@nandappe i have order the MA200M i have to wait 10 weeks to receive it
@jan.didden the idea is reproduce localisation of instruments/voices mainly and what we can from the soundfield
@maudio on your lx mini it's the horizonatal position of the speaker wich give you the 3D soundstage? but you need minidsp and many correction for this, no? my idea was to make it withe fewest electronic and correction as possible
@Scottmoose this is the reason why i like very much your second suggestion it's look like simple. actually for amplification i have NAD C356BEE and i working on a build F5m.
now i have build with speaker with different drivers (MAOP 10, sb20, chn50p) i suppose to make something like this all the speaker of this have be the same?
"OT on" @Scottmoose have seen my email through your website for the design of a speaker with ma 200+chn50? "OT off"
@jan.didden the idea is reproduce localisation of instruments/voices mainly and what we can from the soundfield
@maudio on your lx mini it's the horizonatal position of the speaker wich give you the 3D soundstage? but you need minidsp and many correction for this, no? my idea was to make it withe fewest electronic and correction as possible
@Scottmoose this is the reason why i like very much your second suggestion it's look like simple. actually for amplification i have NAD C356BEE and i working on a build F5m.
now i have build with speaker with different drivers (MAOP 10, sb20, chn50p) i suppose to make something like this all the speaker of this have be the same?
"OT on" @Scottmoose have seen my email through your website for the design of a speaker with ma 200+chn50? "OT off"
my experience is different.
If you have loudspeakers playing to the point you cannot hear any difference between original and reproduction
I tested this with instruments I own which I recorded on myself in the near field listening simultaneously to digitally corrected point source loudspeakers.
Maybe a big stage and orchestra is a different, more complex thing.
But you can easily have a bad sound in the opera being too far away from the stage getting only indirect sound.
Sitting in the first third of the room is different.
So the lamento of loudspeakers being the limiting factor. Its not my experience.
If you have loudspeakers playing to the point you cannot hear any difference between original and reproduction
I tested this with instruments I own which I recorded on myself in the near field listening simultaneously to digitally corrected point source loudspeakers.
Maybe a big stage and orchestra is a different, more complex thing.
But you can easily have a bad sound in the opera being too far away from the stage getting only indirect sound.
Sitting in the first third of the room is different.
So the lamento of loudspeakers being the limiting factor. Its not my experience.
Agree with @Freedom666. IME live orchestra "soundstage" (or bass sound for that matter) is hardly "high fidelity"; nor is soloist or small ensemble live on stage ever "pin-point imaged" (or should be). Even from the best seat in the house (see below). The recordings if done well (mostly, for my areas of interest) are musically able to reproduce the most important, artistic and communicative aspects of live music (see SQ glossary) -- but (sorry) only if the audio system/playback/hearing is extended and flat, coherent in time and phase, and therefore transcient perfect. And, fidelity is fundamentally limited by bandwidth (at the ears, and the brain).
... I'm a life-long fan(atic) of Early Music and have sat the closest to Gustav Leonhardt (unobstructed hands, fingers barely caressing the keys yet generating incredible chords); Colin Tilney WTC (sat behind his shoulder, so-sweet mosquito-level clavichord); John Holloway (full-body Chaconne bow in my face); Monica Huggett (incomparable short-necked authentic all-pock-marked Amati); Jordi Savall many times (solo in Beijing, ensembles in Berkeley etc.); Avi Avital (Chaconne on mandolin in BJ); John Fleagle (Machaut Remede de Fortune, then Medieval folk tunes with horse-hoof toy prop, his final concert, and for children) -- these are but a few of my most treasured memories. Not front-row but among my "gold standards" for evaluating audio: Anne-Lise Berntsen's Engleskyts soprano/organ at the Grace Cathedral in SF; Savall's Folias and Canarios for which I made a trip to NYC (1/1999 concert was titled Canarios and Romanescas). Last-minute balcony seats with my son & daughter-in-law at Carnegie Hall, Gergiev/Municher's Bruckner cycle finale 11/2019 (some musicians hugged each other) alas shortly before the pandemic stopped travel. The CDs obviously weren't of the performances/venues I had heard live -- recordings being less spontaneous -- but hey they just have to do.
... I'm a life-long fan(atic) of Early Music and have sat the closest to Gustav Leonhardt (unobstructed hands, fingers barely caressing the keys yet generating incredible chords); Colin Tilney WTC (sat behind his shoulder, so-sweet mosquito-level clavichord); John Holloway (full-body Chaconne bow in my face); Monica Huggett (incomparable short-necked authentic all-pock-marked Amati); Jordi Savall many times (solo in Beijing, ensembles in Berkeley etc.); Avi Avital (Chaconne on mandolin in BJ); John Fleagle (Machaut Remede de Fortune, then Medieval folk tunes with horse-hoof toy prop, his final concert, and for children) -- these are but a few of my most treasured memories. Not front-row but among my "gold standards" for evaluating audio: Anne-Lise Berntsen's Engleskyts soprano/organ at the Grace Cathedral in SF; Savall's Folias and Canarios for which I made a trip to NYC (1/1999 concert was titled Canarios and Romanescas). Last-minute balcony seats with my son & daughter-in-law at Carnegie Hall, Gergiev/Municher's Bruckner cycle finale 11/2019 (some musicians hugged each other) alas shortly before the pandemic stopped travel. The CDs obviously weren't of the performances/venues I had heard live -- recordings being less spontaneous -- but hey they just have to do.
