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New Loudspeaker Eliminates Distortive Influence 310

Posted by CowboyNeal from the boom-shake-the-room dept.
fejrskov writes "The Danish audio/video company 'Bang & Olufsen' announced a new loudspeaker which promises to eliminate the bad influence from walls, floors and ceilings on the sound. This is achieved by using two technologies: ALT (Acoustic Lens Technology) uses sound dispersing lenses to make sound travel equally in all directions. ABC (Adaptive Bass Control) involves sliding a tiny microphone out at the base of the speaker, playing a series of test sounds, and adapting the bass according to the measured acoustic response. Each active loudspeaker contains amplifiers for a total of 2500W (!) output using B&O's patented ICEPower concept. The price? Approximately 55.000 Danish kroner (8.000 Euro) each."
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New Loudspeaker Eliminates Distortive Influence More

New Loudspeaker Eliminates Distortive Influence

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  • Quite the look (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) * <oculus.habent@gma i l . c om> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @12:59PM (#5926208) Journal
    Wow, the BeoLab 5 is one unique speaker [bang-olufsen.com]. Aside from the price tag I couldn't afford if I wanted, I wouldn't have anywhere to put it. It's much more intrusive than the BeoLab 6000 [bang-olufsen.com], but then, if you can afford 16.000 Euro for the speakers, you can probably re-design the room to match.

    Additional note: the first B&O page linked has some display issues on Safari.

  • What about 'Sony'? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ponty ( 15710 ) <awc2NO@SPAMbuyclamsonline.com> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:00PM (#5926212) Homepage
    I hear they make 'stereo' equipment as well.

    Seriously, though. I listened to some very, very expensive B&O speakers in their showroom, and I was astonished at how awful they sounded. No midrange and bass everywhere. Maybe it's just my ears, but it would take a vast improvement for me to ever consider spending that much money on their speakers.

    • Re:What about 'Sony'? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gilesjuk ( 604902 )
      It's all hype for those with the money to buy it.

      If your hifi is in a room that's acoustically bad then wear headphones or fix the room.

      B&O make fantastic TVs though, the picture quality of their avant widescreen is superb and has to be the best I've seen.

    • Re:What about 'Sony'? (Score:4, Funny)

      by dknj ( 441802 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:28PM (#5926332) Journal
      Are you sure you weren't in a Bose store?

      -dk
      • That was actually my first response. My dad (who wanted to take me there) was all gung-ho about the speakers, but I actually couldn't stay and listen to them, I was so put off by teh combination of the quality and the price.

        Like I said, it may be me -- I have a strange ear for sound, but I can definitely identify what just isn't satisfactory.
      • Here in Portland there is a B&O and a Bose store within an escalator of each other.

        I'd have to say that the Bose actually sounds better than the B&O.

    • Re:What about 'Sony'? (Score:5, Informative)

      by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) * on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:55PM (#5926455) Homepage
      B&O's hardware is gorgeous. Simply works of art.

      However, I also listened to their speakers and was utterly blown away by how awful they sounded.

      In general, the rule for speakers is the sleeker/fancier they look, the crappier they sound. Nobody has really improved on the rectangular sealed box. Add ports (or "bass labyrinth" as bose calls it) and you get a bandpass boost that makes small speakers sound louder, but totally fucks the frequency response and distorts everything at higher volume levels. A driver needs a sealed chamber behind it to stabilize it for clean mids - channel that air around to the front of the box and it just starts to slop. Sealed box == clean sound but you need a lot more power and bigger drivers.

      In the end I went with the BEO9000 wall-mount changer, but there was no way I'd have their speakers even if they were 1/10th the price. I just picked up a pair of Infinity studio monitors and a seaparate amp, and the sound is just phenomenal. I would love to take these speakers into the B&O show room and listen to them double-blind in the same room... I'll bet this pair of big rectangular speakers sound better than their "sleek and elegant" speakers for 1/4 the price. :)

      I'm definitely going to head down there and listen to the new ones though. It doesn't look like they've made compromises on sound quality to get more power from a smaller box... they're just huge. Too bad I can't afford 'em.

