Is a higher directivity speaker 'coloring' the sound?

[MattHooper]

He said his wife loved to go down there to talk with him because it was so easy to hear each other.

So, the renovation didn’t come without it’s downsides.

(OK enough marriage jokes…)

My room does double duty - there’s a separate two channel system, and a separate surround system and projection based home theatre.

For my two channel listening, I can play with the liveness or deadness of the room in a variety of ways - mostly through shifting thick curtains along the walls, and also the projection screen wall is surrounded by large hanging velvet panels that do automated masking for the screen, and I can change the liveness or deadness of that wall by adjusting the portion of the screen that is covered by the black velvet.

When it comes to watching movies, for high performance contrast, I have hidden thin, black velvet curtains, running on tracks along every wall. And so I pull those curtains along the wall walls to create essentially a
“ Batcave black box” for protecting movies.
So the room visually disappears for movies.

I chose a special black velvet curtain that is almost as acoustically transparent as speaker grills so it didn’t get too dead in the room.
But nonetheless, it does quiet the room even more for movies which actually works well for the surround sound.

PICTURES HERE

 

[sfogg]

If there's the sound of an audience shuffling about and talking before the show you won't hear your own self noise over that din. But if it's supposed to be quiet in there you can definitely hear your own foot scuff or voice returning to you in very large spaces. So between movements or songs when there's not a cheering audience the effect could be compelling.

The complex problem is that we don't want the sound of the stereo recording itself feeding back through that reverb simulator. How would that work?? I guess I kind of answered it: only have effect come on when the sound from the speakers is very low. And maybe even a cancelation circuit could somehow be employed.

I think Lexicon built LIVE for performing musicians. The idea was they could use it at home to hear themselves play in a concert hall without actually being in one. Apparently timing is slightly differrent or something like that.

From Dr. Toole's comments it sounds like the system handled dealing with music playing back in a room with LIVE without feedback just fine. That would have been two different speakers systems running though as LIVE wouldn't let you also play music at the same time. Unless, he had a special version. Normally, on a Lexicon if you wanted to add reverb to playback music you would just use one of their ambiance generation modes.

The LARES system is built to increase the sound of concert halls and playback within them so it obviously handles feedback in some manor. That system also had a smaller version for practice musicians but I don't know much about that one. I think I have a DC-2 that has LARES software on it but I haven't done anything with it.

 

[Mort]

I followed the thread about your Genelec 8361a's purchase adventure a while back. I was hoping you would buy them and tell us how they compare with your other speakers after some time.

No Sophie's choice here. I kept both. The wider directivity Philharmonic Audio HT's are beautiful for home theater, acoustic recordings and multiple listening points at a 10-12 foot distance. The added reverb is pleasant and spacious. I use MiniDSP and DiracLive with a subwoofer. It's quite good and affordable.

For my music only, at a single listening place at midfield (4ft), for bass-heavy pop/rock - I significantly prefer the Genelec system including a Genelec subwoofer. The soundstage is smaller but so compellingly clearer, especially in the center vocals. If I could only keep one, it would be the Genelec system by a mile. It's also more than twice the cost, and I think significantly better.

 

[Tim Link]

So, the renovation didn’t come without it’s downsides.

(OK enough marriage jokes…)

My room does double duty - there’s a separate two channel system, and a separate surround system and projection based home theatre.

For my two channel listening, I can play with the liveness or deadness of the room in a variety of ways - mostly through shifting thick curtains along the walls, and also the projection screen wall is surrounded by large hanging velvet panels that do automated masking for the screen, and I can change the liveness or deadness of that wall by adjusting the portion of the screen that is covered by the black velvet.

When it comes to watching movies, for high performance contrast, I have hidden thin, black velvet curtains, running on tracks along every wall. And so I pull those curtains along the wall walls to create essentially a
“ Batcave black box” for protecting movies.
So the room visually disappears for movies.

I chose a special black velvet curtain that is almost as acoustically transparent as speaker grills so it didn’t get too dead in the room.
But nonetheless, it does quiet the room even more for movies which actually works well for the surround sound.

PICTURES HERE

That's a nice setup!

 

[Heinrich]

... Audioholics ...

What the typical audioholic doesn't understand is that even with the beloved 'classical' pieces there is no, no original that gets into the mixing console, There is no methodology that would capture what a healthy pair of ears would hear. The 'stereo' you may think of is a synthetic simulation.

