The death of stereo recordings and stereo systems has been predicted repeatedly and come to naught.
In large part due to the lack of willingness for most consumers, including movie buffs, to invest in more than a 2 channel system.
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Don't get me wrong, there are expensive and cheap seats and, unlike in a lot of audio, you always get what you pay for! :)
What I mean is, the idea that my listening position will no longer convey the location of the performers accurately because of dispersion or phase or timing issues vanishes. The violin or the singer or the piano sound arrives at my head without the degradation possible by attempting to reconstruct the music via 2 speakers. Or 20 speakers. The imaging in real life is always correct.
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You know, I think of the "sweet spot" for speakers completely differently than I do for live music, especially acoustic.
To me, the sweet spot for a speaker is tonal and spacial. That is, that it preserves a stereo image within it AND sounds good.
In a live environment, the idea of losing the stereo image does not apply to me at all. The musicians and instruments exist in the space and as I move around the "quality" of the image remains constant. There’s no concept in my mind of finding a listening location where I have "good imaging" in a live performance. It is all good.
Of course, being too close and too much at an angle of a symphony orchestra I won’t hear all the instruments equally well, but the imaging is always accurate.
This is not the same of course as wanting to be surrounded by the musicians.
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We must have divergent views on what constitutes imaging. Magico S7 give a very wide & expansive presentation. However, they lack focus and create their own ’space’. Nebulous and homogenized is how I hear them.
Well, I’m not a Magico fan boy, I just think they are commonly heard speakers we can use as a common experience to discuss. :) Also, the problems with their imaging is not so much that they don't image, it's' that they need so much width or extremely well treated rooms. |
I feel that there are at least 2 speaker brands which prove you can have really good imaging and a really wide sweet spot, given a wide enough room.
Revel and Magico.
Don't these two brands prove that great imaging in the center and very good off axis listening is not mutually exclusive??
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I'm with Toole and the papers cited here. I've heard Vandersteen and Thiel and I could not really tell you they were better in any respect which was outstanding compared to other speakers which did not pay attention to perfect phase response.
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I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe the research into head related transfer functions (HRTF) can teach us is that we localize sounds based on the complicated comb filtering caused by the shape of our heads, body, ear and even our hair styles.
It's not phase, it's amplitude that seems to matter here.
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We are talking about the time/phase of ONE speaker used in stereo pairs. Waveform coherence is not L/R time delta.
Conversely, tweaking the FR, including off-neutral, can enhance the perceived image greatly. |
Acoustic controls could often be, or generally, more powerful impact than the upgrade of any piece of gear
Yep, and a good sounding room will often gets people off the merry go round of gear buying and trading. "What kind of cables will fix the boomy bass? My speakers are too bright so what kind of power conditioner do I need" all sorts of issues audiophiles go chasing vanish. |
I'd like to push back a little bit against the idea of a speaker with a wide sweet spot not being great in the middle.
Let's take 3 common models, the Magico S1 Mk II, Revels and modern Wilsons.
They all have great imaging in the center spot, but the Wilson's dont do as well off axis.
I think this blows out the idea that you can only get a great sweet spot with a narrow one.
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What you really want is a crossoverless ESL with a 45 degree dispersion angle.
You misspelled line array. :-) |
I hope everyone reading this understands that I wanted to celebrate a wide sweet spot much more than caring about who an audiophile is. Experience has led me to believe you guys only read threads that seem contentious though, so I had to lead with that. ;-D
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I am all for good crossover parts, as I think may be evident in past tweets, but the width of the sweet spot is going to be much more affected by the crossover frequencies chosen than the cost of the resistors.
Other things matter, of course, like the width of the baffle, and the dimensions of the individual radiators and their location, but once those are set, it is the Hz at which the crossovers occur which determine whether or not there will be smooth off-axis response.
Best,
E
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Duke / @audiokinesis Does a very good job above of summarizing the reasons why, @tazz2
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The only down side of wide dispersion is room interactions are stronger and the room becomes more important.
Yes, indeed, though the Ohm Walsh crowd seems to be OK with this. Maybe because some were only omni's up to a point? |
No need to fret on endlessly about this one. That is the entire point of a discussion forum. :-) |
Even a system that is defined as having a "wide" sweet spot will still
sound it's very best in only one location. You can't change physics. I agree, but I'm talking about how rapidly this happens. With wide sweet spot speakers (wsss) there's no feeling of a detent in exactly that spot. In fact, it's hard to hear exactly when you are there or not. |
