sounds like Willy Wonka's waiting for a golden ticket...
will the collective intelligence here just hand out a solution.....? and better yet why would they?
will the collective intelligence here just hand out a solution.....? and better yet why would they?
You seem to want to give the mastering engineer control of the final sound. That is exactly the task of the mastering engineer, but it should not be in the SPEAKERS.
It should be in his mastering chain.
The speakers should be transparent.
So - create transparent speakers, stick them in the mastering engineer's room, and then see if they still measure flat. If not you treat the room so it does, if you still can't make it work that way you can equalize to make it flat, but that might be a cludge as the difference might be caused by room modes / standing waves.
AFTER all that, the mastering engineer can add his own preference by boosting or cutting or using saturation or whatever.
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These topics of active room acoustic treatment....don't you think that this is apart of loudspeaker design?
Exactly!
Neutral speakers are flat measuring speakers *in an anechoic room*.
This can be achieved by measuring in an anechoic room.
Then once you put them in your mastering room, they wont sound flat - because of positioning and room interaction.
That's where room design / treatment comes in.
You don't fix perfect measuring speakers to fit your personal environment / taste, you fix your environment to work with flat speakers to give flat results, and then adjust your mastering chain to your personal mastering taste.
If you change the speaker design to fit your preference, anyone else listening to your audio who doesn't have the same speakers will hear the inverse of the changes you made to flat measuring speakers.
If you changed the design of the speakers to give more bass to accommodate your room, everyone else will hear LESS bass.
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No! Room treatment is a different subject.
First you want perfect speakers, measuring flat in scientific controlled environment (aka an anechoic chamber).
THEN, you want a perfect room to use them in. You can use acoustic room treatment for that.
These are different subjects.
For the first, I advice reading Vance Dickason's "Loudspeaker Cook Book".
For the latter, I advice both Floyd Toole's "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms",
AND
Ethan Winers "The Audio Expert" (which is about 800 pages of pure information).
This is NOT simple subject matter, and speaker design and room treatment are two connected but VERY different subject matters.
This is why I say mastering engineers should not be involved in the speaker design.
Mastering engineers should be involved once the perfect speaker is given to them and the room is treated correctly.
Only THEN can they add their special sauce to the sound using all tools available to them.
Not doing it in this order will only result in listeners not hearing it as the mastering engineer intended (in the ideal case that the listener also has perfect speakers and room setup, which will never be the case. The end result will always depend on the listeners equipment and room which we have no control over, so we should strive for the best universal mastering).
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Adding ambient speakers to emulate a larger or more reflective room ("room augmentation") is used in many concert halls. The more discrete sources and processing stems, the more convincing the effect.
Active cancellation can be used for a specific location and frequency, but as frequency in creases, the physical area in which the cancellation occurs becomes smaller and smaller. The phase cancellation amplitude null at one location becomes a peak at another, then of course there are those nasty room nodes to contend with..
Basically forget about active cancellation unless the source and microphones are in your ears, headphones or earbuds.
Using flat phase/frequency response headphones and HRTF (head-related transfer function) convolution algorithms, given adequate DSP (and programming), virtually any speaker/room combination could be recreated.
That said, making that virtual speaker/room combination track changes with your head movement would require integration of tracking sensors, and because of the time delay inherent in FIR filters would have a lag between the movement and change.
Art
Faithful reproduction (OR: New Dawn Of The Flying Pigs?)
Thanks to the OP for opening this rather sobering thread...
The final blow to my personal delusions of "faithful reproduction"-grandeur came some time ago during a conversation I had with a gentleman who's both a grammy-winning mastering engineer as well as a co-designer/manufacturer of precision-oriented ultra-bandwidth amps.
He merely pointed towards the "elephant in the room": that the only practically relevant "original event" that can theoretically be authentically reproduced in the home is indeed the final mastering take - but of course only if the end user were to clone the exact gear/scenario as in the studio... but being how no two of them are alike (absence of industry standards), which does one bother to attempt to clone?
So one is invariably bound to merely quasi-randomly re-simulating what already is merely a simulation to begin with; the consolation prize one is left with is that one still has, as one veteran speaker designer put it, "plenty of room for interpretation" en route to creating what another termed "a satisfactory illusion".
Achieving a repeatable "apples-to-apples" reproduction standard would indeed have to involve further evolution of mapping to binaural via - like em or not - headphones/earspeakers (couldn't be used in a car however, oh well), with content creators and end users universally adopting identical gear... and for that in turn to happen, it'd of course all need to cost $9.99 given what the mass market is willing to spend on audio these days - or better yet just come free bundled with the TV, right?
