It is so nice to get real feedback-loop from a legendary sound engineer. Thinking back to the early days of life concerts and all the jobs that you guys make to ensure that both audience and performers can hear the concert is pure science and your training shows through your videos. Thanks for sharing such complex concepts in a very humble setting for us
Depending on the circuit, impedance can go up or down over frequency (as can the phase response). DC Resistance can be thought of as impedance at 0 Hz.
@@DaveRatIt is fun working with complex numbers that have a real part (resistive) and an imaginary part (reactive). A cap has the frequency value in the denominator (more freq, less z) and a coil has it in the numerator (more freq, more z)!
Very nicely done, Dave! The only major difference I'm hearing between the 4-D speaker and live sans speakers is with the 4-D you get great clarity and less bass, whereas the latter has the opposite. It sounds more natural through the speakers.
Thanks Dave, impedance is pretty hard to get your head around and your explanations were interesting. (but don't ask me to remember every detail) I think impedance is confusing because we are talking high impedance (in ohms) basically being low power and low impedance (in ohms) being high power. (Is that right ?) Also, (long story cut short) I replaced some 8ohm drivers in my 2 double 18 subs with 6 ohm drivers. i am using i nuke 6000 amps so I had rewire them not to be in parallel but each driver powered individually from left and right amp outputs as i nuke are a bridged amp and only good to 4 ohms. They sound really good !
Cool cool An easy way to remember it is low impedance is like first gear, slow speed lot of torque and torque would be current and speed would be voltage Hi impedance is 5th gear we have lots of speed but not much torque
listening to voice only on speakers helps a lot in determining the tonal characteristics compared to music... less busy fq spectrum plus our hearing is optimized for that sort of sound. the 4d speaker sounded substantially more natural than the large box speaker. in fact the box sounded a bit funny, maybe something going on w/ capturing it w/ multiple mics? thanks for the effort mr Dave, wish you and your fam all the best.
Agreed and since the 4D speaker has speakers very close to the microphones I believe it exaggerates the sound of me moving my head side to side. If I had an assistant at the time and in future videos I will try and capture sound from a farther distance where that exaggeration is less pronounced
That's a side effect of being close with the mics I didn't move the mics from the recordings. The main comparison is the difference between the real voice and the studio monitor and the 4D speaker
@@DaveRat the thing that is confusing for me, is the low impedance is like a shovel with rocks. Implying it has more strength, but as microphone is low impedance.
Great question. It's all relative so a transformer is like a transmission in a car. Low impedance is like first gear it goes slow but it has more torque. Hi impedance is like 5th gear it has more speed or voltage but not much torque at all and can't move things that are of much weight or loads of low impedance When you talk about the microphone that's the engine size so you could have a small engine like a microphone or a huge engine like a power amp and then run that into the transmission that converts it to a low impedance or high impedance or it may naturally be a low impedance or high impedance
the first sub I ever bought was a JBL MP255, 4 ohm sub. I was just a kid in a band and I had a crown powerbase 1 which was basically a 200 watt per channel amp and you could bridge mono this amp so my plan was to run the sub off of it... well the sub's peak power was 2000W and the crown amp made 455 W into 8 ohms. it was not rated for 4 ohms in bridge mono so I think it was a "no no". the individual channels I noticed made like and additional 12% more power at 2 ohms. anyways, I bought this sub on clearance at a music store that was going out of business and I hooked it up and it made the worst "clunk" I heard come out of a speaker before.. it was a metallic car wreck sound. So I disconnected the amp and brought the speaker to atomic music in Maryland where they tested it and it sounded FANTASTIC in the store.. but I couldn't afford a new amp so I just sold it. ( a week later I bought the MP418 powered 15 that was labeled as a 18 ). anyways this lesson taught me a little about impedance. it wasn't long before I was doing a lot of bridging to power dual 18 subs. never had the money to do things the right way. anyways I think that power-base 1 was "power" clipping and just completely failing..I feel like the 4 ohms was drawing down the power supply so fast that there was a voltage collapse and something "snapped" electrically somehow to cause a metallic "clunk" which had almost like a metallic "bell" quality to it.. but it was more complex than a simple "clunk" it was was almost like a couple of clunks all together and some failed restart clunks as well.. it was awful. Anyways for the time being, the powered sub was the answer..
