[Vintage-Audio] H.H. Scott Rocks With Paradigm Monitor 9!

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Phil, 	
	
1. I am totally blind. I know how to listen far better than a sighted person. I
hear what you ignore. Vision accounts for 92% of what sighted people learn and
sense. It overrides the input of the other senses. If you remove the visual
input, it is quite surprising what one suddenly becomes aware of. It was there
all along, but your dependence on vision caused it to be ignored, or filtered
out.	
	
Ever be in a room, knowing you were alone, and suddenly 'sense' the presence of
somebody watching you? You did not see them. You did not hear them. How did you
know?	
	
Really quite simple. The human ear can detect a very tiny change in air
pressure. With your vision disabled, in this case looking forward and the source
is behind you, the vision was not able to override the data from the ears being
fed to the brain. Thus your brain became aware of the tiny change in air
pressure the presence of another person caused. When you turned to look, sure
enough, somebody was standing there observing you.	
	
This works for detecting objects, when the area is quiet. Of course, the object
must be reasonable large so as to effect a change in air movement. 	
	
I have done audio recording for forty years. I have trained myself to listen.
While it is true people hear or see what they expect to hear or see, I use an
empirical approach to eliminate such psychological bias. 	
	
I fed the B&W 630 with 100 watts continuous RMS and used a DAT as the source. I
listened to a specific selection I was familiar with. Then I changed to bi-wired
and listened again. I did this several times to be sure of what I heard. I tried
it with different speakers, to see if there was a difference there also. There
was, but it did vary among manufacturers and models of the same manufacturer. 		
	
I will do some in depth research into what the thinking behind bi-wiring is and
report back to the list. It should prove to be interesting one way or the other.
	
	
Duane W8DBF	
 
	

 

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From: Phil Lefever <plefever@isd.net>
To: vintage-audio@mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Vintage-Audio] H.H. Scott Rocks With Paradigm Monitor 9!
Date: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 7:32 PM


>The bi-wiring does make an audible difference on the high end. By running the
>power from the amplifier in parallel to the top tweeter only and the 
>bottom mid
>range and woofer speakers, more power gets to the tweeter.

Color me skeptical I guess. Provided you are using reasonably low resistance
wires adding a set in parallel will make an EXTREMELY small difference in
power transfer, well below human audibility.

If we analyze the circuit assuming a speaker impedance of 6 ohms and a total
cable resistance of .4 ohms we would normally see a loss of only 6.25% at
the speaker. If we run another identical cable in parallel now the loss
drops to 3.2% an improvement of 3% or about .1db. While I will never tell
anyone they can't hear something, I seriously doubt that humans can detect
a small change like this statistically in a double blind test.

A change in power transfer is therefore a very unlikely player in any
advantage of bi-wiring. There could be a number of other possibilities
such as capacitance and inductance etc as an AC signal is much more complex
then simple DC. I still doubt these things as audio frequencies are very
low in the spectrum. I am still very open for more discussion on this
though!

>I have listened to several system wired both ways and I can tell the
>difference.

Did in any of these comparisons you ever not know the system was bi-wired?
Again not saying it makes no difference to you audibly but as humans we
often perceive a difference just because we are expecting one. Of course
even if it is a psychological difference it is still valid as the listening
experience is psychoacoustical and we can never separate our mind from the
mix. If waxing an amplifier makes it sound better buy a big can of wax and
enjoy your music! Even if the difference can't be measured it is still a valid
difference to the guy with the wax ;)

>Now I am a serious listener Phil and I hear what many others gloss
>over.

I consider myself to have excellent hearing as well. I play Cello and Guitar
and I can still hear the 15KHz flyback transformers in TVs. I laugh at people
that tell me I can hear something (how can they know they don't have my ears!).
My issue is my training in electronics and recording technology that tells me
differently. What we perceive can be altered easily.

Good discussion in any case!

73 and enjoy the Scott/Paradigm combo bi-wired or not!

Phil


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Phil Lefever - Burnsville, MN
Amateur Radio Callsign - KB0NES EN34jt
C8-SP XT-10 C102 80WV
MNAA - Minnesota Amateur Astronomers

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