What is Sonic Listening To?
Acoustic Research is venerable, coming up with the AR XA turntable (of which Sonic owns one, but had an arm that due to its design was dodgy especially when old), and speakers such as the AR2Ax, AR3A (top of the line), then the AR Laboratory Standard Transducer – the AR LST.
It can be of course argued that AR started the march to low efficient speakers and heavy cabinets and acoustic suspension sealed box design. At that time American manufacturers were in a state of hubris. Transistors had been adopted for amplifiers edging out tubes and watts were easy to generate – it was only later that individuals like Holt and Pearson said “watts but wait! How does it sound?”
A little trivia – the original driver in the AR1 was Western Electric!
AR was however committed to music and accurate reproduction as far as they understood it and given the limitations of technology and manufacturing process allowed. They had too these wonderful ads where luminaries of the music world were photographed with their AR music systems comprising most often an ARXA TT (with Shure M91ED cartridge), the AR amp or receiver and AR speakers.
We had Woody Herman, Herbert von Karajan, Arthur Fiedler and Miles Davis. Great ads and Sonic knows an elderly nostalgia fan who frequents the Hifi shops on Saturdays who collects these ads and the AR catalogs.
AR had a tie up with Ensayo Records of Spain and issued some LPs. One is the Acoustic Research Demonstration Record.
I got a copy. Nice snippets of mostly classical music, with one jazz and a flamenco piece. Sonic heard it critically last evening. Compared to the midrange, the treble on this record sounds slightly boosted, the bass slightly shelved down giving an over-tight efffect. On my system, it sounded like three steps going up from Bass to Midrange to Treble. Small steps not Big Tall Steps but steps nonetheless.
I wonder (and here is a mean thought from Sonic) if AR EQ’d the record to sound best with their Speakers, particularly the AR3a?
Given the limitations of the day, frequency response plots of the AR3a showed a good flat midrange, a treble range that was shelved down some 5dB compared to 1 kHz and the bass range below 400 hz up about 3 dB above the 1 kHz reference. In Sonic’s system, the record sounds the exact inverse of this -- except the treble is noticeably lifted but not as much as +5 db.
The nice tracks are the opening Stravinsky, the Albeniz piano piece from Iberia and the jazz piece. The Bach organ toccata and fugue that opens Side Two has the extreme lows and girth rolled off. The unaccompanied female vocal piece in Spanish is a bit distant but nicely dimensional. Flamenco…something that Sonic is a little allergic to. The closing applause is wall2wall and front to back round my listening chair but phasey when Sonic moves the head.
But I like this record for its nice variety.
Sonic