So, the raw input--to take it is a black art, actually--is mixed together in the studio.

If the mix fits, is a question of good judgement. It has remotely to do with a first impression that a real attendee might get, but remotely still. That judgement depends on the actual listening conditions in the mastering room.

In the end, what are you talking about? What speaker would fit the engineer (in the mastering room, the CEO present also) best? Want to get an approval for your personal setup, is there some wiggle room?

In short, there is no 'absolute' to run after. It is a matter of *personal* taste. Hope one has one.

discl/ I'm not a subjectivist when it comes to technical merits, but to run after the sheer total maximum in reproduction is something I dismiss. It would be unreal. It actually is about just taste.

 

[MKreroo]

Stumbled upon this when thinking about faking cardioid's horizontal directivity in my NF setup.
Would some absorption material for 300-1khz region on the front wall behind the speaker achieve something similar?

 

[Digital_Thor]

What the typical audioholic doesn't understand is that even with the beloved 'classical' pieces there is no, no original that gets into the mixing console, There is no methodology that would capture what a healthy pair of ears would hear. The 'stereo' you may think of is a synthetic simulation.

So, the raw input--to take it is a black art, actually--is mixed together in the studio.

If the mix fits, is a question of good judgement. It has remotely to do with a first impression that a real attendee might get, but remotely still. That judgement depends on the actual listening conditions in the mastering room.

In the end, what are you talking about? What speaker would fit the engineer (in the mastering room, the CEO present also) best? Want to get an approval for your personal setup, is there some wiggle room?

In short, there is no 'absolute' to run after. It is a matter of *personal* taste. Hope one has one.

discl/ I'm not a subjectivist when it comes to technical merits, but to run after the sheer total maximum in reproduction is something I dismiss. It would be unreal. It actually is about just taste.

True, much of the way. I believe that people here on this forum mostly help others in the direction of neutrality.. which is a good way to begin, as your journey out of the circle of confusion - since, how do you actually know what you prefer, if your current reference is limited to sales talk and/or highly technical discussions which you don't really understand?

 

[paulgyro]

And make the room as dead as possible as the surround will reproduce the ambiance and spaciousness in the recording. No need for the room to try to fill that in as needed for stereo.

Deader yes then 2 channel, with an RTA60 of around 250-300 ms...but NOT as dead as possible. Too dead just doesn't sound natural and negatively effects overall enjoyment.

 

[Arindal]

Would some absorption material for 300-1khz region on the front wall behind the speaker achieve something similar?

That is in theory a good strategy, and oftentimes used in studio control rooms to help midrange clarity and transparency. To make the indirect soundfield coherent, though, it is advisable to combine lower midrange absorbers with reflective or diffusing properties above 1K, and make sure that the former reaches a bit lower in frequency. Otherwise the ´boomy´ kickball might be dominating the overdamped lower midrange.

A practical problem is that you usually need to cover a large wall area, treat the side walls as well, and the whole thing will get thick due to effective absorption (10-15cm) and diffusion (another 15cm).

What the typical audioholic doesn't understand is that even with the beloved 'classical' pieces there is no, no original that gets into the mixing console, There is no methodology that would capture what a healthy pair of ears would hear. The 'stereo' you may think of is a synthetic simulation.

It is true that any mix of an acoustic event is a creation by the mixing engineer, done to serve interpretation as well as composition, and there cannot be any standard method. Nevertheless there is a reference, the live performance, so most of engineers would not create anything that is too far off in terms of balance between the instruments, reverb pattern, tonality and alike.

Deader yes then 2 channel, with an RTA60 of around 250-300 ms...but NOT as dead as possible. Too dead just doesn't sound natural and negatively effects overall enjoyment.

With surround mixes containing a fair amount of reverb on the rear and immersive channels, like classical music, it is usually not a problem to have a ´dead´, overdampened room, as reverb from the surround speakers will mask the room reverb.

With popular, effect-laden surround mixes, though, this can be a bit annoying, so 0.3s is a good compromise.

 

[tmtomh]

That is in theory a good strategy, and oftentimes used in studio control rooms to help midrange clarity and transparency. To make the indirect soundfield coherent, though, it is advisable to combine lower midrange absorbers with reflective or diffusing properties above 1K, and make sure that the former reaches a bit lower in frequency. Otherwise the ´boomy´ kickball might be dominating the overdamped lower midrange.

