Consideration about Timbre

[fas42]

If that's true, why "eq a bit" your sound? Why to spend those 1000€ plus for a minor/decent frequency response speakers and/or room?

In ANY case, having a decent setup, our brain is power enough to extrapolate things. So why lose time and money taking and testing similar setups when we already have this brain power?

Paradoxically, we don't need Kii THREE at all for our listening. Even my "decent" monitor pair provide enough signal to be extrapolate by our internal DSP brain I want you now... <3

The highlighted is the tricky bit - 99% of what's out there isn't "decent enough", in the reality of it actually working - no matter how much you paid for it, how much other people have raved about how good it is, how brilliant all the technical measurements made of it are ... if it doesn't deliver in the flesh, it ain't good enough ...

 

[Cosmik]

Exactly. Typically, the treble is "offensive", because the the level of audible distortion is far too high in this critical area, to be subjectively acceptable - not from the recording, but from playback misbehaviour. Which is not the fault of the speaker, or the treble driver, but the artifacts in the signal driving the speakers.

Active speakers, powerful DSP, are good ways to make sure the electronics do exactly what they need to do, and nothing more, and divides the load between multiple circuits - a highly effective mechanism for reducing the audible anomalies.

And the active DSP route does more than just replace the passive crossover: it makes it perfectly viable to increase the number of 'ways', which gives multiple benefits (reduces power and frequency demands on the drivers = lower distortion of many kinds; improves the evenness of dispersion).

 

[Nowhk]

So basically you are telling me that:

- our brain is able to differentiate between "real content" and "presentation distortion layer (i.e. color)", and can focus what it want (switching between color, content or both as result);
- tone control (speakers FR, EQ, and such) won't affect the timbre as "content", once I "hear through", but only to balance signal in a way that the magnitude of distortion is low enough to be able to extrapolate the (same) content (i.e. the "real timbre");

Are these statements correct?

I could give you several quotes from people in the industry who basically say the same thing: we 'hear through' the room to the speakers

Can you? I'd like to read somethings about this subject.

 

[Cosmik]

@Nowhk

Some quotes:

Martijn Mensink of Dutch & Dutch

No DSP filtering above the Schroeder frequency! One must be careful with automatic room-correction systems. More often than not they make things worse. What a measuring microphone picks up is not what two ears and a brain hear.

Direct vs. indirect sound.
• The 8c sounds natural and neutral anywhere in the room. Sit close and listen into the recording - you are there. Sit farther away and hear more indirect sound with perfect timbre because of even dispersion and flat power response for a 'they are here' experience.
• No voicing required. Other loudspeakers usually require voicing. Based on listening to a lot of recordings, the tonal balance of the loudspeaker is changed so that most recordings sound good. Voicing is required to balance differences between direct and off-axis sound. The 8c has very even dispersion. It is the first loudspeaker I ever designed that did not benefit from voicing. The tonal balance is purely based on anechoic measurements.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/dutchdutch/2.html

Floyd Toole:

We adapt to several aspects of the rooms we listen in, allowing us to hear through them to identify sound qualities intrinsic to the source itself, and to identify the correct direction and distance of the source in spite of a massively complicated sound field. We need to have measures of the limits of this adaptation, at what points and in what ways our perceptual processes can use some help. The following are a few salient points to ponder. • Voices, musical instruments, and other sounds are instantly recognizable in many rooms and through seriously flawed communication channels. We seem to be able to separate a spectrum that is changing from one that is fixed. What range of spectral variation can we adapt to, and at what level, deviation, and so on, is it necessary to intervene manually? • Once we adapt to the room, subtle differences in quality among a group of loudspeakers are recognizable, and the distinctions are retained when the comparison is done in other rooms.

http://www.wghwoodworking.com/audio/loudspeakers_and_rooms_for_sound_reproduction.pdf

John Watkinson

We live in a reverberant world which is filled with sound reflections. If we could separately distinguish every different reflection in a reverberant room we would hear a confusing cacophony. In practice we hear very well in reverberant surroundings, or better than microphones can, because of the transform nature of the ear and the way in which the brain processes nerve signals.

What the above people are saying (very few here believe it!) is that what you hear is not represented by the quantities of frequency components that are found in the bins after you have taken a Fourier transform in a room. That in fact human hearing combines frequency analysis with time domain analysis to obtain a true picture of the audio 'scene'. They are saying that just as your vision can see past the surroundings to focus on an object, you can focus on the source of a sound while hearing past the reverberation.

