Sounds like you're on some kind of crusade. I try to stay open minded. Let's put things into perspective:
Creating room reflections will increase spaciousness. There's no doubt about it. The question is: is that kind of spaciousness desireable for each and every recording, e.g. movies? Why do certain reflections increase speech intelligibility? Why are the same reflections detrimental in other cases? What are the implications of our ability to adapt to different acoustics? Is there a point in time a recording would take over, i.e. make us aurally forget the acoustics of the room we are in?
Eh I am broke so I have been skimming through the googlebooks abridged version along with some other books like Bob Katz's. I just have been busy with my own kooky ideas and testing them with my system. I also have to use my money on those ideas if I am ever going to get them out of my listening room.
It's just I am really skeptical of laboratory testing and then just taking those results and running with them. Especially when I see on the chart they are in an anechoic chamber I become very skeptical that those results translate in any real way to an average room.
The same way a scientist will look at the conclusions I come to from mixing and controlling reflections through psychoacoustics and phantom imagery and say the results are tainted I think the scientist isn't "real world" enough with a lot of his methodologies. To put it simply an anechoic chamber is a great place to test speakers and microphones but not exactly ideal to test the threshold of what a listener will hear in a real room. It's known that you are more sensitive to things like phase response in a chamber where in a real room you can't hear a difference between phase linear and drastically phase distorted material. So under the same conditions if you were to test the threshold for detecting phase distortions by placing people in a chamber your results would be very wrong if you are actually trying to find out how these things will effect people in a real room.
Moulton seems on point for some of his conclusions. But the more I think about a threshold for reflections the more holes in that theory I see. I mean it is just common knowledge that the more you move freestanding speakers out in the room the more accurate they get. But it seems clear that I can break that rule to an extent and still have accurate reproduction.
I wasn't mad I was just asking you exactly what you think I have wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have added the part about certainty but it does seem like you tend to lecture to me from this pedestal and generally every time you direct something my way you are telling me what I should be doing with absolutely no idea of what I am actually doing. I am keeping most of what I do to myself and sort of dancing around my best ideas.
Key,
if you rather are an experimentalist and willing to spend a bit more than 20 bucks:
Get a pair of Visaton B200 and put them in folded TLs with the driver on top, in the height of your ears, facing the ceiling. Will probably produce some "shout" in this configuration, but if you like the imaging you can coat the diapragms to lift the breakup-frequency a bit. Will also be very useful for removing dust. This configuration doesn't have this wow-effect like the Carlssons when fed with true stereo recordings, but is much more universal and will add some "acousticness" to synth reverb recordings.
if you rather are an experimentalist and willing to spend a bit more than 20 bucks:
Get a pair of Visaton B200 and put them in folded TLs with the driver on top, in the height of your ears, facing the ceiling. Will probably produce some "shout" in this configuration, but if you like the imaging you can coat the diapragms to lift the breakup-frequency a bit. Will also be very useful for removing dust. This configuration doesn't have this wow-effect like the Carlssons when fed with true stereo recordings, but is much more universal and will add some "acousticness" to synth reverb recordings.
o yeah!
first success in my "crusade of open-mindedness" but seriously - what crusade?
I am only saying something like "look people I have founded something and to my ears it' s kind of interesting, so how about trying it yourself?"
hearing is believing
but I am also asking questions (and for this scandalous impudence please excuse me!
)I am asking because I am interested in optimization of the results of my experiments, of all those unusual designs and setups
and some theoretical understanding of what is going on is a prerequisite of serious optimization, isnt't it?
unfortunately what I get from here residing experts as answers to those questions are only suggestions like "You don't understand, You just HAVE to be wrong - period"
"You just have to have hallucinations and/or impaired sense of hearing and/or have no grip of what hi-fi is all about - period", "go read newest Toole - period" etc.
exact wording of those answers is more polite of course but the meaning is such
and I don't know what to think about it
Floyd Toole doesn't cover in His book things like discussed here or in the "stereolith" thread.
On the other hand Toole knows works of people like Moulton (whom He quotes 6 times in His book although without disccusion AFAIK) and many highly respected engineers in the history of this business were developing similar ideas of wide dispersion and diffuse sound, not just Amar Bose but Paul Voigt, Gilbert Briggs, Victor Brociner, Stewart Hegeman, Stig Carlsson etc. etc.
