There are many topics which have no proper place to post on Diyaudio, for example room acoustics.
.
.
Ahhh ..a far too familiar/predictable pattern.
(is there an online manual for this somewhere?)
As in 'Other' forms I visit, the subdivide and conquer desire by (usually one individual, sometimes with an apprentice) is Surprisingly persistent.
Unrelentless imo 😉 .. either they get what they want or leave, although only after weeks/months of badgering.
Imagine being related?? 😀
A logical solution would be to start one's Own forum/soapbox, which could be whatever setup /hobby horse is desired.
(is there an online manual for this somewhere?)
As in 'Other' forms I visit, the subdivide and conquer desire by (usually one individual, sometimes with an apprentice) is Surprisingly persistent.
Unrelentless imo 😉 .. either they get what they want or leave, although only after weeks/months of badgering.
Imagine being related?? 😀
A logical solution would be to start one's Own forum/soapbox, which could be whatever setup /hobby horse is desired.
It seems to me that the utility (an economics term) of a forum is the degree that it meets the needs of the contributors.
The above suggestions for new subforum subjects are, to me, good ones. The supplied rationale, above, to not provide them (i.e., "there aren't enough posts per unit of time to justify 'splitting' the current subforum") seems more than a little arbitrary and capricious--in fact, it seems evasive.
If maximizing sound quality is the objective of home audio, then in my experience, the room size/shape and its acoustic treatments rank at the highest importance, followed closely by the quality of the recordings being played, and then placement of loudspeakers and their inherent qualities.
By this measure of merit then, room acoustics should be the most important section that audio forum participants frequent. If it isn't--then what does that say about the "average forum participant" and what they are trying to achieve, or what they think that they have already understood and achieved?
I'd vote for a room acoustics section, but by the measure of merit promoted above, it hasn't got a snowball's chance.
Which is to say I guess that that kind of rational thinking doesn't apply to the forum's meta-structure, but only the strength of the individually weighted voices voting pro/con of the forum participants--right?
Chris
"...but...we've never done it that way before." 😉
Last edited:
Yes but. This request for a High Efficiency forum isn't being lead by one person. There are several long time, well established members here who are in favor. That carries some weight.
I started another thread after this discussion and it is just starting to pick up steam. The only real problem is that it will be under multi-way speakers even though it will be about much more than that. The people who really use this site will find it but if you are new how would you know where to look for the subject of an active speaker system all the way back to the software available to work with it?
I agree that a sub-division for room acoustics would be a real addition to what there is now. It doesn't fit anywhere logical right now. I'm sure you could get people like Earl Geddes to weigh in on that subject and others who have some real knowledge in that area and not just a lot of noise about magic blocks to attach to your walls.
I agree that a sub-division for room acoustics would be a real addition to what there is now. It doesn't fit anywhere logical right now. I'm sure you could get people like Earl Geddes to weigh in on that subject and others who have some real knowledge in that area and not just a lot of noise about magic blocks to attach to your walls.
This. In the simplest terms, an amplifier takes a voltage and turns it into power. There are several ways to do this, but the basic task is the same. It's a one-dimensional device with electricity in and electricity out.
A loudspeaker accepts power and radiates in three dimensions. It's a power converter and an antenna that has to cover nearly three decades.
Even the simplest full-range loudspeaker has issues with back loading (which kind?), audibility of FR deviations and diaphragm resonance (how to control?), diffraction (ignore or not?), IM distortion (ignore or control?), and dispersion in 3D space (which affects subjective tonality, room positioning, and spatial perception). There are subjective tradeoffs in all these areas, and prominent loudspeaker designers who've been doing this professionally for decades, are not in agreement with each other. It doesn't look One Best Loudspeaker will ever be possible without some kind of breakthrough in materials science.
This is why there is such a diversity of approaches. It's dictated by the limitations of physics (the absurdly wide range of wavelengths), the limitations of materials science, and subtle issues of human perception, as well as personal and subjective musical perception. These are key challenges for any loudspeaker designer, regardless of the technology chosen for the system.
