Peter, The Yellow Shark (Frank Zappa) is one of the best recordings I remember and talking about ambience this album transmits the stage (and the audience) in an impressive way. Another album, although not a live recording, that has really a deep bass is "Deeper" from Pete Belasco, in the track 2 (Deeper) the bass is hard to reproduce correctly but if your woofer can you´ll get a very very deep bass (in some notes) perhaps down to the 20Hz or even lower. I know that here we are talking about bass and ambience but also, I guess, about the capability of the woofer to reproduce the bass frequencies correctly.

Please share that recording with the drums!

Juan

Concentrated only on the first minute of the track 9 - Agnus Dei , from the album Requiem (Reference Recordings), this is what I perceived:

1 - Touching with my hand the 15" woofer I perceive the vibration from the first second to the second 39.

2 - From my listening position, from the first second to the second 10 I hear softly the kettledrums but I do not hear the low frequencies. At the same time I perceive a sense of space or "ambience" to an acceptable degree. Between the second 10 and the second 39 I hear the men choir in addition to the kettledrums, at this time the perception of ambience is very high and still I don´t hear the low frequencies. From the second 39 on, when the female choir enters, the space becomes shallower and flatter with the female vocalists more in front. The sense of ambience decreases significantly.

Relating 1 and 2 what I can see is how the ambience is perceived with more emphasis when the woofer is vibrating between the second 1 and the second 39. So I´d say that although the woofer vibration can´t be heard it contributes to form the ambience.

I should, however, experiment with some other live recording, perhaps also recorded in a church, without those low frequencies, just to see if the ambience is also correctly reproduced.

I would like also to point out something that has to do with the construction of my speakers and how they reproduce the ambience. I think it's a way, perhaps complementary, to address this issue .

This is an excerpt of the Von Schweikert VR- 9SE  manual:

"ACOUSTIC INVERSE REPLICATION
Additional research led to my further discovery that recording microphones encode the musical signal with their overlaying pickup response patterns. After making a series of recordings, using several different microphones, it was obvious during playback that the mics not only had tonal differences related to frequency response errors, but also created different types of imaging patterns. The perception of depth and space was not only dependent on the recording environment and mic placement, but also on the mic’s off-axis polar response. For this reason, I decided to engineer an adjustable ambience retrieval system radiating from the rear of the VR speakers, in able to recreate the space and depth heard in the concert hall when the spaced omni method of recording is used.

Thus, a correctly designed speaker system should project the inverse of the mic signal, acting as a decoder to translate the original sound field. I have termed my design for this decoding as Inverse Acoustic Replication, and the Virtual Reality series of designs was developed from several important concepts related to microphone pick-up patterns. These concepts are based on the consistent phase/frequency relationships in the polar response pattern of the mics, which was later reverse engineered into the VR speaker systems."


For a more complete information on how this speaker reproduce the "ambience", and only with the intention to give other perspective, I´d recommend to read the Technical Information starting in PSYCHOACOUSTICS
http://vonschweikertaudio.com/vr-9se-mk2-technical-information/

Juan

I´ve found the album and I´ll test it when I return home in a couple of hours. Just to help me to understand it better, what does "pauke" mean?

Juan

Thanks Peter, I´ll look for that Requiem although I´m not sure if I have it. However, as you explain it, it seems difficult to perceive the ambient frequency without confusing it with other frequencies. Anyway, I will try it to see if I can "touch" it.

Juan

Hi Peter, could you let us know some of those recordings you were using to test the woofer movements between songs?. To test it in our systems we should have, at least, the same recordings.

Juan

PS. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t see it as a competition between our speakers, on the contrary it seems to me a very interesting observation and a new way to perceive the ambience (and a way to "touch" it)

Alain, thanks for the link, it looks interesting. Have you contacted with TeraDak?

Br
Juan

Peter, when I read yesterday about your new SFS and Q1/xQ1 settings I was by chance reinstalling the ramdisk so I thought that why not to test these new settings. I did it and went to sleep quite late last night and quite happy with the new sound. I made some test with SFS 120 and SFS 4 and with the previous and new Q1 settings, I tested also the clock at 0.5ms and 1ms and ended up with your new values. This morning I´ve been listening music with the new settings until now that I read your post. For me the sound is better now, but mainly in the mid/upper frequencies, not so sure that the bass has been bettered by SFS 4. My speakers can manage the bass volume and crossover point and the 15" woofer inside each speaker is self powered, I never had a problem with the bass and always found a point where it is tide and deep without being blurred, no standing waves either. I have not changed the bass settings with the new SFS values and it is still great, if this bass is colored or not I couldn´t say unless I could listen an open baffle to compare with, all I can say is that I can´t find it distorted in any way. At the end these are better settings than the previous ones in my rig but I´m not so sure, in my limited experience, that a closed baffle means always a distorted bass.

Kind regards,
Juan

Thank you Joachim, I appreciate your opinion.

Best regards,
Juan

Joachim, have you experimented the same kind of problems as Coen with his "dirty" cable?. I mean, have you had any problem with your YFS USB cable, or you find that it works fine and the music is sounding as good as when you tested it for the first time?

Regards,
Juan

Joachim, would be great if you could make a cheap cable like Coen´s to compare it with your YFS USB REFERENCE - DATA ONLY CABLE

Regards,
Juan

Hey Alain, those are great news!. What about the differences in SQ in comparison to the previous situation when you were using your preamp? Do you like it more?, I´m eager to know how you see it.

Juan

Peter, could be my english but I used the word "issue" more in the sense of topic than in the sense of problem and I was not talking only about this topic started by Mani but in general about other topics where we were talking about USB cables in general.
Sorry,  no more battery in my phone...

Juan

Hi Peter, I only wanted to say that the controversy (if there is some controversy) on the influence on SQ using different USB cables remains open. Not in the sense of solving the problem of noise but in the sense that different cables produce different sound. The truth is that I have no noise problems, at least I do not perceive it and yet I notice differences in sound with different USB cable, just like I notice differences between a USB2 cable  and one USB3.  This is what I meant when I said that the USB cable issue remains open.

No way I could see it as a personnal attack, we are peaceful people ;-)

PS. Sorry for the errors and faults, I'm writting from muy phone and don't have muy laptop with me.

This is from YFS web site: "Our Reference USB 2.0 interconnect only comes in a 1-meter length. This is based on the tedious work involved and the extra materials used to make the Reference design. It's not as easy as it looks. Contact us if you have a need for a length longer than 1 meter and we MAY be able to accommodate you. We aren't making any promises but we'll see what we can do."

I personally tested different lengths of the same USB cable, like 0,6m, 1m and 1,20m, and couldn´t see a difference. It looks like the problem is noticeable with lengths longer than 6 or 7m.

Juan

Brian, it looks that YFS has two Data Only USB cable, the Reference and the V4, I think that both are built only of 1 meter length (the V4 is also built of 0,6 m.) so I´m not sure if you could get 6 or 7 foot length. Would be nice to hear from your test if possible.

Juan