placing speakers like headphones

[lduarte1973]

anyone tryed placing speakers like headphones (one on each side of the head) ?

i´ve done that on the bead (1,5 meter apart) and i was amazed on how it sound , much better than headphones or placing the speakers in front of you , almost feels like being on stage with the performer and not "inside your head feeling" you get with headphones.

[Antoinel]

I agree. Great minds think alike!

[sakis]

you are trying to push a broken car off the road while you are pushing from the front side and Antoinel is pushing from the rear side .

DO you expect the car to move to any direction ? obviously not .

[Antoinel]

The cord of a regular headphone is a couple of meters long; meaning that the listener is on a short leash. In my case, I lay on the floor with the speakers several centimeters away from my ears. I am on a short leash too!. It is quite easy to find the "sweet spot" by adjusting the height of my head and moving it front and back.

Please see the attached image which shows 2 compact (bookshelf) ADS L-300C speakers, and a loose woofer behind them (my head). It is experimental and it works great. A tripping hazard! But no headphone will beat the bass output! Regards.

[sakis]

theoretically sound travels through air ....now if you place two speakers ( or two pumps ) opposite to each other playing or pressing the exact same amount of sound or pressure towards each other in the middle you will hear absolutely nothing .

reason is that pressure from the pumps will equalize the opposite pump and result to 0 pressure ...or speakers will completely cancel each other resulting nothing to hear ( approach is theoretical under perfect sources /speakers / and experiment inside a perfect anechoic studio )

In headphones this cannot happen since our head is in between so pressure or sound will travel to our ears without facing each other and thus cancel each other ...

Now in real life two speakers placed face to face and you listening in the middle will cancel most audible low frequencies and then confuse or cancel all the rest ...expect also situations like image, stereophonic picture, and sound stage to be completely vanished ...

[lduarte1973]

i dont say that isn´t true at higher levels , but at low level volume like i listen i dont get that impression , everything is clear.

you cant listen loud with that speaker placing unless you want to go deaf

[sakis]

it probably can be done in low or very low power where sound waves will fade before facing each other and any way i explained to you the principal of operation so the rest is up to you

Generally i thing its a very bad idea

[GloBug]

Sakis is wrong

I too notice an improvement with my large speakers, you don't have to lay on your bed. lol

I don't have them completely facing each other but they are toed in more than 45 degrees, the sound converges behind me so muddiness is not an issue, separation is awesome.
They are a little over arms length away.

This goes against typical advise, which says they should point ahead, being about the same width apart as you are away from them.
I don't think this is as much of a problem in reality as they let on.
Consider your head is similar to a stereo boundary microphone, it's good at separating.

Having the speakers at the sides keeps more of the left signal out of the right ear and vice versa, providing better imaging.

The traditional setup blurs the difference from left and right. This may have been better when earlier stereo was extremely separated left and right, then the traditional setup would produce some cross fading to make it sound stereo.
(Extremely separated meaning say a guitar is recorded on the left channel only etc., not "stereo" at all when you think of it, the amplifier setup would result in a "stereo" effect.)
(This type of stereo can be extremely fatiguing when using headphones, or having the speakers on your sides.)

So nowadays we don't want to create stereo, we want reproduce the stereo recordings.
Since recordings for the most part are recorded in true stereo, we don't need to recreated crossfading with our speakers.

[lduarte1973]

" I too notice an improvement with my large speakers, you don't have to lay on your bed. lol "

that´s only because i´m lazy

This setup is what i use at night before sleeping

[Charles Darwin]

Sakis would be right IF one of the speakers would be inverted.