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History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

bowerswilkins.com

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Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#91
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of such a <$500 system? I'm genuinely curious.

Couple of JBL 306PII active monitors

I also use HifiBerry's AMP2 to drive a pair of old Kenwood speakers with a dedicated subwoofer (it's a 2.1 set out of the box), and boy, that thing's impressive for its size.

It has a Burr Brown DAC and a Class D 2x30W amplifier on board. It has delicious sound.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#92
post #38

Best high-end audio for at home: 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.

Reminds me of the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to determine the point of transparency of lossy encoding for yourself, is to ABX test on your own equipment, with files you've converted yourself. A good way to do this is with Foobar2000's ABX plugin, which lets you compare back and forth and on whole tracks or short snippets if you want. In my experience, headphones always yield the best results, and surprisingly it doesn't matter if I use the stock earb…

> 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. 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 r…

It's not inherent to straight uncompressed PCM audio, it's strictly an artifact of lossy compression. A reel-to-reel tape deck will be noisier and extremely cumbersome compared to proper digital recording.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to determine the point of transparency of lossy encoding for yourself, is to ABX test on your own equipment, with files you've converted yourself. A good way to do this is with Foobar2000's ABX plugin, which lets you compare back and forth and on whole tracks or short snippets if you want. In my experience, headphones always yield the best results, and surprisingly it doesn't matter if I use the stock earb…

>My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap That’s around ¾ the amount of music I carry on my iPhone :-)

I don't collect music just to collect it, I only keep artists and albums around that I really like, or if it's something special and hard to find. Everything else is on YouTube or whatever for the rare occasion I need to listen to Metallica or AC/DC or something.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#95
post #84

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…

ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things. 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 mu…

> 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.

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

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you list the far better speakers?

The “Speaker Rankings” tab here is useful: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe... 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…

That's a great link, thanks! For any other cheapskates out there, here are their highest rated speakers under $250: https://public.tableau.com/shared/T2YR3HZ25?:toolbar=n&:disp...

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#97
If you ever want a pair of decent speakers for next to nothing, look up high(er)-end models from 10+ years ago and buy them second-hand.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#98
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things. 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 mu…

This trope that ‘the best audio product for you is a highly subjective personal choice’ directly contradicts decades of well-established science, and is a long-standing myth that plagues this industry — and not coincidentally, serves to sell a ton of over-expensive garbage to under-educated (by design, via marketing bunk) consumers. If you read ASR’s materials on headphone science and the HD800S review in particular,…

> 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)

Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of your head as examples?

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#99
post #84

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…

ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things. 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 mu…

Then you haven’t read ASR much, as there are plenty of discussions and references to some well established objective criteria that correlate with subjective preferences. It’s not entirely subjective.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#100
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that still had nothing to do with comparing lossy vs lossless, or am I misunderstanding you? 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?

It seems plausible to me. I assume that when you are doing a comparison, you are comparing a single source to a memory (does anyone do comparisons by playing two synchronized sources together, possibly into different ears?) In that case, I can well imagine that listening to multiple live performances primes one's mind to remember clearly how a given presentation sounded, and to pick out small differences, precisely because live performances are all slightly different. I would further imagine that performing a piece, and particularly practicing with the rest of the orchestra or conducting a practice, further enhances one's ability to notice and characterize small differences.

Of course, this might be utter nonsense, and I will bow to bayindirh's judgement on that!

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