No matter how much we wish to believe in something the proof's often in the pudding. It tastes good or it doesn't.
For years I have been a disciple of servo-controlled woofers. And, for good reason. Proper servo control has a number of advantages: lower distortion, reduction of overhang, flat response irrespective of the enclosure and driver parameters. That's a lot to like.
Every Genesis Technologies woofer system I helped design was servo-controlled. It just worked and sounded great.
Not until our senior analog engineer, Darren Myers, and speaker designer, Chris Brunhaver, joined the PS engineering team did I begin to question my long-held beliefs. If memory serves me it was Darren that first questioned the actual sound from the servo system. It wouldn't take long for Chris to join him. Their beef? It didn't sound right.
They said the pudding would taste better without the servo.
The idea of letting go my love of servos was at first abhorrent. Hard to change that which you have truly believed in for as many decades as I. Yet, it didn't take but a few hours of demonstration to flip my switch. What they argued wasn't all that complicated. Servos did indeed produce cleaner bass but, they argued, at the loss of audible slam and impact.
Over the course of a few weeks, multiple experiments were conducted on every kind of music we could come up with. The results were always the same. With the servo in place some of music's excitement was lost—something one doesn't notice until a better example is at the ready for comparison.
It's always a good reminder that no matter how great the recipe, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
