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Horn Speakers - Is it me or.......

tuga

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Except that Toole’s opinion was formed in controlled listening test conditions. Toole is not talking about personal preference in casual listening: that is not what you want to take from his statement.

there are issues with both some of Toole‘s methodology as well as his interpretation of some of the data.
 

tuga

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Can you be specific?
I’ve discussed them a few times. This is perhaps the best example, see how the rating of the narrow directivity Quads improves when listening in stereo. I’m on the phone on holiday so unfortunately unable to provide a decent explanation of my point if view, sorry.

8NEklhC_d.webp
 

stevenswall

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I’ve discussed them a few times. This is perhaps the best example, see how the rating of the narrow directivity Quads improves when listening in stereo.

I thought the point of that was to show why mono listening is more important: Because people are more discerning when the brain isn't getting a rush from stereo sound, and so we see a larger gap. Stereo levels the playing field is what it seems like... The quads are still the worst, it's just harder to tell in stereo.
 

tuga

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I thought the point of that was to show why mono listening is more important: Because people are more discerning when the brain isn't getting a rush from stereo sound, and so we see a larger gap. Stereo levels the playing field is what it seems like... The quads are still the worst, it's just harder to tell in stereo.
Or, no one buys a single speaker, narrow directivity speakers produce less envelopment and thus rate poorly when in mono.
To make matters worse dipoles require adequate positioning which is not dealt with adequately in Harman’s tests.
 

Tim Link

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What we need is a small space the listener sits in with a light scrim all the way around them so they really can't see anything about the room they are in. Then all sorts of things could be changed in the darkness behind the scrim to test myriads of factors - room construction, room size, speaker placement, acoustic treatments, type of speaker, etc. We could spend billions testing this stuff! We need something like NASA. We could call it NARA, the National Audio Reproduction Administration.
 

ahofer

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What we need is a small space the listener sits in with a light scrim all the way around them so they really can't see anything about the room they are in. Then all sorts of things could be changed in the darkness behind the scrim to test myriads of factors - room construction, room size, speaker placement, type of speaker, etc. We could spend billions testing this stuff! We need something like NASA. We could call it NARA, the National Audio Reproduction Administration.

This is my lottery-winning vanity project.
 

Newman

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And post #211 there by @March Audio gives the correct rebuttal: “Toole has been explicit about this. Stereo tests never changed the order of preference over mono. So you can say you don't believe it as much as you like, but until you show some quality objective evidence that contradicts the conclusion, I will stick with Tooles decades of professional research.”
 

Duke

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And post #211 there by @March Audio gives the correct rebuttal: “Toole has been explicit about this. Stereo tests never changed the order of preference over mono.”

Here is what @Floyd Toole actually said, from his YouTube lecture at McGill University in Montreal:

“So we do the test in mono. And we occasionally have done comparisons in stereo as well just to prove the point to questioning persons. And every time the ones that win the mono tests win the stereo tests. There has been no exception to that rule. There is nothing special about stereophony or multichannel so far as sound quality is concerned.” [emphasis Duke's]

Notice that what never changes is which speaker wins sound quality. Not which speaker wins spatial quality. And I believe that Toole is not using the term "sound quality" as if it is inclusive of "spatial quality", because in the mono versus stereo tests, those are clearly two different things. And which speaker wins spatial quality ABSOLUTELY CAN change in stereo! From page 179 of The Book, third edition:

Ranking.Toole.3rdEd.P179-001.jpg
 
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Newman

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If there were error bars on that final set, you might find it too close to call a win. Correct call might be “too hard to tell — thanks to stereo”. So if that’s your evidence, you may have jumped prematurely.
 

amirm

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Notice that what does not change is which speaker wins sound quality. Not which speaker wins spatial quality. And I believe that Toole is not using the term "sound quality" as if it is inclusive of "spatial quality", because in the mono versus stereo tests, those are clearly two different things.
The typical questionnaire in Harman testing simply asks you to assign a score to speaker. If spatial qualities are not considered as you say, then it means listeners didn't care for it. Not because it was excluded. Here are the exact instructions in one of the peer reviewed publications:

Differences in Performance and Preference of Trained versus Untrained Listeners in Loudspeaker Tests: A Case Study

Author: Olive, Sean E.
Affiliation: Research & Development Group, Harman International Industries, Inc., Northridge, CA
JAES Volume 51 Issue 9 pp. 806-825; September 2003

1629933294413.png

1629933238662.png


Clearly then if stereo playback produced superior results due to spatial qualities it would change scores but it did not.
 

amirm

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And which speaker wins spatial quality ABSOLUTELY CAN change in stereo!
As does impression of tonality. All characteristics were included in mono and stereo testing but with results being the same.
 

