[Elecraft] OT: Yamaha 'phones specs: has the world gone mad?

[Jim Brown]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:22:07 -0800 (PST), Paul, PD0PSB, wrote:

>No Doug, the world has not gone mad :-)

>What you seem to overlook is that reproduction (even in communications)
>has to be linear.

Exactly right, Paul. The late Dick Heyser, inventor of Time Delay 
Spectrometry, among other things, and an engineer working on 
communications for the space program at JPL, once said that "describing 
a system using only its frequency response was like trying to write 
poetry with a single word in your vocabulary." The same could be said 
about antennas and SWR. 

The numbers for frequency response in the original post failed to 
include one of the post important parts of the response spec -- the 
TOLERANCE in +/-dB for the stated response.

Furthermore, bandwidth is limited within the K3 by a lowpass filter at 
the output of the DSP, AND there is a "graphic" equalizer within the DSP 
that you can access with RXEQ and set as you like for your ears, 
loudspeakers, and headphones. 

FWIW, I always use top quality high fidelity headphones with my ham 
rigs, including my K3s, and I'm quite pleased with the result. The only 
time I was happy was with a Ten Tec Omni V, which lacked the low pass 
filter, and thus sounded "hissy." The headphones in my shack are Sony 
MDR7506 and MDRV-6, Yamaha CM500 (for when I want a boom mic), Etymotic 
Research ER4, and two Shure in-ear models. 

73,

Jim K9YC