This is why "multi-way loudspeakers" is a catch-all category, with discussion ranging from how to copy commercial high-end products (to save money and maybe learn along the way) to blue-sky projects with no commercial equivalent. By creating one or two more sub-categories, the S/N ratio might improve (we hope) and the level of discussion might be a little more focussed and on-topic.
Last edited:
there should be two more section at diyaudio.
1- horns and high eff systems.
2- room acoustics.
imo, by looking at pictures here, room acoustic is very much ignored and is imo a very important aspect a any systems.
1- horns and high eff systems.
2- room acoustics.
imo, by looking at pictures here, room acoustic is very much ignored and is imo a very important aspect a any systems.
...or a better way to make decisions...🙂
I couldn't have said it better (and his vote is apparently much bigger than mine)... 😉
Only one thing to add: by creating sub-categories, the result is one of the most sure-fire bets that I've seen.
After all, that's the essence of any business decision--do you believe now that it will be successful in the future--right?
Chris
In general, splitting forums is akin to throwing discussion kryptonite on them.
Communities with traditional web-forum technology, like diyAudio, will in general do better with less forums, not more. Yes, it's a bit annoying to have everything mixed up but it's that "cross pollination" between threads that really gets discussions going. If you split a forum into a thousand precise sections, they will all be dead very quickly with no readers and no posters. It takes too long and is too hard to browse, and all those "that looks interesting" cross pollination moments are lost. With fewer visitors, there is less activity, leading to less posts, it's a negative feedback loop. The only reason to ever split a forum is when it's absolutely bursting at the seams.
In the very near future we will have new forum technology infrastructure, and it will most definitely support thread tagging. Being able to search and refine your view of discussions based on tags will give you a much more granular view of threads that you are interested in. In fact it will make the whole concept of "which forum it should go in" almost redundant. This will come right after we upgrade the store, which is in the process of happening at the moment. There will also be a whole smorgasboard of new features to make the browsing and posting experience better.
Communities with traditional web-forum technology, like diyAudio, will in general do better with less forums, not more. Yes, it's a bit annoying to have everything mixed up but it's that "cross pollination" between threads that really gets discussions going. If you split a forum into a thousand precise sections, they will all be dead very quickly with no readers and no posters. It takes too long and is too hard to browse, and all those "that looks interesting" cross pollination moments are lost. With fewer visitors, there is less activity, leading to less posts, it's a negative feedback loop. The only reason to ever split a forum is when it's absolutely bursting at the seams.
In the very near future we will have new forum technology infrastructure, and it will most definitely support thread tagging. Being able to search and refine your view of discussions based on tags will give you a much more granular view of threads that you are interested in. In fact it will make the whole concept of "which forum it should go in" almost redundant. This will come right after we upgrade the store, which is in the process of happening at the moment. There will also be a whole smorgasboard of new features to make the browsing and posting experience better.
Last edited:
For the record, I totally understand how annoying it is to try and find what you want, and also how terrible our current search is. I'm just positing that splitting forums is something to be done only when absolutely necessary. And I do believe that being able to view threads based on tags (and have members or "trusted" members tag any threads) will quickly create a surgical way to view exactly what you want, when you want.
Whilst I like the idea of an active speaker forum (an active speaker is easy enough to define and it could encompass DSP and signal processing), perhaps the simplest approach would be to tag the subject headers when starting a new thread. So we get
ACTIVE: my new speaker project
HE: the 100dB on a mosquito fart speaker project
etc.
It wouldn't necessarily be elegant but it would make browsing and searching easier without splitting forums and creating interest ghettos.
ACTIVE: my new speaker project
HE: the 100dB on a mosquito fart speaker project
etc.
It wouldn't necessarily be elegant but it would make browsing and searching easier without splitting forums and creating interest ghettos.
IAWTC
Over on diyma they segmented the forum a lot.
For instance, they gave horns their own subforum.
And as soon as they did that, people stopped posting and reading about horns. (Because it was already a small percentage of the audience, and once they segmented it, the discussion died.)
