 processing is and improvement or destructive in terms of psychoacoustics. I often see djs who swear by wavs without knowing how the pitch and tempo adjust algo work in the equipment they are using. I.e. Top of the range pioneer Cdj decks run Busybox Linux and ffmpeg

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#76

Post by Applejinx » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

newdude116 wrote: post #61

em500 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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, s…

This magazine did a test with mp3 https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html 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.

Maybe the punk music had more to do with it. Sounds like the guy was keying off of subtleties of sonority and emotive quality which are a lot more fragile to digital processing.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#77

Post by electrograv » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:26 PM UTC

I am surprised there aren’t more mentions here of AudioScienceReview.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).

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#78

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:27 PM UTC

ninjaoxygen wrote: post #8

bwang29 wrote: post #4

I used to work in boutique audio retail. One of the big challenges of the business is how big and heavy good speakers are. In the old days we would need to crate the speaker to customers’ house for audition as every room has a different acoustic, and try a few different speakers with more crates with a upfront fee/credit to purchase, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often anymore. Showrooms nowadays also mostly do not…

I work in high-end AV. Perceptually, in a good space, those fantastic speakers often do not make the sound people associate with "loud", no distortion, no top end becoming hissy, just the concert-level bass to clue you in to how loud it is. People who have paid a lot for their system want that "wow" factor that immediately makes anyone think it's loud. The other issue is that different listening material definitely n…

That reminds me of an Experience I had once at a former colleague. He was a bit of an audiophile, dj/producer and had e.g. added more insulation to his living room to not annoy the neighbours as much, and built his own speakers and record player.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#79

Post by k-mcgrady » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:34 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #69

k-mcgrady wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different categories and use cases to me. HiFi speakers should fill the room. To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be positioned well. Just moving a little bit can make a big difference in the sound.

Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different categories and use cases to me. . Studio monitors can potentially be great hifi speakers, though generally not the other way around. To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be positioned well. Modern studio monitors are often quite the literal opposite of this! Thanks to the waveguide on the JBL 3-series and 7-series monitors, you get nearly perfectl…

Interesting! I guess it depends on the specific speakers/monitors. It's not something I would have considered before. I'll have to check out those JBL's.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#80

Post by stinos » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #52

stinos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if you've listened the piece live or performed it inside an orchestra 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 th…

In classical music, the performance is of course unique, but the piece is not. What I mean is, even if the arrangement has changed for a particular piece, the underlying score, the foundation is same. 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. O…

I sort of get what you're hinting at, but I still think it might be inaccurate; to me your reasoning come over like 'played live there's detail X and Y, when listening those details might be vague or don't come out properly, so that might be lossy compression at work' (please correct me if I'm wrong). Thing is: just poor microphone placement or poor recording equipent or poor mastering can have those effects as well, no?