Do YOU have a flat frequency response in your room?


The most basic truth of audio for the last 30 years is listeners prefer a flat frequency response. You achieve that through getting the right speakers, in the right position, in the right room, and then use room treatments and DSP to dial it in. If you are posting questions about what gear to buy and have NOT measured your room and dialed it in to achieve a flat frequency response FIRST you are blowing cash not investing cash IMO. Have you measured the frequency response in your room yet and posted it?

 

kota1

@esarhaddon , you make a great point. Are you hearing what the engineer heard when they mixed it. That is called the "circle of confusion" and is one of the topics that paper attempts to address. Check out the diagram (Fig. 1) on the second page and then the author states:

Significant uniformity throughout the process is needed if customers are to hear what the artists created. This is the “circle of confusion” shown in Fig. 1. For the system to function sensibly, mixing and mastering engineers need to experience sound that resembles what their customers will hear. Acknowledging that audio systems in widespread use are not necessarily very good, audio professionals in the music side of the business have often used “bad” loudspeakers to check their mixes. The problem is that loudspeakers can be “bad” in countless ways. The dominant characteristics of small low cost audio devices are a lack of bass and reduced sound output capability—a high-pass filter in the playback signal path is a practical way to simulate that. The author’s book [1] (chapters 2 and 18) illustrates the past and present situation in consumer and professional-monitor loudspeakers. Flat on-axis frequency response is clearly the engineering objective for most of these systems

 

@esarhaddon , let me say I don’t know how to get the sound of live musicians in my room, I likely need to start all over with a purpose built studio and a generous budget to achieve that.

However, I can share the most enjoyable way I have found to listen to live recordings. If you see my system you’ll notice a BIG screen in front. Plex now has about 10 live TV stations that play various types of concerts 24/7. I fire up one of those channels with content I enjoy and listen with an upmixer called Audyssey DSX. The emphasis today in multichannel listening seems to be height channels. For reproducing music wide channels are more important than height channels according to studies by Tomlinson Holman (THX). The wide channels seem to be an afterthought with Atmos and DTS-X. Read more about it here:

 

@kota1 if anyone  praises a speaker that Floyd  o Toole and the national research  councils  anicocic  chamber was involved with the development  of that said speaker I know what there system  sounds like! 💩

@Kota1
To start wiht, If you haven’t seen my responses before, I have been designing speakers since about 1975, so I have a definite advantage that many don’t have. BUT, that doesn’t meant that people can’t take clues from what I discuss and improve on what they have. The first place is to see what your system is producing. and I will say it again the Decibel-X Ap on a phne with or without a high quality mic can give you an idea of what you are producing. Yo can use static tones generated my a machine or a span of frequencies recorded, or some colour of generated Noise, or MUSIC.
I will always start with the idea that any SYSTTEM can only produce what your SPEAKERS are capable of. SO, possibly I am prejudiced, but that is where I always Start. If your speakers can Faithfully reproduce RAWE tones across the entire band with equal response, You have achieved the First step. Then look into the tonal quality, approach, attack etc. of the speaker. My current towers (that I built) I broke many of the basic rules on purpose. Like the crossover. Most of your high end speakers use higher order of crossovers and if you look at the individual response of most drivers. they roll off very gently. That makes me want to AVOID the higher order crossovers with their sharp roll off, This allows the frequency response of a driver to keep the crossover point level where often if you look at a graphic of a speaker, you will see definite dips at the crossover point. Then I of course use high quality components and things like a ’Foil Ribbon Coil’ (Continuous wind)instead of a wire wound coil (Fishing real wind) and this provides a much more accurate response and faster response in my speakers.
After you have a good speaker then you can play around with all of your other components to find a sound that you want.
Then there is a recent event in my life that provides a perfect example of what not to do. I was looking at a new AV unit and went to a local (So Called) high end store. i should have known something was amiss when I was introduced to the sales person as the Expert on that particular brand of machine. Now I had called ahead and told them EXACTLY what I was looking for and what I expected. What I have currently to work with and that I would be bringing my own materials that I was intimately familiar with. They immediately show me a system that on the surface seemed to have good quality Cord & Cables. what I had hoped ewer adequate components, but then he took my disk and put it into an X-Box to play. You can’t get any more Audiophile than an X-box now can you (SIC). The disk was a DVD audio of Chinese drums, which can produce some Very clear Low notes and resonances. His system couldn’t even reproduce the notes and he started backpedaling by telling me how the DiracLive setup originally was tuned with a Sub Woofer and he had just pulled the Sub from the system. I have a serious problem if Your system has defeated the low end of your towers in favor of Subs. Also that this sales person would present anything like this as I had previously told them that I didn’t use a Sub in my system. Also I will never believe that the Minnie towers he had with 4.5 inch bass drivers could EVER equal my system with 8 inch drivers o full towers. Bottom line this was the Worst possible disaster of a sales pitch I have ever heard. Also the store had paper thin walls and the only bass that I heard that day was from the next room over. Noting I don’t identify the store. So now I will NEVER know if the brand of machine I was trying to audition is any good or of any quality. I actually wrote the manufacturer and told them about this in hopes they would pull this store license to sell their product line. I don't think it will be rude to say that the system I wanted to interview was an Anthem and that the Store was somewhere in Metro Denver.