Dutch & Dutch 8Cs

[Blumlein 88]

The Kii Three appears to be designed with similar goals.

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/reviews/kii-three-loudspeaker-review-r735/

Review of the Kii Three by the same fellow. A more than decent review if you ask me.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Ok, I see. Nope, I'll wait till they are able to accept USB connectivity and/or till they put inside another board running Volumio or something similar, like there is in MiniDSP SHD.

I've seen where Roon is about to support the 8C as an endpoint.

 

[Krunok]

As far as I understood it, they are working on a Dutch & Dutch digital preamp-thingy, with different kinds of inputs and digital aes/ebu output. But the minidsp SHD Studio should do more or less the same thing. They are also working on getting them roon ready, so one can use roon for streaming directly to the 8Cs. But I highly doubt they will do any physical changes to the connections to the speaker itself in the foreseeable future.

I see it odd they provide AES3 inputs and no USB. Btw, how do you make AES3 connection, only to one of them or the same signal to both of them?

 

[Krunok]

I've seen where Roon is about to support the 8C as an endpoint.

And that would work over Ethernet, I guess? WiFi would be nice as well.

Beside ROON endpoint it would be nice if they can act as an UPnP/DLNA renderer as well.

 

[oivavoi]

I see it odd they provide AES3 inputs and no USB. Btw, how do you make AES3 connection, only to one of them or the same signal to both of them?

AES3 signal to one of the speakers, then an aes cable from that speaker to the other speaker.

Roon will work by ethernet, yes. No wifi connectivity in the speaker hardware that I'm aware of.

 

[Cosmik]

This is a decent review of the 8Cs
https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/reviews/dutch-dutch-8c-loudspeaker-review-r739/
Keith

See how an objectively measured response of 20 Hz and straight line to -10 dB at 20 kHz is subjectively perceived as a neutral or flat response to our ears/brain (red trace overlaid in the above chart). Most participants in the study preferred a frequency response from 20 Hz with a straight line to -10 dB at 20 kHz. A measured “flat” in-room frequency response is not the preferred target, as it sounds too thin or lacking bass.

I still can't understand how this idea persists. It isn't that the listener perceives a drooping frequency response as natural: it's that the listener separates the direct sound from the reverberant, thereby hearing the speaker's flat, neutral frequency response. The reverberation that the microphone and dumb Fourier transform cannot separate from the direct signal is what produces the downward response in the in-room measurement. The precise drooping frequency response is the result of playing a neutral speaker in a certain type of room; it is meaningless as a target in a different type of room or with a different type of speaker.

The conventional explanation is messy, has to refer to a 'mystery' and is basically talking about 'the wrong thing'. The other explanation is neat, clear, precise, elegant and explains why a genuinely neutral speaker sounds neutral without resorting to 'room correction', and why it produces the downard slope in a real room. What's not to like? Answer: it means that hearing is more capable than just a frequency response analyser, and renders the entire hobby/industry of room correction as null and void.

Edit: until recently, genuinely neutral (or close to) speakers were not available. Maybe the 'mystery' of the dropping frequency response might have been an excusable confusion because all speakers had to be corrected to some extent because of their non-uniform dispersion (e.g. ameliorated with baffle step correction) and other horrors related to passive filters, bass reflex, etc. But now that neutral speakers are available, it is amazing that they are being used as 'proof of the droop', rather than direct evidence that the 'droop' is a fiction. When a speaker doesn't need adjustment, has flat anechoic response and sounds neutral in a real room, this is proof of 'hearing through the room' *not* proof of the 'droop'!

 

[Blumlein 88]

I still can't understand how this idea persists. It isn't that the listener perceives a drooping frequency response as natural: it's that the listener separates the direct sound from the reverberant, thereby hearing the speaker's flat, neutral frequency response. The reverberation that the microphone and dumb Fourier transform cannot separate from the direct signal is what produces the downward response in the in-room measurement. The precise drooping frequency response is the result of playing a neutral speaker in a certain type of room; it is meaningless as a target in a different type of room or with a different type of speaker.