      BTW, B&O is big on using funky proprietary connectors for everything. The analog connections use 5-pin DIN connectors (???). However, they will sell you the necessary adaptors if you want to use your own choice of amp/speakers.
      • What is wrong with STANDARD 5-pin DIN connectors (DIN = Deutsche Industrie Norm). It was the most widely available connector for audio when they started their link system.

        You can make adaptors yourself, there is not much of a secret how sound is transmitted through it.

      • Re:What about 'Sony'? (Score:3, Informative)

        by kent_eh ( 543303 )
        BTW, B&O is big on using funky proprietary connectors for everything. The analog connections use 5-pin DIN connectors (???).
        Most european audio gear I've seen used DIN [hardwarebook.net] connectors. It would seem to be the european (or at least German) standard for connecting audio gear.

    • No Highs, No Lows, Must be Bose (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cordath ( 581672 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:53PM (#5926773)
      B&O have historically targetted a certain demographic, and done very well by doing so. Namely, the wealthy who want an obviously expensive and gorgeous sound system, but who don't really know or care much about the sound itself. B&O is one of the fashion trend setters for speakers. For example, Sony's chrome metal column home theatre systems were designed to look very similar to one of B&O's older systems.

      B&O's spiel on audio lenses, etc. really is a bit of a smokescreen. There's no new technology here, and probably not a particularily good implementation of existing tech. However, it has great packaging, glossy magazine ads, and you can bet your arse those B&O store salespeople are smoooooooth!

      Bose is sort of a low end version of B&O. Bose has the most effective and innovative marketing department of any speaker company out there. High margins for dealers, salesperson training, you name it. Watching a bose demo is as entertaining as watching a carnival sideshow. They'll play those little plywood boxes with paper cones through PVC tubing, inside other much larger "Speaker boxes", and a plethora of other gimmichs while gushing about how great they sound. You'd be surprised at what people will believe if they're told to. White Van speaker companies like Dogg Digital or Nuance are but pale imitators of the origional master, Dr.Bose. Truly a master.

      While I respect them as highly profitable and effective companies, would I buy B&O or Bose myself? Probably not. When you want better sound for your dollar it is best to go elsewhere.
    • It is really a grab bag with audiophile speakers. I listend to about dozen pairs of 10,000+ speakers, and was amazied. Some of them sounded about as good as your average $200 "home theater kit", while several were unquestionably the best sound reproduction I had ever heard by a long shot. As in, "worth the money" had I had it to spend. However, by the time I could afford to spend that much, I am sure my hearing will have degraded enough that it isn't worth it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • >All this gimmicky digital signal processing to
        >achieve better sound won't improve things if
        >you don't have the right kind of room, and
        >don't have the speakers in the right places.

        That's not entirely true. In theory, you could use signal processing to not only overcome the limitations of the speakers themselves (say, a frequency response that's non-linear relative to the wattage driving the unit, or certain phase issues), but also the environment they've been placed in (room reflections or can
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • >It would be a pretty difficult enterprise to
            >come up with a 'sensing' microphone that
            >assured good quality from a listening location.

            One possibility might be to let people make a deposit on their credit card for a high-quality, $2,000+ studio microphone. They'd use it to balance their system, then FedEx it back to the manufacturer. If they failed to return the mic, the manufacturer would simply go ahead and charge the cost of the mic to their card.

  • 8.000 Euro vs 8,000 Euro (Score:5, Funny)

    by anotherone ( 132088 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:02PM (#5926217)
    At first I saw "8.000" Euro and thought "Eight bucks even, that's pretty damned reasonable."

    Then I remembered that European countries have the odd habit of using decimal points to seperate thousands rather than commas... blah.

    • And consider if the rating of the speakers are 2500 RMS watts continuous or simply the usual 2500 peak RMS watts with a 0.01 PWM duty cycle marketers love to hawk us with.

      2500 watts each? Now consider a three phase 480 volt power for the living room with a 14,400 oil cooled substation transformer feeding the circuit breaker panel and I'll believe these specifications.
      • Actually, peak power output with 1% duty cycle is very important for music reproduction, as music tends to have a very high crest factor. The problem is that most manufacturers tend to lie about that as well, which is why it is better just to get average power ratings (RMS power is not useful, BTW).

