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Yes, there is a simpler illustration, which I couldn't find during a short time searching. Here is the one I had in mind.
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Blind Listening Test 2: Neumann KH 80 vs JBL 305p MkII vs Edifier R1280T vs RCF Arya Pro5
- Thread starter MatthewS
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thecheapseats
Addicted to Fun and Learning
the point I enjoyed most while reading Olive expanding and explaining Toole's 'circle' in the link you posted - is the room where the loudspeakers are placed to monitor whatever music is used to perpetuate the loop... in the 'circle pics', they are treated as one thing - just lumped together in #2 of the first pic as 'monitor loudspeaker...
and Olive had a great graph demonstrating this point - of the same monitor brand and model, taken from several studios' control rooms (as I understood it, while reading his comments) with very different levels relative to each other which was effective in explaining the issue... it's is not just the speaker alone - but how it excites and interacts within the room in which it is placed...
in proposing some type of calibration standard for speakers themselves, as Olive proposes - the room is and always will be a variable unless it's corrected (in some manner)... that's a big moving target...
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The OP @MatthewS is the first person in a long time to try to collect meaningful data. Great and exciting to see the lively discusions and speculation here. He is moving us closer with speaker listening perception reviews in a way that is far closer to the work @amirm does here, so I am a fan.
We note that
We note that
- Listeners were blind to the speakers on rotation so scored what they heard.
- Scoring was by musicians and audiophiles (80%) and 20% others. Musicians are better than anyone else at knowing how instruments sound. Sound engineers next, followed by Audiophiles (probablyl).
- Differences did not meet statistical significance but.......
- Box & Whisker table shows the variation about the average score for each speaker
- The review was not pulling views from the general population, but from a population skewed towards music reproduction accuracy.
I'm afraid you actually do not get my point. But I can't dismiss that little knowledge from a year in social sciences on how to design a valid survey on peoples' 'real' feelings. Numerical analysis aka statistics is only one aspect. Most of the work goes into the setting and the apparatus of queries.
But even on the level of mere facts in engineering terms I can't get through. There is hefty cross correlation between program material and the tested specimen of speaker boxes, the significant properties of individual speakers cross-correlate and so forth.
Ja, I read Toole's book. I've got it under my pillow. Still I'm not so deeply impressed, that I cannot imagine some progress in the field. I'll leave it as that.
I would have that would be quite uncomfortable, surely bedside table is more appropriate ?
Keith
Keith
First of all, the effort of the OP is highly appreciated. More so, the critique from my side is exactly to celebrate the merits of that effort, as I said explicitely before in my inital post on this. He should not feel to be surrounded by ja-sayers, effectively left alone. Some may have missed this often neglected aspect of work, namely appreciation by engagement in complicity.
(2), (5) Nope, please listen to the music that was used for test. Me as a half-way musician get shivers from the unnatural, superficial attitude it conveys. It's popular hifi-stuff at its worst.
Sorry for coming back on this, but I missed the latest posts before my second last reply. The reference to clinical studies triggered me. Listeners are not biological machines that just react. They form an opinion. If you don't get the difference, what shall I say? Presumably nothing.
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Yes, this is less busy and less confusing, thank you.
Do you think active speakers with DSP play a role in softening that circle of confusion a bit?
You may possibly think that my post was aimed at you specifically. It was not. It is trying to develop the idea and support for the OP. .We both acknowledge that that the OPs work is good? You comment about the choice of tracks which is noted but does come across as unecessarily criticalrather than helpful. Perhaps something is lost in the tone of your writing?
From reading your comments about clinical studies, would I be correct in thinking that you are not expert or practised in that specialist area? it seems like a subjective opinion
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I think it can. I've used DSP since TACT units were available about 20 years ago.
I know Olive's idea was only correcting below Schoeder frequencies (500 hz or less) for room effects, and speaker properties were to be heard above that. Yet they did test some RoomEQ units, and a couple did improve scores in their blind testing. Certainly a messy speaker off axis probably can never be made to equal a speaker with good dispersion, but I'd think quite a few can be improved versus no DSP.