On a laptop screen the dumb measurement looks like chaos, and most audio people think that that view translates into what we must be hearing. Something must be done about it! At the backs of their minds, they are slightly puzzled that they just don't seem to notice huge frequency response changes as they walk about or people sit down in front of them at concerts, even though the measurements would change significantly. They also know that if they fed those changes into a graphic equaliser, they would hear them clearly. Strange...

Here is an example of where someone (our very own Amir) tries to square the circle of this phenomenon!
http://www.madronadigital.com/perceptual-effects-of-room-reflecti

He still prefers a frequency response explanation, however, concluding that if we don't hear acoustic comb filtering it must be being masked by other things or that our hearing just smooths over the comb filtering anyway. It's still a mystery why it sounds so bad from a speaker, however. Oh well...

The alternative would be to accept that acoustic comb filtering is one side of a two-sided coin that our brains are capable of seeing both sides of simultaneously. We simply don't hear the comb filtering as part of the source, because it corresponds perfectly with time domain phenomena that tell us why it is there. Our brain automatically 'reads' the situation.

But notice that if we fiddle with the source itself (changing its EQ for example), we will hear a mutilated source - even if it gives us a flat Fourier transform at the listening position.

As the D&D guy above says, if the speaker is genuinely neutral (in terms of its dispersion as well as everything else) you don't need to 'voice' it. For the rest of us, we need some gentle in-room EQ - that can be summarised as 'baffle step compensation' and variants thereof. This isn't a genuine 'correction' but is a fudge that gives us an acceptable subjective balance. Using DSP, this (and the crossover filtering itself) can be performed while maintaining overall linear phase from the speaker itself, so the direct sound still works in terms of its timing, even if its EQ is slightly non-neutral.

 

[svart-hvitt]

This is something I bore people with frequently! I could give you several quotes from people in the industry who basically say the same thing: we 'hear through' the room to the speakers, and this is an ability that has evolved to allow us to locate and recognise the sources of sounds in a reverberant environment. Our hearing separates the direct sound from the ambience. We hear the ambience - so a horrible room still sounds horrible - but it is separate from the direct sound. So a flat speaker (with good dispersion characteristics) will still sound flat regardless of the room. You can't 'correct' the room by modifying the signal, and measurements don't show what we hear.

But I will not try to persuade you of this! Very few people are prepared to accept that smoothed frequency response measurements at the listening position are not the whole story.

Are you certain that your case holds linearly across the frequency curve? Is room compensation of subber frequencies the same as room compensation of midder and higher frequencies?

 

[Frank Dernie]

We have the local Associated Boards music exams in our music room since it contains a model B Steinway in a quiet space.
Candidates wait and warm up here in my room, where my stereo is, because sound in the music room can not be heard here, and vice versa.
In addition to my stereo I have therefore heard pretty well every musical instrument you can think of being practiced in here.
A cello always sounds right, so does a cornet (to mention 2 of my favourites).
I have always thought that whatever the acoustics of the space I am listening my brain soon compensates for the acoustic characteristics of the room. I suppose there must be some level of awfulness in room interaction - modern minimalist decor comes to mind - where artificially removing some of the peaks is beneficial.
I also believe this happens in concert halls, where the natural frequency response varies substantially from seat to seat but the sound is natural in most, if not all, seats.
The Royal Albert Hall in London and both the Holywell rooms and the Sheldonian in Oxford are cases in point that I am familiar with.

Overall, I find the sound in here more natural without the room correction I have tried so far.

 

[Cosmik]

Are you certain that your case holds linearly across the frequency curve? Is room compensation of subber frequencies the same as room compensation of midder and higher frequencies?

People tell me that it is different for the bass. As always, I seem to take a slightly questioning position...

Most speakers these days are bass reflex, so they interact with the room differently from sealed (e.g. rapid roll-off below resonance), and have a 'blurring' effect in the time domain. They may just not sound all that good for reasons other than the room.

For my sealed speakers I have chosen a specific roll-off point and then -12dB per octave after that. Phase is corrected - it requires long latency. As such, I find the sound pretty good (I am understating it!) and haven't felt the need to go further. I certainly get 'proper' bass that goes down to subsonic.

Of course I can tell that there are places in the room with 'more' or 'less' (or different) bass, but I am reluctant to start down the path of altering the signal (more than the measures described above), or subwoofers in corners and so on.

I would go for the Kii/D&D-type solution if I was going to go further with it.

 

[Cosmik]

I suppose there must be some level of awfulness in room interaction - modern minimalist decor comes to mind - where artificially removing some of the peaks is beneficial.

