Pio2001
Senior Member
I have been trying to equalize my JBL 305P mk2 speakers in order to improve their sound and make it more neutral. According to measurements, they should be quite easy to equalize.
I also have got a pair of Neumann KH-120 monitors, that are among the most neutral speakers one can find.
The JBL retail at 250 euros, the Neumann at 1200 euros. Is it really possible that for 250 euros and an extra 110 euros for an external DSP, I can get the same performance as the Neumann KH-120 ?
Here, I am going to summarize my experiments. The answer to this question is no, I didn't manage to get the same sound with both speakers. However, I discovered many very interesting things during the process, and the result with the JBL, although not identical to the Neumann, is nonetheless excellent.
1 - Context
My setup is an ordinary installation in an ordinary room (6.5 x 3.5 x 2.5 meters) with no acoustic treatment. The speakers are 80 cm away from walls, and the listening position is away from walls.
The room has strong low frequency resonances that need heavy room equalization.
The listening distance is 2 meters, the 60 dB decay time measured between the speakers and the listening position is 0.45 seconds at 500 Hz.
The system includes a MiniDSP 2x4 that is in charge of room equalization below 700 Hz. All other frequencies are left uncorrected, except if the speaker itself needs to be corrected, according to the generally accepted principle that we can "hear through the room".
Three kind of measurements will be used:
-Spinorama of both speakers made with a Klippel device. The one posted by ASR for the JBL and the one posted by Neumann for the Neumann. They represent the actual performance of the speaker without any influence from the room.
-Moving microphone measurement realized with a pink periodic noise of 64 k samples, analyzed with REW RTA, 64 k FFT, 1/48th octave. The microphone is moved above one seat. The curves are displayed either with no smoothing, or with Var smoothing. They represent the result at the listening position.
-Gated measurements made pointing the microphone at the speaker, 70 cm away, halfway between the tweeter and woofer. The speaker being as far as possible from any object. They also represent the actual behaviour of the speaker without any influence of the room, but because I don't have a Klippel measurement device at home, they are limited to high frequencies only, and more and more smoothed towards lower frequencies, until there are no data anymore.
2 - Reference system
I will compare the results that I get with the JBL 305P to the results got with the Neumann KH-120, my reference system, that I have carefully setup and that give an extremely balanced sound.
Here are the measurements of the KH-120 reference system with and without equalization. The blue curve is the equalization applied with the MiniDSP :
Two things are important here :
-The frequency response is uneven above 700 Hz. This is because I have chosen to have the speaker's frequency response being flat, not the in-room response. Actually, it sounds very neutral.
-The target curve below 700 Hz is the result of subjective adjustments made by ear alone. It is said everywhere that room problems below the transition frequency should be corrected, but there is no rule saying how. The target level depends on the room, on the speaker, and on the listening distance, and its value is unknown.
The lack of bass below 100 Hz, for example, is unusual, but I found no other way for it to sound right. A straight line at 51 dB sounds boomy. Anyway, the topic here is to try to get as good a result with the JBL speakers.
Here is the spinorama of the Neumann KH-120, in addition to the measurements at the listening position:
All curves are dispalyed at the same scale. The two directivity index curves have been inverted.
We can see that above 700 Hz, where the speakers are uncorrected, the sound at the listening position is dominated by the sound power curve of the speaker.
This is a surprise : I was expecting the result to be half way between the listening window curve (direct sound) and the sound power directivity index (indirect sound). But the variations at the listening position go actually beyond the variations of the sound power DI. They are identical to the sound power variations themselves !
In fact, with a perfectly neutral ox-axis curve, the sound power and sound power DI curves should have been identical.
What we can remember for the time being is that with this setup, the directivity index of the speaker is going to play an important role in the result.
3 - System under test
Now, what can we expect if we replace the KH-120 with the 305P ? Let's have a look at their respective spinoramas.
The directivity indexes of both speakers are quite similar, with the same anomaly around 1800 Hz. In theory, we can expect very good results if we equalize properly the JBL speaker.
The Klippel measurements are very accurate. If a small problem looks identical on all 4 direct curves, it should be equalized. This is something very different from room equalization, where positive corrections are unadvised, and accurate corrections don't work above 1000 Hz because they depend too much on the listening position. Here, there is no limitation on positive corrections other than the maximum playback level, and no dependency on the listening position.
