Recent content by BenToronto

Rare to see a photo of a home music room on audio websites that doesn't look atrocious for sound due to lack of absorbent. REW can be a big help, starting with basic freq response. I have a clothes closet which holds my heavy winter motorcycle gear - clearly shows up on REW to reduce main room...

All good amps since 1985 sound the same, assuming no odd load (such as electrostatic speakers). You can't be serious about tuning your gear unless you run REW or similar test software, otherwise just guessing. For example, you can do frequency response and distortion in just one minute (once...

Turns out to be a quite hilarious, laugh out loud, action movie. Nothing about Toronto in it (except the title character's name) but local people will recognize some street scenes, like in many movies. Toronto locales often debut as suitable fill-ins for places from Paris to Waukegan, Wisconsin.

At last, somebody has made a movie about my career. Thank you AudioNirvana. BenToronto

Afraid I didn't understand that. How can you remove the voltage from a voltage rail? Isn't "an amp" always a mono amp? Can you explain more fully and/or different words. Thanks. B.

Since we are all dreaming now about ideal systems, the great advance of Sanders was the Sanders amp. It provides high voltage signals to the ESL speakers instead of going through yucky transformers. I'd rate it up there alongside motional feedback at the best you can do. I ran an amp based on...

"...many would find their sound addictive" Many times have I heard audiophiles say, "I can still clearly remember the first time I heard an ESL". In my case, when I was working at Bell Labs, I attended a meeting of the New York audio society in Manhattan. Playing was a speaker composed of an...

Having trouble figuring out why a time reference matters. Isn't a simple sweep all you need for the basic physics (assuming identical mic calibration in sending and receiving rooms)? Much, much bigger issues to think about like location of receiving-room mic (I am assuming everything in the...

Sound loss for what reason? SPL dBA is the traditional assessment of human annoyance. Corrected for airports by how often planes fly... and for other places by all kinds of assumptions about noxiousness, but you get the idea. With a sweep, you get to see what band is troublesome. And then...

Gain management matters and not always easy to balance the competing requirements. In my system, I ended up wiring a simple "vintage" method that proved to be an entirely good solution esp since I can reach the gizmo from my chair. I made a box with stacked Bourne pots (potentiometers, AKA...

I have been using motional feedback on and off since 1966 and DSP since maybe 2010, so I have a modest perspective on both. I love my DSP and how great it is working with REW to make improvements fast. Couldn't be happier with it. But not much that it does that couldn't be accomplished without...

Is DSP just "lipstick on a pig"? Are speaker enclosure or room sounds still audible even when the FR (which is all the DSP changes) are still present? You can certainly restrain resonances by choice of speaker enclosure, room treatment, or what is called "management" of speakers location and...

Good lab practice is to "test" a non-inductive resistor of known value and see what you get.

True. But best not to confuse long-distance judgments (like reinforcement speakers at the back of a large church matching the slow arrival of direct sound from the front) with domestic HiFi. My most relevant test is with a Klipschorn bass which added 12-18 feet to the path of my ESL panels, XO...

As some others have noted here and there, time alignment is one of those concepts that sound important but may not be that beneficial to sound quality.