interesting! the frequency response of the 4d speaker sounds extremely similar to the Live, but it seems to be exaggerating the stereo image significantly. Is that just because it is doubling the stereo differences because it is recorded again thru the 4 mics that feed the 4d speaker? I would be curious to hear the same test but instead of listening with the 4 mic setup, you place another stereo pair a few feet back and use that to listen to both the LIVE and 4Dspeaker versions. Thanks for this cool video nonetheless :)
The proximity of the mics to the 4D speakers makes the sound changes very distinct differences. Ideally for recreating a voice, the 4d speaker would have speaker sources closer together, more similar to the source. But, when farther away the differences are way less audible. But I did not want to move the mics as I used the same positions as the original. I I think did wander with a stereo recorder at the end of th vid that gives a better representation, but I could not wander while speaking as I did not have an assistant
Agreed and that is a challenge in that the mics pick up some of the ambient room and then when the speakers are on they are reproducing some of the ambient room and the mic's are picking up the ambient room both reproduced and the room itself Ideally the recording would happen in a less ambient environment The question isn't whether the speaker sounds identical to the voice but rather does it sound more realistic than a conventional speaker?
@@DaveRat thanks, I found your channel make me understand more about audio, sound and audio equipment. Although I just watching it for fun and no background at all in audio related.
I call your speaker the Ratsker and it wins again, especially in comparison to the Boxsker bookshelf. It does exhibit a bit of frequency resonance but it sounds closer to the listener in headphones than direct in. It reminds me of psychoacoustucally enhanced recordings for close-to-the-head realism. I still think you're really onto something.
Your speakersystems sounds awesome! It would be a great product for studio monitors for studio's who record soloinstruments, folky music, or speech-recordings. Great video, Dave! Thanks!! And very information when listening... so get two videos, for the price (time...) of one! ;-)
Hey thanks for the video! Ive been wanting a refresher on speaker impedence for a while....something I was never formally traned and educated in. Unfortunately some of your explainations and descriptions kind of escaped me. Ill have to watch this a couple more times to see if my little brain picks up on it. If it doesnt, could you pease make another video only using lego and garden hoses to explain impedence? BTW: I thought your "realistic speaker" semed to "Color" the sound compared to the mics. But most pof us are listening on tiny little stereo computer speakers L and R, and the up and down are split somewhere in there.
Very cool and I will ponder another impedance video. As far as the real speaker, the question is which sounds more realistic not which sounds more identical. Coloration of a reproduced sound versus the original when the listener never really hears the original and only hears the reproduction, I believe is an inflated concern. What is more important and less paid attention to is whether the reproduce sound actually sounds like a real instrument or just sounds like a speaker box playing something similar to a real instrument
The 4D sounds way better than the box speaker but still sounds pretty unnatural. Interestingly when you mic'd from behind the 4D with the Tascam recorder I thought it sounded better still... more bottom end and less phasey sounding.
Dave a better test would be that sonic head thing with mics built in that is supposed to emulate human hearing- then comparing sources (real Dave, single speaker Dave, Dave array ) The four mics will have interference with respect to each other that will cause cancellations etc in the listening demonstration…. That all said Your on to something…. VR for audio without the R
If the mics are close enough to the source when recording theoretically the mic should all record different sounds of the source and those phase cancellations during reproduction should be minimal or probably desirable has it mimics the original
Your transmission analogy kind of fell apart at the end there. Way i see it, each gear would be more like a horn/transformer on its own, the transmission switches between them for the most efficient/effective choice at a particular "frequency" 🤷♀️, now i may have to play around with getting different horns attached to both sides of a single driver to sound good...
Hmmm, a horn for both sides and radiate phase and antiphase into the air? Like combining the in and out of polarity of a balanced line? Combined well will give you max cancelation. Treat the front and back of the speaker like pin 2 and pin3 of a balanced line. Except unlike a balanced line we can't just short one side of the speaker to ground we have to do something with it like put ,it in a sealed box or a ported box, or accept the cancellation that occurs when the in phase and out of phase signals combine at various frequencies causing cancellations. A horn adapting the impedance differentials between air and speaker impedances is not really an analogy as much as a description
@@DaveRat Good point, though we do accept some amount of cancelation with any ported box, and especially with ABC designed sub enclosures. Maybe the actual design would be better described as a t-line with a horn on the front. May sound interesting, if not real or even good. In terms of the 4d speaker, have you considered using some kind of reverb or echo generation, then isolating the resulting generated data and playing that on the other channels? I'm not sure how they work, if there'd be enough alteration compared to the original track to "upscale" to 4d without simply turning it into one of those omnidirectional speakers. I understand what makes your method different, just trying to work out a way to take advantage of it using traditional stereo recorded audio. I'm very interested in this project, do you have an email address or other way I could directly contact you?
