Another zombie thread - 13 years old?
Flat gated or anechoic on axis frequency response along with smooth off axis narrowing of directivity is a worthwhile goal. Floyd Toole and Sean Olive have even showed that listeners prefer this. The NRC in Canada (Toole again) helped develop some amazing speakers starting ~30 years ago (Paradigm, PSB, Energy etc...) that follow this prescription and they are successful designs with great reviews.
The combination in the first paragraph will produce a room curve that decreases with frequency due to the narrowing directivity and high frequency absorption in the room. If you have a non-flat speaker or a rough off axis curve, your room curve will have lumps in it. This is often the case with two ways where the tweeter is crossed too high, the directivity will suddenly widen and the speaker will sound bright, even when the on axis is flat, because the reflections are too bright.
In a typical reflective room, the response is a combination of direct and indirect sound. With a speaker that doesn't have the smooth off axis curves, if you then try to equalize it flat with pink noise and a spectrum analyzer or some other such method, it has a really good chance of sounding terrible. It will end up putting way too much energy into the room at high frequencies, and there also may be on axis dips due to off axis peaks that add another confusion factor. Another problem is otherwise flat speakers that have no baffle step correction and sound lean and analytical.
What's funny is that a lot of people who rail against flat tend to like a U shaped EQ curve - the typical boom-sparkle that they learned to like with their loudness control...they want it to sound loud at low volumes, and there is no doubt that this sells speakers, especially to "kids."
Flat gated or anechoic on axis frequency response along with smooth off axis narrowing of directivity is a worthwhile goal. Floyd Toole and Sean Olive have even showed that listeners prefer this. The NRC in Canada (Toole again) helped develop some amazing speakers starting ~30 years ago (Paradigm, PSB, Energy etc...) that follow this prescription and they are successful designs with great reviews.
The combination in the first paragraph will produce a room curve that decreases with frequency due to the narrowing directivity and high frequency absorption in the room. If you have a non-flat speaker or a rough off axis curve, your room curve will have lumps in it. This is often the case with two ways where the tweeter is crossed too high, the directivity will suddenly widen and the speaker will sound bright, even when the on axis is flat, because the reflections are too bright.
In a typical reflective room, the response is a combination of direct and indirect sound. With a speaker that doesn't have the smooth off axis curves, if you then try to equalize it flat with pink noise and a spectrum analyzer or some other such method, it has a really good chance of sounding terrible. It will end up putting way too much energy into the room at high frequencies, and there also may be on axis dips due to off axis peaks that add another confusion factor. Another problem is otherwise flat speakers that have no baffle step correction and sound lean and analytical.
What's funny is that a lot of people who rail against flat tend to like a U shaped EQ curve - the typical boom-sparkle that they learned to like with their loudness control...they want it to sound loud at low volumes, and there is no doubt that this sells speakers, especially to "kids."
I thought the same kind of thing when reading some of the posts in the thread Ron,
i remembered back when any self respecting audiophile had a graphic equaliser connected to their system and almost everyone had that U curve .
Personally i think of ' flat ' as one of those ideal parameters that in theory should be perfect but in reality leaves a lot to be desired.
i remembered back when any self respecting audiophile had a graphic equaliser connected to their system and almost everyone had that U curve .
Personally i think of ' flat ' as one of those ideal parameters that in theory should be perfect but in reality leaves a lot to be desired.
I'd rather a speaker with absolutely flat response then adjust an eq to obtain a linear flow of waves to the way the ears pick up and balance the accoustics. I know magic can be aplied with the right setting but if the speaker doesn't have a flat response then it might not accurately be capable to represent the original. All I feel an eq does is twists the sound to face the listener. I think the dispersion of the sound when things are not flat may help it be heard in different directions from the speaker and accoustics can make it sound better. The best system I heard used an array of tweeters with diffusers and midrange in aray along with a horn and bass. I would have liked to have heard it without the eq setting just so I could compair the sound but the waves flowed and the array made an accoustic pattern within the haas effect and also made left and right ears have the same volume due to the way the high frequencys crossed and they were ear gap apart. It didn't matter where you listened from.
I think there is some misunderstanding on the conditions where the speaker response should be flat, and those conditions where it shouldn't. If there is no agreement on what conditions we're actually referring to, then whether the response is flat or not tells us nothing. Nevermind niceties like measurement method...
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