But now, all that's left is the memory of it. As melancholy travels through my soul, I am trying to reconstruct what can no longer exist through this blog post. I know that I will never again hear the van's incredible sound. But be certain that, at least in my mind, I will replay the songs I remember.
I also know that we tend to idealize what's not material or tactile anymore. But I am fine with an enhanced delusion of what the van was. During its time, nothing came anywhere close to it. Not on install. And especially not on sound.
As a well regarded sound judge who has continued to audition and evaluate the best cars out there, I am allowed to claim that this van was the best ever. Surely there were some fantastic cars like Gary Bigg's many versions of his stupendous Regal, Chad Klodner's majestic Mustang and many others. But I will hold my ground. The ginormous stage made one feel like being seated in the middle of Royal Festival Hall in London. The musical clarity defied even the best home systems. And oh, the low noise. The system was eerily quiet during all musical playback. Textures were delicious and tonality rode right on the line between too sweet and precise. Finally, the psycho-acoustics possible were incredible. Turning the head towards the rear would completely collapse the sense of space. Turning back towards the front would be like launching the Titanic a few feet from your face. It was most certainly a visceral experience. You would forget that you were within a space.
I am afraid that nothing I say will make justice to its performance. So, I will regress to the point of this post. Sharing the videos. The first video offers a short tour of the installation.
The second presents the installation book created for the van. Do keep in mind that in those years, computers did little more than act as typewriters.
For those who like to click through dozens of images, these are the scans from each page:
hello Alberto, reading over the extensive efforts you and paul invested into the astro was truly enlightening. i did have a question. if done again . do you think the asro ould have sounded as good with a direct sound positioning approach in place of the reflected sound approach you used?
ReplyDeleteResponse to Steven (Part 1)
ReplyDeleteSteven,
Thanks for reading the post.
Yours is a very good question. I interpret it as a way to find out if, after many more years of thought and experience, I believe that there is a batter way to build a system. Is there a new technologically superior way to do sound in a van? Have I changed my mind? Moreover, while the vehicle was built with equal input from Paul and I, your question is perhaps directed at me since Paul has continued to build systems where his opinions have been evidently expressed.
I will begin by answering that I never felt that there was a single way to build a perfect system. I am friends with most of the best installers in car audio history and have seen very good results from many variables. I often comment that the main performance differentiator is execution rather than the idea itself.
But in general, I still find myself holding most of the beliefs I had close to twenty years ago. Thankfully, the laws of physics have not changed much since. What has changed is the way we measure them. Many new cool tools are available that make it much faster to define or measure outcomes.
When I started, I had to tune passive crossovers by ear, for example. Later I used an Real Time Analyzer (RTA). The fact that I had a deep understanding of the fundamentals, thanks to doing things the hard way, meant that I did not have the same problems experienced by many who also used the RTA but ended up with poor results. In a way, a tool was never a replacement for fundamental understanding. This is perhaps why I came to become such great friends with Arnot Francis in the UK and many other real engineers in the US. If you look at how the great Richard Feynman addressed science (I wrote an article about one of his books), you will see that he often tried to understand quantum physics concepts first and only then would he start to sort out the math.
Today, there are many simulators available free online. As I use them, they predict the same outcomes I intuitively expect. This means that what has changed is that science has made it easier to show that we were on the right track.
Of course that we have gone from Red Book recordings (CD's) to high definition DVD quality. Recordings are now better. Furthermore, digital processing has become so cheap that much of what we did passively then can now be done at a much lower cost.
At the same time, many things have gone the wrong direction. Many people enjoy MP3's even with their terrible sound. Likewise, class D amplifiers are now pervasive despite the awful noise artifacts they pollute the power grid with.
But when it comes to speaker placement, I can't say that much innovation has taken place. About two years ago, I heard at CES the white Ford Van with the Dynaudio system that was described as the best possible sound in a car. It had the main speakers mounted on enclosures on the "A" pillars. The owner even placed a professional guitar player outside of the van and hooked him to two Dynaudio monitors outside and to the van as a way to demonstrate the accuracy of the system. While the live music was very good outside, the van was a terrible disappointment (and I am being nice). There are hundreds (if not more) vehicles that sound better than the van at every level.
