The room correction or speaker correction? What can we do with dsp power now availabl

As sine waves do not occur in nature the HAS has not developed a means for using them.

Derek, where did you come up with that idea. What type of sound waves do you think we listen to, Square waves in nature? Does a violin not create sine waves, a tree falling in the forest? All recorded music relies on sine wave production. I don't follow what you are trying to say with that statement? Some people seem to be aware when the phase is reversed with an inverting amplifier and the impulse response is 180 degree reversed. That all relies on sine waves to our ears to be aware of a positive or negative energy waveform.
 
The heart of the matter....

Hi Kindhornguy,

Your question is spot on, it will be the same question on the lips of all the other guys reading this thread.

Surely we all listen to sine waves all the time...?
Surely"soundwaves" are all there is ...Waves of sound...?

No, no and for the avoidance of doubt no!

We can come on to music in a moment, but first think of any sound found in nature.
By definition, it is not a wave.
Physically it does not travel through the air (or water or solids) in waves.

In simplest possible terms, all sounds are just a momentary increase in air pressure (compression) followed by a gradual decrease in air pressure ( rarefaction) and then a leveling out back to ambient air pressure.

Thats all there is. That is the only way the HAS detects sound!
(We can ignore jaw / scull bone conduction and body cavity resonance at ULF as that is not applicable to audio / musical sounds in this discussion.)

The sound of wind, rain, waves, lightening, birdsong, animal calls, snapping twigs, avalanche, everything....All natural sounds.

Digging deeper....
Take the sound of a drop of water falling into a pool of water.
Now imagine you draw a graph of this, you have what looks like an impulse response, but is actually a step response.

Now join a few 100 or a few 100,000 of these together (the sound of a perfectly uniform waterfall) and you have what looks like a wave / sine wave but it is not!!
All it is is a series of step responses all linked seamlessly together.

That is why, in music there is no difference at all from a transient sound like a drum strike, and a piano hammer strike and the decay....This is important, the hammer decay is only a series of increase / decreases in air pressure, exactly the same as the initial transient just lower in level....Decays back to ambient.

Digging deeper still, even a continuous note created by a wind instrument, voice or violin are all composed of a series of transients and decays....Vibrating reed, vibrating vocal cord or vibrating strings....All simply compressing / rarefying the air.

Now switch to an electrical signal generating and you can generate a sine wave....At this point I would refer you back John Watkinsons paper I attached as he elaborates on this in a more concise manner than I can.

I really honestly hope I am doing this point justice and managing to convey the gulf of the difference between real world sounds and lab equipment / signal generators.....
In closing, we need to focus on drivers / hardware /software that mimic real sounds not sine waves!!!!!!

Thanks for reading this far and all the best
Derek.
 
A series of step responses is not a sine wave!

Derek,
A rarefaction and compression wave would seem to be the definition of an acoustic sine wave.

No.....Not by any definition, sorry but no!

A singular or a series of any number of compression / rarefaction events are defined by time not amplitude.....
Each individual event has a clear start and stop time, it / they are not continuous....
Even when produced / reproduced one after the other they are in fact individual events and understanding them and "seeing" them as such is key to understanding how sound is created / transmitted and then decoded by the HAS.

Again, as John points out, perhaps more concisely than I have done:

All acoustic sine waves are electronically generated and they contain no time domain information, therefore no directional information, information.

Does this help at all ?
Thanks
Derek.
 
Morse code, thats it!

The answer is morse code....
Think of very sound ( apart from electronically generated sine waves!) as morse code.....

dot for a compression - dash for rarefaction.
The entire sound start to finish may only be 1 dot and one dash, say a snapping twig.
Or the sound could be a single kick drum strike, big dot big dash (tall impulse spike) followed by a series of dots / dashes reducing in height of impulse spike as the drum skin vibrates and dissipates the energy.

Does this make any sense?

Cheers
D.
 

TNT

Member
Joined 2003
Paid Member
Derek, this is one array of 25 Vifa TC9 FD18-08 drivers as measured at the listening position in a living room with these settings:
wfs.jpg


As unsmoothed as it comes in REW. If you want to see the top end you've got to come listen to it first (don't want to start a comb filter discussion) and I'll show it afterwards. Take it for what it is, the average SPL reads ~ 70 dB and the plot goes down to 44 dB on the bottom. In my living room. Hardly the conditions in which the BMR or ATC were measured at I'd say... :D

I made this plot a while ago to show differences in a change of settings in the DSP used by me for my thread.

"Use CSD mode" makes the plot look much nicer when ticked. I dont really get what it is doing... ?

/
 

TNT

Member
Joined 2003
Paid Member
Tnt,

The document is about sound and how air pressure at the ear drum is increased or decreased by sound ie a snapping twig or musical note.....Not raising the air pressure in a sealed box....Do you really think John is unaware that one can seal a box and increase the internal air pressure???;)

If you can find a sound with an infinite transient then one could argue that air could sustain a pressure change.....But as far as sine waves are concerned, once the HAS as analysed the first few cycles there is no more information to be retrieved.