Well, yes. I question whether good results can be obtained in a room like this:

But the point of the 'no correction' argument (or assertion as some people would reasonably call it), is not that you don't hear the room, but that your brain separates it from the source. The room can sound terrible, but if you 'correct' the source you will still have a terrible room. And now a terrible source!

 

[fas42]

So basically you are telling me that:

- our brain is able to differentiate between "real content" and "presentation distortion layer (i.e. color)", and can focus what it want (switching between color, content or both as result);
- tone control (speakers FR, EQ, and such) won't affect the timbre as "content", once I "hear through", but only to balance signal in a way that the magnitude of distortion is low enough to be able to extrapolate the (same) content (i.e. the "real timbre");

Yes. "Real content", the musical event captured on the recording, can become completely dominant, subjectively; overriding all other "distortion layers" present, especially that of the playback system. The most remarkable byproduct of that is that the speakers disappear - it becomes impossible to locate the drivers by sound alone; what seems to be happening is that the brain has decided that the illusion is the real event, and ignores the correct auditory information, that is, sound is coming from 2 separate speakers. And you can't switch this perception, it is no longer controllable.

You can choose to focus on the distortion in the recording in this situation - deliberately lock on to tape hiss say; but it really is just another sound element in the whole. Like allowing yourself to be aware of someone sitting next to you in a concert hall constantly shuffling their feet during the performance - it's your choice whether you want this extraneous sound to bug you, or not. Personally, I've been amazed at how powerful the brain is in filtering and adjusting the content; I have a CD which was incredibly crudely processed to reduce "noise" - it sounds horrendous quite often; but when the setup is working well my head completely ignores this; it's as if it's barely there.

The magnitude, and type of, distortion is everything in this regard - tiny amounts of the 'wrong' type of distortion competely throw the ability of the brain to "fix" the sound.

 

[fas42]

We have the local Associated Boards music exams in our music room since it contains a model B Steinway in a quiet space.
Candidates wait and warm up here in my room, where my stereo is, because sound in the music room can not be heard here, and vice versa.
In addition to my stereo I have therefore heard pretty well every musical instrument you can think of being practiced in here.
A cello always sounds right, so does a cornet (to mention 2 of my favourites).
I have always thought that whatever the acoustics of the space I am listening my brain soon compensates for the acoustic characteristics of the room. I suppose there must be some level of awfulness in room interaction - modern minimalist decor comes to mind - where artificially removing some of the peaks is beneficial.

And behaviour is identical for a playback system, when it reaches a standard that I call, "competent". A cello, or cornet on a recording also sounds right - if they don't, then weaknesses in the rig need to be addressed.

 

[Nowhk]

Fascinating. Nice info I got from this discussion. And I'm reading more and more. Thanks guys

So basically the whole things of "art" and music in general works due to this brain "fixing" concept. If we haven't this, we are basically fuXXXd up, and no one will create a preserved "illusion".
That's the whole trick: create an illusion.
And be able to extrapolate it from source mean getting a setup that (for what you are focusing; everyone will hear specific patterns/elements) minimize distortions. Else it will distort the illusion. Brillant.

My analogy about "how I add salt in the meals" at this point is not about emphasize things (such as changing eq and adjust bass), but adding elements as well. Else the whole discussion about brain "fixing" won't works there with taste (in fact, adding salt I add somethings, don't minimize the rest). Right, in your opinion?

p.s. Sorry, we are about psychology and philosophy now; maybe we have been since the beginning of this discussion eheh. Hope you won't hate me for this, since we are inside an audio forum

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

Well, yes. I question whether good results can be obtained in a room like this:

But the point of the 'no correction' argument (or assertion as some people would reasonably call it), is not that you don't hear the room, but that your brain separates it from the source. The room can sound terrible, but if you 'correct' the source you will still have a terrible room. And now a terrible source!

Not sure why it is so questionable that good results could be obtained in that room by just looking at a photo. Measurements would help illuminate the discussion, if available.

Yes, the preferability of "no correction" in all rooms is an assertion. I don't think there is any good science in all or even many cases to back the separation of room from source by the ear-brain with automatic perceptual compensation for the room. That is particularly questionable in the bass below the transition frequency or even above transition frequency with the perceptual effects of early vs. later reflections.

 

[Nowhk]

Yes, the preferability of "no correction" in all rooms is an assertion. I don't think there is any good science in all or even many cases to back the separation of room from source by the ear-brain with automatic perceptual compensation for the room. That is particularly questionable in the bass below the transition frequency or even above transition frequency with the perceptual effects of early vs. later reflections.

If that's true (i.e. your brain won't do any kind of separation) what you hear is ALWAYS distorted, and varying during time and across different listening.