PS Agree with Jason that splitting would lose those serendipity moments. It's a shame in some ways that FR is regarded as separate from multiway. We end up with Line array and AST systems which don't appear comfortably in either.
??Nobody requested 1,000 sub-forums. Maybe the number got as high as 3, but the initial request was for 2.
I think a good example of the effectiveness of partitioning off specialized interest areas is the Planars & Exotics forum. Through the years that forum has attracted some very devoted contributors and some of the work displayed in that forum is truly impressive. And it thrives because it is a place where like-minded creative thinkers can meet and have a sustained conversation on some very specific topics. Being able to easily find that work in one place has resulted in an active community where there are always challenges to raise the DIY bar. If Planars & Exotics got put under Multi-Way or some other catch-all forum, none of those challenges would happen, because it is just too hard for like-minded experimenters to find the posts and sustain a technical conversation.
The original post wasn't about splitting up Multi-Way--it was about recognizing two new categories in "Loudspeakers". In the past 10 years there has been more and more interest in line arrays, horn designs and other non-conventional speakers. But there isn't a separate place to address these designs, so they end up getting thrown into Multi-Way, even though the description for Multi-Way doesn't include them. Also, the proliferation of easy-to-use DSP (like the Sigma Studio series of chips), class D amps and embedded processors has opened up a lot of new possibilities for the DIY speaker designer. It is now fairly easy to build your own active speakers. But diyAudio doesn't have a good area for discussing these designs, and again, Multi-Way ends up getting abused with posts that don't fit the description of that forum.
The original post was simply a request to provide discussion space for these new or emerging Loudspeaker topics that currently don't fit anywhere else. Line Arrays by itself probably isn't a sufficiently general-interest topic to thrive on its own, but by combining it with other high efficiency designs that forum should almost certainly do as well as Planars and Exotics. And an active speaker forum should also do well, especially if it attracts the soundbar and portable audio folks.
Let me give you a specific example so you better understand the motivation for my original post.
The day I posted this question, I had just completed the board layout for a 20-channel line array amplifier board, with programmable delay for each channel. The board is shown in my post in that UNIFICATION thread in Multi-Way. With 20 channels of delay you can electronically adjust the apparent curvature of the line array. You can emulate the CBT properties that Keele discusses in several papers, or you can focus the array to a single point, or you can create a cylindrical waveform with power tapering. Pretty cool. I wanted to make this an open source design, with the intention of getting group interest to fund board assembly, since the board is not easy to assemble by hand. But then I ran into the problem of where to post this on diyAudio.
I've posted some aspects of this design already in the Digital Line Level, but the topics I really wanted to discuss had nothing to do with the line level circuitry--I was more interested in the line array aspects and what others might want to try with this board. I knew that posting in Multi-Way was a waste of time, as the thread would provide some entertainment for some readers and quickly roll off the first page, but it wouldn't help me find others with similar interests. Also, that forum is for "conventional loudspeakers", and I don't want to derail that forum by trying to discuss a very unconventional loudspeaker.
So the request to consider some additional topics under Loudspeakers wasn't an attempt to pervert the sacred order--it was simply an attempt to "learn, share knowledge, and enjoy interacting with others interested in the design and construction of audio components," which is a quote from the diyAudio Rules page. If I've offended anyone with this request, it certainly wasn't intentional. I'm simply trying to share knowledge and interact with others with similar interests, and feeling some frustration that there is no well-defined place to discuss the audio topics that I'm most interested in.
Make sure you look at how the tags have been abused over on the PE Tech Talk forum. The tags there are mostly snarky comments with no real utility. Tags can be a moderation nightmare if they are available to all users.
Thanks Neil. Definitely no sacred order here, no sacred cows and everything is open for debate. I totally empathize with the difficulty in categorizing stuff. And thanks for the mention of the tag abuse - that's definitely an issue, but I think we can solve that by having qualified and responsible taggers. For the record, I didn't express an opinion as to whether or not to split, I just made a general comment so people know my general view of the general topic. The 1,000 was just for illustrative purposes.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.