Sweet music
Sweet music is midrange purity. Those who are familiar with Chesky Records’ The “Ultimate Demonstration” disc — a CD which contains the record company’s guide to critical listening — should by now know what midrange purity means. But to those who are reading about it here for the first time, midrange purity is one of the requisites of a good sound system, along with high resolution, depth, atmosphere, transparency, presence and visceral impact, to name a few. Chesky, which records and distributes audiophile-grade CDs and LPs, notes that recorded music, when played back, must have flesh-and-bone quality. A singer must possess a good sense of chest, which means that the listener must feel that the singer’s body is contributing to the sound. Impure midrange recreates a voice that sounds detached from the person it came from. The result, says Chesky, is an unnatural or less human-sounding voice.
Midrange is the frequency band between approximately 400 Hz and 2.6 kHz. Since human ears are more receptive to this range, some audiophiles and engineers believe that the midrange region by and large greatly affects the sound quality of a stereo system.
But how can we achieve purity in the mid section? Again, we go back to the audio philosophy of building an audio system around the speakers. This means having first a speaker system with a mid section that is known to be midrange-friendly before building up on other electronics which can drive it. In my humble opinion and based on my own previous experimentations, no other midrange speakers can beat the horns in this department.
The Grammy trophy, given yearly to deserving musical artists, rightly honors the horn of the gramophone. It is a testament to man’s engineering genius that harnessed the horns’ mechanical sound amplification’s potential. But before the gramophone, there was the phonograph (remember the RCA dog Nipper in the famous “His Master’s Voice” ads?), where the record stimulated a heavy metal needle that keyed up vibrations in a small metal diaphragm which in turn acted as the horn’s driver. To attain an audible sound level, this method of amplification was utterly needed in those days before electrical sound reproduction.
Best known for their sound intelligibility — undoubtedly because of their ability to recreate clear, sweet and effortless musical voices — horns are back! Local audiophiles are lucky to have Lauro “Larry” Roxas III of Floridablanca, Pampanga, who makes horn speaker systems at reasonable prices. Go surf the net for Westlake Audio, Usher D2, JBL and other horn speaker system brands, and you will be staggered by how pricey they can be. Larry’s wood horns are definitely world-class in terms of looks that befit your treasured music rooms, without the cost that will drain your pocketbook.
Larry, with the help of another Pampangeño, Lin Gomez of Musicbox, can actually build a complete horn system either passively or actively networked: in pairs of woofers, horns and tweeters.
A modern horn system increases the efficiency of its driver, usually an electromagnetic diaphragm. By themselves the horns are passive components and do not amplify the sound of the driver, but they perk up the coupling efficiency between the speaker driver and the air. The horns thus are akin to an acoustic transformer providing impedance matching between a relatively solid diaphragm and the low-density air, resulting in better aural output from the driver. When you mate them with equally efficient woofers (to take care of the low, mid and sub-low frequencies) and tweeters (high frequencies), the result is a full-range horn system which is relatively easy to blend with a suitable amplifier. Because of its efficiency, a horn system can be powered by even a 10-watt amplifier. Some purists even power their horn system using only a two-watt amp. But a horn system does not only give you midrange purity. With a suitable electronic back up and an acoustically friendly listening room, a horn system can give you endless, sweet music and more.
How is this possible? Remember that musical notes are basically tones (frequencies) and harmonics (the branch of science that deals with the physical properties of musical sound), but it is the harmonics that permit us to differentiate one instrument from another. Also we distinguish the songs of vocalists or the notes on a musical instrument by merging basic and harmonic tones. Bear in mind that we’re dealing with perceptions here and, just like any other perceptions, from the sounds we hear, we can concoct a variety of tones and harmonics combinations all in our brain.
With the relative ease by which horns give us tones and harmonics, our brains will not be too taxed in interpreting them as sweet music.
“What motivates me is good music,” says Larry who’s the development management officer of the Technology Resource Center in Pampanga. A civil engineer by profession, Larry was lured into audio by his audiophile friends in Dau of the same province. There was no turning back for him as soon as he heard sweet music from a pair of JBL bookshelf speakers powered by a Sansui amp which he bought in 1990.
Says Larry: “This may be just a sideline for me, but I enjoy making wood horns which can be placed alongside fine pieces of furniture at affordable prices. I derive pure joy from seeing my friends savor the music that plays from the horn system I made.”
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com or you can tweet audiofiler at www.twitter.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.
