Do you have a source for this?
Anyhow, I am quite sure that this is true, because of this:
The "untrained" listener is usually (?) someone who does not listen intensely and concentrated to the music, and does not focus itself on stereo image, detail or anything. He just wants to listen to music, probably anywhere in the room or even in another room. For this kind of listener, an omni is perfect, because a good one does all that.
For me, omnis have to many drawbacks to use them under my listening conditions, except if I need real nearfield speakers.
Baseballbat
Wrong !
Simple answers are here, right here at this forum !It appears that 2 media channels can provide quite satisfactory results.
It also appears that the biggest problem of stereo at the user end is interaural cross talk (*). Then it follows any method removing unwanted cross talk, OR any method mitigating the perception of unwanted cross talk can be an improvement over traditional stereo triangle.
The above mitigating function can be fulfilled simple by specific pattern of early listening room reflections.
Very simple !
* Fundamentally stereo is based on low frequency interaural cross talk at freq range where ITD dominates (See Blumlein patent 1931). BUT the problem is interaural cross talk at higher freqs around and above about 1kHz.
- Elias
saturnus, im not sure if you miss my point or agree with it. Recording mics have flaws, which an engineer tries to correct as naturally as he can. Necessary, but not ideal. Maybe he should use flatter mics? Possible, but few use anything other than the standard mics for bass, guitar, cymbal. Robustness, reliable and predictable, with as real a output as possible. It is correct for the engineer to do this, I certainly dont want to hear a mic's signature diaphragm resonance. Like i say again, a good eng does this well because he knows his equipment and its flaws.
If the engineer did not do a good job and the recording lacks a nice sense of space, MAYBE adding in your own rooms sounds is more pleasant, but if the recording has good amounts of phase information captured particularly well by Blumlein and ORTF styles, then adding anything to those is not beneficial. A good recording can be holographic in nature, but it's very low level detail that makes these holographic presentations work. It's the little drawn out reverb tails that tell your brain you are in a particular space. You can't mask that and have the same sense of space. Does it really transport you to the venue and fool you? Of course not, but it can do a commendable job.
There is simple test to make for how strong a rooms presence will be on the sound. If you walk into a room and you immediately 'hear' the rooms sonic signature affecting your voice, it will add that same signature to your reproduced music. A well treated room will have a neutral sonic signature neither sounding too dead and lifeless or too bright and reflective.
I agree with Tom Danley that in general, omni designs make everything sound the same, particularly in a live room or too close to the wall. They can sound eerily good though with close mic'd, small groups or solo performers. Sound like I need two systems now...
As an aside, I wonder if pro engineers become particularly sensitive to the sound of rooms and can no longer shut that off in their brains. We walk into a facility and the first we do is take good listen to the tracking rooms. We want to know what the rooms sound like to get an idea of how to place the musicians and the microphones. If the room sounds good, we want to capture it, if not maybe we minimize the naturally captured ambiance and then add artificial back into the mix. The same thing holds true for recording a performance venue.
Greg
By the time anyone is done building and testing a loudspeaker, I humbly suggest they no longer qualify as an "untrained listener".
I don't believe there's such a thing as a "typical" listener, nor do I think there's a "typical" living room. For there to be a typical room, it would need to be in a majority cluster in the center of the curve, and I think with all the different sizes, floor plans, furniture arrangements, window treatments, ceiling styles... I really doubt you'd find a statistically significant cluster to call "typical". It is, of course, to Harmon's benefit to convince people such a mythical beast exists as then they can sell "one size fits all" products. But we all know one size does not fit all. (At least, women know that!)
But this is a silly discussion to be having on a do-it-yourself forum, isn't it? It would be like discussing one size fits all patterns on a sewing forum. The whole point of doing it yourself instead of buying ready made products is you can tailor a piece to your needs. I think it might be more productive, if, instead of championing one principle over another, people would describe their listening preferences, their space, and how they tailored their loudspeakers to meet their needs.
(Greg, do you clap your hands when you walk into a strange (new) room?)
I don't believe there's such a thing as a "typical" listener, nor do I think there's a "typical" living room. For there to be a typical room, it would need to be in a majority cluster in the center of the curve, and I think with all the different sizes, floor plans, furniture arrangements, window treatments, ceiling styles... I really doubt you'd find a statistically significant cluster to call "typical". It is, of course, to Harmon's benefit to convince people such a mythical beast exists as then they can sell "one size fits all" products. But we all know one size does not fit all. (At least, women know that!)
But this is a silly discussion to be having on a do-it-yourself forum, isn't it? It would be like discussing one size fits all patterns on a sewing forum. The whole point of doing it yourself instead of buying ready made products is you can tailor a piece to your needs. I think it might be more productive, if, instead of championing one principle over another, people would describe their listening preferences, their space, and how they tailored their loudspeakers to meet their needs.
(Greg, do you clap your hands when you walk into a strange (new) room?)
By the time anyone is done building and testing a loudspeaker, I humbly suggest they no longer qualify as an "untrained listener".
(Greg, do you clap your hands when you walk into a strange (new) room?)