4 - Early attempts
The first trials, made in january 2020, very quite disappointing!
After having copied the above curve in REW in order to create a correction, it didn't sound right. A first problem was visible on the measurement:
On the right side, at 8000 Hz, the result measured from the listening position follows exactly the correction. Which is wrong. It should behave like it does at 1700 Hz: a correction was made, and the result is good. At 8000 Hz, the correction is completely useless. The result was good before, and it is no more correct after.
The cause of the problem was discovered in the following weeks: the original spinorama included artifacts from the protection cage of the microphone. The 8000 Hz dip was one of these artifacts. The JBL 305P has no dip at this frequency.
I then removed all corrections above 4000 Hz, getting this resulting curve for the JBL 305P:
According to REW's predictions, that correction should give me this result at the listening position:
And this one for the speaker itself, measured with a 5ms window (because of a bug in REW, the pink curve had no microphone calibration):
But the audible results were not as good as expected. The human voices and acoustic instruments were definitely more natural with the Neumann and its jaggy curve at the listening position, than with the JBL and its beautiful curve !
This result is consistent with the hypothesis that this is the frequency response curve of direct sound that counts. Not the one at the listening position.
The Neumann KH-120 would have a direct sound even more neutral than the corrected JBL.
But this is not the end of the story !
5 - New improvements
Recently, I decided to give a second try and to analyze more accurately what's going on. So I went and brought back the JBL 305P in my listening room.
I reloaded the above correction and setup a proper room correction for them. Since the bass reflex port is behind the speaker, the room interactions are not the same as with the Neumann, whose port is in front of the speaker. The deviations in the amount of bass are enough to spoil the general balance.
After few listening sessions I identified a problem with human voices.
I tried to reproduce the problem with a graphic equalizer in order to find the frequency of the problem. I found that if I push the 1700 Hz frequency band of the graphic equalizer up 10 dB, the problem sounds the same. Therefore there must be something wrong around 1700 Hz.
This frequency is outside the room correction frequencies, so I need to look at the anechoic response in order to find the cause:
And indeed, we can see that there is too much energy at 1700 Hz.
This was not visible in the january measurements posted above. And it also contradicts Klippel measurements done by Amir.
The variation on the 1000 Hz side of the 1700 Hz bump is not surprising: I messed with these frequencies in order to adjust the overall target of the new room correction. But the shallow dip on the other side, around 3000 Hz, was not there in january, in the pink curve posted above. I don't know why. Maybe the microphone was not positioned exactly in the same axis during both measurements. And it is possible that my copy of JBL 305P is not identical to the one measured by Amir. After all, this is a 110 euros speaker.
Anyway, I changed the correction.
It was also obvious that the JBL had much more treble than the Neumann. I had forgotten about the treble trim ! You know, the little switch on the back of the speaker, that allows to adjust the level of bass and treble. Neumann advises to set it at -1 dB for listening in a room with live acoustics, and that was the case from the beginning... but not on the JBL.
This correction starts around 8000 Hz, but, given the measurement above, I decided to start it at 5000 Hz in order to further improve the anechoic response of the JBL.
Last, I raised the level below 300 Hz in order to get a warmer sound.
Now, my anechoic curve looks flat from 1000 to 6000 Hz ! I don't pay much attention to what's happening above, as it strongly depends on the exact measurement axis (in front of the tweeter, mid-way between the teeter and woofer etc.)
I also checked the result with a 2 ms window, because 5 ms in not strictly anechoic with my measurement setup:
We can see that the 1700 Hz correction is still needed. The problem was not caused by the 5 ms windowing.
We can also see that the treble variations above 6000 Hz are real, they don't show up in the Neumann measurement.
The inclusion of small reflections that are ocurring between 2 and 5 ms doesn't change the overall balance of the curve, but introduces narrow oscillations.
The rise on the extreme left of the 2 ms curve, from 700 to 500 Hz, doesn't appear in the 5 ms curves, which is consistent with the hypothesis that it is just an image of the window itself and must not be taken into account. It suggests that in the 5 ms curves, the rise from 400 to 200 Hz is an artifact of the same kind and doesn't exist in reality.
