I am just in two minds, regarding the front wave.
If you had never heard of radical toe-in you'd be happy? Then pretend you don't know what it is and keep things conventional.
Radical toe in once more
Hi all. I have bi-directional floorstanders, two way speakers with identical treble and woofer on the front and the back. Half of the sound goes to the front drivers, half to the back.
The toe-in of this type of speaker is very influenced by how the back sound wave and the reverberant sound behaves. These speakers often sound good with radical toe-in due to better room acoustics with a longer back wave towards the corners.
This is a huge topic, and my question is more restricted: what happens with the front firing sound?
Is there an "inherent" problem with radical toe in, when the main sound from the front drivers cross in front of the listener, instead of the more conventional setup where the crossing point is behind the listener - and if so, what?
Is this (potential) minus factor in fact low, if the listener is just a foot or so back of the crossing point?
Showing 2 responses by erik_squires
The question is, what is ideal toe-in. It depends, and lots has to do with how tweeters and mids sound off-axis. In many cases speakers are designed specifically for zero or no toe-in. This allows for a wide sweet spot and may actually smooth out the tweeter and mid response. Especially true for metal domes. Listening on axis is actually wrong for a lot of speakers designed for the average home listener. The radical toe-in idea comes from the idea of attempting to minimize side wall reflections. The idea is to move more of the energy into the room before it gets reflected, hopefully improving imaging and spacial cues when other alternatives ( moving speakers away from side walls, absorbent panels, etc.) are not possible. Take a look at figure 4 in this review for the MoFi coaxial speaker that's been in the news. The off-axis response is superb, but still you can see how the tweeter output goes down off-axis. Then also look at the on-axis response you can see how exaggerated the output is at the very top octave. This is a speaker you probably want to listen to somewhat off-axis for best response, but which will give you a very nice broad listening area. |