View Single Post
  #53   Report Post  
Dick Pierce
 
Posts: n/a
Default Dick Pierce on Altec, or MM?

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message om...

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.


Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging


A LOT of utter irrelvancies deleted

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)


But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.


And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.)


You mean to say, you LIKE that driver. To YOU, it sound better.

That's a great argument for YOU, one for which I will nor can provide
no technical rejoinder. But you have taken your preference for the
driver and elevated it almost to the level of physical fact. In the
process, you failed to address every single technical point I raised.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.


We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.

You brought up the example of how, in your mind, 40 and 50 year old
engine technologgy was, fro some reasons, superior to that which prevails
now. I suggest your example, as applied to the 604, is a highly flawed
example. I would suggest a more apt example would be the comparison
between the internal combustion engine and rickshaws.

Had Altec known 10% of what is known about the intergration of drivers
and cabinets and the resulting determination of driver electromechanical
parameters, the 604 would have had to have been a VERY different driver.
The fundamental physics dictates so. That physics has not changed one
wit in the intervening 60 years. Our knowledge of it has.

In counter to this, you bring up utter irrelevancies about Madisound
and "singing dick high enders" and stuff which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
to do with the fact that th 604 is a BAD DESIGN, and its BAD DESIGN
stands on its own, and need not be compared to anything else, other
than the fundamental operation of physics, electronics and acoustics,
to be judged as bad.

You seem to continue to miss the point that it's not that SPEAKERS
have changed, it's that our UNDERSTANDING of speakers have changed,
and because of THAT, we now know how to change the speakers. Altec
knew NONE of this, NOTHING.

Yoe are certainly correct in that the 604 is unlike anything available
today. I know of now manufacturer of any repute who would knowlingly
design and market a system with such miserable low-frequency performance
as exhibited by the 604 with its typically awful low-frequency alignment.

How wel do you think a system with a whopping 15" driver would sell
if its designers were to admit that it can't go below 50 Hz? And what
sort of reception do you think an 11.3 dB peak at 80 Hz will receive?

That's your 604 in all it's glory, in all it's naive, ignorant of
modern low-frequency design principles, 60-year-old-booming-mid-
bass, absolutely-no-low-bass magnificence.

As I said near the outset of this thread, you may like the 604 and what
it does. But do NOT hold it up as a paragon of loudspeaker design. Having
now investigated it in more detail, I no longer think doing so is
laughable, it's embarrisngly ridiculous. It's a joke. A 60 year old
quaint, if not somewhat unfortunate, joke.

If you want do deal with the technical issues raised in this thread,
I'd be happy to continue. However, you seem to want to raise any number
of totally irrelevant proxy issues that, to me, merely underscore the
gross technical failings of the 604. Such a pursuit is unproductive,
though certainly more so for you than I. I don't know what other readers
can get from this thread, hopefully some of my technical points could
be of some value. But irrelavancies like kit airplanes and demonstrably
misrepresentative views of kit magazines and retail vendors and quite
unsupportable claims of what the current state of the art is have, in
this person's view, no value other than to diminish whatever is left
of any veracity of the foundational basis for your position.