Scale

While speaking about sound, what is it ?

Arie

Scale when applied to hi-fi means that "everything is in the correct proportions".
In other words, there is no compression between the quietest passage and the loudest passage and the sound balance remains constant whatever the volume.

To do this properly, you need both a high peak SPL ability (i.e. ability to play high peaks of sound uncompressed or running out of driver excursion) and a wide bandwidth (i.e. good bass response which needs a large cabinet - a rule of physics...).

This is different to soundstage (which is the placement/separation of the instrments).

Does this help (or has my description confused you further...)?

Andy

Clear to me now,
thanks.

Arie

Arun,

Scale is the ability to reproduce -- with aplomb -- the full dynamic range of a piece of music across the entire frequency spectrum.

Scale is not the same thing as full frequency response -- it's one thing to have speakers that go down to, say, 30 Hz. It's quite another to have speakers that reproduce music in the bottom octave with grace and authority and impact.

Listen to a recording of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor on Sorcerers then on Isobariks and you'll get a good idea what scale is about. The Sorcerers go surprisingly deep and you can hear most of the pedal notes but the organ has little weight. Isobariks do go deeper but the main difference to my ears is that you feel the notes in your sternum and in your toes as the bass loads the floor.

Soundstage height and depth is entirely different. It's an aural illusion that the music is played on a "stage" so many cubits high and so many cubits deep. Lots of Round Earth speakers -- big and small -- can recreate (or, proabably more correctly, fabricate) soundstages. You can have a big soundstage without scale, just as you can have a small soundstage without scale.

Joe

...but is "filling the room" the same thing as scale?

.... a lot of it relies on the preceding electronics (amps and source).

Get these wrong and the sound will be shut it.

Andrew

Andrew Randle
2B || !2B;
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Somewhat. If the speaker isn't capable of filling the room with sound, then it will never pull off the impression that it produces a sense of scale. From the other side, many speakers can fill the room, but can't reproduce the scale of the music; they just don't have the dynamic range and finesse. Catch you later!

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

Smilies do not a forum make.

For me, scale is what you get from a vivid-sounding, but small-speaker system if you extend the bass with lean, fast, useable extension.

REL subs do this to some extent, but a bigger speaker can go much further in this regard. Probably something to do with better dynamics and ability to play louder with ease (throughout the frequency range).

cheers, Martin

[This message was edited by Martin Payne on SATURDAY 16 December 2000 at 23:21.]