Also last year, I judged a sound off in Pennsylvania. Needless to say, I was saddened by the fact that two decades of experience have seemed to create regression rather than progression.
Going back a little more, when I was doing product development in Phoenix, I met master installer Chad Peterson who had a very promising Acura Legend where the top of the dash had been removed and a Dynaudio dome mid and tweet had been installed within. While I found the idea to be great, the system suffered from much refractive and reflective interference. It was a beast that proved too hard to tame even with the use of an ODR. The system was good but never the best.
Response to Steven (Part 2)
ReplyDeleteThe last great idea I saw was when Arnot Francis showed me in 1996 a set of flexible waveguide panels mounted over door speakers. While the idea seemed flawed, the performance was exceptional. This proved again that a fundamental understanding of physics always trumps pretty installations.
How about kick panels? The fact that over the years I built more kick panel systems than anything else should serve as proof that I believe in them. But they have a big problem. There is no good way to get good midbass with them. There is not enough space for a good driver if one wishes to keep the kicks reasonable in size. So, most people end up putting the midbass in the doors which is absolutely and unquestionably the worst place in a car. A basic understanding of waves should highlight why door mounted drivers that operate at frequencies between 200Hz and 600Hz will under perform with asymmetric listener positions (I intend to cover this subject with much more detail at some time later).
Then there are waveguides. I too have done plenty of these. I have worked with every brand ever sold in the market. To me, waveguides are like pet tigers. If you don't watch what you do with them, they will eat you. But when properly used, they will impress all your friends. As a result, I love waveguides for the many things they do well. But I would warn anyone who wants to use them and who lacks a minimum level of sophistication. Here, I would like to make a note that, to me, waveguides are just a kind of speaker rather than a speaker placement technique. I have even used waveguides on the floor reflecting off the front of the vehicle with great success. The main challenge with them also resides in the mibass. It is specially difficult to create a balanced system when your upper frequency drivers are very efficient while your midbass is neither efficient or good.
But what about the many cars with tweets on the "A" pillars and the speakers in the kicks? Well, the midbass problem is not fixed, for one. Next, these systems prove to have undependable imaging at the crossover point between the tweet and the mid because of predictable comb filtering due to the large distance between the drivers and the high beaming that results from their wave interaction (I cover this in a different post).
This brings me back to the speakers in the floor. When I have heard detractors, they often refer to the idea as a reflected sound method. Somehow, phrasing it in this way seems to reduce the technique's appeal. It is as if reflecting anything would reduce fidelity. But I see it differently.
I see reflections as just part of a transfer function. Because the boundaries of the car are so close to the listener, most of the system's transfer function is affected by reflected energy, regardless of where the speakers may be located. When looking at it from the mathematical perspective, reflecting the sound in the way floor speakers do is not as large of a variable as it would first be implied by those who do not like the idea.
Besides, I didn't start liking the method because of any mathematical modeling. Instead, I started liking it when Chris Owen, a very creative American engineer, showed it to me back in 1991. I fell in love with the sound. It was just beautiful like no other car was. In other words, much of what I describe about sound has been first tested through listening. There is nothing like using your ears and disconnecting your eyes; which is the opposite that many do. Many experts listen with their eyes.
Only after Chris showed me the technique did I start to try to understand it. What I found was that it was the closest to a home system. While still playing the music within a much smaller space than that of a home, the time and amplitude balance between frequencies was much closer to residential systems.
Response to Steven (Part 3)
ReplyDeleteMost cars have terrible time response. As a result, physical cues like depth, stage and ambiance are destroyed. I remember judging a Masters style contest in Phoenix in 1999 where only the best 6 American cars competed for money. The morning of the show I listened to a recording in my home system. There was a Gregorian chant track where the church's reverberance was so loud that it was the most dominant aspect of the acoustical presentation. Later, when I heard all those great cars, they all sounded flat. Not one of them recreated any of the church's acoustical space; a quality that was not faked during mixing but that was picked up by the microphones during the recording. On the other hand, comments about the UK van often dealt with its incredible sense of space. When listening while looking forward, the van's system created a complete bubble of sound around you while throwing an expansive stage way in front and across, past the vehicle boundaries. As soon as you turned your head towards the back of the van, the whole effect collapsed. The sound still seemed to come from the front of the van, but the spacial bubble was no longer there. In other words, this was a binaural psycho-acoustical effect; which is what stereo recordings are supposed to create. This is the same effect I experience with my two speaker home system; which I often use for movie watching and which creates the full sensorial effect despite not having surround channels.