The conventional explanation is messy, has to refer to a 'mystery' and is basically talking about 'the wrong thing'. The other explanation is neat, clear, precise, elegant and explains why a genuinely neutral speaker sounds neutral without resorting to 'room correction', and why it produces the downard slope in a real room. What's not to like? Answer: it means that hearing is more capable than just a frequency response analyser, and renders the entire hobby/industry of room correction as null and void.

I was with you until the last sentence.

Yes, I often pipe up about the downward slope thing. That is an artifact of in room measurement of a flat anechoic result. OTOH, while you might not know precisely the slope you'd end up measuring in a given room, an in room measurement that is flat would have to be too bright and come from an elevated treble response anechoicly speaking.

 

[Krunok]

AES3 signal to one of the speakers, then an aes cable from that speaker to the other speaker.

Roon will work by ethernet, yes. No wifi connectivity in the speaker hardware that I'm aware of.

Well, in my opinion that is clumsy. As we live in the world where WiFi can easilly transport >80Mb/s I see no need for digital connection to go over any kind of cables (AES3, USB, Ethernet).

I can even imagine that soon a small ADC converter with MM/MC input would be designed which will be able to send the digital stream from your turntable directly to sume future variant of 8C.

 

[oivavoi]

Well, in my opinion that is clumsy. As we live in the world where WiFi can easilly transport >80Mb/s I see no need for digital connection to go over any kind of cables (AES3, USB, Ethernet).

Agreed!

 

[andreasmaaan]

The conventional explanation is messy, has to refer to a 'mystery' and is basically talking about 'the wrong thing'. The other explanation is neat, clear, precise, elegant and explains why a genuinely neutral speaker sounds neutral without resorting to 'room correction', and why it produces the downard slope in a real room. What's not to like? Answer: it means that hearing is more capable than just a frequency response analyser, and renders the entire hobby/industry of room correction as null and void.

Your explanation of what is happening to produce the downward slope is correct, but you lost me too with the last paragraph. What do you mean by "the conventional explanation"?

Anyway, your conclusion about what how it should work is neat and logical as a hypothesis, but remains to be seen experimentally.

It may prove to be the case that people prefer the in-room sound field to be tilted towards the bass. My two prime candiadates for why this might prove to be the case:

• It's what the engineers were hearing when they mixed all of our music.
• It's what tends to happen with real acoustic sources.

So I believe that I may be wrong and you may be right, but the answer cannot be known without experimental evidence. And this evidence unfortunately may prove to be contingent upon the mixing decisions made in the material we listen to on one hand, and our own experience of hearing real acoustic sources in rooms on the other. Or not

Also, I think you're mistaken about room correction and the target room curve, or at least you've been reading different studies to what I have. The downward slope in the steady-state response is not supposed to be generated by EQ, it's supposed to follow from an anechoicically flat speaker with downward sloping power response being optimally placed in a typical listening room. Only below the Schroeder frequency is room EQ to be used to tailor the response to the target. If the response doesn't meet the target in the mid and high frequencies, EQ is not the answer.

 

[andreasmaaan]

I was with you until the last sentence.

Yes, I often pipe up about the downward slope thing. That is an artifact of in room measurement of a flat anechoic result. OTOH, while you might not know precisely the slope you'd end up measuring in a given room, an in room measurement that is flat would have to be too bright and come from an elevated treble response anechoicly speaking.

I think the interesting thing about a speaker like the 8C is that it is a lot more likely to give a flat in-room response than a typical non-cardioid speaker. So a flat anechoic response and flat(ter) in-room response may not be mutually exclusive.

@Cosmik is convinced (if I understand him correctly) that this result is superior and that no further thought or research need be done.

I'm not so sure, I think there are plausible arguments each way and that experimental evidence is needed.

 

[Soniclife]

The Kii Three appears to be designed with similar goals.