You can reach me through the soundtools.com web site. I don't want to post email here. As far as r verb, my goal with the 4d is to from the instrument into the listing environment, not to recreate the instrument and an environment inside the listening environment. I want it to sound like the instrument is in the room with you, not you are somewhere else
It sounds just as realistic but with different eq😂 Probably the upper bandwidth the speakers can handle rolling off the highs but apart from that not much difference apart from slightly different amounts of room sound. Don't think I can fit one per band member in my living room sadly😂 Sure beats Atmos but imagine playing the Commodores, Bruce & the e street band or slipknot back through this in a small apartment. (On a different note everything beats Atmos)
Cool. You can make a costume like these screen overlays for our ridiculous band. You can be a speaker cabinet and I will be a microphone. Or you can pick something else like a mixing console. That would be funny. Rock on. Have a good one 👍. Keep being creative
This test feels a bit unfair to me. A level comparison would be one mic at some fixed distance out from just you, the custom speaker, and the monitor. The way this is set up, your custom array is close miked and the monitor is far from those mic positions. It's still somewhat compelling, since you are probably about half way between the two mic distances, but still. I believe your speaker array is more realistic, because I trust your ears. But I think this test could be improved.
This is the third video in a series and people can make their own decision on what sounds more real and I will post more I've got one coming up with a drum set and another with a stand-up bass and a flute and I'll keep doing more
I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you attempting to convince us that a multi-directional, multi-driver unit sounds more natural than a multidriver directional unit? It should be obvious by the audio in this video that it does not. The directional speaker would perform better in this video if you had set it up as it is designed to perform and if you would have placed a microphone in front of it. Your multi-directional unit doesn't sound natural at all due to its design and construction limitations, as well as, the fact that, as listeners, we are listening on either headphones or directional speakers.
Perhaps watching the 2 videos that lead up to this would be helpful. Regardless, this w ries of videos will show the differences of conventions speakers trying to recreate natural sound sources As I am sure u are aware, natural sound sources radiate different sounds in different directions, yet conventional speakers tet to recreate these source by radiating a single sound in a single diretion or in the case of omni, even worse, radiating the same sound in multiple dir cations. While this is clearly a flawed adventure, it is commonplace. I am doing a series of videos showing the differences between capturing and recreating sounds in a more realistic way where multiple sounds are radiated in multiple directions.
Your speaker sounds ok. Not perfect but u already know that. I can hear, even on my phone vast difference between your voice through mics vs voice through the speaker. But good try though.
The question is which sounds closer to my voice the speaker I made or the ultra high quality Rogers won studio monitor that I also played? Because theoretically that cheap speaker I made should sound a hundred times worse than that really nice Rogers won studio monitor I got from the BBC
Ok this is interesting, your cheap 4d speaker sounds much closer to the live compared to the expensive speaker. The difference is night and day between the two speakers. It goes to show that clarity isn't money dependant. Meaning you don't have to buy expensive brand speakers to get better sound
It is so nice to get real feedback-loop from a legendary sound engineer. Thinking back to the early days of life concerts and all the jobs that you guys make to ensure that both audience and performers can hear the concert is pure science and your training shows through your videos. Thanks for sharing such complex concepts in a very humble setting for us
🤙👍🤙
Alder audio does a great vid on Freq affecting impedance
👍🤙👍
Depending on the circuit, impedance can go up or down over frequency (as can the phase response). DC Resistance can be thought of as impedance at 0 Hz.
Agreed
@@DaveRatIt is fun working with complex numbers that have a real part (resistive) and an imaginary part (reactive). A cap has the frequency value in the denominator (more freq, less z) and a coil has it in the numerator (more freq, more z)!
Thank you master groovy sound man Dave! always informative, enlightening AND entertaining.
🤙👍🤙
Thanks for your wisdom! Cheers from Argentina!