After loading this new correction in the MiniDSP, here is how it measures from the listening position. The Spinorama is here only for information, since the anechoic response of the speaker is no more the same. The two (inverted) directivity indexes curves, however, are unchanged.
We can see that the in-room response is rising from 1700 Hz to 4000 Hz !
This is strange, but the experiment requires the speaker to be equalized flat above 700 Hz, so I can't change this.
A possible explanation is that, according to REW, in my room, the measured RT rises from 500 to 5000 Hz (from 0.45 to 0.50 seconds IIRC), which is in itself unusual. This is probably related to the absence of carpet or curtains.
We can also see that the treble it perfectly smooth above 4000 Hz, while it was not the case in the anechoic measurements. Here, the Neumann and JBL behave completely differently. Had I tried to correct the anechoic response of the JBL above 6000 Hz, I would have spoiled this result.
6 - How does it sound ?
Well, now it begins to sound really good !
I've been listening to this setup for several days. Here is how it compares with the Neumann KH-120.
The first difference is treble. The Neumann treble sounds weak, too far away. The JBL treble, on the opposite, is strong.
On human voices, according to the recording, the treble ranges from "just right" to "too bright". The voices treble always sounds right, but not the "s" sounds, that, on some recordings, stand out too much. This never happens with the Neumann.
On the opposite, with the Neumann, the treble ranges from "just right" to "too weak".
Besides the level of treble, there is also a difference in treble texture. The JBL treble always sound crystalline, while the treble of the Neumann always sound dull. Even if I increase the treble on the Neumann and decrease it on the JBL, their textures remain unchanged.
I have experimented with the variations above 6000 Hz, trying to reproduce the crystalline sound of the JBL on the Neumann by coying the anechoic oscillations measured above, and there was a bit of change. It sounded less dull. So maybe this difference in texture is caused by these minor variations around 10000 Hz on the JBL.
I have also measured in one point at the listening position, in order to see if the treble anomalies of the JBL's response were visible here without moving the microphone, but I didn't see any obvious difference between the forest of peaks produced by one speaker or the other in one point.
The second audible difference is in the medium frequencies: the JBL medium sounds overall a bit more balanced than the Neumann, however less natural.
Let me explain. With the Neumann, nothing ever sounds artificial, but there is a general feeling of sweetness. A soprano forte, in the real world, hurts the ears in a particular way (personally experienced at the opera) , but the Neumann never seem to be able to hurt one's ears. The JBL "harshness" in soprano voices seem closer to reality. Maybe this is related to the 2000 Hz dip in the resulting in-room frequency response of the Neumann. It complies with the measurements at the listening position, that look better with the JBL.
On the other hand, human voices don't always sound as "realistic" as the Neumann. Listening with the Neumann, the quality of the speakers is never questioned except maybe for the lack of treble. With the JBL, there is still something that sounds sometimes unnatural. You can tell that you're listening to a recording. Sometimes with the Neumann, this feeling disappears and we can hear "through the recording", as if the real voices were there.
I wonder if this performance is permitted by the extremely accurate neutrality of the Neumann's anechoic frequency response, while the slight lack of balance would be caused by the accident in their sound power curve, that plainly affects the result at the listening position.
Unfortunately, the gated anechoic measurements that I can perform at home are not accurate enough to investigate further, by improving the neutrality of my JBL.
The third difference is simple : the JBL have slightly deeper bass. In my setup, they reach 30 Hz at -5 dB, while the Neumann reach only 35 Hz.
Here are the compared measurements at the listening position, with VAR smoothing.
7 - Speaker directivity
In the above measurements, there is obviously something very different between these two speakers. The treble of the JBL being stronger is not an illusion !
The two curves are aligned in level from 400 to 1000 Hz. Above 1000 Hz, all room correction has stopped. Therefore the sudden variation after 1500 Hz is caused by the directivity of the speakers. The JBL look here to have a much wider dispersion than the Neumann in high frequencies.
Let's see if this correlates with the spinoramas of both speakers.
Here, I have overlaid the two spinoramas at the same scale, and changed the colours of the Neumann (replacing red with blue). Looking at the directivity indexes at the bottom, we can see that the JBL have weaker early reflections at all frequencies (in this inverted representation, the higher the curve, the weaker the sound ! ). It tells nothing for us, since we are looking for a difference above and below 1500 Hz, while this effect is the same above and below 1500 Hz. The sound power directivity index is also similar.
