Lone Mountain Audio

If you liked this video, here's one of the guys involved in making of the record and their thoughts about it. I've been blessed to know many of these people through the pro side of our business, the recording side. The thing that stands out to me was what a gentleman and professional Tom was and how that affected everything downstream if you will. Everyone I ever met in his camp was a 100% pro, honest, ethical and elevated everything and everyone around them. Enjoy! Brad

This is not the speaker, speakers cant move without being told to do so from what's in front of them. So either your turntable has warped record on it (which would reproduce that exact artifact as the warped record turns at 33 1/3 ) or an amp is oscillating very slowly. Since its slow, its most likely turntable. You could use a non warped record or a clamp to hold the warped record down and flatten it. A 20Hz rumble filter could also "fix" it if this warped record is impossible to replace. Brad

ATC has been analog active since the beginning (80s) for the very reason discussed here: why active digital front end when the chips underpinning these ADCs and DAC's are constantly changing? Would you really want your speakers to use a long obsolete chip 5 years from now? And I'm not sure about everyone else, but all of these DAC's have a sound of their own- do I really want that across my speakers forever? Seems like if I want to use a DAC, I want to choose it. If I don't want to use a DAC, why would I want to be forced to accept it? Why would I leave such a critical component choice, one that impacts everything I'm listening to, up to the speaker manufacturer? Brad

Davide256, you have a strong point regarding DSP driven actives. This does evolve as chips change. Brad

Flush mounting, by "building" the speakers into a wall is a well known way of improving bass performance in a room. You are effectively focusing the speaker on a "halfspace" environment. This will increase bass response typically by at least 3dB. This is the trick used by studios when they sink speakers into soffits and seal them to the wall. You need a speaker with square edges to make it work best but it can work with radius edges. AS the ATC importer to the US, I have many studios around the US using ATC's this way. Studios in the past almost always used this method to mount their large "bigs" in the wall while the small mix monitors sat on the console "Meter bridge". ATC makes an entire range of square edge flush mount speakers for studios. In addition, ATC makes a speaker range called HTS in their consumer range that "hangs" on wall. They can be integrated into a bookshelf pretty easily. Here's what those look like: Lone Mountain Audio » HTS7 The benefit of these is the weight is hanging on the wall, not your bookshelves. I use HTS40, the same driver compliment as floor standers for my home theater. If you have someone build a soffit to hold them, you can effectively do the same trick as a studio. If you use traditional bookshelf type speakers, you can set them on the shelf of a bookshelf but they will not act like the speakers in your photo. Brad

Good point Kal. How would this affect the audiophile using a turntable? Brad

This is a seemingly easy but technically difficult issue. I have wrestled with this for years. There are two problems: L/R tracking down low (barely on and the beginning of the pot travel) and how precise that tracking stays all the way up and back down. I am VERY suspicious of any claims that a low cost passive or active level controller actually tracks L/R well (within a 1/4 dB) because simple mono sources split across channels are very easy to hear as "different" when tracking is off. This type of thing is audible especially in a quiet studio. Most pots are off L/R as much as 1dB at the bottom of their control and can be spot on at 9 o'clock off again at other positions. Pots of all kinds do NOT track precision, they are very imprecise mechanical parts. Pots with detents are a joke, that's a mechanical dent in the wiper and precise steps are impossible this way, the steps shift over time as the wiper wears. Digital encoders can have precision, but now you are talking about about a A/D and D/A process in the signal chain- something you don't want. Now everything sounds like the A/D and D/A chip used. In 2 years when that little chip inside it is long overtaken by better/updated ones, you are stuck passing everything through this old chip. What would be the point in buying a better DAC when everything is passing through an unknown DAC in the path? If the level control is analog active, everything changes the sound a bit because there are gain stages. If they are passive, they need to be switched attenuators to have any kind of precision or tracking accuracy. In pro studios, if its more than a 1/2dB "step" up and down its too much. In mastering, if its more than 1/4 dB its too much. L/R tracking has to be within a 1/4 dB. This is an extremely difficult area that is hard to solve easily, precisely and transparently. I ordered one of these Schiit Magnius controllers so I want to test it out and see if it works as advertised. I am highly doubtful that a box that costs $199 retail could be good. But I'd love to be proven wrong! Brad

Plus digital in is listening to another DAC permanently overlayed on the sound of the speaker. As every DAC has a sound of its own and grows obsolete with nearly every [annual or semi annual] chip development cycle, this limits a speakers's life [we can have a 10-20 year life. ATC is of the mind the DAC is better left to owner to choose to keep his speakers current across time. One of the foundations of ATC Engineering is the speakers must stay current (be upgradeable) over time if at all possible. Brad