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Could you say more about the two apparently different speakers, and the particular layout's effect/listening experience? I have not tried this layout but did test other L-R types. A hard-panned-right sound R would reach the much more acute right ear first and strongest, then wrap around head to the left ear much weaker and delayed, joined by -R "in opposite phase" fired by (one) rear left speaker. The theoretical problem with this scheme, is that very high frequency would not reach the left ear as -R, but become phase-randomized by the inexact/arbitrary travel distance, i.e. may as well be +R or any other phase; so the interference at the left ear might be constructive or destructive depending on frequency and exact head position (like comb-filtering). Making R less coherent at the left ear, maybe that's the idea? But the rear left +L similarly comb-filters with front speaker L, albeit weaker (hearing is most acute at an angle frontL/R not straight ahead nor to one side). Net effect when I tested some arrangements of L L-R R-L R was that L/R panning became partially neutralized and soundstage narrowed. Confusing?
I tried many different connections and finally settled on this one.
The only way to judge the effect is to actually listen to it.
With this connection, balanced and tube amps can be used without any problems.
It is best to use the same drivers for all of them.
Hi Pierrick59,
It would be better to use the same driver, but I want to keep the side speakers small, so I use different drivers.
They are less peculiar and fuse well with drivers of similar efficiency.
Thanks, next time I have those drivers out together I'll give it another try. Know exactly what you meant by "with this connection... without any problems."
@Pierrick59 I guess this was one reason why I wrote "one to six speakers depending on many things." The gist(s) of L-R | R-L, so called Hafler Differential wiring or (many) similar schemes, were to partially cancel R-panned sound from the left side of the room (and L-panned sound from the right side of the room), and (if only one rear satellite used) to somehow mess up and neutralize rear wall reflections (as I understood/misunderstood it). Turning the room into headphones so-to-speak. Many issues, including wiring incompatibility with bridged amps, and what I wrote earlier (low frequency fine, very high frequency random). Anyway, there are lots of ways to use more speakers, or bipoles firing in several directions (second nandappe speaker); or dipole, omni, cardioid LX, noncardioid LX, etc. etc.
To a large extent the solutions depend on the listening position(s) and environment.
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@ejp He couldn't tell the difference under stated conditions using point-source (and transcient perfect) speakers. I agreed with this part too.
That starts with the dac. It also requires the whole system to be good enough. Probably electrostatic speakers, or at least Magnepan speakers. One or more subwoofers may be needed for LF transient punch and other very LF content. Then speaker placement in the room needs to be carefully considered, and the room treated as necessary to control reflections as needed. DSP by itself can't solve all the problems with speakers and rooms. A dac that reproduces localization cues accurately is not all that common in the more popular part of the consumer market. Unfortunately, a really good system with a deep and wide holographic sound stage is not cheap and easy to do. Besides, even if someone goes to all the trouble with the system, not all recordings contain well recorded localization cues.
On the subject of speakers, one of the things large electrostatic speakers can help a lot with is doppler distortion and related problems with cone speakers. However, there are a couple of articles about fixing those distortions in cone speakers electronically which can be found in recent editions of AudioXpress.
Anyway, if you want to know how to do it, various people here can tell you about the various parts of the problem and what your options are. Maybe I could help with the dac part, which already can get complicated enough.
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I'd appreciate learning about DAC issues. When the Chord Hugo came out I got one and Wow! But nowadays I just cloud-stream my own WAV files to (my third) Huawei P10plus, the original ultra phone developed by the same team that did iPhone (according to my source).
What a bunch of...
You are changing reality with fidelity. You are trading fidelity for reality. The comprehension of the reality might be compromised by our senses, brain, culture, religion etc. but...bandwidth !? The 20-20000 Hz spectra should be there in the recording, and should exit from the speakers 'as is'.
What's hi-fi and what's an human being!?
20Hz or so to 20kHz should be plenty of bandwidth. The problems with reproduction are to reproduce accurately what maybe one pair of condenser mics picked up in a concert hall. That includes the sound of all the instruments and the sound of the room, and the reverberant decays of all those sounds as could be heard at a choice seat in the concert hall. That sense of spaciousness is often flattened in a plane between the two speakers of a stereo system. Instruments are often vaguely in the left or right speaker, or vaguely somewhere in between. That's not everything the condenser mics picked up however. Reproducing all they picked up and doing it well is rather involved, but it can be done pretty well given enough of the right kind of effort.
Hi @Pierrick59 I'd love to chime in because opera is a dare subject for me. Disclaimer: I'm annoying as hell, abusive and I'm an audiophile snob even though my stereo is punching well below $10k. Or maybe not. Hopefully I'm about to be banned at the ASR board and I'm proud of it.