But wait, what if we realign these DI curves around 1000 Hz, where they locally diverge ?
Now we have exactly the same behaviour in the spinorama and in reality : the JBL is stronger than the Neumann from 1700 Hz and above (remember, the DI curves are inverted in the spinorama).
But in order to get this result, we had to offset the DI curves. Physically, the real directivity indexes are the ones plotted in the first diagram ! The waveguide around the dome tweeter of the Neumann spreads exactly the same amount of energy around the room as the waveguide around the dome of the JBL. How is it that we get more treble with the JBL than with the Neumann ?
The answer is a bit complicated, and related to the concept of partial room correction.
Remember that making the room correction for both speakers, I set the target curve between 30 and 700 Hz by ear, listening to a lot of human voices. The real target curve is always unknown. Doing this, what obviously happened is that I used the audible level around 1000 Hz as my subjective reference, thus artificially aligning the sound power of both speakers around 1000 Hz. That's always a problem when correcting only a limited part of the frequency response: we need a reference level. Here, without even paying attention, when I defined all the filters for room eq, I found myself using the 700 - 1700 Hz range as the reference level, rather than the 1700 - 10000 Hz range. That's how it sounded natural to me with human voices.
8 - Future improvements
As I said in the listening results, the Neumann sound a bit weak in treble, and the JBL a bit strong.
Of course, I already tried to correct this difference, always without success. The result sounded worse, leading me to believe that the JBL had naturally more treble than the Neumann in their power response (which, as we saw, is wrong).
The problem was that I was trying to correct the curves measured at the listening position, using a high shelf at 1700 Hz, without paying attention to the anechoic response, nor to the directivity index.
But now I have more information : according to the measurements, this difference in treble is caused by a sudden divergence in the sound power directivity of both speakers between 700 and 2000 Hz, and to the fact that the reference level for room correction was chosen in this range.
Knowing this, I should be able to try a different approach, for example starting the high shelf closer to 700 Hz than to 2000, in order to preserve the anechoic response of the speakers around 1700 Hz, that was spoiled when I was trying to correct of the curves measured at the listening position.
I also have got a pair of Neumann KH-120 monitors, that are among the most neutral speakers one can find.
The JBL retail at 250 euros, the Neumann at 1200 euros. Is it really possible that for 250 euros and an extra 110 euros for an external DSP, I can get the same performance as the Neumann KH-120 ?
Here, I am going to summarize my experiments. The answer to this question is no, I didn't manage to get the same sound with both speakers. However, I discovered many very interesting things during the process, and the result with the JBL, although not identical to the Neumann, is nonetheless excellent.
1 - Context
My setup is an ordinary installation in an ordinary room (6.5 x 3.5 x 2.5 meters) with no acoustic treatment. The speakers are 80 cm away from walls, and the listening position is away from walls.
The room has strong low frequency resonances that need heavy room equalization.
The listening distance is 2 meters, the 60 dB decay time measured between the speakers and the listening position is 0.45 seconds at 500 Hz.
The system includes a MiniDSP 2x4 that is in charge of room equalization below 700 Hz. All other frequencies are left uncorrected, except if the speaker itself needs to be corrected, according to the generally accepted principle that we can "hear through the room".
Three kind of measurements will be used:
-Spinorama of both speakers made with a Klippel device. The one posted by ASR for the JBL and the one posted by Neumann for the Neumann. They represent the actual performance of the speaker without any influence from the room.
-Moving microphone measurement realized with a pink periodic noise of 64 k samples, analyzed with REW RTA, 64 k FFT, 1/48th octave. The microphone is moved above one seat. The curves are displayed either with no smoothing, or with Var smoothing. They represent the result at the listening position.
-Gated measurements made pointing the microphone at the speaker, 70 cm away, halfway between the tweeter and woofer. The speaker being as far as possible from any object. They also represent the actual behaviour of the speaker without any influence of the room, but because I don't have a Klippel measurement device at home, they are limited to high frequencies only, and more and more smoothed towards lower frequencies, until there are no data anymore.
2 - Reference system
I will compare the results that I get with the JBL 305P to the results got with the Neumann KH-120, my reference system, that I have carefully setup and that give an extremely balanced sound.
