That's because the headphones have a very big diaphragm and are very close to your ear or are smaller but even closer (plugs).
The room modes work the same, no matter what level you are listening to. The decay of the drivers indeed becomes worse though, the resonance ridges often get a lot longer and rise a lot in level because with high excursion the unlinearities rise a lot with the level. In addition to that, the asymmetrical motor shows a lot more and then the non-harmonic distortions sheer explode.
Did you try the subsonic filter? It will help a lot. If you listen to music on the computer, you can use a plugin, on a phone/tablet there are apps for that.
Stereophile defines muddiness as ill-defined or congested.
I'd say the main speaker related cause is a non-pistonic driver. This could be caused by cone material (flex) causing IM or harmonic distortion, crossed too high (cone breakup), being over-driven.
The main amplifier cause would be clipping due to being overdriven or current limiting in a low impedance situation.
In terms of room cause, a high energy room could mask an otherwise clean / detailed speaker - with lots of reflections.
I am also assuming the sound is typical across all your music / tracks and not certain recordings. It could be a bad recording - highly compressed.
Do things sounds muddy at low levels? or muddy "everywhere"?
I'd say the main speaker related cause is a non-pistonic driver. This could be caused by cone material (flex) causing IM or harmonic distortion, crossed too high (cone breakup), being over-driven.
The main amplifier cause would be clipping due to being overdriven or current limiting in a low impedance situation.
In terms of room cause, a high energy room could mask an otherwise clean / detailed speaker - with lots of reflections.
I am also assuming the sound is typical across all your music / tracks and not certain recordings. It could be a bad recording - highly compressed.
Do things sounds muddy at low levels? or muddy "everywhere"?
Have a read of this post https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/190663-sparkling-treble-sibilance.html#post2604196 and the subsequent ones. You may change your mind on the advantages 😉 It's what convinced me to try the steeper slope and it worked for me.
Note that in my situation I suspect it was a combo of better suppression of the midbass break up and less strain on the tweeter (possibly more the midbass, as the tweeters are supposed to be able to handle a low crossover with lots of power). I also suspect that the better phase matching played a part. If you were to look at the on axis FR response plots of both implementations of the crossover they were very similar. I didn't take off axis measurements but I suspect doing so would reveal some nastiness in the 2nd order version of the crossover. I've subsequently done off axis measurements of the 4th order implementation and the behaviour is good.
Tony.
With all these descriptive BWs it's about boost in relation to adjoining BWs in particular and relative to the full range tonal balance in general, so no specific frequency AFAIK if for no other reason than we all hear the same, yet not so much, which combined with myriad combinations of source material, electronics, room, speakers, etc, means that probably every opinion/belief posted will to a greater or lesser extent be true depending on all the variables of each app.
GM
Works for me; play a vocal only track and boost different sections and/or individual frequencies [if possible] in the ~250-440 Hz BW and listen to how it impacts the vowels/speech intelligibility.
GM
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FWIW: HOW TO EQ SPEECH FOR MAXIMUM INTELLIGIBILITY
How to EQ Speech for Maximum Intelligibility - Behind The Mixer
GM
How to EQ Speech for Maximum Intelligibility - Behind The Mixer
GM
It's sometimes cool to play around with a good old graphic EQ just to get the feeling of what frequency range has which effect.
And when you're done you can set up the smiley face again … 😉
Regards
Charles
And when you're done you can set up the smiley face again … 😉
Regards
Charles
If it's intermodulation or the room making sound muddy, EQ shouldn't help much. Then it's not a frequency balance issue.
Defo said he has tried several 2-way speakers and listens to metal at moderate spl levels. In his case muddiness could come from anywhere. Listening and measurements with controlled changes in the system are needed to find the real nature and cause of this. I would start with repositioning of speakers and listening triangle in the room.
I have settings for all LR4 and all LR2 in mys dsp-controlled 4-way speakers. I like LR2 better, but at high spl LR4 gives more clarity (subjective, not measurable), obviously because of less intermodulations and less stress (excursion and power requirement) in the low band of each driver.
Defo said he has tried several 2-way speakers and listens to metal at moderate spl levels. In his case muddiness could come from anywhere. Listening and measurements with controlled changes in the system are needed to find the real nature and cause of this. I would start with repositioning of speakers and listening triangle in the room.
I have settings for all LR4 and all LR2 in mys dsp-controlled 4-way speakers. I like LR2 better, but at high spl LR4 gives more clarity (subjective, not measurable), obviously because of less intermodulations and less stress (excursion and power requirement) in the low band of each driver.
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If the definition of muddy was known, wouldn't it then be obvious what the cause was?
Speaker cable can ruin good speakers. I bought some multi strand silver plated stuff. I knocked one of the new speakers over bent all the banana plugs. Quick temporary fix with some solid copper speaker cable made a huge difference. I'm using anti cable stuff now but the price of some of that means it's not the bargain price it once was.
