Start slow and increase curvature as you reach the edge.
One of my designs took that to extremes in the ones in post #5.
A chamfer will give a more effective radius on a typicl box, and they started out with a 0° > 30° > 45° before it folded back to the sides.
dave
The easiest way to weed out speakers which produce an unnaturally big false acoustic image is by playing a mono recording of acoustic music. If the image is free of most reflected and diffracted artifacts, the music will come from dead center between the speakers as it should. If the recording sounds like its stereo and the image extends widely, the reflected and diffracted components are the main contributors in creating the false illusion of stereo.
The poor man's strad is a great design. It addresses most issues with large baffle designs and actually performs better than many narrow baffled speakers in terms of holographic imaging and a solidly centered phantom mono image.
This is matter of listening distance, listen too far away and its like you describe but listen with shorter distance and toe in and the image should get sharp. In my room and speaers transition between the two happens when ear is about 2.2m from speaker. I suspect this distance could be much shorter with some setups and could be somewhat longer with others. Some speakers might have no such thing.
It seems though, that many many people listen too far away and enjoy the hazy sound regardless of speakers. Perhaps they like it, perhaps they don't know that there is "better" sound available almost hands reach, for free 🙂
Nothing wrong with some "fluff and sparkle". Its just nice to listen to mono and get the proper picture presented in front of you. I realize how much I'm dating myself when I mention mono. Its still better than that hard panned novelty stereo we got back in the 60s.
In the old days (when British hifi magazines still had some critical reviews), they used to say mono listening was a good torture test for revealing a speaker's true characteristics.
Rightly or wrongly, I've assumed that the > 12 deg included angle for 'slap' echo/RFZ is sufficient for vehicle truncated aero pods. Ditto, walls, floor, ceiling of custom HTs.
Yes.I owned two very similar speakers-Yamaha NS 1000 and Yamaha NS75T.The baffle,box dimensions,shape and driver type and location are almost identical.The NS1000 has a slightly bigger dome midrange but other than that they look almost identical Both have square baffle edges.
The NS75T images really well but the NS1000 has quite poor imaging.
It would be easy to hear the NS1000 and blame the wide baffle and square baffle edges for the poor imaging but clearly that is not the problem.
I believe wide baffles have been wrongly blamed for poor imaging.Association is not cause..
Hi, I also had a pair of NS1000 years ago and cannot remember how was it like with stereo image. I suspect it is easy to ruin the image with the attennuators, there was pad for mid and tweeter level adjustment and unless they are exactly the same both sides it's quite possible the stereo image falls apart. Its very difficult to adjust them by listening, I remember tweaking them quite often 😀
Your observation makes a point that the image can be quite brittle, problem with speaker(s) could ruin it.
Your observation makes a point that the image can be quite brittle, problem with speaker(s) could ruin it.
Even our beloved EXPERTZ fail to realize that the HRTF at zero degree has deep wide null around 8 kHz you can see it in the equal loudness curves! (EAC/Wiki)
So a third speaker in the middle fail to work as a mono reference!
Do not waste money buying beryllium drivers better look otherwise for peace of mind!
If you feel now bitten hard
reality is a tuff game to play
Greetingz from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hide 🙂
So a third speaker in the middle fail to work as a mono reference!
Do not waste money buying beryllium drivers better look otherwise for peace of mind!
If you feel now bitten hard
reality is a tuff game to play
Greetingz from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hide 🙂
I find it fascinating that a lot of speaker performance metrics I would consider to be solved in a way and largely quantifiable but I haven't really seen much of a consensus on what makes a speaker have good sound stage. Imaging seems to be kinda easy for almost any speaker, I haven't run into a speaker where I couldn't place elements left, center, and right, but creating a stage for the elements to sit in seems tougher.
While subjective, I'm not sure how subjective it really is. Most of my non-audio and semi-audio enthusiast friends would agree on hearing the same things as far as sound stage and imaging goes with speakers I've shared with them. Often they will ask me if they would even appreciate the differences between low fidelity audio reproduction and higher fidelity and I just show them both. Even 'untrained' listeners seem to be quite good at identifying differences.
I think edge diffraction is kind of an important thing here. I'm dealing with a speaker atm that is leaving me disappointed and it has hard edges on the baffle. I swear if I'm in the right spot near them, I can hear the edge that is closer to the driver as a secondary sound source. So it's probably best to minimize diffraction, probably a reason for a lot of high performance speakers pursue fixing that problem.
So far my favoraite speaker as far as sound stage and imaging goes were the Behringer 2030p. I kinda wish they still make them in a passive model because the actives have a different internal volume (I asked behringer and they kinda lied to me about it, if you have both in hand it's obvious one has reduced internal volume). The amp is also kinda junk, pops hard on power on and off.
If you check the ASR review you can see this speaker has surprisingly good dispersion.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...behringer-b2030p-studio-monitor-review.14719/
So my belief right is now that having smooth dispersion and minimal diffraction effects are the key to great imaging and sound stage.
I also think there needs to be some talk on what a wide baffle is. Seems it's mostly anything wider than your typical 7-8" bookshelf speaker baffle. I'd argue it should be defined as narrow, medium, and wide, or something of the like. I think speakers in the medium width baffle area the least forgiving reguiring hefty round overs.
While subjective, I'm not sure how subjective it really is. Most of my non-audio and semi-audio enthusiast friends would agree on hearing the same things as far as sound stage and imaging goes with speakers I've shared with them. Often they will ask me if they would even appreciate the differences between low fidelity audio reproduction and higher fidelity and I just show them both. Even 'untrained' listeners seem to be quite good at identifying differences.
I think edge diffraction is kind of an important thing here. I'm dealing with a speaker atm that is leaving me disappointed and it has hard edges on the baffle. I swear if I'm in the right spot near them, I can hear the edge that is closer to the driver as a secondary sound source. So it's probably best to minimize diffraction, probably a reason for a lot of high performance speakers pursue fixing that problem.
So far my favoraite speaker as far as sound stage and imaging goes were the Behringer 2030p. I kinda wish they still make them in a passive model because the actives have a different internal volume (I asked behringer and they kinda lied to me about it, if you have both in hand it's obvious one has reduced internal volume). The amp is also kinda junk, pops hard on power on and off.
If you check the ASR review you can see this speaker has surprisingly good dispersion.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...behringer-b2030p-studio-monitor-review.14719/
So my belief right is now that having smooth dispersion and minimal diffraction effects are the key to great imaging and sound stage.
I also think there needs to be some talk on what a wide baffle is. Seems it's mostly anything wider than your typical 7-8" bookshelf speaker baffle. I'd argue it should be defined as narrow, medium, and wide, or something of the like. I think speakers in the medium width baffle area the least forgiving reguiring hefty round overs.
Do these have similar HF extension? I've had to add supertweeters to my NS-500YST, 10" servo bass + Be dome mid and tweeter, very early roll-off highs.
Re: dispersion, IMO, at the HF needed for sharp 3D imaging the only way to make a consistent and repeatable-by-others evaluation is to precisely toe-in the speakers so that very HF at the limit of hearing is aimed directly at the ears from front L/R (very easy to check with a tone generator). Only then, with less than 1cm tolerance front-back, will the sound source(s) DEPTH/DISTANCE be precisely registered by the brain, like a well-focused picture image (but in 3D).
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Except the no baffle tweeter is then going to be placed near the midrange with it's cabinet and edges.
Put the midrange without any baffle. Put lots of felt in behind ( and around: you don't want no cardiod nor dipolar emission)