And what about floor and ceiling reflection? How long did it take for them to disappear?
I never found floor reflection to be an audible problem - except when I had seen a measurement of it beforehand 😉
After reading Tooles book I am not sure any longer which of all those reflections are a real problem and which are the product of crude measurement conditions and the false believe that measurement is identical to hearing. Whenever reflection test methods advanced - from isolated chirps and clicks and simulated walls to real rooms and real speech/music - the detection thresholds became less intimidating. For speech we even know that some degree of reflection is better than no reflection. Research into audio scene analysis even tells us, that the brain will easily integrate reflection after reflection - as long as its structure is still resembling the original.
FWIW, the most "surreal" experience I've ever had listening to speakers was with dipole radiators - large electrostatics to be exact. Most everywhere in the room, the sound totally sucked - poor tonal balance, non existent imaging, etc... But when seated in the "sweet spot", it was like being transported to the live event. Oddly enough, most large format or electrostatic speakers measure like crap. By the looks of FR and CSD plots, you'd think they were $49.95 white van specials. But that's certainly not what they sound like.
I consider any reflection that masks spatial detail of the recording as "bad". There are numerous reports of people that experience a more transparent and wider sound stage when first reflections are reduced. At the same time remaining single reflections that "stick out" gain more importance, especially when slightly asymmetrical. My current room had that problem.
What is good for speech intelligibility is bad for other signals. That's exactly the reason why any one-size-fits-all approach (like dipoles) will ultimately fail. The recording needs to be enabled to deliver the appropriate spatial information. Two speakers at +/-30° is obviously not the last word in sound reproduction.
I agree with this as well. In the next week or two, I will start looking at some differences between different EQ locations. Currently, based purely on listening, there are some better locations to EQ to, I suspect that every speaker will be different. Generally I would go for somewhere no further distance than the diameter of the driver. Shape the enclosure to minimize diffraction, use drivers that decay fast in CSD.
Not at all my experince. The first test that I do with any speaker is to close my eyes - can I "hear" the location of the speaker? At CES I could for virtually every speaker there - except maybe the big all alluminum ones. They were pretty good at this trick, but the price - well that's another matter.
I think if you are shooting for 'accurate to the recording', narrow directivity is the only reasonable option down to near the modal region. We have a tendency to look more at the frequency domain w/ regards to this, but there are other issues. AES E-Library: The Role of the Initial Time Delay Gap in the Acoustic Design of Control Rooms for Recording and Reinforcement Systems If you are going for 'spacious envelopment', you could use broad dispersion or narrow cross-fired in a Live End/Dead End room. Surround Sound in a fairly dead or LEDE room can give you both as well.
Wide dispersion speakers probably have more issues sounding overly bright close to reflective surfaces. I think we can all agree to that.
Disappearing speakers? To me that's a mood/sweet spot thing that requires good sound reproduction. It may be easier the better your reproduction gets. Out of the speakers I have, my Mackie get me there faster.
Dan
Wide dispersion speakers probably have more issues sounding overly bright close to reflective surfaces. I think we can all agree to that.
Disappearing speakers? To me that's a mood/sweet spot thing that requires good sound reproduction. It may be easier the better your reproduction gets. Out of the speakers I have, my Mackie get me there faster.
Dan
Of course you can hear the speaker with very dry signals panned to the very left or right. For how long did you sit down in the sweet spot and listen to each speaker?
I normally like that "oh my gosh" feeling. Only once did I hear a pair of speakers that totally disappeared in a small room. It was a pair of Jamo speakers, but I can't remember the model. Most systems tend to sound like they have the wrong polarity, so I really could not comment.
Why would he have been listening ot that? Did Earl bring a bunch of early Beatles stereo tracks to CES? 😛
I would suggest trying mono-recorded vocals such as American Recordings by Johnny Cash. When in the sweet spot, any decent system I've used places him dead center, as it should be. This is only from the that sweet spot, of course.
I can see how Earl's system and preferred setup would allow for more movement off of the sweet spot than most. For me it's not an issue, I listen solo. My wife would be happy with a boom box placed pretty much anywhere.
Dave
That's it. I knew we were all missing something very obvious! It was the aluminum. - Or perhaps it was the salmon moose ? I wish somebody had told us before now we should be building our speakers out of aluminum. Just think - all that wasted BB and MDF. 😱
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBTsMJ4jNk
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Not long, and that's the key. Good speakers vanish instantly, not so good ones takje time for you to adapt to this, but in the end having to adapt somehow isn't right. This may be why there is listener fatigue - having to adapt can be tiresome.
I'm curious, with your systems, if you listen to a recording that has something panned fully left or right, where do you perceive the sound to originate?
Dave
This is certainly an issue. I heard some Wilsons that were not bad in the sweet spot, but it was so precise that you needed your head in a vise. There are six seats in my room. The three across the front are, for all practical purposes, equivalent, the second row are the same across the row, but not quite as good as the front. This and the desire to play at extremely high levels - like a movie theater - dictates some design issues. Those Wilson's were good at that one seat, but didn't play loud and cost an arm and a leg. I didn't see that as a respectable design. But hey, they had a great finish on a kitchen counter substrate, so at least thats something.
