If that is a theory concerning omni-directional speakers not being able to create a realistic sound space with good phantom sources in normal listening rooms (your "realistic reproduction") then there are some Linkwitz Pluto owners you should talk with who may have a different perspective -if you're open to some empirical exploration.
Not to mention MBL. Still the very best imaging/soundstage I've ever heard.
Hi,
They are welcome to their perspective. Try putting them into a control room, give them a mike-feed and then go to the other side of the glass.
In the last nearly 3 decades I have build more speakers (and other gear) than I care to remember. I have pretty much tried anything else but massive concrete horns build into the structures of the house.
I have heard ton's more stuff (especially a few years in London, when I worked my way through my 2nd degree as tech fixing HiFi, a lot of it quite Hi-End and Pro-Audio, electronic Musical instruments etc.).
I would call that pretty open to empirical exploration.
And note, I was not per se to sound staging in respect to the problems of omni's (though they generate more additional reverb that I would add to most recordings in the studio, this BTW is what makes them sound so spacious, all that extra wet reverb). This is less of an issue, though images tend to much more vague with Omni's.
The Issue is that reflections are greater in level than the direct sound and no matter how flat in frequency response your Omni is, the reflections will NOT have a perfect flat frequency response. If they had, there would be no need to measure in an anechoic chamber. If those reflections arrive within the haas window (meaning anything with less than around 10m distance between speaker and listener) the human hearing "lumps" the reflections in with
direct sound (first arrival), but the tonality is of course no longer accurate (cannot be).
If you want a subjective flat response from an Omni (or very wide dispersion speaker) you are best off EQ'ing it flat in room, using pink noise. And yes, I have done this on many occasions for wide dispersion speakers. The funny thing was that when the guy's with their ETF or other MLS based system (of course windowed to exclude reflections) came over and measured they declared the system had a horribly non-flat response. I ALWAYS obliged them by EQ'ing it according to their measurements. After that the system invariably sounded bad, simply on tonal balance...
But suit yourself and even deny the evidence of your empirical exploration.
Ciao T
They are welcome to their perspective. Try putting them into a control room, give them a mike-feed and then go to the other side of the glass.
if you're open to some empirical exploration.
In the last nearly 3 decades I have build more speakers (and other gear) than I care to remember. I have pretty much tried anything else but massive concrete horns build into the structures of the house.
I have heard ton's more stuff (especially a few years in London, when I worked my way through my 2nd degree as tech fixing HiFi, a lot of it quite Hi-End and Pro-Audio, electronic Musical instruments etc.).
I would call that pretty open to empirical exploration.
And note, I was not per se to sound staging in respect to the problems of omni's (though they generate more additional reverb that I would add to most recordings in the studio, this BTW is what makes them sound so spacious, all that extra wet reverb). This is less of an issue, though images tend to much more vague with Omni's.
The Issue is that reflections are greater in level than the direct sound and no matter how flat in frequency response your Omni is, the reflections will NOT have a perfect flat frequency response. If they had, there would be no need to measure in an anechoic chamber. If those reflections arrive within the haas window (meaning anything with less than around 10m distance between speaker and listener) the human hearing "lumps" the reflections in with
direct sound (first arrival), but the tonality is of course no longer accurate (cannot be).
If you want a subjective flat response from an Omni (or very wide dispersion speaker) you are best off EQ'ing it flat in room, using pink noise. And yes, I have done this on many occasions for wide dispersion speakers. The funny thing was that when the guy's with their ETF or other MLS based system (of course windowed to exclude reflections) came over and measured they declared the system had a horribly non-flat response. I ALWAYS obliged them by EQ'ing it according to their measurements. After that the system invariably sounded bad, simply on tonal balance...
But suit yourself and even deny the evidence of your empirical exploration.
Ciao T
>>> Now don't get me wrong, some people like the way Omni's sound and present the music (some people even like B*se 9o1's) and that is a personal choice, down to taste and preference.
Last weekend at a super bowl party one of my sons noticed the horrid sounding bose system scattered across the hosts media room. Sony electronics and a big bose sub filled the room with boomy, muffled sound. The little black boxes looked like bats hanging from the ceiling and the plastic housed sub was like the cheesiest end table... farts emanating from it like a gassy cow. He noted it was bose and asked how anyone could buy such bad sounding speakers... he's used to diy.
DIY is not for everyone but it can be addicting and can help music lovers achieve excellent sound for much less than store bought speakers.
Wonder how the little beringer's would have sounded in that room instead of the bose?
Last weekend at a super bowl party one of my sons noticed the horrid sounding bose system scattered across the hosts media room. Sony electronics and a big bose sub filled the room with boomy, muffled sound. The little black boxes looked like bats hanging from the ceiling and the plastic housed sub was like the cheesiest end table... farts emanating from it like a gassy cow. He noted it was bose and asked how anyone could buy such bad sounding speakers... he's used to diy.