Duke

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The typical questionnaire in Harman testing simply asks you to assign a score to speaker. If spatial qualities are not considered as you say, then it means listeners didn't care for it. Not because it was excluded. Here are the exact instructions in one of the peer reviewed publications:


Were stereo tests included in that study? It is not clear to me that they were.

Stereo tests were clearly included here (page 178, 3rd edition, this is the questionnaire used for the Rege/KEF/Quad test whose results are shown a little further down this post):

Toole.3rdEd.P178.jpg



All characteristics were included in mono and stereo testing but with results being the same.


The circled results do not look the same to me. What am I missing?


Ranking.Toole.3rdEd.P179-001.jpg
 

Duke

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If there were error bars on that final set, you might find it too close to call a win.

There are dots shown which represent individual ratings, which you can use to create your own error bars.

"Too close to call a win" would be a "tie" which would STILL be a change in "who wins spatial quality", from one winner in mono to two winners in stereo.

If I understand correctly, your position is that which speaker wins spatial quality never changes between mono and stereo. I don't think that position is supported by the data or by Dr. Toole's statements, as it seems that his statement about ranking never changing between mono and stereo applies to sound quality and not spatial quality. If you can show otherwise, please do.
 
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tuga

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Having seen photos of the Harman shuffler room one other relevant potential issue comes to mind: are the testers in these studies always seating in the “right” spot or do they also include reports of listeners in other “wrong” seats (which again would favour wide-directivity speakers)?
 

ahofer

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Having seen photos of the Harman shuffler room one other relevant potential issue comes to mind: are the testers in these studies always seating in the “right” spot or do they also include reports of listeners in other “wrong” seats (which again would favour wide-directivity speakers)?

I tend to think more of what Alan Shaw calls "real speaker positioning in real rooms". Granted that the Toole/Harman/Olive framework is intended to define a speaker that would sound good in a *variety* of room situations, there still seem to be commonalities in how people *tend* to position and surround their speakers that one could, perhaps, design for. The test center doesn't seem to be anything like a real room.
 

Newman

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There are dots shown which represent individual ratings, which you can use to create your own error bars.

"Too close to call a win" would be a "tie" which would STILL be a change in "who wins spatial quality", from one winner in mono to two winners in stereo.
No, it would NOT be a tie. It would be “too hard to tell — thanks to stereo”. Like I said the first time.

It’s important to know how to interpret statistics. Get it wrong and you go down all sorts of rabbit holes.
If I understand correctly, your position is that which speaker wins spatial quality never changes between mono and stereo. I don't think that position is supported by the data or by Dr. Toole's statements, as it seems that his statement about ranking never changing between mono and stereo applies to sound quality and not spatial quality. If you can show otherwise, please do.

Again, no. What I am saying is exactly what I said: you don’t have evidence that it does change spatial quality rankings by changing to stereo, even though you mistakenly thought you did. And that’s all I said. I didn’t say the words you put in my mouth, or mean them. We don’t have evidence that it does change with stereo, is not the same as saying it definitely never changes with stereo. Like I said the first time. This shouldn’t be so hard.
 
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amirm

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Were stereo tests included in that study? It is not clear to me that they were.
No. The point I am making is that people are allowed to judge speakers in whatever way they want. You had made a distinction that people were not allowed to judge spatial qualities. I showed that they could if they value it.

Stereo tests were clearly included here (page 178, 3rd edition, this is the questionnaire used for the Rege/KEF/Quad test whose results are shown a little further down this post):
Sure because that was the specific focus of that study.
 

amirm

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Having seen photos of the Harman shuffler room one other relevant potential issue comes to mind: are the testers in these studies always seating in the “right” spot or do they also include reports of listeners in other “wrong” seats (which again would favour wide-directivity speakers)?
They do both depending on the test. When a single trained listener is used, it is solitary and the person sits on axis. When large groups are tested, they sit wherever in the room with a dozen or so seats. In some of the studies like the one I noted, this is actually discussed as a factor in differing preference or statistical power of the results.
 
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