How NOT to set up speakers and room treatment ( Goldensound)

[tuga]

So today the panels are back up and I'm a very happy bunny today.

Ha, but were you wearing a blindfold when AB-testing?
And I hope you listened to a single speaker placed in front of your iMac...

 

[fineMen]

I'm not sure I understand what you said by there is no 'decay' of a single frequency ?
RT60 and T60 are 2D graphs of time vs frequency (that can be more or less smoothed).

You didn't say that directly, but only to make sure: one (!) frequency cannot logically decay ;-)

It's a lot of blah blah around, never mind

 

[Somafunk]

Ha, but were you wearing a blindfold when AB-testing?
And I hope you listened to a single speaker placed in front of your iMac...

I closed my eyes, this'll do won't it? , and for the single speaker thing I guess I could place one of my HomePod mini's on the desk

 

[cavedriver]

Just like you I pay attention to imaging when listening do live acoustic music. I certainly hear imaging (and I've always tended to favor the closer seats at symphonies).
Is it "pin point?" That can be hard to agree upon because it's pretty subjective what we might mean by "pin point," as in how precise does it have to be for any particular individual to think "this is pin-point imaging!"

Where I live, in a downtown-adjacent area, there is almost constant live music being played in the streets - usually small folk or jazz groups, live un-amplified instruments. When I stop, close my eyes and listen for imaging it's actually pretty close to plenty of small group recordings I play on my system.
I would say that the live imaging is actually quite precise - I can point to exactly where the trombone player is and that he is several feet in front of the drums etc.

I think having been attending more symphonic concerts lately and listening to more recordings, I'm only at the point where I'd be happy if I can confirm that the conductor put the violas on the left with the violins or on the right with the cellos

 

[amirm]

Fair enough. What I meant is that the preference should be universally applicable.

It would be if music had standards for tonality. Then we could replicate it and be done. Right now, we have no idea how music is mixed, what the tonality of the room was where the music was created, etc. So this problem has no specific solution. Just listening to a different set of music will get you to potentially prefer something else. All we can do is get better than random guess.

 

[amirm]

You seem to be changing between control room and domestic room indiscriminately, it’s hard to follow

Either way, you best not chop off a key heading in what you quoted. You also didn't answer me. Do you own the book or ran with that abstract from someone else's post?

 

[amirm]

It’s just as easy to point out flaws in Toole’s research

You haven't been able to poke any holes so I don't know why you say it is easy. If it were easy, you would be putting forward myriad of research he shows to back his point of view. For your part, you just disagree.

 

[caught gesture]

After having the same 2.2 speaker set up plus the same DAC, amplifier, source, etc, in a heavily treated room following the design principles for a control room as found in Master Handbook of Acoustics (as far as I could with the room I had available) and then moving everything into a domestic room (with lots of books!), I noticed some differences. In the treated room the bass was dryer and more focused even though I am using Dirac now. Transient attack was more noticeable in the treated room, especially on percussion (snare hits especially). The soundstage was wider in the treated room. This was particularly evident in mixes using hard panning. If I closed my eyes, on some recordings the hard panned elements seemed to come from the boundary and sometimes, surprisingly, outside of the room. On mixes with few elements the musicians were more separated.

On most mixes I actually prefer the domestic environment. There seems to be more cohesion. I get distracted less by details and tend to listen more to the whole mix.

 

[amirm]

The envelopment of the concert hall is either captured or enhanced in the mix.
You can’t conflate recorded envelopment with room-generated envelopment.

To my eyes this is an area where Toole’s personal preference has stood in the way of unbiased interpretation.
He’s fond of envelopment to the point of using upmixing

That's just wrong. There is nothing natural about sound coming out of a point source of a speaker. Side reflections pull the image of the sound out of the point source of the speaker, giving a more proper presentation. People who prefer this are not stupid. They like what they hear for this reason. Your impression of why this is wrong continues from the lay confusion there must be a lot of reverb, echoes, etc. As Dr. Toole shows, side walls cannot produce sufficient envelopment anyway. For that, you need multichannel and hence his affinity there.

 

[tuga]

Either way, you best not chop off a key heading in what you quoted. You also didn't answer me. Do you own the book or ran with that abstract from someone else's post?

I own the book.

 

[Vuki]

Can you give some example tracks with ambience..?