What you can achieve with this discussion is to set the bar. You can pick some opera recordings you love and ask people around what exactly they hear with those recordings, use this board for speaker DIY build and use the super best audio friends for gear tune up suggestions. It's not about money, you can often spend $50 here and $50 there and get a totally new sound level.
For the bar, you absolutely can achieve the level when your system sounds about as good as individual instruments. Also, it should beat any amplified venue by a large margin. E.g., it was mentioned above that some amplified opera with singers and orchestra using microphones sounded like crap. It sure was. I attended about 100 operas in my lifetime, including 20+ The Met, ~2 Berlin Opera and the rest all kind of much lower venues all across the Europe. The amplified ones sounded like crap. The Met is the best, it's never amplified. Good seats are extraordinary, bad far seats may actually sound worse than a good stereo.
What you can compare is the dynamics, clarity and soundstage. I have DIY Tang Band W6 2313 computer desktop speakers and decent gear. In terms of dynamics they are poor compared to any live sound, so I'd ask someone else for setting the bar and good solutions. But in terms of clarity and soundstage I'm already almost in the nirvana. I recommend those recordings to compare what you already have: Verdi Requiem. Tidal has about 40 variants. This is a complete bad *** challenging music, 50 piece orchestra and 50 ppl choir. And you can compare a bunch of them.
Here my snob part for which I'm trying to get banned at ASR - the Hi Res requiem variants should sound better than CD, for example this one is great - https://tidal.com/browse/album/221530642?u. At any given moment of time I am able to pick 2-3 live instruments from the orchestra and 2-3 singers from the choir. In terms of soundstage it's very wide left to right and the speakers must completely disappear, you should not be able to point the finger from where the sound comes. My system right now has not very deep soundstage, but it's fixable and I know this recording can go deeper. You can ask people around what exactly they hear to compare.
In terms of speakers - you can use this forum to collect DIY recommendations, but don't rush until you understand. Your initial idea with 16 speakers was bad, it's going into the wrong direction. You must have a large 3-way system for the opera. I suspect that separate cabinets for the mid and tweeter, and then a separate one for 2 side firing woofers.
From what I saw, the best system I think for the opera is this one:
. Except I think slightly smaller but dual opposite firing woofers should be better.
What you can achieve with this discussion is to set the bar. You can pick some opera recordings you love and ask people around what exactly they hear with those recordings, use this board for speaker DIY build and use the super best audio friends for gear tune up suggestions. It's not about money, you can often spend $50 here and $50 there and get a totally new sound level.
For the bar, you absolutely can achieve the level when your system sounds about as good as individual instruments. Also, it should beat any amplified venue by a large margin. E.g., it was mentioned above that some amplified opera with singers and orchestra using microphones sounded like crap. It sure was. I attended about 100 operas in my lifetime, including 20+ The Met, ~2 Berlin Opera and the rest all kind of much lower venues all across the Europe. The amplified ones sounded like crap. The Met is the best, it's never amplified. Good seats are extraordinary, bad far seats may actually sound worse than a good stereo.
What you can compare is the dynamics, clarity and soundstage. I have DIY Tang Band W6 2313 computer desktop speakers and decent gear. In terms of dynamics they are poor compared to any live sound, so I'd ask someone else for setting the bar and good solutions. But in terms of clarity and soundstage I'm already almost in the nirvana. I recommend those recordings to compare what you already have: Verdi Requiem. Tidal has about 40 variants. This is a complete bad *** challenging music, 50 piece orchestra and 50 ppl choir. And you can compare a bunch of them.
Here my snob part for which I'm trying to get banned at ASR - the Hi Res requiem variants should sound better than CD, for example this one is great - https://tidal.com/browse/album/221530642?u. At any given moment of time I am able to pick 2-3 live instruments from the orchestra and 2-3 singers from the choir. In terms of soundstage it's very wide left to right and the speakers must completely disappear, you should not be able to point the finger from where the sound comes. My system right now has not very deep soundstage, but it's fixable and I know this recording can go deeper. You can ask people around what exactly they hear to compare.
In terms of speakers - you can use this forum to collect DIY recommendations, but don't rush until you understand. Your initial idea with 16 speakers was bad, it's going into the wrong direction. You must have a large 3-way system for the opera. I suspect that separate cabinets for the mid and tweeter, and then a separate one for 2 side firing woofers.
From what I saw, the best system I think for the opera is this one:
Ideally you should be able to point to the exact spot somewhere between the speakers for each virtual sound source, just as you would be able to do if sitting close to the to the stage in the audience. In this case the space between your speakers approximately represents the width of the stage (or of the concert hall -- depends where the mics are pointed).
It is important that your system is truly flat down to 20Hz as a minimum, preferably lower. I worked in a few large and well-known concert halls and venues in London and the subsonic content surprised me. It is important to be able to reproduce this LF as it adds much to the realism when reproducing the acoustics of large enclosed spaces; it might not be apparent that the sub is needed as there is no obvious subsonic source in the orchestra (ok, some percussion perhaps) but it's very obvious if it's suddenly turned off. A little of the magic simply disappears.
I am a great fan of surround speakers subtly implemented - none of this helicopters flying behind one's head nonsense though! Again, if done properly they are, apparently, inaudible until switched off and the illusion of space and height collapses.