A practical problem is that you usually need to cover a large wall area, treat the side walls as well, and the whole thing will get thick due to effective absorption (10-15cm) and diffusion (another 15cm).



It is true that any mix of an acoustic event is a creation by the mixing engineer, done to serve interpretation as well as composition, and there cannot be any standard method. Nevertheless there is a reference, the live performance, so most of engineers would not create anything that is too far off in terms of balance between the instruments, reverb pattern, tonality and alike.



With surround mixes containing a fair amount of reverb on the rear and immersive channels, like classical music, it is usually not a problem to have a ´dead´, overdampened room, as reverb from the surround speakers will mask the room reverb.

With popular, effect-laden surround mixes, though, this can be a bit annoying, so 0.3s is a good compromise.

@MKreroo , before you go covering your walls with absorbers tuned to the 300-1kHz range (and it's hard to cover that full range and only that range, BTW), you want to have some reasonable confidence level that your speakers' in-room performance does indeed have excess energy in that range. Arindal's assumption is based on his assertion that any speaker without more or less constant directivity will, in an untreated or undertreated room, produce boomy mid-bass/lower midrange and/or unclear midrange. This is an unsupported assertion, despite the impression he tries to give with vague references to his own experience (not that experience would be much better support even if it were specified more clearly).

And @Heinrich 's point is in no way addressed by Arindal's response here because as has been explained ad nauseum in this thread and many, many others, one cannot simply use "the live performance" as a reference since for the majority of recordings there was no single live performance, and for a large number of recordings of actual live performances the mix and mastering do not in fact use detailed, comprehensive cues from the actual performance and performance venue. And that leaves aside the further complication that even with minimally mic'd live recordings of acoustic classical performances, it is physically impossible to create the sonic illusion that the listener's room has anywhere near the size, scale, or acoustical properties of the performance venue. It also leaves aside the problem of whose live performance experience exactly: someone on stage? Someone in the 1st row right in front of the orchestra pit? 7th row? 30th row? Loge or mezzanine? And what is the "real," precise timbral balance of an orchestra - what listening distance and, crucially, height relative to the instruments is the "real" one. Yes of course, flutes should sound like flutes and trumpets should sound like trumpets, and two acoustic guitar strings strummed together should sound like both strings and not just the higher or lower one. And an acoustic performance in a large, echoey church should sound more ambient than one recorded in a treated studio (unless of course the producer adds a lot of reverb to the studio recording, which is quite common). But within these fundamental parameters there's a huge range of subtle variation and none of us can say which one is right based on some singular reference of "reality." It's nonsense to claim otherwise.

 

[Digital_Thor]

If we dont know how they recorded, mixed and fiddled with sound, even before we start messing with our system. Then, how should we truly know how it should sound in our homes, and what is more or less natural?
I mean, who has all those instruments at home, ready to make a 'reference' of 'real'?

 

[Heinrich]

If we dont know how they recorded, mixed and fiddled with sound, even before we start messing with our system. Then, how should we truly know how it should sound in our homes, and what is more or less natural?
I mean, who has all those instruments at home, ready to make a 'reference' of 'real'?

@tmtomh what a nice "final word" on that topic. It should be pinned somewhere.
@Digital_Thor the reference is your taste, really, except you want to judge the taste of the engineer--then you have to replicate their studio
@Arindal neither is room teatment key to good home listening, nor is the 'live performance' to be shrinked into the format, and magically revived again. That is impossible for so many reasons I better don't start to reiterate--what engineers (I know one since her very beginnings) learn in the first weeks on university

 

[tmtomh]

If we dont know how they recorded, mixed and fiddled with sound, even before we start messing with our system. Then, how should we truly know how it should sound in our homes, and what is more or less natural?
I mean, who has all those instruments at home, ready to make a 'reference' of 'real'?

It’s a great question. Part of it is taste as @Heinrich says. The other part is that if a speaker’s measured performance is known in detail, and if it hopefully has very good measured performance, you can have a decent degree of confidence that you’re hearing recordings with a high degree of fidelity - or if you’re not then it’s because of a speaker-room interaction that can be improved with room-correcting EQ/DSP and/room treatments (and for some issues, moving or angling the speakers and/or changing the listening distance).