I ask because locating speakers, at least IME, is to large extent related to the recording and panning (also assuming good room and seat placement). As I suggested earlier, with something as simple as a mono recording or one engineered with only partial panning to artificially create a "soundstage" (I'm not opposed to that at all) and when I am in the sweet spot (however wide or narrow it may be), I cannot localize any reasonably good set of speakers.
When you say fully left or right, what do you mean precisely? Are you saying that it's a somewhat nebulous left/right not located at a speaker?
Dave
To me the "image" from the recording is quite seperate from "locating the source", this is what I find so disturbing - they interfere with each other. Yes, if my speakers are panned purely to one side then the image is not localizable at precisely any position. It is easier to create a phantom image closer to the centerline than at any off center location.
To me this problem is greatest with horn loudspeakers, which shouldn't be a surprise. SOme horns are just pinpoint locations, left and right. I believe that it is the HOMs which make the source so obviously localizable because when you get rid of those the speaker does disappear. Piston speakers do not suffer as readily from this problem, but they have a whole host of other problems.
There was someone that did the Jordan transmission lines
using MDF, hard wood, and aluminum, using JX92S. Aluminum was the most preferred sound quality.
Back in the 80's, I almost bought a pair of Wilson WATTs, around $3000 at that time.
I spend the last two days at Martina Schöner and i listened to the L`Art du Son speaker that is a 4 way ZDL after my Definition. Ok, we later renamed it into TDL, Total Defraction Loudspeaker or FDL, Full Difraction Loudspeaker but i did not rename the thread.
We listened to some CD but Vinyl mostly. The frontend is a heavy modified Garrard Loricraft 401 with Naim Aro Arm and Lyra Scala. I can asure you that Martina did a good job and this frontend does not rumble audibly and has excellent speed stability.
Our meeting centered around phonostages. We listened to 3 MC stages of my design, a Loricarft Missing Link and a Pre-Pre of my design. Besides comparing this stages that whould span a commercial price range of 300,- € to 5000,-€ we experimented with different power supplies from Battery, Regulated PSU and Mains conditioners and Mains Generators, Stereo and Double Mono. We listened to a diet of only 3 recordings : Hatari Soundtrack - Henry Mancini, Dido - No Angel and Serge Gainsbourg - La Chanson De Prevert. Each and every configuration gave a diffent impression of "space", "image", "size", "focus", "height", "depth", "width", " 3 - dimensionality " or how you dare to call it. For example the Gainsbourg has his voice very close to the microphone. The phonstage that we identified as the "best" ( our taste ) made his voice very big with a lot of information about natural and artificial reverb. On the Dido recording her voice could sound small and one meter high but also as high as 2.5m with much more ambient information. The ZDL was superb at diffentiating this spacial clues and sounded surprisingly well and "not there" even from my seat that was left of Martina and she was sitting in the midle at the "sweet spot". I can not say with confidence that a ZDL is any more correct then any other principle to transport us to the recording venue but it is a fine tool for us to differentiate spacial differences that come from the hardware or the software. What i learned in this two days, or relearned because i am watching that effect more carfully and in isolation, is that a good speaker also need good software played back over good hardware. What you attest to a speaker in an unfamiliar setup can have more to do with what the speaker has to digest and how it is set up. A demo at a typical show will not tell you how good or bad this spaeker is under more favourable conditions unless extrem measures are taken by the manufactures crew to make it sound good under show conditions. I know that. I was at countless shows worldwide as amateur and professional over the last 35 years. Sometimes the magic happend but after the show i felt half dead.
We listened to some CD but Vinyl mostly. The frontend is a heavy modified Garrard Loricraft 401 with Naim Aro Arm and Lyra Scala. I can asure you that Martina did a good job and this frontend does not rumble audibly and has excellent speed stability.
Our meeting centered around phonostages. We listened to 3 MC stages of my design, a Loricarft Missing Link and a Pre-Pre of my design. Besides comparing this stages that whould span a commercial price range of 300,- € to 5000,-€ we experimented with different power supplies from Battery, Regulated PSU and Mains conditioners and Mains Generators, Stereo and Double Mono. We listened to a diet of only 3 recordings : Hatari Soundtrack - Henry Mancini, Dido - No Angel and Serge Gainsbourg - La Chanson De Prevert. Each and every configuration gave a diffent impression of "space", "image", "size", "focus", "height", "depth", "width", " 3 - dimensionality " or how you dare to call it. For example the Gainsbourg has his voice very close to the microphone. The phonstage that we identified as the "best" ( our taste ) made his voice very big with a lot of information about natural and artificial reverb. On the Dido recording her voice could sound small and one meter high but also as high as 2.5m with much more ambient information. The ZDL was superb at diffentiating this spacial clues and sounded surprisingly well and "not there" even from my seat that was left of Martina and she was sitting in the midle at the "sweet spot". I can not say with confidence that a ZDL is any more correct then any other principle to transport us to the recording venue but it is a fine tool for us to differentiate spacial differences that come from the hardware or the software. What i learned in this two days, or relearned because i am watching that effect more carfully and in isolation, is that a good speaker also need good software played back over good hardware. What you attest to a speaker in an unfamiliar setup can have more to do with what the speaker has to digest and how it is set up. A demo at a typical show will not tell you how good or bad this spaeker is under more favourable conditions unless extrem measures are taken by the manufactures crew to make it sound good under show conditions. I know that. I was at countless shows worldwide as amateur and professional over the last 35 years. Sometimes the magic happend but after the show i felt half dead.
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