You don’t need it but I can’t see a negative for having it beyond the temptation to constantly arse about with it thusly distracting from drinking beer and listening to music.
Oh don’t ever stop conversation or anything else with a woman to adjust EQ, unless you want them to leave and or burn your dinner .
Assuming that the speakers measure flat on-axis and have a well-controller dispersion pattern, and that there’s nothing particularly unusual about the room layout and speaker placement, my interpretation of the studies is that room EQ is best used only in the modal region and not above.
By far the biggest impact on my total system, apart from the speakers
Pressure range: < 20-30 HzMaybe if you clarify this "modal region" term for the sake of us rookies in this area..
Maybe if you clarify this "modal region" term for the sake of us rookies in this area..
"No voicing required. Other loudspeakers usually require voicing. Based on listening to a lot of recordings, the tonal balance of the loudspeaker is changed so that most recordings sound good. Voicing is required to balance differences between direct and off-axis sound. The 8c has very even dispersion. It is the first loudspeaker I ever designed that did not benefit from voicing. The tonal balance is purely based on anechoic measurements."
A distinction needs to be made between speaker correction and room correction. If your speaker is one of the new breed of constant dispersion boxes, you will find that 'room correction' is a red herring.
The designer of the D&D 8C:
If your speaker does not have constant dispersion, you need to make a compromise between flat direct sound and un-coloured room sound - the two are mutually exclusive in this case. So you may find that some EQ improves the sound in a particular room, but you are not correcting the room (which is impossible); you are partially correcting the speaker for use in that room.
So people say... but... my suspicion is that this transition is what we expect to hear; it is consistent with the reverberation at higher frequencies because it is caused by the same floor, walls and ceilings. If I modify one band so that it doesn't correspond with the rest (in terms of frequency and time domain), I break the consistency. Of course it will cause the expected nulls and peaks as you move around that will leap out in measurements, but will you hear them if you're not listening out for them? I don't think so.Not meaning to rehash this one But I think there is some pretty good evidence that, while throughout most of the audio band we discriminate well between the direct and reflected sound, below a certain frequency (or range of frequencies) in a given room, this ability to discriminate tends to fall apart.
In this frequency range, whether we label what we're doing "room" or "speaker" correction (I think the former is an appropriate term if the speakers are anechoically correct and exhibit constant directivity - which FWIW the 8Cs do not), we are correcting the perceived tonal balance of the system in a range in which the room influences it - and indeed typically dominates it.
(I agree about re-hashing, but the topic was raised afresh and I just couldn't let it lie...)
A fair point. As was mentioned earlier, you might even start getting into pressurisation at low frequencies - which is a special, not strictly acoustic, phenomenon. Also, things rattle and vibrate. So of course, even in my ivory tower, I would not be averse to the bass being rolled off at the very bottom end.Slightly left-field question: given what you've said above, would you always be in favour of speakers having anechoicically flat bass? Or would you suggest that in a smaller room a gentle roll-off or shelf in the bass of a few dB (often framed as partial rather than full baffle step compensation) is preferable? The common wisdom seems to be the latter, but it seems to me that your position would suggest the former.