Stereo speakers with or without subwoofer for mixing and mastering

[Teon]

Worth a look.
Keith

Thank you for sharing this. Haven’t watched it yet but I strongly believe that this will help a lot.

 

[sigbergaudio]

I have a hard time visualizing how the measurement angle of the microphone will look in real life. Could you provide some photos please?

Also, the graph shows how the frequencies spread from a speaker, but from which surface of the speaker? Is this graph showing the woofer/tweeter spread, back of the speaker, too etc.?

It's different ways of doing it, but a simple variant to explain is that a microphone is fixed in place, pointing directly at the front of the speaker (typically at tweeter height). This measurement is the middle of the graph I posted. Then say you spin the speaker 45 degrees on it's horisontal axis, so that it the front of the speaker is now pointing 45 degrees to the left or right of the microphone. This is the measurement marked with 45 on the y-axis of the graph.

Watching the video that is posted is also a good idea, there you can see a video of what happens. In that video I guess the microphone is moving instead of the speaker, but the result is the same.

 

[Ellebob]

I guess I am not giving a good enough analogy

It doesn't matter if the box is hollow or solid. It could just be a board. I was trying to demonstrate that a small wave would reflect off it. With small sound waves (higher frequency) not much sound would be heard behind the speaker. A large wave would go right over the box or board. we would hear the sound behind the speaker.

 

[NTK]

I have a hard time visualizing how the measurement angle of the microphone will look in real life. Could you provide some photos please?

Also, the graph shows how the frequencies spread from a speaker, but from which surface of the speaker? Is this graph showing the woofer/tweeter spread, back of the speaker, too etc.?

This figure from the ANSI/CTA-2034-A shows where the mic positions are for the measurement. There are 2 measurement "orbits", horizontal and vertical. Horizontal is shown more often than vertical. The picture @sigbergaudio's post shows the measurement results from the horizontal orbit.

For the chart, the vertical axis is for the angles the measurements were taken. Straight ahead is 0°, in the direction of the "reference axis". Horizontal axis of the chart is for the frequency. Colors show the "normalized" sound pressure levels, which are the deviations from the sound pressure level at 0° (the "on-axis" response) averaged over the frequency range of several hundred Hz to several thousand Hz (there is no strict standard for this frequency range).