2. speakers
  3. 150549-20253

Pin point imaging isn't for everyone

A subject my posts touch on often is whether pin point imaging is desirable, or natural. While thinking about wide-baffle speakers in another thread I came across this quote, courtesy of Troels Graveson’s DIY speaker site. He quotes famous speaker designer Roy Allison:

I had emphasized dispersion in order to re-create as best as I could the performance-hall ambiance. I don’t want to put up with a sweet spot, and I’d rather have a less dramatically precise imaging with a close simulation of what you hear in a concert hall in terms of envelopment. For that, you need reverberant energy broadcast at very wide angles from the loudspeaker, so the bulk of energy has to do multiple reflections before reaching your ear. I think pin-point imaging has to do with synthetically generated music, not acoustic music - except perhaps for a solo instrument or a solo voice, where you might want fairly sharp localization. For envelopment, you need widespread energy generation.


You can read Troel’s entire post here:

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/Acapella_WB.htm

This goes, kind of, with my points before, that you can tweak the frequency response of a speaker, and sometimes cables, to get better imaging, but you are going significantly far from neutral to do so. Older Wilson’s were famous, and had a convenient dip around 2.4 kHz.
erik_squires

Showing 1 response by cleeds

cleeds
6,119 posts
 
mijostyn
The information that provides the ambient characteristic of the room/hall the recording was made in is in the recording not in the room you are playing it back in. All your Hi Fi room can do is add distortion ...
That might be true if you were referring to a binaural recording intended to be heard on headphones. Or it might be true for a recording intended to be heard in an anechoic chamber. But a conventional recording is intended to be played in some sort of acoustic environment, so your claim makes no sense. And that is all part of what makes our hi-fi hobby so tricky because, of course, those making the recording can't possibly know in what sort of environment it will ultimately be heard.
More to discover