I don't know what sort of EQ JBL uses in their active monitors, but they use some. For that matter, they use plenty in their M2. So apparently they have found DSP can improve a speaker in regards to listener ratings.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
the track list doesn't seam to suport the bass extension theory.
I would love to see the in-room meassurements unsmoothed,
but it seams that the JBL mid range boost equalizes a deficiancy of the room in that range. at least that's my theory with the limited data given.
about the circle of confusion: engeniers will monitor in the near field, so without a strong extra ambience, and their speakers tend to be flat. that means that the best speakers for reflective rooms in the mid- and far-field will be those that best combine with the room....that means that this wont be necessary flat. that's why we use in-room correction.
I would love to see the in-room meassurements unsmoothed,
but it seams that the JBL mid range boost equalizes a deficiancy of the room in that range. at least that's my theory with the limited data given.
about the circle of confusion: engeniers will monitor in the near field, so without a strong extra ambience, and their speakers tend to be flat. that means that the best speakers for reflective rooms in the mid- and far-field will be those that best combine with the room....that means that this wont be necessary flat. that's why we use in-room correction.
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The good side though is that is more relevant for the bass region as above humans tend to adapt and hear "though" the room and mainly the direct sound.
Bass always needs EQ to the room but from the other side as Toole recommends it is easy to have a variable bass shelving filter at playback for differently well mixed recordings.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
if we take a 1000 living rooms, and create a mean response of those, I actualy doubt that flat is the best starting point. there is probably a tendency towards a comon deficiency
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No like mentioned above, we mostly hear through the room above the Schroeder frequency. So direct even response is best. Don't confuse those sloping in room measurements with not being flat. Remember it is a measurement artifact. A speaker that is flat in an anechoic environment will have that slight downward slope measured in a room.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
how so, when a first reflection comes in a few ms after the direct? this is probably only true in halls with an actual reverb
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Magic of our brain and ears. It filters out the first few milliseconds of those reflections. So what we hear is fairly close to the direct sound. That is why microphones aren't like ears. This is why you can play something over a speaker, and record it even close up. Play it back and you hear the early reflections picked up by the microphone. Because they are coming direct from the speaker. We hear that direct sound and have no way to filter it out. If the reflections come slightly delayed from other angles our ears can mostly remove it so we don't hear early reflections.
It actually doesn't work with large halls. They have noticeable reverb because the reflections are long enough they don't get filtered and it does not sound as much direct to our ears.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
science says otherwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedence_effect
you can easily test this with two speakers. send them the same signal, but delay one of those a few ms. you will see that you ear wont filter out the later one, but treat both as a single signal, but shifted in space
The article appears to support what @Blumlein 88 stated. Perhaps you are in"violent agreement"?
The precedence effect or law of the first wavefront is a binaural psychoacoustical effect. When a sound is followed by another sound separated by a sufficiently short time delay (below the listener's echo threshold), listeners perceive a single auditory event; its perceived spatial location is dominated by the location of the first-arriving sound (the first wave front). The lagging sound also affects the perceived location. However, its effect is suppressed by the first-arriving sound.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
can you further reduce the citation to where this is happening? I fail to see your point here.
you should take the test I sugested
I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Toole, but he is not entirely accurate about the circle of confusion.
Commercial music is mastered with the assumption that it will be played in a home listening environment, and is EQ'd during mastering stage for this purpose. While all mastering environments are not the same (for example, at Sterling Sound, the acoustics and speakers are significantly different between Ted Jensen's room and Greg Calbi's room.), mastering studios generally have rooms with acoustics similar to a typical home environment. I would say the mastering environment is similar to that of a listening room in a high end audio shop. The same goes for speakers.
The master tape sent to the mastering studio is completed in the recording studios. Recording studios are designed to have as flat room acoustics and monitors as possible. It is very different from domestic environment. (In recent music productions, mixing engineers have often taken on the final adjustments traditionally done in mastering studios. For example, Serban Ghenea does mastering during the mixing stage. However, his studio is not a typical professional recording studio but rather closer to a mastering studio.)