        Also, any well defined amplifier is capable of outputing nearly full power continously. Having a much higher peak output than average output is a sign of weak filter capacitors on the power supply, which will

    • Re:8.000 Euro vs 8,000 Euro (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:55PM (#5926779) Journal
      Then I remembered that European countries have the odd habit of using decimal points to seperate thousands rather than commas... blah.

      As I understand it, SI recognizes the ambiguity of the decimal vs. the place value separator. I believe that the encouraged convention is to use a nonbreaking space every three digits to mark place values--this way, either a comma or a period marks a decimal. No ambiguity.

      As an aside, the European system makes more sense from a design standpoint. You use the smallest possible symbol (period) to mark groups of three digits. The most important place value you tag with a larger symbol (comma), so it stands out. For the record, I grew up in Canada, and we use the 'American' convention for decimals.

      Of course, real /.ers should use scientific notation for everything.

      • For the record, I grew up in Canada, and we use the 'American' convention for decimals.

        I grew up in Quebec (which is still part of Canada, last time I checked), and when I was in elementary school (late eighties) they taught us to use the comma to mark the decimal point. By the time I reached high school, they had given up on that.

  • For the lazy.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by BillYak ( 119143 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:02PM (#5926219) Homepage
    Thats $8,494.07 USD.

    http://xe.com/

  • What would rule (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Evil Adrian ( 253301 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:03PM (#5926221) Homepage
    What would REALLY be neat is if they could make microphones that weren't affected by room dimensions, walls, etc. Doing home recordings can be a giant pain, especially when recording drums... the room contributes so much to the sound, and since most home musicians can't afford gigantic rooms, you wind up recording in a tiny room which, for those of you that know acoustics, makes things very boomy and difficult to control. Then we have to go and spend hundreds of dollars on bass traps for the room corners, which still don't fix the problem, they just make it less noticable... sigh.

    • Re:What would rule (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 )
      Build a diagonal baffle. Simply find some 2x4's, build an A frame, lay on some sheetrock, then carpet the thing. Placing it diagonally through the room will eliminate a significant amount of echo that is causing problems for you. If you can find a business that had a dropped celing that they are remodeling, you may be able to get better accoustic dampening with the panels than with carpeting.

      If you really want to dampen sound, you may even want to fill your walls with sand. This will reduce the amount of a

    • Re:What would rule (Score:3, Informative)

      by crucini ( 98210 )
      I think the biggest thing you could do to eliminate the boxy low frequency resonances is get rid of the parallel walls and floor/ceiling. I realize this isn't easy. Could you built a stout partition running diagonally through the room and put the drummer in one triangle? Or you could cover two walls and the ceiling with randomly sized protrusions - maybe hand-carved foam with a skin of concrete. They need to be pretty rigid. The problem with that second idea is that it will only spread the resonance a
    • > if they could make microphones that weren't affected by room dimensions, walls, etc

      This should be possible as processing step with PC audio software. Just
      record a loud click-type noise (eg let a balloon burst). This is the
      "finite impulse response" (FIR) of your room. It describes how your
      room responds to a single impulse.

      Using a mathematical formula, software can calculate the inverse impulse
      response from this. This can be used to remove the effects that your
      room had on a recorded signal.

      This is
    • What would REALLY be neat is if they could make microphones that weren't affected by room dimensions, walls, etc.

      Yep. You need to get one of them newfangled psychic microphones--one of the ones that detects what sound you want to hear, rather than recording the sound that is actually incident upon it. Advanced versions of the psychic microphone will also adjust for errors in pitch (particularly for amateur vocalists) and can perform guitar solos.

      Seriously, what you want to do can be done (to some ext

  • At my church, we meet in a room that looks like the inside of a whale (no, really). To counter this, we installed a computer-based equalization system from Meyer sound labs: the SIM II. Not counting the speakers' cost (about half-a-million), the SIM unit itself ran us (I think) about $35,000 with microphones--and you still do some hand-tuning. Nice to see "mini-SIM" technology at work (especially because it's automagic).