Here are the measurements of the KH-120 reference system with and without equalization. The blue curve is the equalization applied with the MiniDSP :
Two things are important here :
-The frequency response is uneven above 700 Hz. This is because I have chosen to have the speaker's frequency response being flat, not the in-room response. Actually, it sounds very neutral.
-The target curve below 700 Hz is the result of subjective adjustments made by ear alone. It is said everywhere that room problems below the transition frequency should be corrected, but there is no rule saying how. The target level depends on the room, on the speaker, and on the listening distance, and its value is unknown.
The lack of bass below 100 Hz, for example, is unusual, but I found no other way for it to sound right. A straight line at 51 dB sounds boomy. Anyway, the topic here is to try to get as good a result with the JBL speakers.
Here is the spinorama of the Neumann KH-120, in addition to the measurements at the listening position:
All curves are dispalyed at the same scale. The two directivity index curves have been inverted.
We can see that above 700 Hz, where the speakers are uncorrected, the sound at the listening position is dominated by the sound power curve of the speaker.
This is a surprise : I was expecting the result to be half way between the listening window curve (direct sound) and the sound power directivity index (indirect sound). But the variations at the listening position go actually beyond the variations of the sound power DI. They are identical to the sound power variations themselves !
In fact, with a perfectly neutral ox-axis curve, the sound power and sound power DI curves should have been identical.
What we can remember for the time being is that with this setup, the directivity index of the speaker is going to play an important role in the result.
3 - System under test
Now, what can we expect if we replace the KH-120 with the 305P ? Let's have a look at their respective spinoramas.
The directivity indexes of both speakers are quite similar, with the same anomaly around 1800 Hz. In theory, we can expect very good results if we equalize properly the JBL speaker.
The Klippel measurements are very accurate. If a small problem looks identical on all 4 direct curves, it should be equalized. This is something very different from room equalization, where positive corrections are unadvised, and accurate corrections don't work above 1000 Hz because they depend too much on the listening position. Here, there is no limitation on positive corrections other than the maximum playback level, and no dependency on the listening position.
4 - Early attempts
The first trials, made in january 2020, very quite disappointing!
After having copied the above curve in REW in order to create a correction, it didn't sound right. A first problem was visible on the measurement:
On the right side, at 8000 Hz, the result measured from the listening position follows exactly the correction. Which is wrong. It should behave like it does at 1700 Hz: a correction was made, and the result is good. At 8000 Hz, the correction is completely useless. The result was good before, and it is no more correct after.
The cause of the problem was discovered in the following weeks: the original spinorama included artifacts from the protection cage of the microphone. The 8000 Hz dip was one of these artifacts. The JBL 305P has no dip at this frequency.
I then removed all corrections above 4000 Hz, getting this resulting curve for the JBL 305P:
According to REW's predictions, that correction should give me this result at the listening position:
And this one for the speaker itself, measured with a 5ms window (because of a bug in REW, the pink curve had no microphone calibration):
But the audible results were not as good as expected. The human voices and acoustic instruments were definitely more natural with the Neumann and its jaggy curve at the listening position, than with the JBL and its beautiful curve !
This result is consistent with the hypothesis that this is the frequency response curve of direct sound that counts. Not the one at the listening position.
The Neumann KH-120 would have a direct sound even more neutral than the corrected JBL.
But this is not the end of the story !
5 - New improvements
Recently, I decided to give a second try and to analyze more accurately what's going on. So I went and brought back the JBL 305P in my listening room.
I reloaded the above correction and setup a proper room correction for them. Since the bass reflex port is behind the speaker, the room interactions are not the same as with the Neumann, whose port is in front of the speaker. The deviations in the amount of bass are enough to spoil the general balance.
After few listening sessions I identified a problem with human voices.
I tried to reproduce the problem with a graphic equalizer in order to find the frequency of the problem. I found that if I push the 1700 Hz frequency band of the graphic equalizer up 10 dB, the problem sounds the same. Therefore there must be something wrong around 1700 Hz.
This frequency is outside the room correction frequencies, so I need to look at the anechoic response in order to find the cause:
And indeed, we can see that there is too much energy at 1700 Hz.