DIY is not for everyone but it can be addicting and can help music lovers achieve excellent sound for much less than store bought speakers.
Wonder how the little beringer's would have sounded in that room instead of the bose?
Hi,
A heck of a lot better, even though I call them "Minimum Quality", this is actually a decent appellation. The BBC LS3/5 is also called "Minimum Quality" by the BBC itself.
Ciao T
A heck of a lot better, even though I call them "Minimum Quality", this is actually a decent appellation. The BBC LS3/5 is also called "Minimum Quality" by the BBC itself.
Ciao T
Not to drag things OT, but I'll mention in passing that the one time I heard MBLs in a large room- at a show- they were amazingly good. Very natural tonal balance and solid imaging almost irrespective of where in the room you were. They barely sounded like speakers. For who assume that enthusiasts simply hear what they expect, I can honestly say I had no particular expectations, and was generally a bit sceptical about omnis going into the room. With enough space around them, omnis certainly can work really well.
>>> "Minimum Quality"
Sometimes minimum quality is good enough.
Sometimes less is more.
Having not heard the speakers in question throughout this thread i can only assume how things might hove sounded. But i know what i like in my listening space and accept things could be totally different in another. In fact, i remember a very modest mono, old, KLH clock radio that sounded 'good enough' but was wonderful in the little art department i worked in. In that room the music was glorious... and it was certainly minimum quality. It would not surprise me if the Orions or Berihgers sounded worse in that room.
Sometimes magic happens... sometimes it doesn't. Personally, i will pass on both the Orion and Beringer because i believe, based on my experience, there is better to be had for less and more fun to be had in DIY.
Sometimes minimum quality is good enough.
Sometimes less is more.
Having not heard the speakers in question throughout this thread i can only assume how things might hove sounded. But i know what i like in my listening space and accept things could be totally different in another. In fact, i remember a very modest mono, old, KLH clock radio that sounded 'good enough' but was wonderful in the little art department i worked in. In that room the music was glorious... and it was certainly minimum quality. It would not surprise me if the Orions or Berihgers sounded worse in that room.
Sometimes magic happens... sometimes it doesn't. Personally, i will pass on both the Orion and Beringer because i believe, based on my experience, there is better to be had for less and more fun to be had in DIY.
These kinds of threads always give me a chuckle because the perspectives presented more often than not entirely miss the boat. Linkwitz has a strong valid argument about what our ear/brain naturally anticipates when the sound of a voice or instrument is projected into a living space. With close mic'd recordings - the dipole or omni radiator is superior to all others because it most closely resembles the real thing - a guitar, violin, harp, and to a lesser extent voice - at producing the original sound in the space. The entirely different philosophy of controlled directivity on the other hand works better for recordings that possess a fair amount of spatial cues already in them (unlike close mic'd recordings). They generally do a better job of preserving the spatial cues of recordings that have a lot of ambiance because they are usually better at reducing lateral reflections. Much is made of the "tremendous" improvement in uniformity of frequency response of the constant directivity approach over the dipole but in practice that is somewhat overblown. A number of dipole radiators have very good off axis performance but more importantly, most critical listening is not done 40 degrees off axis or while walking around a room so a good deal of effort is generated to accomplish something that isn't that important in the first place. In large auditoriums uniform coverage at wide angles is certainly critical but not so much in the average home.
>>> but more importantly, most critical listening is not done 40 degrees off axis or while walking around a room so a good deal of effort is generated to accomplish something that isn't that important in the first place. In large auditoriums uniform coverage at wide angles is certainly critical but not so much in the average home.
I totally agree!
I totally agree!
I had a rough time trying to listen to Louis Kentner's Lizst operatic paraphrases on the Behinger. It does have a thick mdf box. FWIW here's my previous post with measurements vs a little Yorkville and uncorrected Audio Nirvana Super10 in a 41Hz tuned 70l box, U can get the idea of how strident on-axis the Super10 might sound. (it works well in a Karlson)
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...ons-beaten-behringer-what-16.html#post2397207
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...ons-beaten-behringer-what-16.html#post2397207
+10 , Horns are the worst for the typical home environment IMO, most will have to listen 2 close , Omni's or dipoles will work and will image, they will require a "proper " room to do so ...
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I've eq'ed omnis in-room (to explore this stuff) using swept sine waves, DRC, BrureFIR and then processing the front channels using FIR filters - the sound is improved, but the sweet spot is very narrow. Also, using rear reverb channels (with omnis) and concert hall impulse responses to create a rear sound field.
