[mythtv-users] Speaker Suggestions ???

[Marko Nurmenniemi]

R. G. Newbury wrote:
> Brian Wood wrote:
>   
>>> If you are going to go listen to some speakers,
>>> take your own CD of something you know really well and know how it
>>> should sound. Better yet if you have a friend with a good system,  
>>> listen
>>> to it there too, before going shopping. Arrange for a quiet time: you
>>> cannot choose speakers with a hockey game going on on the 50" plasma
>>> screen behind you. My choice would be something like Alfred Brendal
>>> playing Mozart piano concertos with Sir Neville Mariner on a Phillips
>>> DDD CD: very well balanced and mixed. Any fault in the speakers or amp
>>> will show up, instantly. Yo-Yo Ma doing the first cello concerto and
>>> anyone doing the clarinet concerto in D will expose any errors in a
>>> speaker.
>>>       
>> Ah Ha - a *real* music lover !
>>
>> For checking out low-frequency response, I have a recording of E.  
>> Power Biggs playing the Flentrop Organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum,  
>> and several others made on the Aeolian-Skinner at St. Bartholemew's  
>> in NYC (a 198 rank instrument).
>>
>>     
>>> If you have multi-channel decoding problems, check out the forums at
>>> stevehoffman.tv for assistance like here at mythtv-users. If you don't
>>> mind going to the cheaper end, you can buy 5.1 and 7.1 components on
>>> eBay for $200 which will likely be quite adequate for most TV (but may
>>> not make it for a 'Live From Lincoln Centre' PBS HD broadcast.)
>>>       
>> I have sat in the Efanel truck for more than one of those productions  
>> (well, not the HD part), but that was years ago, when digital was a  
>> new-fangled watch and the Scully 100s ruled the world.
>>
>> The Philharmonic is good, but I happen to think that Jimmy Levine's  
>> little outfit is better, especially now that they play independently  
>> some times.
>>
>> Much thanks for the advice, for a group that almost never mentions  
>> audio there seem to be some experts here.
>>     
I have a personal opinion which is strongly related to my early years.
In my opinion the best speakers come from Finland and should start with 
letter G... ;-)
I use Genelec acoustically matched pair for both 2-way and 5.1 listening.

Seriously though, if you are talking to a enthusiast dealer (at least in 
our neighborhood) it should be no problem to get a pair or two in your 
home to get the acoustics "right". That is the place you want to test 
the speakers not in an dampened studio, unless you also own one.

Another thing to note is that any demo disk should contain sounds or 
music that are NOT compressed. One of my first disappointments came 
after I noticed that almost all of my CD's were lacking both in high and 
low content. So all my rock albums were basically disco music.

High quality content is usually best recorded in classical music but 
there are some artists that actually care about these things, they are 
hard to find in my experience though. One of the easiest measures for 
high frequencies is to listen for example how long a piano or symbal (? 
the plates in a drum set ?) keeps on playing before it is muted beyond 
noise threshold. For the deep bass there is only one option, again go 
with classical, what I have found useful is to find recording done in 
churches. Really deep tones area possible from those pipes.

-M