Cheers Nacho and Argentina
Very nicely done, Dave! The only major difference I'm hearing between the 4-D speaker and live sans speakers is with the 4-D you get great clarity and less bass, whereas the latter has the opposite. It sounds more natural through the speakers.
Thanks Dave, impedance is pretty hard to get your head around and your explanations were interesting. (but don't ask me to remember every detail) I think impedance is confusing because we are talking high impedance (in ohms) basically being low power and low impedance (in ohms) being high power. (Is that right ?) Also, (long story cut short) I replaced some 8ohm drivers in my 2 double 18 subs with 6 ohm drivers. i am using i nuke 6000 amps so I had rewire them not to be in parallel but each driver powered individually from left and right amp outputs as i nuke are a bridged amp and only good to 4 ohms. They sound really good !
Cool cool
An easy way to remember it is low impedance is like first gear, slow speed lot of torque and torque would be current and speed would be voltage
Hi impedance is 5th gear we have lots of speed but not much torque
listening to voice only on speakers helps a lot in determining the tonal characteristics compared to music... less busy fq spectrum plus our hearing is optimized for that sort of sound.
the 4d speaker sounded substantially more natural than the large box speaker. in fact the box sounded a bit funny, maybe something going on w/ capturing it w/ multiple mics?
thanks for the effort mr Dave, wish you and your fam all the best.
Agreed and since the 4D speaker has speakers very close to the microphones I believe it exaggerates the sound of me moving my head side to side. If I had an assistant at the time and in future videos I will try and capture sound from a farther distance where that exaggeration is less pronounced
Is the pan more dramatic left and right, obviously with your speaker?
That's a side effect of being close with the mics I didn't move the mics from the recordings. The main comparison is the difference between the real voice and the studio monitor and the 4D speaker
Good explanation
🤙👍🤙
@@DaveRat even tho it didn’t quite sink in, it’s that math side of the brain. Maybe one more analogy would do it. Who knows
@@DaveRat the thing that is confusing for me, is the low impedance is like a shovel with rocks. Implying it has more strength, but as microphone is low impedance.
Great question.
It's all relative so a transformer is like a transmission in a car.
Low impedance is like first gear it goes slow but it has more torque.
Hi impedance is like 5th gear it has more speed or voltage but not much torque at all and can't move things that are of much weight or loads of low impedance
When you talk about the microphone that's the engine size so you could have a small engine like a microphone or a huge engine like a power amp and then run that into the transmission that converts it to a low impedance or high impedance or it may naturally be a low impedance or high impedance
the first sub I ever bought was a JBL MP255, 4 ohm sub. I was just a kid in a band and I had a crown powerbase 1 which was basically a 200 watt per channel amp and you could bridge mono this amp so my plan was to run the sub off of it... well the sub's peak power was 2000W and the crown amp made 455 W into 8 ohms. it was not rated for 4 ohms in bridge mono so I think it was a "no no". the individual channels I noticed made like and additional 12% more power at 2 ohms. anyways, I bought this sub on clearance at a music store that was going out of business and I hooked it up and it made the worst "clunk" I heard come out of a speaker before.. it was a metallic car wreck sound. So I disconnected the amp and brought the speaker to atomic music in Maryland where they tested it and it sounded FANTASTIC in the store.. but I couldn't afford a new amp so I just sold it. ( a week later I bought the MP418 powered 15 that was labeled as a 18 ). anyways this lesson taught me a little about impedance. it wasn't long before I was doing a lot of bridging to power dual 18 subs. never had the money to do things the right way. anyways I think that power-base 1 was "power" clipping and just completely failing..I feel like the 4 ohms was drawing down the power supply so fast that there was a voltage collapse and something "snapped" electrically somehow to cause a metallic "clunk" which had almost like a metallic "bell" quality to it.. but it was more complex than a simple "clunk" it was was almost like a couple of clunks all together and some failed restart clunks as well.. it was awful. Anyways for the time being, the powered sub was the answer..
A capacitor lets lows through... in SERIES! This is fun, Dave!
interesting! the frequency response of the 4d speaker sounds extremely similar to the Live, but it seems to be exaggerating the stereo image significantly. Is that just because it is doubling the stereo differences because it is recorded again thru the 4 mics that feed the 4d speaker? I would be curious to hear the same test but instead of listening with the 4 mic setup, you place another stereo pair a few feet back and use that to listen to both the LIVE and 4Dspeaker versions. Thanks for this cool video nonetheless :)
The proximity of the mics to the 4D speakers makes the sound changes very distinct differences.
