Fireside - Listening

Describing listening impressions is always tricky. This is the most subjective part of the whole DIY process, and your ability to describe sound with words will impress your listeners (er... readers) - or not.

If I tell you that I am very pleased with the result you won't be very suprised ... Now trying to be unbiased I would say the strength here lies in the bass section that is clearly something I never heard from a 4" inch unit. Audible bass as low as 40 Hz, this only is worth listening. The highs are also very correct and balanced, thanks to the titanium membrane, I guess. My other, older speakers have a Dynaudio AF28 which is clearly superior in definition and, how can I say that, "aeriality" (you forget the sound is coming from the speaker, it just seems to float in the air) ? The Titanium Tang Bang are quite OK and the listening result is a good balance between bass, mids and trebles.

But clearly I was looking for something else to present the results. So I had this idea of virtual A/B comparison : recording the sound that comes from the speakers with a good microphone (I have a Zoom H2 microphone that is quite decent) and then mixing the recorded sound with the original signal, thus alternating between the two. In this manner you will get an impression of how they sound.

Audacity mixing
Mixing the sources with Audacity

So here I present some high-quality MP3 files with the original sound alternating with the sound recorded from the Firesides. A bit of warnings :

Stanley Clarke, from the album "If this bass could only talk"
If this bass could only talk

Jean-Michel Jarre, from album Oxygène 3
Oxygène pt 15

Minino Garay, from the album "Vamos"
La chanson d'hélène

Rickie Lee Jones, from the album with the same name
Chuck E's in love

Eddie Gomez, from the album "Gomez"
Dabble Vision

Eric Serra, from the album "The Big Blue"
Big Blue overture

Miles Davis, from the album "Tutu"
Tutu

And finally I have made 2 small videos to show you that the speaker membran doesn't move very much, although the music was fairly loud. This is also a big difference with Bass-Reflex where we are used to see the membran moving a lot. This better membran excursion control is certainly beneficial to the sound.

video 1 video 2


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