How audible are resonances, or how much do they matter?

[kemmler3D]

Curious about something here. The last stand for my two EV ZLX speakers before the Yamahas take over will be a 50 person bachata dance on top of a parking garage. Right now, they're using some JBL Partybox 310 and it's fine, but only fine. Do you think a stereo ZLX setup here will outperform the Partybox despite having less bass extension?

Good question. IMO you need good SPL below 80hz and really down to 60hz for dancing. Below that is good but not required. SPL @ 60hz is more important than F3/6/10 extension IMO. The better speaker for dancing will have better performance in that area... just my opinion. But this is something I thought about a lot when I used to compete with the Partybox-type speakers.

I guess you could bring both and try a side-by-side, why not?

 

[bachatero]

I'm doing a side by side listening test with my Neumann KH150s by cutting out everything below 80Hz and above 800Hz.

Impressions:
- It's too easy to feel the resonances on both speaker enclosures once you've eliminated everything else. But on the KH150s, it feels only as strong as when you slide your fingers along the painted wood, meanwhile on the ZLXes it feels much more substantial as if you were playing bassy music.
- Compared to the KH150s, the sound has a sort of added "distortion" to it that doesn't sound completely like distortion but sounds abnormal. Something similar can be heard from the KH150s but these are existing filter artifacts due to the super harsh lowpass I'm using and which are also audible in the ZLXes.
- Subjectively, the ZLXes feel "muddy" in that it's harder to make out each instrument/part. With the KH150s you can still easily discern each component knowing that they all sound like from a walkie talkie.
- The KH150s still sound better even if I turn the volume way down on them.

 

[Waveform Fidelity]

I am surprised that no-one mentioned car audio at this point. Even the best in-car audio system are plagued with lots of resonances, door panels, speaker grills, loose coins in the console, undamped cavities, etc. and so to answer your question “are resonances audible?” yes they are very audible, especially on speech, and you can see that from the long impulse response too!

 

[Penelinfi]

my new favorite word

Coming soon to a dystopia near you...

I know of a story, where you can get "comaprison" from being in The World


I think if those EV speakers were measured with the modern metrics, you might see distortion spikes, roughness in the rainbow graph (forgot name), extended trails in impulse response, potentially in compression, maybe multi tone as well.

 

[bachatero]

The DZR12s have arrived.

I did about an hour of testing and they're clearly way better sounding than those plastic monstrosities thanks to their all plywood cabinet, but the bass extension is somehow not as good as suggested by the graphs, even with the added bass boost plus an added low shelf filter. I ALMOST got the 15 inch version instead for better bass but don't like the idea of beaming at higher frequencies.