Am I to understand that they didn't know what hi-fi is all about?
on the other hand I know opinions of many people who praise the "spatial recreation" abilities of such unorthodox designs and setups, that is of Stereolith and "Stereolith like setup" and of various omnidirectional designs
among them people like eg. Arthur Salvatore, certainly not an "audio-heretic" but rather mainstream hi-end audio dealer for years with immense experience and personal loudspeaker sound preference towards things like big Coincidents or Wilsons:
REFERENCE COMPONENTS-SPEAKERS
nevertheless He honestly admits that it is rather classic Hegeman omnidirectional design (Morrison Audio) that:
simple omni better in that regard than sophisticated mainstream behemoths?
or perhaps Salvathore is just one more guy with impaired hearing or ignorant of what is good in this hobby? or perhaps Don Morrison is His boyfriend?
are You into home cinema? I am not, and it is not hi-fi, hi-fi is about the music, home cinema is different kind of home entertainment
good questions! In fact the same I keep asking and asking
Only I was thinking that You rather know the answers since You have read all the books, newest Toole etc...
well, so, who can answer?
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I totally I agree with Earl but nonetheless there is useful spatial information in signals lower 500 Hz. Find out for yourself with the following two examples of a low-pass filtered male voice:
Low-Pass (24 db) at 150 Hz (AAC, 2 MB)
Low-Pass (24 db) at 300 Hz (AAC, 2 MB)
It also becomes pretty obvious how important higher frequencies are to understand one word at all
Best, Markus
I always was with Earl Geddes on localization below approximately 600 hz, as with sine-waves I can not hear at which speaker it is generated, in a listening room that is. I've also done some experiments outside - in the free field I can tell from which direction the sound comes to very low frequency sine-waves. I don't remember the exact frequency, but 100 hz was still pretty easy.
Your samples are very enlightening. For both samples localization is easy in-room! Apparently sine-waves differ too much from normal program material making them invalid for this kind of testing.
on "detrimental" early reflections, Moulton and Toole
from Toole "Sound Reproduction"on page 417:
"In control room, attenuation of early eflections, particularly those from the side walls, is usually a requirement. The need for this has been discussed earlier, and it is an option, not a requirement. All to commonly, (...) all that is accomplished is an attenuation of first reflections from tweeters. (...) The spectral balance of the sound has been altered, and possibly a good speaker has been made to sound less good."
this is pure Moulton’s argumentation
so, does Toole really view early reflections as detrimental to the sound quality?
from Toole "Sound Reproduction"on page 417:
"In control room, attenuation of early eflections, particularly those from the side walls, is usually a requirement. The need for this has been discussed earlier, and it is an option, not a requirement. All to commonly, (...) all that is accomplished is an attenuation of first reflections from tweeters. (...) The spectral balance of the sound has been altered, and possibly a good speaker has been made to sound less good."
this is pure Moulton’s argumentation
so, does Toole really view early reflections as detrimental to the sound quality?
o yeah!
Don't know why I need to repeat myself constantly: strong lateral reflections is a spatial effect. It's similar to the perception one has in certain concert halls.
I'm into audio reproduction. A system that is capable of reproducing only one special kind of aural space is useless to me.
Nobody can. I'm here to learn something new but all I found is people fighting for their subjective personal truths.
Toole argues that lateral reflections are preferable. But there's more to the story. The book has 500+ pages. Did you read the whole book or are you just pulling quotes that suit your needs?
that's ok!
however it is not useless for many music lovers who even don't have any TVs or projectors at home.
and I'm not sure what You mean saying "one special kind of aural space"
Designs and setups I'm speaking of in this thread certainly don't reproduce only "one special kind of aural space". They reproduce what is in the recording. Perhaps some listeners would maintain that there is some superimposed common "space signature", that everything spatial is somewhat magnified, but still it is something very different from "one kind of aural space"
well, it's an unfair overgeneralization IMO
and actually "fighting for personal truths" is not the worst case
the worst is advertising camouflaged with expertising
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I"m with you there. Outside it's easy. I remember being able to point to where an earthquake came from. That's a really low sound. And in a big enclosed space like hotel ballroom or concert hall, bass localization is not too hard.
So I assume it's the reflections and room modes that mess it up in most normal size listening rooms. Midrange sounds still seem a lot easier, no matter what.
There is also a time factor involved. The longer the signal is on the better you can resolve its location. A short LF wavelet would not be localizable in any environment.
Many? I'm talking about the majority, you're probably talking about yourself.
You don't need a projector to watch a Blu-ray disc. It's pretty easy (and common) to hook all your sources like cable/satellite/internet receiver, disc player, game console, etc. to an AVR and TV.
My experience is different. All omni directional concepts I have heard did create the very same aural space for each and every recording. Single sounds were always oversized and localization was ambiguous. That's exactly the same perception I have in classic concert halls. The difference is that classic music is made for these kind of spaces but virtually all other recordings are not.
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That was the trouble wit the earthquake. =(
What would constitute a "wavelet"? Less than a full cycle at that frequency?
Would that difficulty also apply to wavelets of a higher frequency?