After building speakers since about 1968 (as a hobbyist), I'd have to say that the most perfect speaker will be one that works best with the acoustic situation of the listening room. Unless the speaker is pretty bad in other ways, or the recording is poor, this is likely to be the weak link.
If I was going to produce a speaker system for the market, I'd include an active processor (probably all analog) that would multi-amp the speaker for tight cutoffs (24dB.oct.) and general accuracy, and it would have four Baxandall tone controls that allow pumping up the low bass and/or creating the perfect sounding "Loudness Compensation" curve and/or correcting a bad recording. I've been living with that for decades (my own design) and am completely pleased with it.
For the speakers themselves, in my fairly conventional apartment living room I prefer open-baffle towers for 100HZ and up, with separate closed box actively EQ'd woofer cabinets that can be independently moved around for best interaction with the room. Towers with built in woofers can be great, but being able to put the woofers against the front wall at the floor (but not in 3 surface corners), while the towers are out from the wall several feet seems much better. By using a line array for 100HZ - 1.4kHZ (four 5 inch drivers from the floor up to about 35 inches and tilted back by about 10 degrees) I get considerably less comb filter effect due to floor and especially ceiling bounce. My Seas Millenium dome tweeters are about 42 inches off the ground and that seems about perfect to me. If you have a woman living with you, the speakers may need to be right up against the wall, which doesn't work well with open-baffle speakers. Reflections of less than about 6mS cause some kind of psycho-acoustic effect that isn't good. So OB's must be out at least 3 feet from any walls. But are otherwise my choice.
If I was going to produce a speaker system for the market, I'd include an active processor (probably all analog) that would multi-amp the speaker for tight cutoffs (24dB.oct.) and general accuracy, and it would have four Baxandall tone controls that allow pumping up the low bass and/or creating the perfect sounding "Loudness Compensation" curve and/or correcting a bad recording. I've been living with that for decades (my own design) and am completely pleased with it.
For the speakers themselves, in my fairly conventional apartment living room I prefer open-baffle towers for 100HZ and up, with separate closed box actively EQ'd woofer cabinets that can be independently moved around for best interaction with the room. Towers with built in woofers can be great, but being able to put the woofers against the front wall at the floor (but not in 3 surface corners), while the towers are out from the wall several feet seems much better. By using a line array for 100HZ - 1.4kHZ (four 5 inch drivers from the floor up to about 35 inches and tilted back by about 10 degrees) I get considerably less comb filter effect due to floor and especially ceiling bounce. My Seas Millenium dome tweeters are about 42 inches off the ground and that seems about perfect to me. If you have a woman living with you, the speakers may need to be right up against the wall, which doesn't work well with open-baffle speakers. Reflections of less than about 6mS cause some kind of psycho-acoustic effect that isn't good. So OB's must be out at least 3 feet from any walls. But are otherwise my choice.
I tend to disagree. I have been shopping for headphones lately and was literally shocked because of the in general very poor quality of the majority of headphones on the market, I really had not expect this. Have you for instance ever listened to a Beats Audio headphone ? terrible all over. Most Grado's are spitting in your ears, most consumer headphones have way too much sloppy bass etc etc. They also tend to sound totally different from each other, more so then loudspeakers do nowadays.
I allready own a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones with a decent headphone amp and while these have a very good reputation (and are amongst the better sounding ones that I have heard) my loudspeakers easily beat them in terms of detail, soundstage, dynamics, tonality, low level resolution and coherence. So headphones perfect ? I'm afraid not, and I don't even consider my own loudspeaker to be perfect.
I'm not up on the latest headphones, although I did hear some amazing high-end phones about a year ago. I'd be interested to hear more about these speakers you have that you feel sound way better than even the Sennheiser HD600's.
As described here most likely, http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/aksa/229568-naksa-vs-others-again.html. I've recently heard something similar, done by a member on this forum and driven by heavily tweaked Naim gear. Very "exposed" sound, if something is not 100% it stands out strongly - but I have heard it get into the good zone, and there it was doing an excellent job ...
Yep, that's a brief description of my system. It's not perfect but it does something right that I rarely hear in other systems. I'm a sound engineer and in my work I hear a lot of instruments playing live. I always listen to the instruments unamplified before I put a microphone in front of it and this has become a sort of reference to me. Most systems just lack the micro and macro dynamics and the low level resolution to portray a real instrument with a long decay in the notes. That's something the smaller AMT's, the high efiency featherlight coned midrange (with a RMS of <0,5 !!!) and the twin 15" woofers in open baffle is capable of. Still not as good as live but in a way believable.
As with all loudspeakers in the world my own loudspeakers have their own set of compromises. A loudspeaker without compromises simply doesn't exist and I think it is too often ignored that the room,the loudspeaker and the amplifier act as one system not as seperate components and should be matched to each other. So, what is the perfect loudspeaker ? My answer to that is : It depends
Maybe these guys ? Phantom
They claim they have developed a system that is up to a 1000 times better than any existing loudspeaker in the world. 🙄
Wouldn't it be nice if this marketing bla bla was right for once ?