    • Church, eh. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, it'd be a shame if you spent that kind of money on, say, the homeless.

  • What does this do that a serious audiophile can't? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:09PM (#5926251) Homepage Journal

    Seriously, "acoustic lens" is just a fancy term for a horn, something that has been used for years to control dispersion and distortion. Also, a mic extended from the base to measure the low-end response? Has anyone heard of a Real Time Analyzer (RTA)? Linear X [linearx.com] makes a PC based RTA for around $900 (PCRTAjr). If you can afford a $16,000 pair of speakers, you can afford to buy an RTA to set it up, or find a dealer that has one.

  • Uses? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DarkBlackFox ( 643814 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:09PM (#5926254)
    Are these loudspeakers designed for use in say, a PA system? Or for use in home theater, or theater theater? Perhaps for DJing purposes? What exactly is it intended to do that a well equalized set of JBL speakers can't produce?

    Seems like it's only prominant feature is the ability to produce 360 degree sound, but for that price, you could easily get 5 or 6 high quality speakers and arrange them in a circle.

    The flash based site doesn't yield any useful specs either.
    • Are these loudspeakers designed for use in say, a PA system? Or for use in home theater, or theater theater? Perhaps for DJing purposes?

      None of the above. They're designed to enable rich people to show off.
    • >What exactly is it intended to do that a well
      >equalized set of JBL speakers can't produce?

      It can do it at quiet volumes. For some of us, an amp and speaker is worhless if it is incapable of damaging the foundation of a house. It's very easy to overcome limitations of a room when you are willing to move huge volumes of air (FOH reinforcement for a rock band), because you make the room gemoetry irrelelvant. But at quiet volumes you have other problems.

      I understand the apppeal of "home theatre" and
  • slashdot marketting for B&O?

    An acoustic lens that makes sound travel equally in all directions? Sounds like a fast DSP that cancels out room reflections.

  • Multipath interference and distortion well studied (Score:4, Informative)

    by HidingMyName ( 669183 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:12PM (#5926268)
    I'm surprised they got a patent on this, the military has been studying this for years. Edelman's recent work [newscientist.com] uses inverse functions to counter multipath interference in sonar with security applications. The only difference here is application as far as I can tell, the technique appears similar.

    • Perhaps it's because B&O isn't a US-based company, but based out of Denmark?

      However, the interference of sound and magnetic waves has been studied to death by the military. The technology developed by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs for doing A/D encoding ran into just such an issue with the US military -- it turned out some of their approaches were being used by these little cruise missiles the US had spent a couple billion developing. (They ended up being allowed to use it, but it was restricted so th

  • Audiophiles are *worse* than drug addicts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:13PM (#5926269)
    Drug addicts will at least leave you in peace, shooting their arms up in abandoned alleyways and passing out with friends around the bong.
    Moreover, when drug addicts throw their money away, they're usually pumping it back into the local economy instead of shipping it off to hardware manufacturers overseas.

    Audiophiles, in contrast, aren't content to waste their money in private or among other like-minded individuals. Oh no. They have a compulsive need to prosthelitize about their audiophilia. As if there weren't enough of their kind in this world as it is, they will openly moan and complain about the quality of others' audio equipment and wax on end about the relative merits of whatever their latest hobbyhorse format is over mp3 which is far too lossy or whatever they're bitching this week.

    In all my years of knowing dope smokers and heroin addicts, I've never known any to spend half as much time trying to justify the benefits of their drug of choice as audiophiles do about their wares. It just isn't done. Drug addicts are content to enjoy their recreational substances and leave it at that. Audiophiles feel a need to go so much further.

    The other day, I was reading about the US Supreme Court's latest court case upholding the constitutionality of religious groups' use of public school space for after-school bible classes. But what I think was left out of the debate was how religious groups are such a small threat when compared to other secular groups. Whereas the liberals would like to bar the Good News club from coming to elementary schools, they would happily and cheerfully admit an audiophilia club. Whereas the Good News club is just trying to save your soul, the audiophiles are both trying to steal your soul and bilk your wallet at the same time. That is the true threat in our society today.