Its all quite fun, and part of the joy of being a DIYer, even if the results don't quite work - getting a living room to sound like a concert hall is tough (and probably impossible).
Close - within 3 feet. That's of course only a little over 3ms, so still within the integration "window", but the mind compensates for for minor (and even fairly major) deviations in freq. response in fairly short order. Dominate lateral cues due to intensity differences (1.5 kHz through 7 kHz) however are still well beyond integration.
I've expressly tested this with these speakers (actually a few of the omnistat models).. they are ubiquitous in the US at "Best Buy" chains.
They sound like small mini monitors, and functionally they are like mini-monitors except they don't have a significant bounding baffle. They are radial and remove most of the effects of lateral diffraction. The wide dispersion also tends to present a more monophonic emphasis via a higher degree of cross-correlation, at a slight penalty to timbre.
They are very different in sound and design to a Bose 901.
There is a huge unspoken assumption here.
You're suggesting that on a "dry" close mic'd recording, which doesn't have much if any spatial cues encoded in the recording, the omni directional speaker will do a much better job than a somewhat more directional speaker in convincing you that that recorded instrument is actually a real instrument placed in the room with you.
The problem is that many natural and commonly recorded sound sources are not uniformly omni-directional in the first place.
Is a human voice omni-directional ? No, because there will be a lot of high frequency loss if the person is facing away from you and there is no room reverberation to reflect the high frequencies back to you.
Does a Grand piano (if mic'd in a dead acoustic environment) sound exactly the same on the open side as it does on the opposite side ? No.
Does a trombone sound the same from in front and to the side or behind ? No.
Does a person standing playing a guitar sound the same from the front and from behind ? No, the high frequency transients such as plucking will be significantly reduced from angles beyond 90 degrees or so.
Stand a real guitar player in your listening room in the speaker location facing the listener, and the high frequencies will be radiated primarily in the forward hemisphere, with significant high frequency roll off to the rear.
The portion of the signal reflecting off the front wall behind the real guitar player will have both a tilted down frequency response and a different timbrel characteristic, (since the sound radiated from the rear of the sound box is different to the front) unlike an omni-directional speaker which is reproducing the on axis recorded response of the performer in all directions, something which is not natural and will also result in an excess of high frequency reverberant energy relative to the real thing.
So in this regard a speaker with a carefully controlled directivity that is somewhat (but not excessively) more directional at high frequencies than low should actually mimic the directivity of the original sound source more closely than the omni - for the majority of sounds which are non-omni directional in real life.
For the few sounds that are truly omni-directional in real life, (struggling to think of any, at least instruments) maybe the omni will be more correct, but no one speaker can mimic the directivity of all recorded sound sources, since the directivity profile is not encoded into the recording in the first place - we only know what the instrument sounded like on the recording axis.
Now, playing a "dry", dead, close mic'd recording with an omni may sound more "interesting", even more subjectively "pleasing", as it is introducing more room characteristic into the sound that is lacking in the recording itself, but I would strongly argue against the notion that this is somehow "more accurate" when the original recorded sound sources are probably not omni directional in their own characteristics, and we only have a snapshot of their radiation pattern in one direction to go by.
The good thing about a controlled / constant directivity approach (at least above 200Hz or so, where it's practical) is that the direct to reflected ratio is much higher, so if the recording has spatial cues like reverberation those recorded cues will generally win out over the cues of your own room, transporting you to the ambient space of the recording, whereas with the omni you're mixing in a good strong dose of local room reverberation to the point where the two become muddled up.
Also remember constant / controlled directivity doesn't mean that there is no reverberation of the local room - only that its significantly reduced, and in the case of constant directivity, relatively well balanced in frequency response.
If you listen to a "dry" recording on such a system, there is still enough ambient reverberation in your listening room (and no counteracting cues in the recording) to add some room character to the sound so it doesn't become unpleasant and dead sounding. Get the right balance of speaker directivity and room liveness and you can have the best of both worlds
The vagueness of "images" from an "omni's" presentation is often quite a bit more realistic. Also just how vague it is is largely dependent on size of the driver (operating from 1-7 kHz) and the listener distance from that driver.
Beyond the fact that our brain's effectively equalize for deviations in freq. response..this brings up the question of what is correct?
A lot of the monitors I've seen in control rooms are effectively "bouncing" right off of the console. Plus, because of the actual near-field monitoring and the significant "toe-in" of most monitors, cross correlation is high - and that's a fair bit of inter-channel combing that is altering the timbre. Of course many will move to mid-field monitors and headphones for various sampling and correction, but there is always a big question of what is "correct" tonally - even for those engineering it, ..minute to minute.
-Because of this I personally feel that Levinson had it right with something like the Palette. Let the user adjust to "taste".
"Accuracy" in playback is a misnomer.