There must be something lost here in translation. As an ATC distributor, we are mostly in pro but also home, I would never say "get them close to the wall" unless i wanted you to pick something else. "Close to the wall" would increase boundary reflections, playing havoc with the image and mid/HF tone. Maybe they said rear boundary? Which wall did they suggest? Getting speakers AWAY from boundaries is normally the best plan in almost all cases. Want to hear a good demo? Go into a large room with boundaries far away. Want to hear a bad demo? Get speakers near boundaries, especially on the sides. Too bad, I would have suggested calling ATC and asking the engineers there about what is best. After all, the guys at the factory are acoustics guys, with a lot of experience with their speakers in lots of environments. Brad

Elliot is a great guy and this is sort of proof of how a well experienced salesperson can save you a lot of headache and money (by avoiding bad purchases). If they use that knowledge to help you skip steps that many less informed people take, carry good brands, they can be so helpful. Not all of them are great, but Elliot/Innovative Audio has been doing this a long time and doing it well.

I actually worked in a hi end hi fi store in 1975 selling Audio Research and many other high end brands. The best speakers I ever heard in there were the Dahlquist DQ10, Magneplanar Tympanis (near impossible to get right in a small room- talk about endless fiddling- but when you got it right WOW), KEF 105. (I think they were all available around the same time.] We had the NS1000 when new, I hated them. The NS1000s (actually the entire line of speakers of this era from Yamaha) were overly bright and no bass. Sort of embarrassing to turn them on as a "high end store" cause they sure weren't high end (nothing in Yamaha's line was high end at the time but their receivers and integrated were a good value). NS1000 and the entire range looked very cool with the black box, metal mid and HF drivers and white woofers. There was a lot of mid fi out there (this was the era of GIANT receivers), Pioneer, Sansui, Kenwood, etc. Yamaha was the new player at that time. NS1000s were very much in that mid fi category along with other "box" speakers like Dynacos, Infinity, JBL, Advent, etc. Brad

I have some comment as I know some of the folks involved on the music side. Amazon is not driving this- Universal is. Universal wants to go back at an amazing catalog of titles and release them in higher rez and ATMOS. Amazon is just the delivery channel. That in and of itself is a fantastic development, that a company that size wants to buy higher rez music because they think we'll buy it. Tidal is lovely, but my kids have zero awareness of it without me saying "listen to this". They are already using Amazon or Apple or Spotify- these are sources they know and as more and more big music companies get with it, we'll get a lot of content redone. Hopefully this Universal Music project will make money with such content and cascade into more and more investment in hi rez music and delivery systems. I expect there will be some silliness and some very nice new material. Abbey Road in ATMOS is amazing- and remixed/created by Giles Martin, an extremely talented son of the original mix engineer. That mix is available on Blu Ray in the Abbey Road Anniversary release. Some of this is the drive to remix back catalog in ATMOS, which when done correctly represents a move from 2 dimensional to real 3 dimensional audio. You need a wider bandwidth to deliver all that, so its forcing the music delivery people to figure out how to increase bandwidth- AND resolution. Its top level engineers being hired to do this work, it being done at Blackbird Studios, Capitol, the old House of Blues in Nashville. There is a challenge in figuring our how to master in ATMOS, so many of the ATMOS/Hi Rez titles are not mastered at all. Imagine, for the first time, just remixed and released. In many cases it has deep involvement from the original artists or family if they are no longer with us. This is not the 70s and 80s when record companies (mostly all gone) controlled everything. Loudness wars these days mostly impacts pop music destined for top 40 play and playback systems with extremely limited dynamic range (10dB maybe?). I cannot imagine why people would not encourage this work, for we are actually removing the corporate involvement in many of these record decisions and giving it back to the artist and engineer to build something new. Expect to see all delivery systems to creep toward high rez and some will embrace ATMOS as more and more playback systems adapt this 3D format (played back mostly through headphones I expect). I suspect one day everyone will be offering 24/96 as a minimum. Brad

Most dialogue never varies from a "center only" position when it comes to movies. They have been adding sound effects to center more and more (explosions etc), and sometimes even music, but Id say that's the exception to the rule.

The challenge with 2.1 is it doesn't work so well with movies or video that always have a center (dialogue) channel. Having dialogue from left or right is asking the receiver or amp processing to decide where and how to handle dialogue, which is never good. So 3.1 is the smallest I would go as a desktop solution UNLESS its only music, never video or movies. Brad

I think the words "high quality" and "sound bar" cannot be used in the same sentence- its an audio rule! The only one I've ever heard positives about from others in the industry was the top end Sennheiser AMBEO. Not heard it myself. Brad