Vance Dickason has been working as a professional in the loudspeaker industry since 1974. He started out as a loudspeaker entrepreneur, but over the years has worked and consulted for audio companies on loudspeaker designs for professional, home, and car audio applications. He currently represents two OEM driver manufacturers - Bravo, a Brazilian manufacturer, and Samsung Electro Mechanics Company (SEMCO), a division of Samsung (though he remains an independent consultant, designing loudspeaker systems for a variety of manufacturers).
Vance is the author of The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook or the LDC, regarded as the standard introduction to loudspeaker design engineering (see sidebar). He also has another book, Loudspeaker Recipes, and over the years has written articles about audio and loudspeaker designs for a range of publications. He's given presentations, lectures, and seminars at technical meetings and for loudspeaker companies and audio industry groups. He was honored in 1995 by the Audio Engineering Society with a citation "for his contributions to audio education and the industry." He is a contributing editor for Speaker Builder and CA&E.
His interest in audio reproduction stems from his passion for music, and love of technology. His "other" interests include writing and performing music and collecting vintage vacuum-tube shortwave radios. For Vance, all the work and effort he's put into this industry has "always been about the music."
I visited Vance at his Lake Oswego home in Oregon, right outside of Portland. As a car audio enthusiast, I just wanted to hear the opinions of this industry pioneer, and the recent release of the sixth edition was a convenient excuse. The remainder of this article is a distillation of the main threads of discussion during that conversation: the myth of "the perfect loudspeaker;" some comments on today's car audio loudspeakers; the need to listen responsibly; and surround sound as the future of car audio.
On the "Perfect Loudspeaker"For hi-fi type speakers [where the speakers have a flat frequency response and little or no distortion] with similar design parameters, there really is no such thing as a "perfect loudspeaker." For every reviewer who raves about one speaker, you can find another who hates it, and vice versa. Measuring the parameters for the speakers gets some numbers on paper and verifies that these numbers are within spec, but in the end it's really up to the taste of the listeners as to which speaker sounds "best."
Let's not kid ourselves: the reason why we work so hard to put these [sound reproduction] systems together is to "simulate" live music, or at least live musicians. The only way to really get the full effect of live music is to....listen to live music! In the end, all this fancy stuff we're doing is just simulation.
The problem is that everything in the signal path puts a bias on the original music. For example, if you take a set of microphones and have a person speak into each one, the output from each mike would sound different even though you're amplifying the signal with the same equipment. See, there's no such thing as a "reference" microphone (it's one of those variables a musician can play with when they're recording) and it's difficult to make such comparisons, so I don't really like to talk about speakers that way.
Instead, I like to talk about the "timbre" of a speaker. Basically, the particular mix of materials and choice of design creates a sound unique to that loudspeaker, a signature sound, so to speak. An analogy can be made with pianos. Musicians will tell you that pianos made by Kawai sound different than those from Baldwin, Steinway, and Yamaha, but pianos made by the same manufacturer can sometimes sound very similar. All these different piano brands are fine musical instruments and the question of which "sounds better" becomes a moot point: they're all good interpretations of what a "piano" should sound like.