They do, but Mitch needed to measure with a mic and then set the adjustment to get the correct slope, where the 8c only need a tape measure and the basic questions answered in the configurator. He went further than that but that seemed optional / advanced config, not 'basic' setup. It seems the design + basic config should give in room sound quality greater than what most people on hifi forums have, after years of fiddling and building up knowledge. When you buy a high quality TV you don't expect to end up having to read up on visual processing, optimum light levels etc to get a picture that looks fantastic, just a few mins in the menus turning off the manufacturers dumb picture enhancement modes etc is all that's required. These seem like the audio equivalent of a TV purchase.

 

[Cosmik]

I think the interesting thing about a speaker like the 8C is that it is a lot more likely to give a flat in-room response than a typical non-cardioid speaker. So a flat anechoic response and flat(ter) in-room response may not be mutually exclusive.

@Cosmik is convinced (if I understand him correctly) that this result is superior and that no further thought or research need be done.

I'm not so sure, I think there are plausible arguments each way and that experimental evidence is needed.

I'm simply using logic:
A neutral speaker (flat response) in the near field (effectively anechoic or in an anechoic chamber) sounds neutral.
A neutral speaker in the far field sounds neutral.
Logical conclusion: humans find a flat response to sound neutral.

But the 'conventional' explanation/conclusion i.e. espoused by all room correction enthusiasts, is that something happened when the listener moved from near to the speaker to far away. Their hearing changed so that they now prefer a drooping frequency response - because an indiscriminate microphone/FFT measurement shows that if you accumulate a timed window of in-room sound and then examine the contents of the FT bins, there is a downwards slope. If the duration of the window is changed, the slope changes, too. Messy.

The other explanation (did someone mention Occam's Razor?) is that the human hears the direct, neutral sound from the speakers wherever they are in the room relative to the speakers!

It's simple logic, could have been (was?) predicted before these speakers were developed, fits perfectly with everyday experience and what evolution would have provided if it wanted an animal's hearing to give it a survival advantage. It also fits perfectly with the 'hollow recording' experiment where an in-room microphone picks up something different to what a human hears in the live situation. But I could be wrong...

 

[andreasmaaan]

Actually @Cosmik now I'm not sure I understood your original post!

Is the "conventional explanation" in your view that the on-axis response above the Schroeder frequency should be non-flat to enable a downward sloping room curve?

I thought this was more of a rookie error than it was conventional wisdom...

 

[Cosmik]

Actually @Cosmik now I'm not sure I understood your original post!

Is the "conventional explanation" in your view that the on-axis response above the Schroeder frequency should be non-flat to enable a downward sloping room curve?

I thought this was more of a rookie error than it was conventional wisdom...

The conventional explanation is that "People prefer a drooping response when listening in a room". Science tends to suggest that is the case. But only if you accept that human hearing is purely a frequency response analyser. In other words, the science is reporting a correct but partial result. And then a wider conclusion than is warranted is being extrapolated from this - and an entire industry and way of messing up some commercial recordings is born.

The unambiguously logical explanation is: "Human hearing separates the speaker's direct sound from the room. A dumb mic/FFT shows a downards slope but human hearing only hears the direct, flat sound when all the acoustic cues are present. It doesn't matter whether the source is a speaker, or a live performer; the human's hearing does the same processing".

A bad room cannot be 'corrected' by changing the direct signal. The listener will hear a changed direct signal, and the room will still sound bad.

I am not completely alone with these thoughts:

... it is now widely recognized that we perceptually "stream" the sound of the room as separate from the sound of the sources - that is what happens in live performances. A Steinway is a Steinway; only the hall changes.

 

[andreasmaaan]

The conventional explanation is that "People prefer a drooping response when listening in a room". Science tends to suggest that is the case. But only if you accept that human hearing is purely a frequency response analyser. In other words, the science is reporting a correct but partial result. And then a wider conclusion than is warranted is being extrapolated from this - and an entire industry and way of messing up some commercial recordings is born.