And you should make the same reflections I've made: everytime you hear some elements that bring somethings differents. Timbre is the example I've posted.

Just this would create a chasm of considerations, wouldn't?
As "you never heard the original song" or "I decide how to shape the song", and such. Crazy... isn't?

That's mostly why I open thread like this. It seems there's a separation of things: preservation of sounds elements or pseudo-choice of shaping sounds. These are the two main veins...

 

[Cosmik]

Not sure why it is so questionable that good results could be obtained in that room by just looking at a photo.

Can you not imagine the sound of that room? And can you imagine it if the floor was wall-to-wall carpet? You don't need measurements to tell you what the difference would be.

The carpet industry has even made a little promo about it!

 

[oivavoi]

Can you not imagine the sound of that room? And can you imagine it if the floor was wall-to-wall carpet? You don't need measurements to tell you what the difference would be.

In my experience the fundamental requirements for a good room is wall to wall carpeting, high ceilings and non-minimalist furnishing.

 

[svart-hvitt]

In my experience the fundamental requirements for a good room is wall to wall carpeting, high ceilings and non-minimalist furnishing.

Sounds like a budget hotel room around Paddington station. Music wasn’t the first that came into to my mind when I was there

 

[oivavoi]

Sounds like a budget hotel room around Paddington station. Music wasn’t the first that came into to my mind when I was there

Hehe, perhaps! Anyway, I don't think it's too complicated. Like Cosmik I also think that we adapt to the room when we listen. There is much research which documents this mechanism. The last study I know of is this one: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/805557/9/2013 135th AES Convention Pike.pdf

Still, I do believe that rooms can be better or worse for listening. A room with more volume will lower the frequency in which the bass starts behaving bad (but unlike Cosmik I think room-eq is very beneficial in the lower frequencies). Wall-to-wall carpeting, and non-minimalist furnishing, will largely eliminate echoes in the higher frequencies.

Also, my subjective and anecdotal experience is simply that rooms like this sound better to me. Large, carpeted and furnished rooms often have an ambience that is at once alive and serene & non-fatiguing.

 

[Thomas savage]

Sounds like a budget hotel room around Paddington station. Music wasn’t the first that came into to my mind when I was there

This is accurate

 

[svart-hvitt]

Hehe, perhaps! Anyway, I don't think it's too complicated. Like Cosmik I also think that we adapt to the room when we listen. There is much research which documents this mechanism. The last study I know of is this one: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/805557/9/2013 135th AES Convention Pike.pdf

Still, I do believe that rooms can be better or worse for listening. A room with more volume will lower the frequency in which the bass starts behaving bad (but unlike Cosmik I think room-eq is very beneficial in the lower frequencies). Wall-to-wall carpeting, and non-minimalist furnishing, will largely eliminate echoes in the higher frequencies.

Also, my subjective and anecdotal experience is simply that rooms like this sound better to me. Large, carpeted and furnished rooms often have an ambience that is at once alive and serene & non-fatiguing.

I do agree that chaotic interior is good for music playback, «chaotic» in a statistical sense.

Then again, I also believe that it’s possible to do better than just «chaotic» but then we are talking about more of a listening room and not a living room.

I also think wood is better than concrete in constructions if room is not corrected by physical, acoustical measures.

Time for interior magazines to take on the challenge to write THE ARTICLE on home interior for the audiophile?

(I mean here «audiophile» in the original, positive meaning).

 

[Cosmik]

but unlike Cosmik I think room-eq is very beneficial in the lower frequencies

I haven't made my mind up on it. Clearly I am doing *some* EQ by manipulating where the speaker (8" woofer, sealed) begins to roll off, plus I am choosing a roll-off of 12dB per octave. The bass is also corrected to be linear phase and time aligned with the other drivers. In my usual listening room (6 x 3.5 x 2.4m, carpeted, non-minimal furnishing) it sounds just fine.

In another room I listen in, the ceiling is much higher, and I am using 12" woofers in very large sealed enclosures. Here, I have placed the start of roll-off a bit lower, and I get true subsonic bass at a higher level. I guess that if I wanted to go that deep in the first room, I might have to resort to different methods, like subwoofers, etc.. But for me, if the bass is just ordinary spectacular, that'll do. I'm not chasing humongously spectacular in that particular room!

Also, my subjective and anecdotal experience is simply that rooms like this sound better to me. Large, carpeted and furnished rooms often have an ambience that is at once alive and serene & non-fatiguing.

Yes, for me such a room allows the sound to 'bloom'.