As with all loudspeakers in the world my own loudspeakers have their own set of compromises. A loudspeaker without compromises simply doesn't exist and I think it is too often ignored that the room,the loudspeaker and the amplifier act as one system not as seperate components and should be matched to each other. So, what is the perfect loudspeaker ? My answer to that is : It depends
Maybe these guys ? Phantom
They claim they have developed a system that is up to a 1000 times better than any existing loudspeaker in the world. 🙄
Wouldn't it be nice if this marketing bla bla was right for once ?
Jay1111 said:
In physics there is a strict rule about gedanken (thought) experiments: they may invoke technology yet to be invented, but they can't violate known physical laws - unless of course the intention is to test the limits of those laws in which case carefully planned violations are acceptable. Audio requires no such violation, so we can no more have perfect patterns from a finite size speaker than a radio engineer can have an isotropic radiator.Scottmoose said:
We could, perhaps, envisage a 'perfect piston' in order to calculate the frequency response and dispersion it would give. Then we would see how far short we fall even from this limited 'perfection'.
My gut feeling is that this will do the job, if all the little, extra details that are so important are also taken care of - wait and see if enough falls into place, for enough people, so that the concept does take off ...
That is some pretty cool looking tech - very futuristic - almost expect to see them hovering and following you around the house
Loudspeakers do a lot of things, many of which require contradicting properties. And then… there is the issue how loud do you wish to do this thing??
What I see are several layers.
The situation is confused by at least two things, first one normally depends on the quality of a recording to contain something real, in reality, with nearly all recordings, the stereo image is entirely or party composed at the mixing board and if done well “sounds like” the real thing.
Second is, and this is my take on it, our hearing and brain compose a 3d audio experience out of the input from our two ears and this has been learned through your life time AND everyone’s ears are a little different just like our eyes are.
Part of that learning process is rejecting noise; things that your brain has learned don’t matter and are not part of your conscious audio experience. That is why you can take a high resolution measurement of speakers in a room and be horrified by the deep comb filtering and yet you don’t really hear that, deep notches only mean “missing information” and your brain fills that in without your knowledge. At the far extreme of this is the cocktail party effect where on just a few snippets of sound across the room, you can still follow the conversation in your head.
On the other hand, the missing information is still missing and while they say you can’t hear comb filtering, you can usually hear it if you move around and you can certainly hear the effect when removed and the information restored.
If you have decent headphones and a measurement style microphone, you can strip away some of that spatial processing by presenting your ears with exactly the same thing on each side.
Connect the mic and headphones, ideally have some friends talking nearby and set your volume to a realistic level. Listen to the sounds around your house, your friends talking and listen for a little while so you get used to the world in glorious mono, without the noise rejection your brain has or the forward directivity your ears produce.
That being the case, you will hear all kinds of stuff in the background you would have to decide to listen for normally (because it’s usually rejected).
After you are used to how real your friends and room sound, put on your most revealing recordings, play through one speaker first. Now, you will hear more room that you’re used to but you will likely also hear colorations in your speaker more clearly because your ears aren't rejecting it "for you". If you do this outdoors with the speaker up on a ladder etc, you only hear the loudspeaker itself and i have also found this useful developing loudspeakers for work.
At this level, a loudspeaker used for accurate reproduction would like any other part of the chain be able to under go a number of generations if inserted into a generation loss recording test.
Very few loudspeakers can actually go more than a generation or two before being unlistenable so the industry is far from the standard of a faithful reproducer.
Part B is the room, when your outside, the only sound that reaches your ears is the direct sound and ground bounce.
We are SO used to the ground bounce that if you go into an anechoic chamber it sounds absolutely WRONG. Outside, with one listener, directivity essentially doesn’t matter except it governs how much total acoustic power you need to radiate to reach X SPL at distance X, the more directional, the less power is required.
Indoors, the room can help but most often hurts what can be done compared to outdoors, the reflections are not a part of the recording but IF there is large enough, deep enough ITG or initial time gap between the direct sound and train of scattered reflections, the reflections are nice.
This means, no reflections from side walls or radiations from speaker edges, nothing ideally other than ONE radiation from ONE point in space and time like the speaker signal converted to sound pressure. In directivity, Horns and large panel speakers can have an edge. Large panels generally radiate a figure 8 with little to the sides usually and by the time the rear radiation has reflected off the back wall, it is often far enough behind not to mess up the ITG. Horns are uni-directional, if large can radiate very little energy outside the pattern but normally produce an interference pattern with the mate at crossover and are larger and more difficult to deal with generally.
Generally, the more directivity the speaker has, the larger the area in front where the direct sound dominates, the near field and where listening is best.
So, how does one define what ideal is in terms one could measure or quantify? The only auditory way to quantify I ever found was those generation loss tests on loudspeakers.
Try listening to them with a measurement mic and decent headphones, move the move around while listening .
Best,
Tom
Danley Sound Labs
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