Why Eminence

I see a lot of posts on Bill's forum asking about this driver, that driver, isn't there something else that's better.  I thought I might address that.

I've been around business a long time.  Grew up in a hardware store, owned by my father.  I watched him for years interact with his suppliers.  The hardware industry until the 70's was dominated by small, independent stores and wholesalers.  We'd go to shows and everybody knew Dad.  Everybody.  The whole thing was built on interpersonal relationships, everybody helping everybody else succeed.  Show were fun, we got TONS of swag, and were pretty much treated like vip's, even though it was a small town hardware store.  Then vendors would bend over backwards to help you make money, be successful with their products, and know you on a first name basis. 

That all changed in the late 70's.  WalMart, the rise of the hardware co-ops, Home Depot, and such changed the face of retailing.  Suddenly we weren't so important anymore.  They could send two truckloads to a big box, or a pallet to us.  Which became more important?.  The small personal wholesalers disappeared, replaced by buying co-operatives like Ace and True Value.  It was a join or die proposition to compete with the boxes.  The personalization disappeared.  There are still vestiges of it around, but nothing like the old days. 

Which is a long way around to Eminence.  When I first got into this, I approached the suppliers like the hardware store suppliers became in the 80's and 90's.  Wrong.  This industry is like hardware in the 60-70's.  It's built on relationships, personal and business.  Eminence reminds me so much of those old wholesalers.  I call, the same people answer, every time.  If you need something technical, well, you get to talk to the speaker designer.  If you have a problem, you can talk to the president, vice president, whoever you need to get it done.  I treasure that.  I have it with most of my main suppliers in this business.  It feels like the old days.  Are there better drivers out there? Maybe, on an individual basis.  Comparing overall lines of drivers, I don't think so.  The neo's are cutting edge designs, and the other mfgs are just now starting to catch up.  And the prices of their drivers are truly great compared to many of the others.  Bang for the buck is off the charts with Eminence. 

There's one more big bonus.  Eminence is a US made driver.  Entirely except for I believe the ASD 1001 is an import.  They do have a plant in China, but it only supplies the Asian market, it does not ship here.   US jobs, US manufacturer, committed to that.  Sure, I sell stuff made in China and elsewhere, there's no choice.  But I have very little interest in another line. Sure, that may limit my growth, but so be it.   Loyalty and service are rare commodities these days.  On all three sides of the equation, supplier, seller, and customer. 

Fundamentals

I've been having a conversation with a client for some new subwoofers.  He's been in the big league pro game for a very long time.  It's been very interesting and enlightening.  His philosophy really dovetails with what I do and believe, but he articulates it better than I have.  Here are his words, about current day setups:

It just seems that contemporary systems introduce so many layers of additional problems which then have to be addressed with layers of additional equipment, power, and processing. They are less of a technological advancement than they are a marketing breakthrough.

Contemporary practitioners have lost touch with basic sound system physics in favor of psuedo-science buzzwords, although at every level they are still subject to them.

Apologies to the author for not quoting the source, I'm protecting his anonymity. 

The fundamentals.  The core of everything you do.  Doesn't matter what your chosen profession, hobby or passion is.  If the fundamentals aren't second nature, you're destined to flail, flounder and be either very frustrated or a failure.   Before you buy that new whiz bang processor, or add the latest and greatest plugin to your desk, take a look at your system.  What are you trying to achieve?  Where are the faults that you're trying to fix?  Understand the limitations of your gear.  Understand the fundamentals of sound. Cancellations, cabin gain, dispersion, inverse distance law.  They're not hard, but can be counter intuitive. Sound is not like water, nor light, our most common frames of reference.  

Lots of problems can be cured with placement, optimization of existing gear, and an informed hand on the eq and gain.  All the fancy techno whiz bangs we have available should be used to tweak that last little bit that's possible, after the fundamentals have been addressed.  They won't fix problems caused by the basic physics of sound.  Only you can do that, with knowledge.  

As with anything today, the amount of knowledge out there is vast.  But, the basics are the basics.  Most of them were covered in the 20's, 30's and 40's at RCA labs.  If you haven't scrolled through the educational links on Bill's forum you should.  It's pretty much all in there.  Some of the papers get very technical.  But many of them are fundamental primers on sound.  

