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 simonmoon

simonmoon's avatar
simonmoon
571 posts
 
I also think Mr. Allison is a bit off base.

I have had several speakers with ’pinpoint’ (precise) imaging, without a strict sweet spot. I have a pretty broad listening area, with precise imaging.

When it comes to accuracy, in almost every way (timbre, dynamics, detail, attack and decay, etc), I am all on board.

But if pinpoint or precise imaging, is considered inaccurate, I have no problems with that sort of inaccuracy. I am not willing to give up accuracy in those other aspects, for more precise imaging, but that does not seem necessary with many speakers. 

After all, I’m sitting a smallish sound room, that is almost impossible to recreate an orchestra, or jazz quartet, rock band, etc, with completely accurate scale or power, so a little extra exaggerated imaging helps fill in the gaps for me. It servers to help suck me into the performance just a bit deeper.
More to discover