    I'm glad someone is finally casting the light of public scrutiny upon this pestilence in our midst. Audiophilia must be banned and criminalized as it has no place in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our forefathers did not give their lives to found a nation where we could scamper around with our goldplated headphones and 10 megawatt amps in one giant aureal masturbatory frenzy.

    • Bumperstickers? (Score:5, Funny)

      by yroJJory ( 559141 ) <me@@@jory...org> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:36PM (#5926365) Homepage
      Sounds like you need some bumperstickers for the cause!

      Here's my first contribution:

      Use vials, not tubes!

  • Trademark Names (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 )
    I detest companies that use trademarked phrases as if they are scientific principles.

    'ALT (Acoustic Lens Technology)' and 'ABC (Adaptive Bass Control)' sound like marketing buzzwords. Where's a peer-reviewed paper describing the phenomenon?

    The technology might be cool, but this sounds like a verbatim fax from Bose or similar hype marketing outfit.

    I've been hating Stereo Salesmen since first encountering the snide ignorant critters during my connector quests of the 70's. I stomached being in their prese

    • Re:Trademark Names (Score:5, Insightful)

      by crucini ( 98210 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:44PM (#5926393)
      Exactly. However, it doesn't mean they aren't good speakers. It just means that marketing departments don't aim at techies. The "ALT" buzzword rubs me the wrong way because "accoustic lens" actually means something - an array of parallel plates mounted in front of an exponential horn to diffuse sound. They lost relevance in the mid-70's when the constant-directivity horn was developed. There are still audiophiles using, and swearing by, accoustic lenses. Since I can't view the website, I don't know if B&O has resurrected this antique technology, but I doubt it. More likely their marketers didn't bother asking an audio engineer if the term was already taken.

      In all fairness, there's a legitimate marketing reason for assigning names to "technologies", however trivial those technologies might appear to an engineer. Let's say this speaker takes off, and the manufacturer wants to make a smaller, cheaper one with some of the same ideas. They can say "the model 5000 has ALT and ABC". This helps them rub off some magic from the flagship product to something more affordable. I still don't like it, though.

  • Oh, please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:17PM (#5926290)

    I'm having a hard time swallowing this.

    Acoustic lensing has been used for quite some time. I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing. With the traditional sound cone, most of the sound is directed at the listener. With equal dispersion, a lot the sound is being reflected. This means it's being muddied on reflection, and you have delay issues.

    Regarding ABC: One of the biggest problems in bass is the standing wave. A standing wave is inaudible at one part of the room, but overpowering in another. One aspect of a standing wave is that it has no effect at the speaker.

    Now, using a mic for calibration is a good thing. The Pioneer Elite VSX-45TX reciever, for example, can be hooked up to a mic that is placed at the listening position. It can then calibrate itself for delay, levels, and per-channel eq. That accommodates most room dynamic problems as well as they can be, at least by preprocessing. But if your subwoofer seems to have a screwy response curve, then no preprocessing is going to make it right-- you have to actually stand up and move it.

    • I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing.

      Since I can't view the website, I don't know what, if anything, they're offering. But given a room with some reflections, speakers with a constant coverage angle and constant directivity can sound less colored by the room. This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound. However all practical speakers become 360 degree radiators below a certain frequency. So the question is, ho

      • This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound.

        That was supposed to be the main point of my post, but I'm off my game today. Thanks for the insight.

        Therefore the walls and ceiling receive a very uneven frequency response, which they pass on to the listeners. If you compensate this with equalization, life still isn't perfect because the direct sounds seem quite different in localization and character from the reflected sounds.

        While I agree

        • While I agree with what you say, it sounds like this is would be an argument against 360 degree coverage. Wouldn't that amplify the effect, meaning that you'd have to do more with the eq?