This was not visible in the january measurements posted above. And it also contradicts Klippel measurements done by Amir.
The variation on the 1000 Hz side of the 1700 Hz bump is not surprising: I messed with these frequencies in order to adjust the overall target of the new room correction. But the shallow dip on the other side, around 3000 Hz, was not there in january, in the pink curve posted above. I don't know why. Maybe the microphone was not positioned exactly in the same axis during both measurements. And it is possible that my copy of JBL 305P is not identical to the one measured by Amir. After all, this is a 110 euros speaker.
Anyway, I changed the correction.
It was also obvious that the JBL had much more treble than the Neumann. I had forgotten about the treble trim ! You know, the little switch on the back of the speaker, that allows to adjust the level of bass and treble. Neumann advises to set it at -1 dB for listening in a room with live acoustics, and that was the case from the beginning... but not on the JBL.
This correction starts around 8000 Hz, but, given the measurement above, I decided to start it at 5000 Hz in order to further improve the anechoic response of the JBL.
Last, I raised the level below 300 Hz in order to get a warmer sound.
Now, my anechoic curve looks flat from 1000 to 6000 Hz ! I don't pay much attention to what's happening above, as it strongly depends on the exact measurement axis (in front of the tweeter, mid-way between the teeter and woofer etc.)
I also checked the result with a 2 ms window, because 5 ms in not strictly anechoic with my measurement setup:
We can see that the 1700 Hz correction is still needed. The problem was not caused by the 5 ms windowing.
We can also see that the treble variations above 6000 Hz are real, they don't show up in the Neumann measurement.
The inclusion of small reflections that are ocurring between 2 and 5 ms doesn't change the overall balance of the curve, but introduces narrow oscillations.
The rise on the extreme left of the 2 ms curve, from 700 to 500 Hz, doesn't appear in the 5 ms curves, which is consistent with the hypothesis that it is just an image of the window itself and must not be taken into account. It suggests that in the 5 ms curves, the rise from 400 to 200 Hz is an artifact of the same kind and doesn't exist in reality.
After loading this new correction in the MiniDSP, here is how it measures from the listening position. The Spinorama is here only for information, since the anechoic response of the speaker is no more the same. The two (inverted) directivity indexes curves, however, are unchanged.
We can see that the in-room response is rising from 1700 Hz to 4000 Hz !
This is strange, but the experiment requires the speaker to be equalized flat above 700 Hz, so I can't change this.
A possible explanation is that, according to REW, in my room, the measured RT rises from 500 to 5000 Hz (from 0.45 to 0.50 seconds IIRC), which is in itself unusual. This is probably related to the absence of carpet or curtains.
We can also see that the treble it perfectly smooth above 4000 Hz, while it was not the case in the anechoic measurements. Here, the Neumann and JBL behave completely differently. Had I tried to correct the anechoic response of the JBL above 6000 Hz, I would have spoiled this result.
6 - How does it sound ?
Well, now it begins to sound really good !
I've been listening to this setup for several days. Here is how it compares with the Neumann KH-120.
The first difference is treble. The Neumann treble sounds weak, too far away. The JBL treble, on the opposite, is strong.
On human voices, according to the recording, the treble ranges from "just right" to "too bright". The voices treble always sounds right, but not the "s" sounds, that, on some recordings, stand out too much. This never happens with the Neumann.
On the opposite, with the Neumann, the treble ranges from "just right" to "too weak".
Besides the level of treble, there is also a difference in treble texture. The JBL treble always sound crystalline, while the treble of the Neumann always sound dull. Even if I increase the treble on the Neumann and decrease it on the JBL, their textures remain unchanged.
I have experimented with the variations above 6000 Hz, trying to reproduce the crystalline sound of the JBL on the Neumann by coying the anechoic oscillations measured above, and there was a bit of change. It sounded less dull. So maybe this difference in texture is caused by these minor variations around 10000 Hz on the JBL.
I have also measured in one point at the listening position, in order to see if the treble anomalies of the JBL's response were visible here without moving the microphone, but I didn't see any obvious difference between the forest of peaks produced by one speaker or the other in one point.
The second audible difference is in the medium frequencies: the JBL medium sounds overall a bit more balanced than the Neumann, however less natural.
