Recent content by MarkS

I am in a position of being able to assess his multiple sworn statements over the decades that digital totally sucked and that only 100% pure analog, like those sweet sweet MoFi pressings, sounded any good at all, and that the contamination of digital was completely obvious to anyone with ears...

C'mon Matt, you know better. Fremer never looks at the measurements which he does not do himself. Amir listens after measurements and Erin listens both before and after, and both try to correlate what they hear with what they measure. Yes, but knowing you are makes a big difference IMO. You can...

The difference is that Amir & Erin understand the pitfall of sighted bias and take steps to mitigate it. Fremer (like most others in the audiophool world) flatly disbelieves in even the possibility of sighted bias. IMO, this makes his reactions to what he hears (or imagines he hears) to be far...

Kal, can you share your listening distance and ear height for this system? Thanks!

I did not realize that the coax driver on the Blades is so much higher than it is on the Reference series. Why does KEF do this? I would think that the height of this driver is a critical design element and that it would be the same on all speakers (which I believe it is across the Reference and...

Ha ha! Ironically that's one of the most covered songs ever. Here's one of my favorite covers of it, by The Iron Cross Band in Romania; I like this version better than the original:

"We sit about 7 feet from the TV, and it is a small room with a shared wall" The Ascends are fine. Unless you plan to do some listening while standing up, at that distance vertical directivity is a complete non-issue. Also, one sub is plenty and you do not need DLBC with it. (You do need DL.)...

I appreciate not having to pay for fancy cosmetics that I don't care about.

Sitting on my couch, my ears are at about 34".

I have never understood why female vocals would make for a good listening test. Linda Ronstadt has never sung to me with her lips inches from my ear, as they are from the microphone. I have absolutely no clue what that should sound like.

It's not. Harman data shows that flaws that are perceptable in mono are less percepatble in stereo, and that relative rankings are usually (but not always) the same in mono and stereo. (See Figure 8.12 in Toole's book for an example of rankings that reverse in stereo vs mono.) This is only...

The lesson the Harman work teaches is that pink noise itself is the best signal for evaluating speaker quality. Or at least those aspects of speaker quality that can be ascertained by listening to a single speaker. Which, I continue to maintain, are not all aspects of speaker quality...

FYI to anyone planning to buy direct from Ascilab, there's now a backlog of orders on the C6B. I ordered a pair two days ago, and received this email: "Currently, we are experiencing a high volume of orders, which has caused a delay in shipments. Your ordered products are expected to ship in...

Personally I find Tracy Chapman (and similar, eg Jennifer Warnes) to be far more annoying than pink noise, but that's me. :) But any actual music will have constantly changing spectral balance (that's why it's music!), which has to be a hindrance in hearing errors in tonality, which is borne...

And did they?