sound practices reading club /16

Another stab at speakers. This time some serious dicking around with Altec VOTT Speakers for Hi-Fi by Jeff Markwart and John Tucker, from sound practices issue 4. In it, they describe how they got hooked on Altec A7s, but also started to get to know its weaknesses. Next, they describe how they dealt with these, followed by their take on Altec driver and horn selection. Next is the Karlson bass speaker, their solution for deeper bass. They finish with describing their improved results. As an appendix there is two sides of Altec driver spec sheet.

teaser quote: ‘It was immediately apparent that these imposing boxes did a number of things very well compared to the majority of speakers I had been evaluating. […] I was hooked. Before long there was a pair of A7-500 Utilities in my front room running on a pair of 6B4-G push-pull triode monos I built. John Tucker stopped by for a listen and soon Altecs appeared at his house also.’

my take

This article is in many ways a continuation of last week’s. The A7s were already mentioned there as the practical (relatively small) Altec VOTT horn system. Here are now a couple of guys who jumped right in and share with us what it is like: the immediate breakthrough to another world of dynamic, effortless reproduction, but also a list of nagging issues that you have to decide to deal with, or not. Yes, ‘doing it right will also require time.’

Also a continuation is in some of the preferences/recommendations. For instance the ones for long horns (watch that one as we go along) and for bi-amping for ‘still higher performance.’

All the Altec illustration material is cool. Shows how serious the components involved are and the kind of floor space a ‘baby’ system like this requires. The Magnificents that are mentioned in the article are more domesticated, but side-by-side the regular theatre version is cooler, in sort of a Darth Vader way.

Then there is the Karlson. What I can say about it is that some people, like Mark and John here, swear by it, and other people, to paraphrase Greg, consider it ‘kind of a bad joke,’ more of mind trick than something that works properly. I am at the moment more enthusiastic about tapped horns as a modern solution for this problem. These seem to do exactly two octaves, so everyone can size them to do exactly the bottom two octaves one needs.

pop quiz

Reading the list of steps for achieving a low system noise level, I was struck by the inclusion of ‘use stepped attenuators.’ How is that going to help, I thought. Well, I think they mean using stepped attenuators made of a quality switch and low-noise resistors. This in contrast with a potentiometer made of a metal wiper scraping over some reluctantly conducting material (carbon, ‘conducting plastic’) where dirt piles up, the overall circuit kept together and conducting with rivets.

Now go and read the article, see you next week.