And yet spaciousness is created by the presence of room reflections, if you treat the room you dull these down, so you're losing something by doing so. You can deaden the room as much as you want, but all you're doing is tending towards what headphones sound like and I personally do not want to get anywhere near that with loudspeakers in a room.
Granted, if you've got an overly resonant room with wide expanses of large reflective surfaces then you need to treat it to a certain degree. But to treat a room to the point where a loudspeaker with standard 1" tweeters will give you the kind of imaging that a decent wave guide loudspeaker will give you, in a normally furnished room, is going too far.
It may seem at odds with the hobby in general, but I don't see room treatment as an acceptable route towards improving the sound. This is because it's completely at odds with how normal rooms are put together. With all the rooms in my house it's a case of living first, sound second. If both can be accommodated together then that's a good thing and in the main listening room it generally is, but room treatment simply is not an option anywhere.
Adding in lots of room treatment isn't really an answer to my question though. Maybe I should have been a little more specific, but what type of loudspeaker implementation gives you better imaging than a wave guide.
There is also the fact that a wave guide gives you a wider sweet spot than any direct radiator does. This again is getting back to what I was saying about room treatment. In my mind what we want to be aiming for is improving the performance of loudspeakers in standard rooms, ones without anything special about them and ones certainly without any special attention paid to them with regards to optimising the sound quality. Why? Because this is not what typical rooms are like. Short of putting the loudspeakers in an optimum position relative to the walls and the listening position, one should not have to do much else to arrive at exceptional sound reproduction. If you do, then the system doing the reproduction, is flawed.
As I said before, loudspeakers with direct radiators typically have smaller sweet spots than ones with wave guides, this is a good thing for the wave guide loudspeaker because it eases up on the requirements for actually getting a strong central image in the first place. Sure you might be able to get a nice central image without a wave guide, but your head will be more in a vice. This is not a good thing as it is placing even more constraints on what needs to be done to actually arrive at something that sounds good.
If I move house, I want to have to not worry about whether any of the rooms are going to be suitable for the hifi and whether or not I am going to need to do XY and Z to them to make it sound 'right'. I just want to plonk down the hifi in any room of an appropriate size and have excellent sound reproduction within minutes.
Granted, if you've got an overly resonant room with wide expanses of large reflective surfaces then you need to treat it to a certain degree. But to treat a room to the point where a loudspeaker with standard 1" tweeters will give you the kind of imaging that a decent wave guide loudspeaker will give you, in a normally furnished room, is going too far.
It may seem at odds with the hobby in general, but I don't see room treatment as an acceptable route towards improving the sound. This is because it's completely at odds with how normal rooms are put together. With all the rooms in my house it's a case of living first, sound second. If both can be accommodated together then that's a good thing and in the main listening room it generally is, but room treatment simply is not an option anywhere.
Adding in lots of room treatment isn't really an answer to my question though. Maybe I should have been a little more specific, but what type of loudspeaker implementation gives you better imaging than a wave guide.
There is also the fact that a wave guide gives you a wider sweet spot than any direct radiator does. This again is getting back to what I was saying about room treatment. In my mind what we want to be aiming for is improving the performance of loudspeakers in standard rooms, ones without anything special about them and ones certainly without any special attention paid to them with regards to optimising the sound quality. Why? Because this is not what typical rooms are like. Short of putting the loudspeakers in an optimum position relative to the walls and the listening position, one should not have to do much else to arrive at exceptional sound reproduction. If you do, then the system doing the reproduction, is flawed.
As I said before, loudspeakers with direct radiators typically have smaller sweet spots than ones with wave guides, this is a good thing for the wave guide loudspeaker because it eases up on the requirements for actually getting a strong central image in the first place. Sure you might be able to get a nice central image without a wave guide, but your head will be more in a vice. This is not a good thing as it is placing even more constraints on what needs to be done to actually arrive at something that sounds good.
If I move house, I want to have to not worry about whether any of the rooms are going to be suitable for the hifi and whether or not I am going to need to do XY and Z to them to make it sound 'right'. I just want to plonk down the hifi in any room of an appropriate size and have excellent sound reproduction within minutes.
Again, crude generalisation! You do make a lot of generalisation! so for you, room treatment is all created equal. Its not a science where of course you dont just put treatment everywhere in your room and hope for good results.
Maybe thats why you like subwoofers, because the only way to have good bass in a room, without subwoofer, indeed may well be with room treatment.
I have two 14 inch thick floor to ceiling bass traps, and it sound much much much better in the bass, its pratically like another speaker. The difference is so major that I cannot belive then anyone can have clean bass without bass traps. And many thinks that also.
I wonder how have you treated your room, what have you tried, ect.
To make sure your bass traps reflects highs therefore not making a room too ``dead``, theres a multitude of ways to make sure highs are reflected like putting tin foil paper kraft on the front of your absorption panels.
If you ahve a well treated room, and thats a question, how important it is to have a wave guide? Where is a waveguide much different?
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I think that's the key point. Some folks may be enthusiastic enough to have dedicated listening rooms with special room treatment etc. However, for most of us, decisions about what furniture to buy and how to arrange it are not made by the hifi.
"I'm sorry dear, we're going to have to move house. The size/shape of this living room doesn't suit my new loudspeakers" would certainly not go down well in the average household.
You are partially right. Treating the room can get you good results.
