Transparency
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsContinuing with Audiophile terms I find Transparency a much used term that perhaps is a bit nebulous and easy to overuse. One of the first things you notice about many of these terms is they are somewhat self descriptive; as any really good and valuable word should be.
Transparent means you can see through it and the opposite would be opaque; the middle would be translucent. The greater the transparency the more “see through” qualities one is getting in the music.
The first time the term really struck home with me was with my first pair of electrostatic loudspeakers, the Quads, followed by Acoustats and then Martin Logans. Yup, for a period in my life, I was all about electrostatic loudspeakers because they had a see-through like quality – an increase in transparency – like nothing I had heard before. The fact that you had to hold your head in a vice and they didn’t have bass or dynamics didn’t bother me till later, but that’s another story.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to hear a really great pair of electrostats you’ll know what transparency means. One of the first tracks I remember hearing on an electrostat was from a Sheffield Direct To Disc recording of Lincoln Mayorga playing Stevie Wonder’s cover of “You are the sunshine of my life”. That was a memorable cut and, for the first time, I could actually see through the group playing. More than depth and separation of instruments, this transparency I am referring to was like lifting a veil that covered up the inner details of what I was hearing. I could hear into the music. And deeply.
Transparency is still a quality I look for in electronics.
Circuit elements I have found that detract from transparency are capacitors in the signal path and amplifying devices with too little current flow. I have also discovered power supplies have a major impact on the transparency as does a measured increase in IM (intermodulation Distortion).
I hope this explanation helps your ability to see the word a little clearer.
Tuning the room has made me wondering if all the extra construction work was worth doing??? Since Bob and you are so much ahead in knowledge and equipment that most all of the viewers might hope to achieve, I am doubting whether I should install corner traps in my listening room? Maybe the next video will change my mind.
Good luck!
Actually, I am stuck in a past article on the value of using exotic power cables; especially with regard to where to use special power cords versus when the manufacturers (low cost) cord is acceptable. Honestly, I wouldn’t ship a product that was advertised as audiophile quality with a crappy power cord, but I am not an accountant.
The corner traps are something I’d stick with even if they did nothing but break up the room modes – which may be all they’re doing at this point. They, along with the crown moulding, reduced the slap echo of the room tremendously. Part of the trick is to get non-parallel walls wherever you can easily – corner traps do that well.
OK Paul, this time a serious question. How do corner traps achieve non-parallel walls? The front and rear walls are still parallel to one another, as are the side walls to one another (in most rooms). It is just with corner traps the wall area of each of the four (again in a typical room) walls is reduced somewhat in area. But then the opposite corner traps could be parallel to one another!
From my reading on room acoustics, sound waves can actually travel along the walls, ceilings, and floors until they reach a plane intersection. This is why those triangle absorbers in corners at ceilings and floors (three plane intersections) often work so well. And also why your crown molding along the ceiling suggestion helps too. So are not your built–in corner traps serving the same general function as tube traps or large leafy plants placed in corners? Of course inclusion of a Helmholtz resonator in the corner trap then creates a dual function.
I’m not challenging you on this point, only trying to better understand. So thanks.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to have simply suggested they eliminate the corners where a lot of build up occurs – they also reduce slap echo by breaking up the parallel walls. One could argue that even if you used angled wall surfaces over the entire wall at each point along the way you have parallel surfaces – but that’s not instructive. To sound the angled corners help reduce slap echo in the room among other attributes.