But how is this possible? In a home system we try to eliminate reflected sound as much as possible. We place our high end speakers away from the rear and side walls. We also sit far from any boundaries. We want to create an environment where reflected sound arrives with sufficient delay and loss of amplitude as to not blend with the direct sound. By separating direct from reflected sounds we try to preserve the integrity of the faint spacial cues. In a vehicle though, this is tremendously difficult. Only extreme beaming, as is the case with waveguides, has a hope to address this issue. Likewise, Mark Eldridge in the US uses an array where a digital processing algorithm written by Doctor Doug Winker tries to control dispersion within his NASCAR car to reduce the effects of reflected sound. But the problem with these two viable techniques is that they are narrow in bandwidth. Waveguides usually operate only down to 800Hz while Eldridge's array operates to a maximum low of about 200Hz (this is my deduction from listening to it and from understanding the physics behind it). This means that these systems suffer from poor linearity. While most judges do not know how to recognize this problem, it is my experience that average listeners can discern this issues even when they do not know how to describe them. In other words, these are the kind of acoustical flaws that make you feel like there is something wrong with an otherwise beautiful system. They seem unnatural.
By reflecting the otherwise direct sound, the goal is to create a single cohesive wave that will hit the listener with a high degree of integrity. Yes, the goal is to reflect the sound. This means that there is no longer a destructive interaction between direct and reflected sounds. This same technique can be successfully deployed in the home. Former Stereophile writer Dick Olsher once demonstrated a reflected sound system at CES.
By reflecting, from a large surface like the back wall of a room or the windshield of the car, the large reflective surface becomes the speaker. It is like having a massive array or a very large electrostatic within the car. The effect from such large speaker system would be extreme broad-band beaming. it would be like the waveguide or Eldridge's array but all the way across the spectrum. This is why we also reflected the woofers.
But what are the problems with speakers in the floor? Well, you need to protect them because people will want to step on them even when it may be the first time they ever place their feet over such a location.
Response to Steven (Part 4)
ReplyDeleteYou will also have to make sure to have access to them so that they may be cleaned often. People have dirty feet and small rocks easily end up over the cones.
Finally, there is the risk that someone may place a large laptop over their closed legs while listening to the system. But other than an extreme situation like this one, most body parts do not affect the sound so long as there is enough distance between the speaker and the body part. Here, think of a large boulder in a river. Water flowing around the boulder will create a high pressure area behind the boulder and a low pressure area after. But just outside of these areas, the water flows with normal pressure. In simple terms, the sound bends around the object in front of it. In practice, the stage stability is much more robust than it would seem.
To end, I will confirm that I still believe that reflected speakers placed in the vehicle's floor are still the best way to recreate sound in a vehicle.
As it should be clear, the idea of reflecting the sound is suddenly not as malign as originally interpreted after looking at the photos. I nonetheless suggest that you try it for yourself. There is nothing like learning from experience. That, after all, is why I love audio.
thank you alberto! apologies for being late with my reply. your point about the lack of midbass dynamics in today's systems is a point taken to heart. tonally i have loved'hated many systems. but dynamics wise "uninvolving" is a fair descrption. sadly i have even felt that way about many home systems as well, until i heard a system built by a freind of mine i realy only had slight insight into dynamics. ridiculous that a pair of beyma tpl150 pleated diaphragm drivers and a pair of vintage jbl 15 inch woofers could provide such an education, but mn did they play well! as far as the reflected sound approach , i have to say i agree whole heartedly with the reasoning you have provided. i am gathering drivers for myattempt as we speak. i plan to play with this concept soon! thank you for the thorough education. i will study the van pictures some more and develop some questions to ask. thanks again for your insights alberto!
ReplyDeleteYou are welcomed Steven.
ReplyDeletePlaying is what it's all about.
By the way, if you ever want me to reply in private, feel free to give me your e-mail though a separate comment. Don't worry that I will not publish your e-mail.
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ReplyDelete