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Crossfeed for Nearfield Listening

syzygetic

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My office system is currently nearfield. A couple of DBR62 speakers mounted with tweeters at ear level perhaps 1m from head and a 7060B under the desk. Everything is room corrected and PEQ - it's a perfect Harman curve from 20Hz to 20,000Hz, at least at any SPL I'm planning to use while working!

I was playing with the DSP in Roon the other day, and I messed with Crossfeed. I use this on my HD6XX phones, and I like it, but I never considered using it for nearfields. It actually (in a blind A/B test) does appear to help center the audio image.

Is this normal, or just material dependent? I did a proper A/B, but not on a range of material. Does anyone actually use a little crossfeed on nearfield setups to help with the hard pan feel on some music?
 
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syzygetic

syzygetic

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Sweet, thanks for the reference, an interesting read!

I'll have to play around with this a bit on different material. I'm sitting here listening to some Amanda Palmer at the moment, which is highly sensitive to the effect, and benefits from crossfeed. Some of that is how they're mixing her voice to dead center with the instruments panned hard L/R, though.
 

andreasmaaan

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What you're doing is actually almost the opposite of ambiophonics there. The latter reduces loudspeaker crosstalk at the listener's ears, while what you're doing is increasing crosstalk (at the speakers).

I don't have a theory as to why it appears to help centre the stereo image, but I'm gonna think on it...
 
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syzygetic

syzygetic

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I just tried some Radiohead (In Rainbows), blind A/B again, and it's very clearly detectable, but I would not call it beneficial to Radiohead, perhaps because of the more deliberate mixing. Without crossfeed on this material, the soundstage is much larger. With crossfeed, it's quite tightly centered. between the speakers.

Perhaps this is simply mix dependent. It's that way on the headphones too, but I haven't found it to be detrimental on headphones, only beneficial.
 

andreasmaaan

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I just tried some Radiohead (In Rainbows), blind A/B again, and it's very clearly detectable, but I would not call it beneficial to Radiohead, perhaps because of the more deliberate mixing. Without crossfeed on this material, the soundstage is much larger. With crossfeed, it's quite tightly centered. between the speakers.

Perhaps this is simply mix dependent. It's that way on the headphones too, but I haven't found it to be detrimental on headphones, only beneficial.

Try comparing with correlated pink noise. That will immediately tell you whether the crossfeed is actually helping centre the phantom centre image.
 
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BillG

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I've got a cold and I'm not paying the normal attention to what I'm posting. Anyway, ambiophonics is a different sort of cross-feed implementation then what's typically used for headphones. I still think it's useful to look at, though.
 

ahofer

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I just did this by accident when I swapped in a DAC to my desktop (Genelec 8010s with sub) that I had been using for headphones. Roon picked up the headphone settings. I liked it! Hope that doesn't make me an audiophool.
 
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