          I think what you're missing here is that the uneven frequency response reflecting off walls in a typical system is a result of the varying dispersion pattern of conventional frontward-firing drivers. By constructing a system that fires in all directions, the walls receive all frequencies equally rather than only those w

  • Bose already has something similar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bluestar ( 17362 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:17PM (#5926292) Homepage
    Check out the latest Bose Lifestyle systems with Adapti-Q(sp?).

    They include special "headphones" (microphones you wear on your head). You sit in five locations where you normally listen to music/movies and play the special CD. It listens to itself and adapts the system to your living room. Yes, the change is clearly audible.

    It also means your speakers don't have to be in a perfect rectangle. Place them anywhere you want and it will adapt.

    I got the Lifestyle 35 (integrated DVD/AM/FM) for $3000 US. RF remote, sounds awesome and the speakers are *tiny*.

    • Re:Bose already has something similar (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rabtech ( 223758 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:01PM (#5926504) Homepage
      Bose sells cheap crap made in china... Paper cones, inferior woofers, etc. They are selling moderate home theater gear at high prices, all based on some gee-whiz marketing and most folks don't know any better.

      I promise you, $3,000 spent could get you something much better than the same money spent on a Bose system.

      P.S. that little microphone gimmick is just that, without reference grade microphones to run the measurements with.

      think I'm full of it? Go post on some of the pro audio newsgroups, or check the forums at www.prosoundworld.com. Heck, even ask around on some of the home theater groups. Or ask the folks at FOH magazine. People that make their bread & butter dealing with sound. People who have real equipment that can accurately measure system response. People who do real research.

      All of them will tell you that Bose is overpriced mediocre gear. Most people buy Bose and think bose is cool because of the marketing. They wouldn't know dbspl from dbv if you knocked them upside the head with an audio textbook.

    • Re:Bose already has something similar (Score:5, Informative)

      by DaveJ2001 ( 559498 ) <dejewett2002 @ g m a i l . com> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:19PM (#5926612)
      Bose? Good? Hardly... for $3000 you can do much better than Bose, and you'll get something that's upgradeable as well, when new surround formats are available. Those who think Bose is good should check out this link, especially the part about the frequency gap between 80 and 200hz:

      text [intellexual.net]

      Dave

    • Re:Bose already has something similar (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @03:42PM (#5927016) Homepage Journal
      B&O are known for stuff that looks artsy, sound good and don't interact well with other's products, at greatly inflated prices.

      Bose is known for stuff that looks good, sound OK at best, at greatly inflated prices. Bose's QC also allows a 10dB variation to "pass" as a qualified product when most quality manufacturers use 3dB or less.

      For half the price of that Lifestyle 35 you can get an Anthony Gallo set that looks better, sounds better and the speakers are little 3" to 4" spheres. IIRC, they don't rely on a midrange to do a tweeter's job or a woofer's job like Bose does.

      I don't think the auto adjust is included but I wouldn't pay much for something I can do by hand and an audio meter for free, $40 if you don't have an audio meter. It's much easier to do than installing or using any computer.

  • What about the laws of acoustics? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by yroJJory ( 559141 ) <me@@@jory...org> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:21PM (#5926304) Homepage
    Okay, so the ALT disperses sound in all directions. That doesn't stop the acoustic presence of walls, floor, ceiling, and whatnot.

    Acoustic reflections are going to happen unless you treat the surfaces that the sound is reflecting off. And to make a room more accurate, absorption is only one of the necessary treatments. Without diffusion, the room will sound very dead and, to many, quite uncomfortable.

    The design (and placement) of an audio source is only one small part of making a room sound good.

    Been into any hoity-toity restaurants in the past few years and noticed you can't understand the person 2 feet away from you? The popular design of restaurant spaces lately includes big vaulted ceilings and lots of open space, but few use any acoustic treatments in these spaces, causing large, boomy rooms.

    It's not the source of the audio that needs to be changed (the talking people or the loudspeaker), it's the room itself.

    The ALT simply attempts to remove the focal point (or sweet spot) from speaker placement. I've not heard one of these, but my feeling from looking at their website is the eliptical dispersion simply puts the focal point in a spot where no one actually sits and then tries to relfect that spot to the rest of the room.