Pope Music

"Audiophile label founded in 1994 by Gene Pope and Alan Leftwich, based in Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. Concentrated on making classical recordings using mostly Russian artist on one hand and on the other recordings of American singer/songwriters. Recordings were made with a pair of DPA...

www.discogs.com

 

[amirm]

I tried a totally unscientific and subjective experiment yesterday by removing the side wall absorption at first reflection points, and removing the sidewall absorption/diffusion just behind me whilst leaving front/rear of room as is. (I didn't remove them personally, got my rather bemused mum to remove them for the afternoon)

Just so we're absolutely clear I have absolutely zero/zilch/nada/not a fu£king jot of acoustic training so this purely based on what I heard, the room was set up a few years ago by a mate who works in the industry using rew/umik mic and his 30+ years of work in studios)

Front of room
4 tri traps with membrane range limiter, 2 4" absorption panels with tuned membrane and 1 4" absorption/diffusion

3 2" panels on ceiling

Rear of room
Rear of room with 8" bass traps with tuned membrane and 4" absorption/diffusion

I removed the 4 side wall panels shown below (old pic, ignore my previous krk's, these are all old pics)

I sat and browsed my usual listening of electronic/electronica such as Jon Hopkins, Craven Faults, Underworld, Moby, Carl Craig, Rival Consoles, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Dave Clark, Loscil etc...etc.

The sound in listening position in front of monitors was undefined, less direct snap, less impact and the side wall reflections were rather annoying for my preferred musical choice.

So today the panels are back up and I'm a very happy bunny today.

This concludes my totally unscientific subjective appreciation of how my room sounds with/without side wall treatment

Thanks for trying but you have a near-field situation with no side-wall treatments for first reflection points which is the topic of discussion here. This kind of experiment is tricky because removing absorbers also changes the rooms overall level of reverberation so it is not a proper AB test. You are also doing the test sighted which makes it harder. The research I post already about mixing music dealt with both of these factors by keeping the overall level of absorption the same and keeping the testing blind.

 

[tuga]

That's just wrong. There is nothing natural about sound coming out of a point source of a speaker. Side reflections pull the image of the sound out of the point source of the speaker, giving a more proper presentation. People who prefer this are not stupid. They like what they hear for this reason. Your impression of why this is wrong continues from the lay confusion there must be a lot of reverb, echoes, etc. As Dr. Toole shows, side walls cannot produce sufficient envelopment anyway. For that, you need multichannel and hence his affinity there.

Pull the image of the sound? Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
I never said that people who prefer the widening of the images and soundstage are stupid, they like what they like.

Stereo creates a bi-dimensional sense of scenic width by placing the images on or between the speakers. A single speaker is unable to create that sense, all images are aligned with the speaker's axis.

Linkwitz:

https://www.linkwitzlab.com/AES-NY%2709/The%20Challenge.pdf

 

[cavedriver]

Sadly the folklore has gotten so bad that if you don't have a room full of acoustic panels, folks think something wrong with your room. What is really wrong is that people haven't spend $35 on Dr. Toole's book and a few days of reading and learning about real sound acoustics. Please, please do not follow the Internet consensus on this. They are just wrong.

well stated, but just a side note, I noticed Dr. Toole's book is up to $60 on Amazon...

 

[amirm]

Pull the image of the sound? Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

There you go: you don't even know the standard terminology about the topic we are talking about. It is also described at length in the Acoustics of Small Rooms which you just claim to own. Spend more time reading the research and less complaining and we will make progress.

 

[amirm]

well stated, but just a side note, I noticed Dr. Toole's book is up to $60 on Amazon...

Thanks. I could swear when the original edition came out it was that cheap. But I see it at $56 for electronic version which is what I recommend (much easier to search).

 

[Eckerslad]

Again, it is not his preference, it is that of majority of listeners when formally tested. To advocate otherwise means pretending that the preference of a few is what should be advocated.

The way I understood it, the listeners in Toole’s tests preferred speakers with even directivity if set up in a reflective room, that doesn’t infer that they preferred a reflective room.

 

[amirm]

The way I understood it, the listeners in Toole’s tests preferred speakers with even directivity if set up in a reflective room, that doesn’t infer that they preferred a reflective room.

No, that is not the case. Research is independent for each topic. But each does play on the other. FYI there was another research done with speakers with bad directivity and even there, side reflections were thought to be good. I don't recall the paper title so can't find it now.

 

[cavedriver]

Thanks. I could swear when the original edition came out it was that cheap. But I see it at $56 for electronic version which is what I recommend (much easier to search).

good point about searchability. My fondness for physical objects gets in the way in this case where the book is really a reference document and digital tools just work so much better than things like a human-made index.

 

[caught gesture]

good point about searchability. My fondness for physical objects gets in the way in this case where the book is really a reference document and digital tools just work so much better than things like a human-made index.

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan is an interesting read.
Imagine a time of scrolls, no index and, for a long period, no spacing between words and no punctuation. scriptiocontinuaasthenorm!