Ideally for recreating a voice, the 4d speaker would have speaker sources closer together, more similar to the source. But, when farther away the differences are way less audible.
But I did not want to move the mics as I used the same positions as the original. I I think did wander with a stereo recorder at the end of th vid that gives a better representation, but I could not wander while speaking as I did not have an assistant
You never cease to amaze me
I could talk about the FED's interest rate policy....or, talk about an easy subject like impedance ;) Your videos are insanely interesting!
with the addition of tweeters I think the 4 way speaker would be very convincing
Of course I'm listening on stereo headphones so some of the effect is lost.. Seems like when the speak was firing there was more ambient room noise.
Agreed and that is a challenge in that the mics pick up some of the ambient room and then when the speakers are on they are reproducing some of the ambient room and the mic's are picking up the ambient room both reproduced and the room itself
Ideally the recording would happen in a less ambient environment
The question isn't whether the speaker sounds identical to the voice but rather does it sound more realistic than a conventional speaker?
Impressive
👍🤙👍
@@DaveRat thanks, I found your channel make me understand more about audio, sound and audio equipment. Although I just watching it for fun and no background at all in audio related.
I call your speaker the Ratsker and it wins again, especially in comparison to the Boxsker bookshelf. It does exhibit a bit of frequency resonance but it sounds closer to the listener in headphones than direct in. It reminds me of psychoacoustucally enhanced recordings for close-to-the-head realism. I still think you're really onto something.
Your speakersystems sounds awesome! It would be a great product for studio monitors for studio's who record soloinstruments, folky music, or speech-recordings. Great video, Dave! Thanks!!
And very information when listening... so get two videos, for the price (time...) of one! ;-)
Hey thanks for the video! Ive been wanting a refresher on speaker impedence for a while....something I was never formally traned and educated in.
Unfortunately some of your explainations and descriptions kind of escaped me. Ill have to watch this a couple more times to see if my little brain picks up on it.
If it doesnt, could you pease make another video only using lego and garden hoses to explain impedence?
BTW: I thought your "realistic speaker" semed to "Color" the sound compared to the mics. But most pof us are listening on tiny little stereo computer speakers L and R, and the up and down are split somewhere in there.
Very cool and I will ponder another impedance video.
As far as the real speaker, the question is which sounds more realistic not which sounds more identical.
Coloration of a reproduced sound versus the original when the listener never really hears the original and only hears the reproduction, I believe is an inflated concern.
What is more important and less paid attention to is whether the reproduce sound actually sounds like a real instrument or just sounds like a speaker box playing something similar to a real instrument
The 4D sounds way better than the box speaker but still sounds pretty unnatural. Interestingly when you mic'd from behind the 4D with the Tascam recorder I thought it sounded better still... more bottom end and less phasey sounding.
Being in the room with the 4d is better than a stereo r cording over TH-cam.
It's amazing the differences even translate as well as they do
Dave a better test would be that sonic head thing with mics built in that is supposed to emulate human hearing- then comparing sources (real Dave, single speaker Dave, Dave array )
The four mics will have interference with respect to each other that will cause cancellations etc in the listening demonstration….
That all said
Your on to something…. VR for audio without the R
If the mics are close enough to the source when recording theoretically the mic should all record different sounds of the source and those phase cancellations during reproduction should be minimal or probably desirable has it mimics the original
Great Video. 😃👍♥️
Your transmission analogy kind of fell apart at the end there. Way i see it, each gear would be more like a horn/transformer on its own, the transmission switches between them for the most efficient/effective choice at a particular "frequency" 🤷♀️, now i may have to play around with getting different horns attached to both sides of a single driver to sound good...
Hmmm, a horn for both sides and radiate phase and antiphase into the air? Like combining the in and out of polarity of a balanced line? Combined well will give you max cancelation.
Treat the front and back of the speaker like pin 2 and pin3 of a balanced line.
Except unlike a balanced line we can't just short one side of the speaker to ground we have to do something with it like put ,it in a sealed box or a ported box, or accept the cancellation that occurs when the in phase and out of phase signals combine at various frequencies causing cancellations.