In the interim between now and when pigs start flying, let us take solace in our freedom to keep on churning out those (re-)interpretions and enjoying those illusions!
Thanks to the OP for opening this rather sobering thread...
The final blow to my personal delusions of "faithful reproduction"-grandeur came some time ago during a conversation I had with a gentleman who's both a grammy-winning mastering engineer as well as a co-designer/manufacturer of precision-oriented ultra-bandwidth amps.
He merely pointed towards the "elephant in the room": that the only practically relevant "original event" that can theoretically be authentically reproduced in the home is indeed the final mastering take - but of course only if the end user were to clone the exact gear/scenario as in the studio... but being how no two of them are alike (absence of industry standards), which does one bother to attempt to clone?
So one is invariably bound to merely quasi-randomly re-simulating what already is merely a simulation to begin with; the consolation prize one is left with is that one still has, as one veteran speaker designer put it, "plenty of room for interpretation" en route to creating what another termed "a satisfactory illusion".
Achieving a repeatable "apples-to-apples" reproduction standard would indeed have to involve further evolution of mapping to binaural via - like em or not - headphones/earspeakers (couldn't be used in a car however, oh well), with content creators and end users universally adopting identical gear... and for that in turn to happen, it'd of course all need to cost $9.99 given what the mass market is willing to spend on audio these days - or better yet just come free bundled with the TV, right?
In the interim between now and when pigs start flying, let us take solace in our freedom to keep on churning out those (re-)interpretions and enjoying those illusions!
This one seems promising:
AVAA C20 - Active Bass Trap - PSI Audio
Tease mode on: I know Bob told it is fabulous! ( no kidding!).
Tease mode off:
I've heard from someone i trust that these one are effective at what they do but 2500€ /unit...ouch!
Turk: you are welcome to use the expression! But be sure no one copyrighted it! It won't happen this is in french and a regular expression ( used on day to day basis) 😉
AVAA C20 - Active Bass Trap - PSI Audio
Tease mode on: I know Bob told it is fabulous! ( no kidding!).
Tease mode off:
I've heard from someone i trust that these one are effective at what they do but 2500€ /unit...ouch!
Turk: you are welcome to use the expression! But be sure no one copyrighted it! It won't happen this is in french and a regular expression ( used on day to day basis) 😉
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I don't get what you're trying to say here, sorry.
It's simple - the entire sound chain has to be flat from the beginning.
So you start with flat measuring speakers in an anechoic room.
Then you install them in a room and treat it to again measure flat. ("Transparent")
Only THEN, when the entire sound path measures flat in your mastering room,
can you as a mastering engineer add your special flavor to it.
Perfect flat speakers, perfect room treatment.
And THEN you, the mastering engineer, can do all fancy stuff you want using linear phase eq or sideband compression or saturation or whatever.
This wasn't in reply to you...and usually want to wait and think about your post because you ask some really tough questions.
This is a very glass half empty half full type statement. I tend to be on one side of the spectrum, I also said that all enclosures where horns. There is no in between there is yes or no, they areeither the same or different, to which, they are the same, in the aspects to which they are the same as opposed to to the differences. The similarities are much higher than 50%. Room acoustics still applies, for us, to signal. It still all starts with the signal so once again this common plane.
my theory has already been proven in a netlfix episode lol!
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80237094?trackId=200257859
She would take the Mastering Engineer, the Loudspeaker engineer, the Room acoustics engineer, etc, etc, etc, and set them down at one table, remove their titles and tell them to create.
You will never defeat this approach to design
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I don't know i've not seen one in real yet neither seen pictures of what is really in nor opened so i can't tell.
From the description it seems to be something like that but PSI is a serious company so they may have not displayed the whole technology. I know this is for lowend so a bit of delay should not hurt too much but if they use some software treatment it'll have latency...
Turk: oh un cousin de la belle province! Enchante, et on dit pas 'compris,' on dit 'je vous ai compris!' Dedicace au grand Charles qui a bien mis la zizanie avec vos compatriotes anglophone! 🙂 Sacre francais! LoL
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Thats only true if you design a speaker for one specific room and situation.
Not if you want to design a generic "perfect speaker" without random variables that change per listener / setup.
Thats the whole point of this discussion.
You keep on confusing the subject by flipping the goal between "designing the perfect speaker" and "designing the perfect speaker for a unique situation".
These goals are mutually exclusive.
These goals are mutually exclusive.
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