Of course fatigue can be from the original recording in the worst cases. Certainly I find much current pop fatiguing because of the deliberate way it is produced, for both artistic and production reasons, although the line seems to be blurred ATM.
I am not being egotistical, I hope, but with what I currently have, the range of quality is wider than I have ever had, and with a new very good FM tuner it is now easy to hear recording differences, eg. from Sounds of the 70s today.
TV sound is all over the place from unintelligibility to 1950s-60s clarity and naturalness. It is almost possible to describe the cubicles from BBC studios by speech.
A low-pass on a woofer attenuates the music signal above the corner frequency, but I feel like you should be a bit more specific about the wording. If we go with the example of a woofer that has an LP at 100 Hz which gets a 200 Hz sine wave, the sine wave will come out at approximately -6/-12/-18/-24 (etc.) dB relative to the passband. However, if the woofer gets a 50 Hz sine wave, and the HD5 of the woofer at 50 Hz is e.g. -60 dB (at some arbitrary voltage input), the distortion product at 250 Hz will be -60 dB relative to the 50 Hz output regardless of whether the LP is there or not. The electrical filter does nothing for a signal generated downstream. Interestingly, acoustic filters can and do impact these above-band distortion products (down-firing, felt or fiberglass in front, bandpass enclosures, etc.) Even side-firing typically does, although I hesitate to call that an acoustic filter since the overall output from the driver isn't really changing.
This is why you don't want to run very high with a rigid cone driver that has a severe breakup, even if you have a steep low-pass below that point. The distortion products that land in the region of the severe breakup are a major factor in the metallic stereotyped sound. The W22EX is a great example (SEAS W22EX001 | HiFiCompass). You'd think you could go up to 2 kHz based on the frequency response, maybe more, until you look at the HD charts and see the ridiculous HD5 at 1 kHz that lands you almost in the most sensitive part of the audible spectrum. And, unless the even-higher-orders of harmonic distortion are extremely low, you might even be forced to cross lower, although to be fair almost no one tests HD6 and up.
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Hi tmuikku, my take is that the lower range of a driver's passband is pretty much always where the weakness lies.
I mean, it's where excursion is maximum, it's where BL is losing linearity.
So, like you say, asking a tweeter to dig too low will suck.
But this is where a steep HPF xover to the tweeter can be a benefit.
You can take the tweeter lower when steeper, with less excursion worries, than when trying the same xover freq with a shallower xover..
Only problem then is the higher-order xover that is needed for steep....excess phase wrap, screwed up group delay, ....iow and simply said, blown timing.
And tis why linear phase xovers rule, almightily so, amen so be it, forever and ever
Hello Mark, saving up for FIR capable processor for sure
So, I'm roughly generalizing here but a speaker driver would have motor related distortion at it's lower frequency range (excursion) and cone related distortion in the upper range (breakup). Do these have different kind of distribution of harmonics? I guess I should check out some distortion graphs.You are right, electrical low pass filter attenuates the fundamental but not the (loudspeaker generated) harmonics and acoustic low pass would attenuate the harmonics as well.
Then there is the hf transducer. If we think distribution of different harmonics at particular frequency as a color. Lets take 1.5kHz crossover point between woofer and tweeter as an example. If there was too much of a difference in color between 1kHz and 2kHz content was this fatiguing even though it is relatively low and wasn't immediately obvious to ear? If it was fatiguing it is very important to avoid distortion with driver selection and high/low pass filters. In which case the steep filters would be better choise as well as acoustic low passing instead of electronic? Gotta get more coffee
edit. found this Midrange distortion so ignore the distortion generating part from my post since I'm not educated enough where the distortion emerges in speaker drivers
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Mis-matching driver characteristics is something which can cause cognitive dissonance.
The ESS Heil is way better than the 12" woofer that was used with it in the 70s and onwards, and this was commented on by many people. The woofer was slow and this resulted in a lack of continuity and coherence. It may be better with the newer woofers, but they look much the same to me.
This is why I substituted a Rogers mid/woofer; an attempt to get more consistency.