But lets be real, these are your options:
1-You can put a lot of sound absorbers and diffusors and other nasty and ugly things on your walls, ceiling and floor and use dome tweeters. You can get the imaging right IF you know what you're doing
2-Use a waveguide in a loudspeaker
I choose option 2 because it is better in my book in every way possible.
I have a thing or two to say about this part of the post but i just have to make sure what kind of bass traps you have 🙂 Can i see a pic of bass traps you've installed ?
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Who ever said that waveguide will do anything to control the bass frequencies ? Apples and oranges again.
Do you people read what everyone is writing or you just want to argue ? Arguing just for the sake of arguing is stupid.
I would strongly disagree with this position. Remember that controlling the directivity is not enough, it must be narrow AND controlled and that CANNOT be done with piston-like sources. It is a physical impossibility. No piston source has constant and narrow directivity, only waveguides can do that.
High efficiency is required for low thermal modulation and to get high directivity. It was not a goal per-see
This CAN be done, but there is little advantage to using a direct radiating cone piston as it is not as well controlled nor as efficient as a compression driver. Remember that the wavefront at the throat should be nearly flat. A cone does not do that, but a flat piston ala an aluminum honeycomb does. My first OS waveguide was made with such a device and it worked very well.
I have used large format compression drivers several times. On an OS waveguide the response above 8 kHz was always poor in terms of control and power output. Most horn beam at these frequencies which is why you don't see this problem with most devices. The problem with a lower crossover is not the compression driver however, it is the size of he waveguide to do this.
Then you do not understand how a direct radiator works. they always narrow. And you obviously have not looked at many polars if you think that a direct radiator is in any way comparable to a waveguide in directivity control.
It is not really necessary below about 700 Hz. So why compromise > 700 Hz for something that doesn't matter so much?
In theory dipoles are not "bad", they just present more problems than they solve.
I would suggest that all of the available data suggests that this range actually is the least important perceptually, or at least 200 - 700 Hz. Below 200 Hz its all modal and not solved with the speaker system design. 700 Hz - 7000 Hz is absolutely the critical range. Read Griesinger if you want to see why that is.
This just is not true. A "well treated" room should be lively or the sound will be dead sounding. Your proposal would yield a dead room with - maybe - a comparable center image as a waveguide. I am not too sure that you have much evidence supporting your position except "it sounds good to me."
This is absolutely correct, but not really the point is it? We are talking about the best that can be done, not the best that a given room (that can't be changed because of WAF) can do.
Just got back from my trip to Alaska. Most of this thread is right on the money. A few people do not seem to fully understand how loudspeakers interface with rooms and perception. It is a difficult topic without an extensive literature, but there is some. It is all fairly consistent.
a well treated room
This has not been my experience at all. I have a devoted sound room, very well treated, mostly with 2inch 703. In some places I have doubled up the 703 for a 4 inch thickness. The only things dead are those dreaded nasty reflections/or echoes, if you will. The music that plays is alive and breath taking, with a deep and wide image, depending upon the music source, of course.
p.s. WAF is not a limiting factor in my home. Just because those who are "not allowed to" does not mean those of us who are, are wrong.
This has not been my experience at all. I have a devoted sound room, very well treated, mostly with 2inch 703. In some places I have doubled up the 703 for a 4 inch thickness. The only things dead are those dreaded nasty reflections/or echoes, if you will. The music that plays is alive and breath taking, with a deep and wide image, depending upon the music source, of course.
p.s. WAF is not a limiting factor in my home. Just because those who are "not allowed to" does not mean those of us who are, are wrong.
what?
I never said that a treated room should be dead. In the contrary, you have to make sure that when you put bass traps, make sure to add a way for the highs to be reflected in the room to make sure the room doesnt become to dead.
Yes, but what else is in the dedicated sound room? A proper lived in room tends to have a fairly wide assortment of 'junk', if you like, placed about it. These serve to break up and scatter those 'dreaded nasty reflections/or echos'.
My bathroom for example, without shower curtains, has loads of those reflections, add in the curtains and it sounds like a normal room. If your dedicated room is fairly Spartan in it's furnishings, then you will need a certain amount of treatment, as it were, to get it to sound like a normal room.
At the university I attended they had a dedicated listening room with sound treatment, but this was because the room had nothing in it besides a couch and the hifi.
My bathroom for example, without shower curtains, has loads of those reflections, add in the curtains and it sounds like a normal room. If your dedicated room is fairly Spartan in it's furnishings, then you will need a certain amount of treatment, as it were, to get it to sound like a normal room.
At the university I attended they had a dedicated listening room with sound treatment, but this was because the room had nothing in it besides a couch and the hifi.
Bass traps wont affect imaging though, which is what we are talking about. You said you'd added room treatment to the effect of deadening the reflections that would otherwise impair the systems imaging capabilities. The only way you're going to do this is by putting room deadening treatment on the side walls and possibly the ceiling.
And my experience is the exact opposite of yours. But I have done may rooms like this, not just one.
"The music that plays is alive and breath taking, with a deep and wide image, " - Wow almost no one ever says something like that! 🙄
The data is clear however that more "room treatment" there is the less "spaciousness" there will be - they are opposing tendencies. "Nasty reflections" come from poorly managed speaker directivity. You can't have a live room and poorly designed speakers - dead rooms help to shield the listener from the speakers flaws, but at the sake of spaciousness. I prefer both thank you very much.
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