The new TV and problems solved.

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Our old flat screen TV was a JVC "HD ready" 37". It lasted for 15 years until it eventually grew tired of being woken every morning. Probably just a simple component in the PS but retirement beckoned. 

I measured the space available and made cardboard mock-ups of potential candidates. It would be a 55" screen. Leaving just enough room on the AV "stage" for the floor standing Mission 753 Freedoms. These speakers must be nearly 30 years old by now, but have always pleased. A Mission 753C Freedom centre speaker sits in the simple steel shelf unit which supports the TV. These speakers were all bought secondhand having already been long discontinued.

OLEDs are the present best picture quality technology in most online reviews. The cost is high when newly released but drop as the different models reach the end of their sales year. A TV which lasts for years can have its purchase price divided by its lifetime. Inflation usually makes a mockery of the original purchase price. So why choose an inferior TV if you fully intend to keep it?

After extensive online research, our first choice was a 55" LG OLED TV. I collected it from a big shed, city chain store standing upright in its huge box in the car trailer. The picture quality was stunning but there was a pervasive stench of burning oil. The advice seemed to be that it was the fire protection coating on the circuit boards and it would stop smelling soon. It didn't, despite the technician who called saying it wasn't smelly in his opinion. So I returned the TV expecting to get a replacement. It just would not be an LG. Once bitten...

The Sony KD55-AF8 OLED was the next choice and I took advantage of the generous, end of model year discounts. This was duly taken home and dragged upstairs. The picture quality was even better than the LG and more importantly, much more natural. The LG picture had always looked as if it were "sharpened" with image handling software. Very unnatural it looked too on the cityscape screen saver. It would never look like that to the unaided human eye.

The experimental, manifold, 4x15" upper bass speaker was dismantled and the drivers put into storage to make more room on the AV stage. So it was back to the original AE 4x15" IB with more power from both channels of the EP2500. After weeks of TV watching we liked the picture but the SQ was demanding constant volume increases just to hear the dialogue. The Sony has a weird screen loudspeaker using rear actuators.

Netflix has never been very good on dialogue clarity from first hearing. The 4k Netflix subscription didn't help the sound. Much against my long suffering wife's strongest "advice" I brought the Linn Kans forwards from their former rear "surround" duties. They had been muted for years because they were irritating being so close to our sitting position whatever their relative sound level. The Kans were simply placed on top of the Mission floor standers and very silly they looked too!

There was an instant transformation in sound quality compared with the TV speakers. Or the big three Missions on AV system. Finally the dialogue could cut through the background garbage so beloved of modern film makers. Even YouTube videos now had stunning sound quality from the Sony's internal TV tuner. I listened to my favourite Voces8, Hauser, pipe organ and other classical music channels and was delighted. 

I had to make some changes to the speaker set up in my Onkyo TX-NR818 AVR menus. It took some fiddling to get it to send OSD onto the Sony TV. Then I eliminated the Mission Center and set the Kans as L&R full range despite their 120Hz lower limit. They then sounded so much better than using a 120Hz crossover. I have always used a Naim NAP180 to Bi-amp the front L&R rather than using the Onkyo. The Kans were happy to be driven by this old English amp. It too must be 30 years old by now. Where did all those years go?

Dialogue on the Netflix 4k series, which we watched last night, was much more intelligible. It did not require the volume be wound right up just to hear what was being said. I reduced the settings on the twin knobs of the big Behringer amp by a notch or two to better balance the bass. 

Age brings its problems. Not least with one's hearing. Particularly after a long lifetime of enjoying loud music, loud car and motorcycle engines and other "abnormal" abuse. The most obvious problem is "masking." Which means that background sounds easily swamp any dialogue. Daily exchanges with one's partner are apt to need almost constant repetition.

It matters not whether this is in real life or while watching or listening to TV/AV. It becomes almost impossible to hear well enough to maintain a normal conversation. With TV watching you get the deaf grandma/grandpa syndrome. The volume has to be raised constantly to cut through to the dialogue. One's ears have been filtered by age to a much narrower frequency response. The speakers must provide the inverse of that response to fill in the holes.

