The stiffness of the tweeter cone helps determine how pure and uncoloured the sound is at high frequencies. Beryllium is many times stiffer than aluminium, the material usually used in tweeter cones. Being stiffer, the dome acts as a more perfect piston – delivering more accurate transients and lower colouration. In addition, its extended high frequency response is ideal for getting the best out of today’s high-resolution recordings.

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-19 03:06:53

The stiffness of the tweeter cone helps determine how pure and uncoloured the sound is at high frequencies. Beryllium is many times stiffer than aluminium, the material usually used in tweeter cones. Being stiffer, the dome acts as a more perfect piston – delivering more accurate transients and lower colouration. In addition, its extended high frequency response is ideal for getting the best out of today’s high-resolution recordings.

This stiffness is the problem. Some years back all extreme hard domes had a resonance. Unfortunately i can't find a neutral measurement of these 7200SE

I hear you.  Ultimately the paper does document the performance of that speaker and it shows no on-axis resonance in semi-anechoic measurements. 

AJ's hypothesis hinges on off-axis resonance.  What's our theory of that surviving the room absorption by fair bit?

Chance would give you 50% correct. The overall results were 56% correct. Whatever effect we're looking for here is a very small one.

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-19 13:49:09

I hear you.  Ultimately the paper does document the performance of that speaker and it shows no on-axis resonance in semi-anechoic measurements. 

AJ's hypothesis hinges on off-axis resonance.  What's our theory of that surviving the room absorption by fair bit?

I don't want to present speculation as fact, but if there is a measurable resonance, that indicates the presence of a real mechanical property that would usually have wide-ranging implications. These could be somewhat (but not completely) ameliorated by making the on-axis response "flat" using DSP. (A gifted designer might be able to achieve a similar effect mechanically, damping the resonance sufficiently on axis, but leaving traces off axis.) The effect of the resonance may still be detectable off axis, and/or in certain time domain measurements, and/or in certain distortion measurements. The result of IMD (for example 24+26kHz), being at a much lower frequency, may have a different polar response, and in any case has no trouble bouncing off the walls.

I have no idea of the facts or reality of the situation, but we don't know nearly enough to discount this. It would be foolish to claim that this particular effect must be audible, but it would be almost as foolish to claim that it must not be.

What do you think the 56% represents?

I see you're misplacing the burden of proof, yet again.

So much for being in the objective camp.

You are wrong in the specific here but let's put that aside.  You say that I don't know this fact.  Well, read this article I wrote on WBF Forum with respect to relationship of Time vs Frequency in acoustic measurements.

Which in this case is something to be verified!

Remember we don't have anything remotely like that from Meyer and Moran.

In other words, this is pure speculation.  You don't even know if this is the tweeter they used.  You don't know if it is that it generates IM distortion in-band.

Your theory is that with full knowledge of issues surround intermodulation, they entered the test blind and fell victim to it anyway?

AJ's hypothesis hinges on off-axis resonance.  What's our theory of that surviving the room absorption by fair bit?

This stiffness is the problem. Some years back all extreme hard domes had a resonance. Unfortunately i can't find a neutral measurement of these 7200SE

It's a strange thing to launch a new product on, isn't it? Doesn't the commercial world usually go for bigger wins? 2x or 4x subjective improvements to launch a new format? AM to FM. VHS to DVD. SD to HD. I don't recall a 15 wait before someone finally managed to spot the improvement in a double-blind test with those. I know we're not talking about physical formats any more, but still; the commercial realities of what people will pay to replace/upgrade must still apply. Maybe in 2-channel audio formats there isn't a 2x or 4x improvement left.

Finally Amir, I documented how this paper completely distorted ABX testing, and again I see no response from you.

Most won't press to 105db, probably from fear of damage/destroying them.
Also, I highly doubt they would do so with test signals with strong ultrasonic content (like the cherry picked recording).

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-19 03:06:53

The stiffness of the tweeter cone helps determine how pure and uncoloured the sound is at high frequencies. Beryllium is many times stiffer than aluminium, the material usually used in tweeter cones. Being stiffer, the dome acts as a more perfect piston – delivering more accurate transients and lower colouration. In addition, its extended high frequency response is ideal for getting the best out of today’s high-resolution recordings.

This stiffness is the problem. Some years back all extreme hard domes had a resonance. Unfortunately i can't find a neutral measurement of these 7200SE

Here is the measurements of the track in question:
Where do you see 105 db of ultrasonic dynamic range AJ?

I asked them why they did that and the answer was: "to make the dude in florida angry" except they used the Nordic term for "dude."  Honest! 

This Convention paper was selected based on a submitted abstract and 750-word precis that have been peer reviewed by at least two qualified anonymous reviewers. The complete manuscript was not peer reviewed. This convention paper has been reproduced from the author's advance manuscript without editing, corrections, or consideration by the Review Board. The AES takes no responsibility for the contents.

It should be noted that, although the FIR filters were comparable to those used in converters or mastering, the downsampling to 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz was not carried out; it was not feasible to replicate an A/D or D/A converter exactly since they typically use multi-stage decimation. We wanted to emulate the frequency and impulse responses of such converters while remaining in the 192 kHz domain.

The quantization either included RPDF (rectangular probability density function) dither or did not. We chose to use undithered quantization as a probe and although we would normally recommend TPDF dither for best practice we considered rectangular dither to be more representative of the non-ideal dither or error-feedback processing found in some commercial A/D and D/A filters.

CONCLUSIONS
1. FIR filters that emulate downsampling for sample rates of 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz can have a deleterious effect on the listening experience in a wideband playback system.
2. 16-bit quantization with and without RPDF dither can have a deleterious effect on the listening experience in a wideband playback system.

Don't you think it's strange that you do so much better with your laptop and headphones on whatever sample someone throws at you than the inventors of MLP did when they got to pick the sample, conversion settings, speakers and listeners? ...  Cheers, David.

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-19 16:34:37

Here is the measurements of the track in question:
Where do you see 105 db of ultrasonic dynamic range AJ?

Bzzzt. Those aren't the droid we're looking for. 
At some point, you may or may not figure out why why need to see system transparency (speakers, software, etc) data to avoid the possibility of false positives due to artifacts.

You say that the quality difference was incremental/tiny.  Not at all.  Music that we remastered for these formats sounded far better than the CD.  You can read this in Meyer and Moran report:

Don't you think it's strange that you do so much better with your laptop and headphones on whatever sample someone throws at you than the inventors of MLP did when they got to pick the sample, conversion settings, speakers and listeners? Did your work at Microsoft reveal you had sensitive hearing right from the start, or did your ability to hear artefacts improve with training and exposure to them during that time, or did it happen since?

THAT was M&M 's point.  That great and obvious difference did not require >44kHz sampling or >16 bits  in the delivery medium, to achieve.

The  'high resolution delivery format' was immaterial,  except  in the sense that it sometimes 'obligated' (but did not force) the producers to provide a proper 'audiophile quality' mastering....which was then used to *falsely  'demonstrate' the overblown claims for the HR format itself, to uninformed listeners* --like the ones who buy fancy DACs from you, thinking they will hear 'night and day' difference.

Quote from: krabapple on 2014-11-19 18:47:13

THAT was M&M 's point.  That great and obvious difference did not require >44kHz sampling or >16 bits  in the delivery medium, to achieve.

It did from business point of view.  What enabled labels to dump millions of dollars into new masters was the advent of new formats with strong copy protection.  If you stayed with the CD you wouldn't get it.

Well, you seem to be lost as to what argument we are having.

*You* don't get to dictate what *my* thread is about