Neumann are products designed for recording studios and are not intended for mastering (even if they claim so). The speakers used for mastering are usually the audiophile speakers, and for example, Ted Jensen was using B&W800D. B&W800D is a consumer product (even if they claim it's for professionals), and its response is clearly not flat. B&W800D has a BBC dip, and its bass and treble are slightly smiling. This is the typical frequency response of an audiophile speaker, as can be seen in Stereophile.
In other words, commercial music is assumed to be played back in non-flat home environments, and there is no circle of confusion. This is simply a result of historical circumstances, and no matter how much technology advances to make household speakers flat, it cannot fundamentally change the issue of compatibility with recordings that have been sold for over 50 years in the past. No one would be foolish enough to listen to vinyls without RMAA correction just because they hate the correction, but trying to listen to a source that was not originally intended for a flat environment in a flat environment may be wrong. In fact, there are likely many people who intuitively feel that flat speakers are a bit unbalanced.
It's not a matter of science, but rather a matter of history.
However, recent mastering has been adapting to more flat speakers compared to 20 years ago, and someday flat speakers may become the standard as time passes. Also, there are differences depending on the source. There are bright sources like Norah Jones that are often used as a reference for Audiophile's listening tests. If such sources were used in this test, the results would have naturally been different. However, this is not the circle of confusion or anything like that. It's simply a fact that there are brighter sources, and there's no need to worry that your environment is too bright, you just need to recognize that the source is bright. We should not treat the source as the word of God.
Commercial music is mastered with the assumption that it will be played in a home listening environment, and is EQ'd during mastering stage for this purpose. While all mastering environments are not the same (for example, at Sterling Sound, the acoustics and speakers are significantly different between Ted Jensen's room and Greg Calbi's room.), mastering studios generally have rooms with acoustics similar to a typical home environment. I would say the mastering environment is similar to that of a listening room in a high end audio shop. The same goes for speakers.
The master tape sent to the mastering studio is completed in the recording studios. Recording studios are designed to have as flat room acoustics and monitors as possible. It is very different from domestic environment. (In recent music productions, mixing engineers have often taken on the final adjustments traditionally done in mastering studios. For example, Serban Ghenea does mastering during the mixing stage. However, his studio is not a typical professional recording studio but rather closer to a mastering studio.)
Neumann are products designed for recording studios and are not intended for mastering (even if they claim so). The speakers used for mastering are usually the audiophile speakers, and for example, Ted Jensen was using B&W800D. B&W800D is a consumer product (even if they claim it's for professionals), and its response is clearly not flat. B&W800D has a BBC dip, and its bass and treble are slightly smiling. This is the typical frequency response of an audiophile speaker, as can be seen in Stereophile.
In other words, commercial music is assumed to be played back in non-flat home environments, and there is no circle of confusion. This is simply a result of historical circumstances, and no matter how much technology advances to make household speakers flat, it cannot fundamentally change the issue of compatibility with recordings that have been sold for over 50 years in the past. No one would be foolish enough to listen to vinyls without RMAA correction just because they hate the correction, but trying to listen to a source that was not originally intended for a flat environment in a flat environment may be wrong. In fact, there are likely many people who intuitively feel that flat speakers are a bit unbalanced.
It's not a matter of science, but rather a matter of history.
However, recent mastering has been adapting to more flat speakers compared to 20 years ago, and someday flat speakers may become the standard as time passes. Also, there are differences depending on the source. There are bright sources like Norah Jones that are often used as a reference for Audiophile's listening tests. If such sources were used in this test, the results would have naturally been different. However, this is not the circle of confusion or anything like that. It's simply a fact that there are brighter sources, and there's no need to worry that your environment is too bright, you just need to recognize that the source is bright. We should not treat the source as the word of God.
dasdoing
Major Contributor
if we compare mastering with mixing, the first will make sure the tonal balance is compatible with existing material...the later is more about precise balancing of sepearate sources (instruments, vocals).
tonal balance is something we get used to, and we have preferences.
the balancing of individual elements in a mix on the other hand is somethinng that can be easily be unbalanced with deficiancies in the playback system. for example: the mix has a loud electric guitar with the main energy in a specific band of the frequency response. if the playback system now has a resonance in that range, the guitar will be too loud. if you have two systems though which are balanced, but one has a steeper falling curve, the guitar is still balanced...only the tonal balanced changed
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