I will admit to owning a dsp.  A DEQ2496.  It's an amazing piece of gear.  But the more I used it, the less I used it's features.  Now, I use the PEQ, the delay, and GEQ.  That's it.  DSP gives each of those more power than their analog counterparts, and I find it more than enough.  

Use your ears, use your head.  It's the best processor you have.  The rest is just icing on the cake. 

The sound in your head

Not to brag, but I've always had exceptionally good hearing.  Even at over 50, I can still hear to almost 15k, after a lifetime of engines, equipment and stereos.  I've always semi protected it.  Whenever it got uncomfortable, either working or listening, I would leave the concert, turn off the motor, whatever.  No earplugs, I just limited the exposure.  I went to see Ted Nugent while in high school at a fairly small venue.  It hurt, my ears rang for 2 days.  I never went to see him again until Damn Yankees came around, more than 20 yrs later and I took earplugs. I think that's when I became aware of what it could do to you. 

It all changed 2 months ago.  I went to bed.  Laid down, immediately heard about a 500hz tone in my left ear for roughly 30-45 seconds.  It stopped, there was pressure on the ear, and ringing in a fairly high frequency range.  WTF.  I figured a sinus infection had set in.  Went to my local doctor, who saw no sign of infection, prescribed claritin for relief of sinus pressure.  Told me to come back if it didn't stop.  I knew of an excellent otolaryngologist about 35 m away in Pittsburg.  I called and made an appointment.  Took 2 months to get in.  I went yesterday.  6k in my left ear is down 25db, 8k is down 50 db.  That's as high as they test, their primary concern is speech intelligibilty, which only extends to 4k.  Son of a bitch.  For no apparent reason.  It is internal, the bone conduction test confirmed it.  Unfixable.  He prescribed a nasal spray to relieve pressure which occurs occasionally.  The real pisser is the constant tinnitus.  It's not horrible, just annoying.  And when I crank the ht, harmonics in that 6k-8k range can be painful.

What is, is.  I'll learn to compensate.  But the whole point of this is you have a sound in your head.  It's always there.  You just can't hear it.  But if you damage your hearing, there it is, never to go away.  When you're looking for the imaginary sound in your head that you want to hear, PROTECT against the real sound that exists in your head.  I have some of these musicians earplugs that I've used religiously at every show since I started back doing sound.  YOU NEED THESE.  They work amazingly well, and are cheap.  At a deafeningly loud metal show, one of the first after I got them.  I had them in.  A punter came up to talk and I could hear him perfectly.  I pulled a plug to test and I could not understand him, at all. Freakin amazing. 

Do your sound checks, put them in after about 5 minutes into the show.  Pull them out occasionally to check.  They'll also prevent creep which occurs as your ears get fatigued and you keep cranking the levels. 

Ears are our business/hobby/passion.  Don't let what you want to hear get drowned out by the sound in your head. 

Was there a reason?

Some days you go to the shop and it all runs like a fine clock.  Every cut fits, every decision works.  Your clamps hold the work in the right place until you finish nailing.  You make that perfect mitered joint, no filler needed.  The squeezeout of the glue is just right.  More work gets done in a couple of hours than you imagined when you started the day.

Then there are the others.  Nothing, and I mean nothing works.  Every board has to be recut, nails miss their board, clamps slip.  You can't find anything.  Run out of glue.  No screws.  The nailer jams. Shit just happens and happens and happens. 

Today was one of those latter type days.  I used to force myself through and try to accomplish something.  I've learned just to walk away.  If in a couple of hours nothing useful has been accomplished other than raising my blood pressure, I quit and go home.  It's not worth it.  I usually have to tear apart whatever I did during those times anyway. 

I'd rather make a customer wait, or my own projects wait, than half ass it fixing mistakes. 

Re: More Later, or my journey through audio land

I've been screwing around with this stuff a long time.  Mostly dabbling at the edges, figuring out ways to get my fix without spending massive amounts of money.  I've never been able to spend the big bucks on audio.  And in retrospect, I think that's a good thing.  It made me particular, and realistic.  Particular about what kind of sound I liked, and realistic about what kind of equipment was necessary to create it.

