Once upon a time on usenet Brian Gaff wrote:
There were some odd speakers that in some surroundings sounded better
than they should have, such as those Toshiba spheres things in the
70s. They could sound awful though and needed a quite dampened room
and a bass bin to really sound sweet. Bloody heavy to fix to ceiling
supports though, Not want to drop one of those on my foot.
For those who like the spacial type sound.

Worst speakers? Hmm sadly some of the goodmans attempts ast high end
speakers all seemed to honk, even their cheap ones did. Maybe their
engineers were deaf?

I've had quite a few Goodmans speakers and the only ones I kept are Mezzo
SLs from the 1970s (they were nearly 450 quid in 1975). They're a two-way
'bookshelf' speaker with a 10" woofer and the wonderful SEAS H087 1.5"
soft-dome tweeter / mid. They sound extremely 'musical', the speakers
vanishing and leaving just the music...

That said I don't listen to them any more due to them rolling off the
highest frequencies (despite a bit of equalisation in the crossover to boost
the highs, that big soft dome which sounds so good up to 12kHz doesn't like
to go much above 15kHz) and, increasingly my ears are also doing the same
thing. Consequently I prefer 'brighter' speakers these days.

Oddly contemporary reviews (most long since vanished from the web) described
them as being a little bright and forward! I can only think that was when
compared to contemporary and older speakers.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

Brian

Ian McCall wrote:



** No, it refers to *monitoring" real sounds - ie live mic signals.

It defines a purpose and the speaker must be suitable for that
job.


Hadn't really thought of it purely for live but yes - that's what I
was trying to imply in the other post I made. It's not there to
sound good, it's there to be accurate and let you monitor levels.


** Accuracy is an ideal that few so called monitors achieve and NONE
of the famous ones - like JBL's.

Other qualities matter far more, the most important one being that
studio engineers must be familiar with them. This last fact has made
it near impossible to develop studio monitors beyond 1960s standards.

The thing I hate most is the ABSURD and snobbish idea that "monitor"
class speakers are inherently BETTER than home hi-fi speakers.

JBL used this fallacy as a marketing ploy to sell huge numbers of
their awful L100s to a gullible public.

One speaker I know well is equally suitable for home or studio use -
the Yamaha NS1000. Justifiably very famous and very expensive today.

If you have never heard a pair, you need to.

Their accuracy on all sorts of music and speech rivals Quad's
electrostatics.


.... Phil