On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 09:43:55 +0100, Eiron
wrote:

On 04/08/2011 16:28, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In aweb.com, Rob
wrote:


I had a pair of 988s for a year or two and did find them pretty
astonishing. It's difficult for me to explain, but 'uncoloured',
'unresonant', 'precise', pin sharp' perhaps. Bass more in the 'tuneful'
than 'deep' camp, and I could never pair them with a REL sub I had
successfully.

I've managed to get a sub working OK with the 988s I use in the living room
'AV' system (just stereo, of course). But never found any happy combination
of a sub with the old 63s in the hifi room. I guess this is partly a matter
of different room acoustics, and partly a matter of different source
material.

In the main, two things led to selling them. I did find that I had to
sit still, pretty much on an axis, or else the tone/image would shift to
a much greater extent than I've found with box speakers. The sound
remained consistently good, I just found the effect tiresome.

I recognise what you mean. Even optimally set up I experience something
similar. I tend to regard them as the 'biggest pair of virtual headphones
in the world' in some ways. The best result means having your head in about
the right location to get your ears in the right places wrt the invisible
large headphones floating in space.

So the 'virtual point source' doesn't really work?


The virtual point source was an interesting claim, but technically
naiive. Had the speaker been a complete sphere, the virtual point
source at its centre would have been spot on.

With a speaker of limited size, the effect is the same as a true point
source in another room, and a speaker-sized hole in the intervening
wall. It is easy to see how things go wrong off-axis. In other words,
if you aren't perfectly lined up, the point source is simply not
visible through the hole, and you lose all the highs.

d