The unambiguously logical explanation is: "Human hearing separates the speaker's direct sound from the room. A dumb mic/FFT shows a downards slope; human hearing only hears the direct, flat sound when all the acoustic cues are present. It doesn't matter whether the source is a speaker, or a live performer; the human's hearing does the same processing".

The science doesn't assume human hearing is purely a frequency response analyser. If that were the case, no distinction would be made between the direct sound and the sound field.

The conventional wisdom does, on the contrary, very clearly make this distinction. The direct sound should be flat, the sound field should slope downward. The whole thing is based precisely on the fact that our ears are not FR analysers but can distinguish the direct from the reflected sound. It's literally the opposite of the way you're characterising it!

 

[Cosmik]

The science doesn't assume human hearing is purely a frequency response analyser. If that were the case, no distinction would be made between the direct sound and the sound field.

The conventional wisdom does, on the contrary, very clearly make this distinction. The direct sound should be flat, the sound field should slope downward. The whole thing is based precisely on the fact that our ears are not FR analysers but can distinguish the direct from the reflected sound. It's literally the opposite of the way you're characterising it!

So why in the review above does it say

See how an objectively measured response of 20 Hz and straight line to -10 dB at 20 kHz is subjectively perceived as a neutral or flat response to our ears/brain

(I started off by referring to this statement. A few Chinese whispers later, and I have to go back to it again!)

And if we're being correct about this, I didn't say what you just said. I was very precise:

Science tends to suggest that is the case. But only if you accept that human hearing is purely a frequency response analyser. In other words, the science is reporting a correct but partial result. And then a wider conclusion than is warranted is being extrapolated from this

 

[andreasmaaan]

So why in the review above does it say

Well I don't know what the reviewer's views are. Your post was attacking the "conventional wisdom", not the reviewer.

But FWIW the reviewer does go on to say in the sentence directly after the one you quoted above:

“The Science of Preferred Frequency Response for Headphones and Loudspeakers” goes into more detail and provides links to further studies, which show the same preferences, for both loudspeakers and headphones, after repeated listening trials.

And then if you click on that link, a few paragraphs into it he says (my bold):

Note that this preferred in-room target curve does not guarantee good sound. The loudspeaker needs to have flat anechoic response and smooth sound power.

So I don't think he's moved far if at all from the conventional wisdom either.

 

[Cosmik]

Well I don't know what the reviewer's views are. Your post was attacking the "conventional wisdom", not the reviewer.

But FWIW the reviewer does go on to say in the sentence directly after the one you quoted above:


And then if you click on that link, a few paragraphs into it he says (my bold):


So I don't think he's moved far if at all from the conventional wisdom either.

This conventional wisdom of yours doesn't explain anything. It just makes an observation from which is extrapolated the logic for 'room correction' and 'target responses'. These, you must surely admit are 'conventional' ideas.

Only a real explanation, or understanding as opposed to the passive observation of science, will explain what is happening.

I unveil my new signature.

 

[andreasmaaan]

This conventional wisdom of yours doesn't explain anything. It just makes an observation from which is extrapolated the logic for 'room correction' and 'target responses'. These, you must surely admit are 'conventional' ideas.

Only a real explanation, or understanding as opposed to the passive observation of science, will explain what is happening.

I unveil my new signature.

Hahahahaa

I'm still not sure I understand what you're trying to say in concrete terms though. I don't understand what your "real explanation" is.

It seems to me that you agree with the conventional wisdom that the direct sound and the sound field should not be conflated above Schroeder. Correct?

But it seems that you disagree with the conventional wisdom that the two should be conflated below Schroeder? I.e. you disagree with the idea that EQ should be used to smooth the steady-state response below the Schroeder frequency. Correct?

And the other thing I don't understand about your position: Do you believe that both the direct sound and the sound field should measure flat? Or that only the direct sound should be taken into consideration, i.e. the sound field is not of any interest?

Or are you saying something else?