  • That's nice, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by H0NGK0NGPH00EY ( 210370 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:24PM (#5926319) Homepage
    When will we get this?

    Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.

    Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board.

    Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message.

    "People of Earth, your attention please," a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.

    "This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council," the voice continued. "As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."

    The PA died away.

  • how much?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:32PM (#5926346) Homepage Journal

    Eight Thousand Euro???

    Wow.

    That's what I call getting a Bang for your bucks. :-D

  • Ahhh, more speaker "art" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Admiral Llama ( 2826 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @01:36PM (#5926369)
    Ever notice how the large majority of speaker companies have speakers that look like a box?

    Ever wonder why after decades of research they're still a box?

    Ever notice that B&O likes to make non-conventional looking stuff and then charges an arm and a leg?

    They're selling you functional art at really high prices folks.

    If you want speakers that actually sound good, then try an electrostatic or planar speaker. Magnepans [magnepan.com] aren't a kajillion dollars and are a damned good place to start looking for planars.
    • Personally I dig Avant Garde's [avantgarde-acoustic.de] style. These speakers both look and sound excellent... of course they do cost a 'kajillion' dollars. :)
    • If you want speakers that actually sound good, then try an electrostatic or planar speaker.

      Make that good looking speakers that actually sound good, but even base models are still a bit expensive. The one thing that electrostatics do is keep everything pretty well in phase, but the magnitude is actually often all over the place often at least +- 5dB. They also still need a bass module (i.e. a "box") because planars don't have enough excursion.
      • >They also still need a bass module (i.e.
        >a "box") because planars don't have enough
        >excursion.

        That's not always the case. *Small* planar speakers, like Magnepan's $700 entry-level pair, require a subwoofer if you want to reproduce loud low bass (think dance, rap, or the cannons in the 1812 Overature). But the giant-sized, 7' tall top-of-the-line Magnepan speakers certainly don't require a sub. True they're expensive (around $4,000 a pair, I believe), but they're still only a fraction the cost
    • I've actually heard one "art" type speaker that was worth someting, and that is the B&W Nautilus [bwspeakers.com]. I've got no idea if all their chatter about the tapered tubes has any foundation in science, or is just marketing hype. However, the speaker does bak up all its hype with good sound. It really does sound great and measure flat. But, interestingly enough, I'd say it is no better than the SC-Vs from the now closed down Dunlavy Audio Labs. They built your standard boxy speakers ranging from large to huge, wit
  • Approximately 55.000 Danish kroner (8.000 Euro) each.

    Or........... About 8 VW Beetles..

  • Too bad I can't read the site (even AFTER the page fully rendered 100% fine):

    Another browser needed...

    To view this site, you must use either:

    Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5+ for Windows or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+ for Mac OS or Netscape 6.0+ for Windows or Mac OS or Mozilla 1.0 for Linux users

    Please visit the supplier websites to attain the appropriate browser

  • The Open Source Way... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Quickening ( 15069 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:09PM (#5926553) Homepage
    Sad that such a topic shows up on Slashdot without mentioning open source solutions which are cheap to free. Check out Digital Room Correction [freshmeat.net] and BruteFIR [ludd.luth.se] for instance.
  • MBL makes 360 degree speakers [mbl-hifi.com] also. But they are probably even more expensive.

  • B&Ollocks! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Doug Neal ( 195160 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @02:37PM (#5926683)
    B&O kit is for people with more money than sense (sense of hearing that is). The amount you pay for it, you can get the same results with kit a tenth of the price. You are only paying for the design.

    IMHO, all this crap that companies like B&O and Bose spew about their R&D and the latest gadget they've come up with to "shape" the sound or whatever has little basis in reality at all. Audio reproduction is not a mystery. It is well known how to get good results. There's no secret to it and B&O have not made any breakthroughs.

    So if you have the cash and the inclination, instead of spending 8 grand on a pair of these speakers, get yourself some kit from Quad, TAG McLaren Audio, Arcam, Mission, etc. I'm willing to bet you could put together an entire system that'd sound ten times as good as these for a quarter of the cost of these speakers alone, without any of this nonsense they're putting in them.