The ESS Heil is way better than the 12" woofer that was used with it in the 70s and onwards, and this was commented on by many people. The woofer was slow and this resulted in a lack of continuity and coherence. It may be better with the newer woofers, but they look much the same to me.
This is why I substituted a Rogers mid/woofer; an attempt to get more consistency.
Haven't used it or the Beyma versions myself (like to though) but from everything I've read about them they are best matched with a 6-8" high sensitivity mid crossed in at 2-2.5k in a 3way than forced to run down to their very limits in a 2way.
I'm a firm believer that any driver should remain flat and coherent to at least one octave beyond it's pass band.
So while strictly speaking it could be used with 12" I think the result would be sub-optimal.
Ah - ok... so it was a one time - one brand/driver issue - and not all metal drivers that was reviewed?
All drivers have breakup modes. It's just a matter of how much and when.
And I do agree that it is why I really did not like Grimms audios speaker with the Magnesium 8" and the DXT, simply because those two drivers do not blend well - exactly because of the reasons we're writing about here
Time domain distortion (not phase!) causes listener fatigue
Trying to answer the original poster question "what causes listener fatigue?"
I have attached a document which answers the question in detail from the perspective of time domain distortion.
Please note and read the detailed explanation of the fundamental difference between time and phase distortion as explained by John... Many vested interests such as loudspeaker manufacturers deliberately try to confuse the two separate issues because they have no way to fix the elephant in the room!
90% of the attached is from John Watkinson 2014 and 2016 papers, but I also found Derek Wilsons Rapid Energy Decay driver technology very interesting.... I went to his house for a demo and came home with a pair of his studio monitors! They are never fatiguing and always make me want to sing along, sometimes I even dance (when no one else is in!)
hope this is interesting to someone else too!
Alex.
Trying to answer the original poster question "what causes listener fatigue?"
I have attached a document which answers the question in detail from the perspective of time domain distortion.
Please note and read the detailed explanation of the fundamental difference between time and phase distortion as explained by John... Many vested interests such as loudspeaker manufacturers deliberately try to confuse the two separate issues because they have no way to fix the elephant in the room!
90% of the attached is from John Watkinson 2014 and 2016 papers, but I also found Derek Wilsons Rapid Energy Decay driver technology very interesting.... I went to his house for a demo and came home with a pair of his studio monitors! They are never fatiguing and always make me want to sing along, sometimes I even dance (when no one else is in!)
hope this is interesting to someone else too!
Alex.
A couple of weeks ago I watched "The Decline of Western Civilization", which is a documentary about L.A. punk rock in the late 70s and 80s.
The original music, played back over a decent stereo, is like nails on a chalkboard. Just really painful to listen to.
Most of it originated in an era where people listened to music over boomboxes and cassette tapes, and I have a feeling the recording engineers hyped the treble because of that.
Truly some of the worst recordings ever. Fun movie tho!
Maybe something in that, although I think it would be better to invent your own term rather than nick one.
I don't think that have "nicked" any term.
The Rogers mid/woofer was from a BBC LS 5/8, which by coincidence also crossed at 1.8k, as did that on the ESS Heil which had a LR4 Xover, I used a 1st order on the mid/woofer.
I agree about overlap, and 2 octaves beyond Xover for each driver are now regularly recommended.
There is of course the personal subjective preference for the number of ways, I like two but will just accept three, fives, as in JM or Wilson I cannot tolerate.
Ah - ok... so it was a one time - one brand/driver issue - and not all metal drivers that was reviewed?
All drivers have breakup modes. It's just a matter of how much and when.
And I do agree that it is why I really did not like Grimms audios speaker with the Magnesium 8" and the DXT, simply because those two drivers do not blend well - exactly because of the reasons we're writing about here
No, we looked at several.
I'm not sure what you mean. It seems to me there is no way of knowing what it's supposed to sound like.
If it has a clear meaning that is very much contrary to being ambiguous is it not?
I used it because it is appropriate.
In the context of using two drivers with very different sounding characteristics, I believe that cognitive dissonance can be the result because the brain is receiving two very different characteristic sounds which should have a coherence in both source and character.
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