I remember my first diy speakers.  T/S parameters weren't very old then.  I had this Radio Shack book with charts that you used to find the parameters from the measurements.  I went to the local tv shop and pestered them until they let me use a tone generator and voltmeter to check my drivers.  They were some old 15's out of a guitar cab.  Looking back, they were probably celestions and worth a damn fortune now.  So anyway, it was a ported 15 with a piezo tweeter.  Damn they got loud.  And were probably pretty nasty, but at 16, who cares. It wasn't too long after that I put a biamp, (yes in 1974) system in my car, with outboard amplifiers.  Nobody even knew what hell I had.  2 6x9's in the back, 1" domes and 5 1/4's in the front.  And it was a cassette.  8 tracks still dominated in those days.   As I recall it didn't get loud, but it sounded good.  That seems to be my M/O with car stereos to this day.  They don't really get insanely loud, but they're balanced and sound good. 

The vagaries of youth.  They never leave you, you know.  The stuff that got your blood boiling then still does today, whether you admit it or not.  

DIY or buy.?

I hang out at lots of forums.  I don't post on very many, for a couple of reasons.  One, DIY is frowned upon in many places.  Two, there is a core group of haters out there who dis Bill's cabs and diy in general every chance they get.  I've done a couple of internet flame wars, and won't do it again.  It's not worth the effort.  The old internet saw "Even if you win, you're still retarded", holds so true.

I just don't get the resistance.  DIY in home audio is an accepted practice, acknowledged to provide better sound for your buck than virtually any store bought speakers.  I accept the fact that if you're meeting riders, diy won't cut it.  Engineers going from gig to gig need some consistency.  But at our level, who's ever even seen a rider?   Most of my gigs are just glad to have a PA.  If it wasn't for me, they'd cobble together something that sounded like crap, but got loud.

Cost effectiveness is one of the arguments.  You can buy decent stuff cheap enough that it's not worth your time to build it.  They have a point, until you compare performance.  Open up a cab and take a look.  Maybe it's a plastic box, mdf or particle board.  BB is pretty rare under 1k.  And plastic boxes sound like plastic boxes, talk about the generic me too look.  They ALL look alike.  The cheapest components they can find,  the simplest construction possible.  Speaker in a box.  That's all I see at the sub 1k level.  Oh, and add a self powered version, now you've added an amp to a $500 speaker.  So which should sound better, the $500  with the amp, or the one without? 

I see post after post after post about which speaker to buy.  Picking nits.  The differences of anything under 1k is marginal at best, unless you get clear down to the white van speakers.  (Can you say Gemini?)

Do your homework.  Get smart about sound.  It can be very complicated, but the basics are actually pretty easy.  Response, sensitivity, dispersion.  None of those are hard to understand, and will serve the vast majority of users.  Know the limitations of what you're looking at.  Then make the choice to diy, custom build or factory cab.   Just be aware of the  tradeoffs, time vs money vs quality.

Relentless, but with One exception

After rereading my last blog, I realized there is one area that the pursuit of really innovative products seems to be stuck. The last and most important link in the chain. Loudspeakers. The basic design of the speaker is well over 100 yrs old. Sure, materials have improved, performance has improved, but the basic moving diaphragm from an electric motor is unchanged. Sure, there has been some odd stuff (plasma tweeter)over the years, but nothing that could be used in the pro world, and not much in the home audio world. Probably the last big breakthrough in speakers was the creation of the acoustic suspension box in the late 50's. Even then, it was improvements in the then 50yr old cone and driver that made it possible. Really more of a tweak than a breakthrough.

There's nothing like the revolution that DSP and digital technology are creating.  As I walked through NAMM, everybody has a speaker in a box.  Nothing special, nothing exactly exciting.  The exciting part for all of them was the onboard amps, dsp enabled, that allows you to overcome the limitations of loudspeaker design. 

Not to disparage the upper end stuff out there.  I saw some truly astounding and well designed line arrays and subs.  But all the midrange stuff shows very little imagination. The low end stuff is just crap.   Tweaks to drivers, but still, a speaker in a box.  You can do the same with any decent software, a good driver and a table saw.  It used to be rocket science to design a good direct radiator box,  it's not anymore. 

I know that's why I was so drawn to Bill's boxes 5 years ago.  They broke out of the mold.  Even though horn technology is probably the oldest, nobody had revisited it seriously for years.  There's still some black art in a good horn, which makes me very happy every time I use them.  Yes, it's a speaker in a box, but what a box.  They're different.  They're unusual.  And I made them.  That's the best part.