To put it another way, you can never be sure you’re hearing exactly what the artist, producer, or engineer intended. But by using measurements you can be reasonably sure that your speakers are not uniformly coloring the sound or making it impossible to achieve good fidelity. In other words you can achieve confidence that if there is a problem, it’s not your speakers - or conversely, that if your speakers have sonic issues or limitations, you can be reasonably confident about whether those issues are the cause of whatever problem you’re hearing.

The problem with not relying on measurements that allow you to understand what the speaker intrinsically does vs what your room does, is that you can end up getting speakers that happen to sound great in your room with certain music, or that sound great in some aspects. But a lucky synergy between flawed (or uncorrected/non-room-EQ’d) speakers and a typical room is very unlikely to be lucky with all genres or all recordings or in all aspects. And then you go down the rabbit hole of the audiophile’s favorite trope - “the journey.” And you risk chasing your tail from one “upgrade” to another.

 

[MattHooper]

it is physically impossible to create the sonic illusion that the listener's room has anywhere near the size, scale, or acoustical properties of the performance venue.

Not to dispute anything else that you wrote, but a gentle pushback on this that I might give:

I think there is a fair amount of leeway in the fact we are talking about an “illusion.”

Because to a certain degree, an illusion can also be about what the individual brings to the illusion. I remember many times seeing movies with my wife’s friend who would leave any drama or romcom talking breathlessly, as if all the characters were real and everything we just saw a really happened. She was sucked into the illusion far more than I was.

Likewise, I have a friend for whom horror movies just don’t land at all, and I can watch a movie and be completely sucked in to the illusion of the events, while nothing at all feels real or believable to him.

I think to a certain degree there’s a similar aspect of what the listener brings as a mindset and level of engagement to the stereo illusion. Some people aren’t even trying for a sense of realism in their system and so they don’t go looking for it. Others like me really enjoy a sense of realism, and I sink into it when it occurs.

One of my goals for my two channel set up is that an acts as a sort of transportation, device or “ Star Trek Holo-Dock” where to the extent possible, my room will seem to shape shift to the nature and acoustic character of the recording. So I’ve played with set up and dialled in reflections in a way that seems to do that very well for my purposes.

I can think of a recordings such as one where the entire back wall of my room seems to acoustically disappear and a set of drum drums slowly appears out of great distance as through a large hall. Likewise, I can think of certain symphonic recordings where the Tympani seem to be coming from a long distance in the far corner of a large hall beyond my loudspeakers.

And there’s instances that I’ve mentioned before where I’m listening to a well recorded Orchestra, and the sense that the orchestral space melds with my room seems essentially seamless. The problem there is that my speakers clearly can’t produce the actual scale of being close to a Symphony Orchestra.

But this is where the user comes in terms of the illusion. If I close my eyes, I can imagine myself in seats from the right distance from the symphony - it might be up on the balcony further away - at which point the size of the orchestral image I’m hearing seems to sound about right from that imagined “ distance.”
And at that point, I’ve had the sense of hearing right into a large hall to the orchestra at that distance. I have left the sensation that I’m in a relatively small room hearing sound that’s actually only about 7 feet from me from the speakers.

So this is what I mean about once we start talking about illusions, there’s a bit of mushiness there to contend with.

(which doesn’t rule out in principle actually studying illusions that actually fool people, and do not necessarily require the user to engage imagination).

 

[RexrothPigeon]

Nevertheless there is a reference, the live performance, so most of engineers would not create anything that is too far off in terms of balance between the instruments, reverb pattern, tonality and alike.

You really think most recordings are of live performances? Doubt

 

[RexrothPigeon]

Arindal's assumption is based on his assertion that any speaker without more or less constant directivity will, in an untreated or undertreated room, produce boomy mid-bass/lower midrange and/or unclear midrange. This is an unsupported assertion, despite the impression he tries to give with vague references to his own experience (not that experience would be much better support even if it were specified more clearly).

At some point @Arindal is going to have to provide evidence of his thousands of measurements and vast empirical experience. So far he's ignored requests for corroboration, persisting instead in trust-me appeals to authority and demonstrations of logic and rhetoric.