Let me explain. With the Neumann, nothing ever sounds artificial, but there is a general feeling of sweetness. A soprano forte, in the real world, hurts the ears in a particular way (personally experienced at the opera) , but the Neumann never seem to be able to hurt one's ears. The JBL "harshness" in soprano voices seem closer to reality. Maybe this is related to the 2000 Hz dip in the resulting in-room frequency response of the Neumann. It complies with the measurements at the listening position, that look better with the JBL.
On the other hand, human voices don't always sound as "realistic" as the Neumann. Listening with the Neumann, the quality of the speakers is never questioned except maybe for the lack of treble. With the JBL, there is still something that sounds sometimes unnatural. You can tell that you're listening to a recording. Sometimes with the Neumann, this feeling disappears and we can hear "through the recording", as if the real voices were there.
I wonder if this performance is permitted by the extremely accurate neutrality of the Neumann's anechoic frequency response, while the slight lack of balance would be caused by the accident in their sound power curve, that plainly affects the result at the listening position.
Unfortunately, the gated anechoic measurements that I can perform at home are not accurate enough to investigate further, by improving the neutrality of my JBL.
The third difference is simple : the JBL have slightly deeper bass. In my setup, they reach 30 Hz at -5 dB, while the Neumann reach only 35 Hz.
Here are the compared measurements at the listening position, with VAR smoothing.
7 - Speaker directivity
In the above measurements, there is obviously something very different between these two speakers. The treble of the JBL being stronger is not an illusion !
The two curves are aligned in level from 400 to 1000 Hz. Above 1000 Hz, all room correction has stopped. Therefore the sudden variation after 1500 Hz is caused by the directivity of the speakers. The JBL look here to have a much wider dispersion than the Neumann in high frequencies.
Let's see if this correlates with the spinoramas of both speakers.
Here, I have overlaid the two spinoramas at the same scale, and changed the colours of the Neumann (replacing red with blue). Looking at the directivity indexes at the bottom, we can see that the JBL have weaker early reflections at all frequencies (in this inverted representation, the higher the curve, the weaker the sound ! ). It tells nothing for us, since we are looking for a difference above and below 1500 Hz, while this effect is the same above and below 1500 Hz. The sound power directivity index is also similar.
But wait, what if we realign these DI curves around 1000 Hz, where they locally diverge ?
Now we have exactly the same behaviour in the spinorama and in reality : the JBL is stronger than the Neumann from 1700 Hz and above (remember, the DI curves are inverted in the spinorama).
But in order to get this result, we had to offset the DI curves. Physically, the real directivity indexes are the ones plotted in the first diagram ! The waveguide around the dome tweeter of the Neumann spreads exactly the same amount of energy around the room as the waveguide around the dome of the JBL. How is it that we get more treble with the JBL than with the Neumann ?
The answer is a bit complicated, and related to the concept of partial room correction.
Remember that making the room correction for both speakers, I set the target curve between 30 and 700 Hz by ear, listening to a lot of human voices. The real target curve is always unknown. Doing this, what obviously happened is that I used the audible level around 1000 Hz as my subjective reference, thus artificially aligning the sound power of both speakers around 1000 Hz. That's always a problem when correcting only a limited part of the frequency response: we need a reference level. Here, without even paying attention, when I defined all the filters for room eq, I found myself using the 700 - 1700 Hz range as the reference level, rather than the 1700 - 10000 Hz range. That's how it sounded natural to me with human voices.
8 - Future improvements
As I said in the listening results, the Neumann sound a bit weak in treble, and the JBL a bit strong.
Of course, I already tried to correct this difference, always without success. The result sounded worse, leading me to believe that the JBL had naturally more treble than the Neumann in their power response (which, as we saw, is wrong).
The problem was that I was trying to correct the curves measured at the listening position, using a high shelf at 1700 Hz, without paying attention to the anechoic response, nor to the directivity index.
But now I have more information : according to the measurements, this difference in treble is caused by a sudden divergence in the sound power directivity of both speakers between 700 and 2000 Hz, and to the fact that the reference level for room correction was chosen in this range.
Knowing this, I should be able to try a different approach, for example starting the high shelf closer to 700 Hz than to 2000, in order to preserve the anechoic response of the speakers around 1700 Hz, that was spoiled when I was trying to correct of the curves measured at the listening position.