Juhazi, why not share what you do to eliminate muddiness? I'll start...
Attend to all response variations without using EQ (except at driver level). Ie at the original cause of the variation, especially in the low hundreds of Hz and thereabouts.
Attend to all response variations without using EQ (except at driver level). Ie at the original cause of the variation, especially in the low hundreds of Hz and thereabouts.
Basic cause of muddiness is poor frequency response. The closest thing to experience some of it would be to unplug the midrange and tweeter drivers from a good sounding 3 way loudspeaker or perhaps listen to a bad recording. I have heard many times at local soccer games how the voice of the commentator was very muddy sounding and I guess it must have been a poor microphone. The cheap ones have horrid frequency response but tone controls can help.
Yes of course. But does the OP use "muddiness correctly"? Could there be several reasons for this?
I haven't actually heard or corrected muddiness myself. But perhaps I just don't hear it? Or haven't defined/called it as it? Who else here has heard Defo's speakers in his room - do you agree with him about muddiness? In my litterature (perception of) poor clarity is different, but close.
The seven bad dwarfs pic is good, and if we follow it, muddiness might be excaggeration of 200-300Hz range. This happens to be the range where we typically get floor reflection (with 2-ways) and perhaps combined with front-wall reflection (causing nulling), both of which fight against muddiness!
Muddy is "lack of clarity due to extra content, usually dark tones" which has nothing...not much to do with linear distortion such as frequency response, phase match, phase distortion, amount of directivity etc. though listening impression could have some similarities with actual extra sound content.
Different types of intermodulation distortion and mechanical resonances produce extra sound content i.e. muddiness.
To avoid muddiness and a not clear sound image, you need to have tons of headroom, headroom on the amp and the speaker drivers
I know a friend who had the same problem, now he has a B&W 800D (MKI) amped with Luxman M300 amps and a Luxman C300 preamp. It sounded very muddy on that setup when he was playing very complex symphonic and prog metal, but now he did put a 10dB pad between the pre and the power amp (so he's maximum playing half power) and it sounds way better and still loud enough. The same occurs when he listen to classical music (and he likes the more bombastic stuff like Wagner and Mahler). For less complex music there is absolutly no issue on that setup without the pad...
His theory is that he now has more headroom on the (input of the) power amp wich avoid distortion of the signal and so creates a clearer sound with the same setup in the same room. And i have the feeling he could be right.
I know a friend who had the same problem, now he has a B&W 800D (MKI) amped with Luxman M300 amps and a Luxman C300 preamp. It sounded very muddy on that setup when he was playing very complex symphonic and prog metal, but now he did put a 10dB pad between the pre and the power amp (so he's maximum playing half power) and it sounds way better and still loud enough. The same occurs when he listen to classical music (and he likes the more bombastic stuff like Wagner and Mahler). For less complex music there is absolutly no issue on that setup without the pad...
His theory is that he now has more headroom on the (input of the) power amp wich avoid distortion of the signal and so creates a clearer sound with the same setup in the same room. And i have the feeling he could be right.
I'm with ya right up until the "singer" starts to ummm sing. I like bands like Slipknot and Pantara where the singer oftentimes is screaming but I don't understand the appeal of the "Cookie Monster" rarrrr. I like to think it's not my age that prevents me from understanding it's appeal but I don't get it.
AFAIK, there is no point in having a zobel network if you can get nice matching roll-offs without one.
I.e it's only really "required" if you cannot get the driver roll-off your aiming for otherwise.
Or am I missing something?
Yea true as long as any impedance rise is on the other side of the roll off but with second order XO's at high volume they may not be working as they normally do.😡
Then you have to take into consideration that the muddy sound that you are referring to probably starts off sounding maybe OK but after a little while is when you start to hear the sound degrade? If that's the case it could be from compression in the drivers voice coils from the heat. 🙁
Combine all of this together and your impedance is all over the place and you phasing is also likely to start going out at certain frequency's as well. 😱
I'm not familiar with the speakers you mention so I can't comment on them specifically (I've always built my own.) but looking at the XO's can tell you a lot.
Headphones are around 64 ohm's and they are driven with amps that put out 15 watts on average so not apples to apples.
So the lesson here is you need to make your own speakers. That's what I do and it works for me.😀
That is weird because the amp and pre-amp are of the same series and are matched. They are designed to play well with each other. So effectively he changed the gain structure by attenuating the voltage coming out of the pre-amp by a couple of volts. The amp should be able to play just as load as long as it can reach full out put with in the limits of the volume control. This is the way we would put a base volume knob on sub woofer amps in car audio before they started coming with them. Only instead of a fixed resistor we would use a potentiometer.
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