Not sure if the wink means you are not serious, but I have to respectfully disagree with you here. The general level of the best DIY has reached an amazing point, but for every great project, there are tons of others out there that are really bad. Being an educated, trained listener takes years or critical listening AND learning from others to point out how and what to listen to. When I first started assisting at a mastering studio in town, the engineer would make small changes to EQ and compression and I could not even hear the difference in an A/B scenario, but now those subtle, maybe 1dB differences do not escape my perception. Making a couple of speakers does not get you there. I'm good and I'm not even close to some guys I know who can call out ranges or frequencies down to +-50hz. I'll say something like, "There's a problem in the upper bass range", but some other guy might say,"there is a resonance around 160-180hz". I'll be damned if they are not correct most of the time.
And, yes I'm that weird guy who always points out the sound of a new space to my friends. Clapping, clicking making sounds and talking loudly to see what it sounds like.
for the purposes of the test such a listener is asked to focus on some aspects and to make comparisons
again I am with Linkwitz:
because simply not known, even by experts, and usually dismissed on basis of some theories and a very limited listening experience - casual or even worse - on an audio show, without any serious investigation, not to mention any attempts at optimization
Last edited:
it is not just another person in the thread, the "professional bias" is Dr Floyd Toole's hypothesis:
Attachments
Wrong !
It appears that 2 media channels can provide quite satisfactory results.
It also appears that the biggest problem of stereo at the user end is interaural cross talk (*). Then it follows any method removing unwanted cross talk, OR any method mitigating the perception of unwanted cross talk can be an improvement over traditional stereo triangle.
The above mitigating function can be fulfilled simple by specific pattern of early listening room reflections.
(bolds are mine)
Elias is 100% right, it is all perhaps about getting a low IACC in the first place, Dr Toole writes a lot about it in his book
You are very much welcome
BTW
anyone wants golden ears?
Moulton Laboratories :: Golden Ears
KIQ Productions
interestingly Moulton is a prominent advocate of wide dispersion (uniform 180 degrees horizontally) loudspeakers
I totally agree with you. Critical listening is a skill, as much as playing an instrument is a skill. There's a big difference between someone that has learned three chords and can struggle through a song, to someone that can play a whole set of covers in a bar, to someone like Jeff Beck who leaves other guitarists scratching their heads in wonder.
But I included "testing" to weed out those who simply throw a few speakers in a box and stand back with pride. I do think most here are far beyond the "untrained listener" that Baseballbat mentions.
Of course, with all the computer programs and new test gear at our disposal now, there's still a chance people aren't listening. A group of friends built a studio in the '70s, real top tier stuff - 24 track 3M, Harrison board, UREI monitors... and one of them was totally frustrated that a guitar player we knew kept saying my recordings of him in the '60s, done with just a pair of 664s and a Sony tape deck, sounded better. Thing is, with only one knob, I spent hours on mic placement, listening, moving, listening, moving... and my engineer friend thought he could plop a Neumann in the room and make it sound good from the control room. (Natch, the fact that in the '60s he was playing a Les Paul with PAFs through a Tweed didn't hurt....
)But I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that are listening more than they're reading graphs, and that they haven't damaged their ears too badly with all those power tools.
Then he is biased...
Maybe Linkwitz is right with the quoted claim. But it doesn't imply that omnis are accurate (or more accurate than other CD speakers). He is well known for his dipole speakers, and I believe he would not advocate them if an omni is better.
Also, it is quite easy to build CD speakers with a conventional design. Of course, they can't be exactly CD below the baffle step, but if you sufficiently lower it (below the transition region of your room), you will get a similar result as with omnis or dipoles.
Baseballbat
I guess there is nothing more to add other than I see it as a requirement that omnis should be acoustically small as well, which is not always the case.
The problem with this paragraph is that people could think they wanna be in this professional camp and hence they want to like highly directional speakers. It has an aspect of the power of suggestion, imho.
(and I am not saying that highly directional speakers have a problem. Directional speakers are good in several ways. But only if they are directional bottom to top).
yet focused and biased don't mean the same
he is best known for dipoles but he designs omnis too:
Pluto introduction
You mean that 1st order lateral reflections will be effectively exact copies of the direct sound? Because this is the desired result
its a jedi mind trick
Stereo IS a "jedi mind trick". Reproduced sound is an illusion. For hifi, folk are looking for either, (as often ambiguously stated*), 'you are there' or 'they are here'.
Either way, it's an illusion, cuz even when these states are achieved you are not there and they are not here.
The hifi objective, not always articulated well, is to reproduce the illusion intended by the recordist. What we can do is reproduce all the signal on the medium without it being modified or masked by the reproduction equipment and the room.
So you have to decide what to about the room and the speakers.
Dead room and lots of sources?
Live room and fewer sources? What sort of live room?
Some sort of compromise?
What sort of compromise should be optimal?
Stereo IS a "jedi mind trick". Reproduced sound is an illusion. For hifi, folk are looking for either, (as often ambiguously stated*), 'you are there' or 'they are here'.
Either way, it's an illusion, cuz even when these states are achieved you are not there and they are not here.
The hifi objective, not always articulated well, is to reproduce the illusion intended by the recordist. What we can do is reproduce all the signal on the medium without it being modified or masked by the reproduction equipment and the room.
So you have to decide what to about the room and the speakers.
Dead room and lots of sources?
Live room and fewer sources? What sort of live room?
Some sort of compromise?
What sort of compromise should be optimal?
If you point somenone to a special feature then he is biased.
I know. But why is he advocating dipoles then?
They'll be "exact" as an omni's reflections are "exact". Just at another level, depending of directivity.
Baseballbat
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.