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History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

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Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#121

Post by JKCalhoun »

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 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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#122

Post by doteka »

growt wrote: post #31
JohnBooty wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but 90% of the road can be traveled with just basic, but good components IMHO. Amen. No expert here but I've been in the hobby for a while and have demo'd some high end stuff at audio shows. 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.

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

I’m rather happy with my el cheapo Denon receiver (no idea about the model but like 220 euro new 5 years ago) and a pair of Wharfedale Diamonds 10.1 .

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#123

Post by JohnBooty »

bob1029 wrote: post #86
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In a modestly sized room 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 yo…

   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.
Objectively, this is true beyond doubt and can be easily measured!

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...

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#124

Post by louwrentius »

ben7799 wrote: post #110
louwrentius wrote: post #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.

My father has had a pair of B&W 7xx loudspeakers for almost 30 years now. 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 se…

I can relate to that: my 85 year old aunt has Magnat speakers from the early eighties and they sound amazing to this day.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#125

Post by vnorilo »

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,…

I believe Fraunhofver did a pretty rigorous scientific test that established the CD transparency quality to be around 256kbps mp3. I don't dispute or doubt that.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#126

Post by js2 »

electrograv wrote: post #77

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…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370372

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#127

Post by KozmoNau7 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #111
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still only a 6.5" woofer, my bookshelf speakers have 6.5" woofers :-) I consider a 10" woofer to be the smallest size for a speaker to be considered large, and 12" or 15" is preferred.

Alright, maybe this 4-way with a 12" will interest you: http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=4005 But I agree that PA plans are a viable alternative can be Hifi, too.

Now that looks like a speaker for me :-)

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#128

Post by oriolid »

Applejinx wrote: post #76
newdude116 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I did some personal experiments back in the day when hard disks were expensive and found that the compression artefacts show up first in distorted guitars and cymbals, then brass instruments and everything else survives much lower bit rates. So that could explain why the punk rock fan hears the compression problems first.

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.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#129

Post by smoldesu »

I'm probably in the minority here, but companies: please just call it the Nautilus. It's a product, not a person, and I don't care how much time or effort or personality was put into your product. I paid money for it, I own it now. It will be called "The iPad", not "iPad". It outright annoys me when companies try feigning familiarity like that.

Re: History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

#130

Post by passivate »

electrograv wrote: post #112
gmadsen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the perfectly valid critique, that sennheiser sub bass roll off very quickly. An eq filter won't fix this without distorting sound.

I didn’t miss it; it’s just not valid. (1) The HD800S is actually not as highly regarded as you may think on ASR because these issues do show up in the measurements and are pointed out in the review (did you read it?), but also (2) the HD800’s issues are indeed very much fixable with EQ, and I can confirm this subjectively with direct experience with my HD800S. I hope you’re not thinking I’m advocating a crude N-band…

You claim high-end audio is not subjective, but then bring up the Harman target. You're defeating your own point. As you know, the Harman target is a "mass market" pleasing option for average joe's. Its not the be all and end all of audio signatures. I am in the "bass head" camp, and I loathe it for a lot of the stuff I listen to. I'd take a JVC HA-SZ2000 over the HD 800s for my taste.
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