As sine waves do not occur in nature the HAS has not developed a means for using them.

Ok, but then if air can't sustain pressure change, taken your specific case, we wouldn't hear anything really, would we?

//
 
I think your description has gone badly astray. Here is the phenomenology, as abbreviated as possible

From point of view of our subjectivity nature generates sounds which are sustained and sounds that are transient.

We are immersed in a field of sound from which some sounds are heard as meaningful: a broken twig, music, highway noise, speech, the breeze, bird song, and so forth.

This sound field can be captured by a microphone, generating an electrical signal analogous to the sound field, which may be recorded on a medium.

We can mechanically or electrically regenerate a recorded signal from a medium and send it to a mechanical or electrical transducer which vibrates analogously to the signal it receives, thus re-producing, (with varying degrees of accuracy), the original sound field. And from that sound field arises to our subjectivity some sounds that are meaningful; for example, speech or music.

If we wish to improve any aspect of this process, then we must do physics.

The successive compression and rarefaction of liquids, solids and gases is a wave, even if it is only one compression and rarefaction, and may be represented as a sine wave.

What we call a transient sound, such as produced by hitting the edge of snare drum or a block is a very short collection of waves.

Is your concern the timing of the reproduced collection of waves?


Hi Kindhornguy,

Your question is spot on, it will be the same question on the lips of all the other guys reading this thread.

Surely we all listen to sine waves all the time...?
Surely"soundwaves" are all there is ...Waves of sound...?

No, no and for the avoidance of doubt no!

We can come on to music in a moment, but first think of any sound found in nature.
By definition, it is not a wave.
Physically it does not travel through the air (or water or solids) in waves.

In simplest possible terms, all sounds are just a momentary increase in air pressure (compression) followed by a gradual decrease in air pressure ( rarefaction) and then a leveling out back to ambient air pressure.

Thats all there is. That is the only way the HAS detects sound!
(We can ignore jaw / scull bone conduction and body cavity resonance at ULF as that is not applicable to audio / musical sounds in this discussion.)

The sound of wind, rain, waves, lightening, birdsong, animal calls, snapping twigs, avalanche, everything....All natural sounds.

Digging deeper....
Take the sound of a drop of water falling into a pool of water.
Now imagine you draw a graph of this, you have what looks like an impulse response, but is actually a step response.

Now join a few 100 or a few 100,000 of these together (the sound of a perfectly uniform waterfall) and you have what looks like a wave / sine wave but it is not!!
All it is is a series of step responses all linked seamlessly together.

That is why, in music there is no difference at all from a transient sound like a drum strike, and a piano hammer strike and the decay....This is important, the hammer decay is only a series of increase / decreases in air pressure, exactly the same as the initial transient just lower in level....Decays back to ambient.

Digging deeper still, even a continuous note created by a wind instrument, voice or violin are all composed of a series of transients and decays....Vibrating reed, vibrating vocal cord or vibrating strings....All simply compressing / rarefying the air.

Now switch to an electrical signal generating and you can generate a sine wave....At this point I would refer you back John Watkinsons paper I attached as he elaborates on this in a more concise manner than I can.

I really honestly hope I am doing this point justice and managing to convey the gulf of the difference between real world sounds and lab equipment / signal generators.....
In closing, we need to focus on drivers / hardware /software that mimic real sounds not sine waves!!!!!!

Thanks for reading this far and all the best
Derek.
 
From your waterfall screen dump, it can be seen that you use this option in REW.

//

Yes, and?....
Nothing is missing from that plot that would add to the point I tried to make.
Care to show one at your listening position?

Your avatar gif animation wesayso... are you saying "shut-up"? :)

//

You might recognise David Lee Roth, it's the very last part of the video for "Jump".
Guess what he's saying ;)

I got this...

//

Did the Mathworks Matlab compiler runtime (MCR) 2013a 8.1 install correctly? All of them for the right OS e.g. 32 bit or 64 bit?
 
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Derek,
I think as your early post on how a speaker was looked at as a piston and how that was so off base is also going on here with the generation of sound. All sounds we hear are sine waves and that is why we can record them as such. I just don't know where you come up with some of this thinking? We do not listen to single impulses, that is not how our ears work. The way you describe things we are listening to square waves with instantaneously produced impacts and instant infinitely fast ending of those impulses. Speakers don't work that way and neither do ears. We listen to sine waves.
 

TNT

Member
Joined 2003
Paid Member
That's why I asked :). Your sentences are a bit short and I didn't get that part.
Hope your second try works...

2:nd try:

In REW, using waterfall display, and in its Control panel; there is a "Use CSD mode" tick box. What does it do?

For me, checking and unchecking this option makes a big difference in what is displayed - mostly in time.

There... :)

//