    Having said all that, I'm currently listening to a pair of B&O speakers, although they are about 30 or 40 years old. Obviously they had a bit more of a clue back then as the speakers sound amazing, although they were marred by the very long and very thin cables they came with. A bit of modification of the terminals to accept a thicker cable made them sound like a completely different set of speakers. It makes me wonder, if B&O were prepared to completely ruin the sound for the sake of the design of the cable, of all things.. what else are they doing?
  • Does anyone know anything about that 2500W 'ICEpower' amplifier? I wasn't able to find anything on their aweful website, but it at least sounds suspiciously similar to Sunfire's Tracking Downconverter which supplies their subs with 2700W with an amp the size of a candy bar.

    This Tracking Downconverter supplies their 11" cube subs with enough power to get the stroke of the subwoofer to over 2"... that's moving quite a bit of air. With I believe an 8 pound magnet, and 16 pounds of dead weight on the opposite

  • walk into your local B&O store in a tie dye sh (Score:3, Informative)

    by Splork ( 13498 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @03:17PM (#5926892) Homepage
    and watch the stuffy sales clerk walk around like a snob and turn everything off including the lights without speaking to you until you leave.

    that's how "Good" B&O equipment is. they're worse than Bose when it comes to selling for 8x markup.
  • There is a movement wherein old analog synthesizers are highly saught after by musicians, and they are adding synthetic "old record" sounds (scratches and pops) into their songs.

    It seems some find digital music too clean and pure. The "dirt" adds personility, and this is even from the young croud, not just nastalgia seekers.

    Perfect reproduction and esthetic enjoyment are not necessarily the same thing. A lot of it is one-upmanship. Then again, some get entertainment from listening to music, others get it
  • Now the wives (or the odd husband) of audio freaks everywhere have some chance of removing the big leather chair from the middle of the room, if the sweet spot is everywhere.

  • Where are the specs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pettifogger ( 651170 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @05:14PM (#5927451)
    B&O is just like Bose. While their products are undoubtedly beautiful, they charge a huge amount of money for poor performance. Judging from the photos of this, it looks like it has a speaker firing up towards the UFO-shaped thingie in order to spread the sound in a circular fashion- sort of like those old hassock-style floor fans.

    If you really want a speaker that performs in a similar manner and you're not afraid to build it yourself, take a look at:

    http://www.agora.dk/users/ole.thofte/conus1.htm

    This is the Conus I speaker by Ole Thofte- he estimates that it costs about $85 to build, and it should sound as good or better than the $8,000 B&O speaker. And as for the little microphone? If you get some books and a few pieces of test equipment, you can take care of this yourself at a very low price. Either that or you have an extra $7,915 to hire a professional to do setup and placement for you.

    Also, the acoustic lens is nothing new. I just looked it up in the Audio Cyclopedia, and while there was no date of origin, the Cyclopedia is copyrighted 1959, so the acoustic lens is at least 44 years old. This is just another example of tarting up old technology and trying to pass it off as something new. This kind of snakeoil is not unusual in high-end audio.

    What's sad is that if you want a decent stereo and not pay a fortune for it these days, you have to build it yourself. Speakers sold at the big box electronics stores are not good (including Bose; if you don't believe me, go Google for some performance specs on them. Your $20 computer speakers probably have more accurate reproduction), a quick comparison with "good" speakers leaves no doubt, whether you're an audiophile or not. As for me, I dropped about $250 to build a pair of full-range ribbon loudspeakers with wonderfully flat response. Could have built them for less, a lot of the price was for two types of exotic wood I wanted to use. Anyone seriously interested in good sound should skip this overpriced crap and check out the DIY forums on the Internet. You really can set up a wonderful system for well under $1,000.

  • eliminates distortive influence, eh? someone should try using these while watching Fox News...

  • The original geeks (Score:3, Funny)

    by kongjie ( 639414 ) <kongjie@ma c . com> on Saturday May 10, 2003 @06:14PM (#5927743)
    Reading this I'm reminded that before the era of the personal computer, it was mainly audiophiles who spent a large percentage of their time writing about things most people couldn't give a shit about.

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