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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 prof

prof
3,511 posts
 

I hear quite precise imaging in live unamplified sounds.

I was recently in a city park in which a large group of people were playing a variety of percussion instruments, large and small.  Eyes closed, the direction of the instruments were quite well defined.  I could point with good precision to any instrument I chose.

As to "point point imaging" that actually remains a bit too vague.  Just "how pinpoint" would be be talking about?  In one sense it can mean images squeezed to tight they have become miniaturized spots of sound in the soundfield.  "pinpoint sized."  On the other hand it can mean simply "the sound coming from a precisely localized space."  Which to me certainly doesn't sound bad and is actually how I experience most sounds.   So not sure which we are talking about, or if it's somewhere in between.

In any case,  I have come to value precise imaging.  It's not simply due to the visualization effect, but live sound sources to me have the characteristic of density and palpability, not a sense of being diffuse.When a speaker "lines up" the sound sources well, the sonic impression to me is that the instruments take on that added solidity of the real thing.

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