The Linn Kans are 40 year old, shoe-box sized speakers with a rather forward frequency response. Which nicely suited our immediate dialogue problems. I suppose the next step is to go for a commercial outlet, hearing test and start wearing hearing aids. The incredibly long waiting lists for hospital hearing consultants offers little chance of help from that direction. 

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French cattle suffering premature deaths near wind turbines.

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Yet another weird story in the news. French cattle are reported to be dying early in the presence of wind turbines. The authorities first guess was electrical or magnetic fields causing the problems. Of course that turned up a blank.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49045742

They should then have looked at infrasonics. The very low frequencies [VLF] caused by the wind turbine blades. Not only by the wind on the blades themselves but when the blades pass the tower or mast. Wind shadow flutter. 

We all know the effect of waving a long stick quickly through the air and producing a deep muffled roar. Now imagine a turbine blade longer than a football pitch! The silent roar goes unnoticed except by larger animals. Elephants and whales are hyper sensitive to VLF. Why not cattle?

Infrasonics readily cause distressing and debilitating symptoms. Which are highly dependent on frequency and mass. Frequency is measured in Hz or cycles per second. The lungs, bowels and even the eyeballs can be readily made to vibrate by low frequency sound if it is powerful enough. Loudness is measured in decibels [dB[C.] Where 'C' is referring to lower frequencies. "Normal" noise is measured in dB[A.] Traffic, factories, trains, building work, etc.

The human chest, bowels and eyeballs are all susceptible to these very low frequency vibrations. So called "sympathetic resonance." Where vibrations are picked up from the air and then amplified by the mass of a particular organ.

Nausea is very commonplace and can be excited by large diesel engines in buses, lorries or trains. Fear or anxiety is another common symptom of specific low frequencies. I have suffered from these symptoms myself when testing my powerful VLF subwoofers over the decades.

Now imagine a larger animal with much heavier organs. They could well be hypersensitive to resonance at frequencies which pass completely unnoticed by mankind. Though it should be said that there are frequent complaints from people living near wind turbines and wind farms. Which lead one to suspect that these complaints are not taken seriously because of the massive, negative publicity it would cause if it were publicly accepted. Wind power would have to be moved offshore to avoid public resistance.

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Breathing new life into the music.

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It is ages since I scribbled anything on this blog. Then came the gentle failure of our 14 year old, 37" JVC HD-ready TV. This meant a replacement had to be found. Something hopefully future proof with a PQ worthy of investment. Over the years I have occasionally visited the big electronics sheds with walls of TVs and sneered at the often dreadful pictures. Or the stuttering lateral movements. We were never so troubled at home.

Only recently has OLED thrown itself across my tracks and demanded my attention. The trouble was the considerable expenditure could not be balanced against the continuing satisfaction with our current TV. Until, as already mentioned, the old one started to misbehave. 

Then came the annual, manufacturer's stock clearance. As this year's models were trundled forth. It was decided to invest in a middle sized, mid-priced LG OLED from last year at less than half the original price. If it lasts 14 years, like our last one, then we shall be in our mid eighties by then and probably long past caring. Who knows what visual entertainment technology will have been invented by then?

Anyway, to finally get to the point, it was decided to clear the stage where our TV sits just above the open stairwell. That meant the dismantling and removal of the 4x15" upper bass "augmenter." Leaving all bass duties to the original, in wall, 4x 15" IB subwoofer on the left. 

As a sound check I put "Tzar of Instruments" [Russian Organ Music] in the BDP and settled down. It was immediately obvious that the weight and quality of bass was back. I listened all the way through after tweaking levels. Very enjoyable it was too. I'd now like to get rid of the old BFD and have the Onkyo '818 AVR separate the subwoofer signal. With nothing more than rough levels under its control. Further fine, level adjustment can come from the 4000. Which is back to each channel driving a pair of 13Hz, AEIB15s in series. 

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