 

[Curvature]

I think the guy in the YT video gets a few things very wrong. Firstly, he claims that ILD is a part of how the ears localize bass in a room. That is a claim I have yet to see having been proved. I have had the chance to test this in anechoic rooms, and it is just incredibly hard to localize a sound source that is not well above 100Hz. Distortion is often the explaination to why we can actually localize a low frequency source. I tried once with 8 x 18" subs, and I wanted to run a check to see if all the drivers were working. This was just so hard to do as even when I was extremely close to one sub, the level of bass was almost unchanged compared to mid way between two subs.

Secondly, our ears ability to discriminate phase between the ears is not necessarily the same as what we normally refer to as ITD. This means, we can quite easily localize a sound with ITD when high frequencies and crisp transients are present. In ideal conditions, our ears can do as good as <+/- 1 degree. However, if we separate the low frequency content and run the low frequencies from a single source, we still localize the source to be in the same position, regardless of where the sub is.

Our ears ability to hear phase differences are quite good, even at relatively low frequencies. The example that shows interference between two sound sources with different frequency is a great example of this. It may happen in real life that we have this kind of effect, but the point is really not valid as this means we must have two sources located exactly where the speakers are, and this is no less artificial than using a mono sub.

His point could have been that the sound sources are projected to two different perfect positions by the speakers, and then creates this kind of interference. However, it will not create the same interference pattern as in the original room, so neither is this any less artificial than using a mono subwoofer.

He also ignores the fact that this type of interference does also occur between the speakers and room modes. This type of effect is often effectively combated by making a full mono subwoofer setup with several subwoofers that are set up to supress room modes. Even having two subwoofers playing a mono signal would typically reproduce interference between room modes and the speakers to a less degree than running stereo bass on the two subs.

He answers a question about ITD with using pulses, ignoring the fact that anything below 100Hz is not really a pulse. It is just a part of it, and what we hear will be a mix of frequencies.

Lastly, I would like to point out that a lot of his talk goes on about how some things are wrong and others are right. But the use of rhetorical references are not backed up by any science at all.

So, he is correct that we can hear some phase information in bass when we compare two sources directly. He fails to mention that most of the time, when we experience this (including his 100Hz interference example) what we hear is that the sound pressure between the ears are actually different, and we can also feel this on our body as well. This is something that happens regularly in asymmetrical rooms. He also fails to mention that when a pure bass sound source is off to the side a bit, the ILD is not nearly enough for us to actually hear, and neither is the phase due to the long wavelength.

So to me, this looks a lot more like someone trying to sell something, using real science incorrectly to give an impression that their point has been proven.

You got a few things wrong about hearing in your comments. I'll be happy to address them in detail.

Try this post I wrote in another thread first: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../locating-bass-80hz.66617/page-3#post-2422121

 

[Snickers-is]

You got a few things wrong about hearing in your comments. I'll be happy to address them in detail.

Try this post I wrote in another thread first: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../locating-bass-80hz.66617/page-3#post-2422121

You are welcome to share your opinion on my points in this thread.

 

[NTK]

I think the guy in the YT video gets a few things very wrong.

Is that Dr. David Griesinger that you are referring to? Or were you referring to the video in post #1? If it was Griesinger, you should know that he is the recipient of the Acoustical Society of America's Wallace Clement Sabine Silver medal for his contributions to, of all things, "human perception of sound". His work is referenced by the late Dr. Leo Beranek (link).

If I find myself in disagreement with Griesinger on the topic of "human perception of sound", I would not be so presumptive to assume that he is wrong and I am right.

 

[Snickers-is]

Is that Dr. David Griesinger that you are referring to? Or were you referring to the video in post #1? You know that he is the recipient of the Acoustical Society of America's Wallace Clement Sabine Silver medal for his contributions to, of all things, "human perception of sound", right? His work is referenced by the late Dr. Leo Beranek (link).

If I find myself in disagreement with Griesinger on the topic of "human perception of sound", I would not be so presumptive to assume that he is wrong and I am right.

View attachment 483265

Physics do not care what medals or honors one may have received. I respect all human beings, but once a scientific topic is discussed, nothing is off the table unless it is off topic.

I would like to underline that I did write that I think he is wrong. Instead of claiming that he is in fact wrong, I tried to explain why I think he is wrong. If my position is correct, I believe it leads to him being factually wrong. If my position is incorrect, it means he may be correct.