A horn adapting the impedance differentials between air and speaker impedances is not really an analogy as much as a description
@@DaveRat Good point, though we do accept some amount of cancelation with any ported box, and especially with ABC designed sub enclosures. Maybe the actual design would be better described as a t-line with a horn on the front. May sound interesting, if not real or even good.
In terms of the 4d speaker, have you considered using some kind of reverb or echo generation, then isolating the resulting generated data and playing that on the other channels? I'm not sure how they work, if there'd be enough alteration compared to the original track to "upscale" to 4d without simply turning it into one of those omnidirectional speakers. I understand what makes your method different, just trying to work out a way to take advantage of it using traditional stereo recorded audio.
I'm very interested in this project, do you have an email address or other way I could directly contact you?
You can reach me through the soundtools.com web site. I don't want to post email here.
As far as r verb, my goal with the 4d is to from the instrument into the listing environment, not to recreate the instrument and an environment inside the listening environment.
I want it to sound like the instrument is in the room with you, not you are somewhere else
Observe what is said, not how its sound is reproduced 😆(seriously, thanks for this!)
It sounds just as realistic but with different eq😂
Probably the upper bandwidth the speakers can handle rolling off the highs but apart from that not much difference apart from slightly different amounts of room sound.
Don't think I can fit one per band member in my living room sadly😂
Sure beats Atmos but imagine playing the Commodores, Bruce & the e street band or slipknot back through this in a small apartment.
(On a different note everything beats Atmos)
Cool. You can make a costume like these screen overlays for our ridiculous band. You can be a speaker cabinet and I will be a microphone. Or you can pick something else like a mixing console. That would be funny. Rock on. Have a good one 👍. Keep being creative
😉😉🤙👍
This test feels a bit unfair to me. A level comparison would be one mic at some fixed distance out from just you, the custom speaker, and the monitor. The way this is set up, your custom array is close miked and the monitor is far from those mic positions. It's still somewhat compelling, since you are probably about half way between the two mic distances, but still. I believe your speaker array is more realistic, because I trust your ears. But I think this test could be improved.
This is the third video in a series and people can make their own decision on what sounds more real and I will post more I've got one coming up with a drum set and another with a stand-up bass and a flute and I'll keep doing more
1:15 I like your other hat better 😂
Smashing
👍🤙4
😮😮😮❤❤❤
I'm not sure what your point is here.
Are you attempting to convince us that a multi-directional, multi-driver unit sounds more natural than a multidriver directional unit?
It should be obvious by the audio in this video that it does not.
The directional speaker would perform better in this video if you had set it up as it is designed to perform and if you would have placed a microphone in front of it.
Your multi-directional unit doesn't sound natural at all due to its design and construction limitations, as well as, the fact that, as listeners, we are listening on either headphones or directional speakers.
Perhaps watching the 2 videos that lead up to this would be helpful.
Regardless, this w ries of videos will show the differences of conventions speakers trying to recreate natural sound sources
As I am sure u are aware, natural sound sources radiate different sounds in different directions, yet conventional speakers tet to recreate these source by radiating a single sound in a single diretion or in the case of omni, even worse, radiating the same sound in multiple dir cations. While this is clearly a flawed adventure, it is commonplace.
I am doing a series of videos showing the differences between capturing and recreating sounds in a more realistic way where multiple sounds are radiated in multiple directions.
Hmmmmmm I gotta spend more time listening to this. I hear the changes but how ti explain it…
Awesome. yes there will be significant differences. Its not about being the same but about being realistic.
Your speaker sounds ok. Not perfect but u already know that. I can hear, even on my phone vast difference between your voice through mics vs voice through the speaker. But good try though.
The question is which sounds closer to my voice the speaker I made or the ultra high quality Rogers won studio monitor that I also played?
Because theoretically that cheap speaker I made should sound a hundred times worse than that really nice Rogers won studio monitor I got from the BBC
Ok I'll give tis vid another listen to determine. I'll post a reply after
Awesome
Ok this is interesting, your cheap 4d speaker sounds much closer to the live compared to the expensive speaker. The difference is night and day between the two speakers. It goes to show that clarity isn't money dependant. Meaning you don't have to buy expensive brand speakers to get better sound
Ps. I always tell people that clarity has very little to do with brands and more to do with design