My little company, AudioKinesis, has been invited to participate in an "Innovations" room at RMAF 2017. The four Innovations rooms will all be on the Second Floor of the Tower, and the room I will be sharing with James Romeyn is Room 2014.
The mandate for these Innovations rooms is, be educational and visitor-friendly. So we will do our best to accommodate music requests, welcome and answer questions (even the hard ones), and be educational as well as promotional. And of course, we're supposed to do something innovative!
The topic we want to delve into is, the psychoacoustics of reflections in small rooms. We won't be able to demonstrate the main ways that "reflections done wrong" are detrimental, but at the risk of painting with a broad brush, early reflections tend to degrade clarity, and spectrally incorrect reflections tend to degrade the tonal quality. So that leaves relatively late-onset, spectrally-correct reflections as potentially the most beneficial.
What we'll have set up is, a pair of fairly directional main speakers, which also incorporate a set of switch-off-able rear drivers, optimized for their role, that fire up towards the ceiling. This way the output of the rear-firing drivers arrives after a long enough time delay that it can theoretically be beneficial. The cool part is, we will have a remote control unit available to listeners so they can toggle between rear-drivers-off and rear-drivers-on, and hear the differences, and decide for themselves whether the net result is beneficial or not.
This configuration is conceptually similar to what I've been showing for a couple of years, but this time the difference is, you the listener (or some other listener, depending on whose turn it is) can easily switch back and forth and therefore easily make your own observations. I doubt either configuration will be the across-the-board winner, as there are tradeoffs at every turn in the audio world, but it should be educational one way or the other.
Since the principles involved are generally applicable and not system-dependent, you don't need to be "in the market" to benefit from the demo.
I don't know what the other "Innovations" rooms will be doing, but make sure you don't miss Second Floor of the tower this year!
Duke
The mandate for these Innovations rooms is, be educational and visitor-friendly. So we will do our best to accommodate music requests, welcome and answer questions (even the hard ones), and be educational as well as promotional. And of course, we're supposed to do something innovative!
The topic we want to delve into is, the psychoacoustics of reflections in small rooms. We won't be able to demonstrate the main ways that "reflections done wrong" are detrimental, but at the risk of painting with a broad brush, early reflections tend to degrade clarity, and spectrally incorrect reflections tend to degrade the tonal quality. So that leaves relatively late-onset, spectrally-correct reflections as potentially the most beneficial.
What we'll have set up is, a pair of fairly directional main speakers, which also incorporate a set of switch-off-able rear drivers, optimized for their role, that fire up towards the ceiling. This way the output of the rear-firing drivers arrives after a long enough time delay that it can theoretically be beneficial. The cool part is, we will have a remote control unit available to listeners so they can toggle between rear-drivers-off and rear-drivers-on, and hear the differences, and decide for themselves whether the net result is beneficial or not.
This configuration is conceptually similar to what I've been showing for a couple of years, but this time the difference is, you the listener (or some other listener, depending on whose turn it is) can easily switch back and forth and therefore easily make your own observations. I doubt either configuration will be the across-the-board winner, as there are tradeoffs at every turn in the audio world, but it should be educational one way or the other.
Since the principles involved are generally applicable and not system-dependent, you don't need to be "in the market" to benefit from the demo.
I don't know what the other "Innovations" rooms will be doing, but make sure you don't miss Second Floor of the tower this year!
Duke
