[Hallicrafters] Bumblee Caps.

[Richard Knoppow]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ross Stenberg" <k9cox at charter.net>
To: <hallicrafters at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2012 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Hallicrafters] Bumblee Caps.


> Yes but do they have the effervescence, sonic purity, 
> musicality, and
> clarity of those old caps :^)


     Sometime in the late 1940's a magazine called "Audio 
Engineering", later called just "Audio" published a list of 
suggested terms for reproduced sound.  I don't have it at 
hand and can't remember much but it ran to about twenty 
terms. Some made sense, like shrill or boomy, but others 
didn't.  I've found that most of the time "obscure" 
characteristics can be traced to very conventional faults 
like gross frequency response errors or plain old 
distortion.  Some of course is just imagination. I remember 
once listening to a symphony concert, I mean live with an 
orchestra in the hall, and hearing a splice go by. What did 
my ears hear that my brain interpreted that way?  I don't 
know but its happened many times.  I also have heard other 
"faults" in live music with no amplification such as 
"wandering" of location, etc. Of course, that is just 
acoustics, but we can hear all sorts of stuff in recorded 
music that is interpreted as some artifact of the 
recording/reproducing process when its no such thing.
     Sometime in the late 1940's Howard Chinn (I think) of 
CBS ran an experiment that resulted in his conclusion that 
people liked limited frequency response better than wide 
response.  Harry Olson, of RCA, thought this was nonsense 
and did his own testing. Chinn used recorded music 
reproduced on loudspeakers and Olson used a life orchestra 
with bandwidth filtering by means of an acoustical filter 
between the orchestra and audience. Result: people liked the 
widest band possible. The answer to the difference was the 
_distortion_ in Chinn's set up.  The narrow band filters 
reduced the audible distortion so people preferred it. In 
Olson's experiment there was no distortion so people liked 
the wide band best.  One must really know what you are 
measuring.  This was an embarrassment to CBS, who had beat 
RCA to the punch with the Lp record. I think this was sort 
of revenge.


--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk at ix.netcom.com