The ASR "objectivists tribe" ;) has to read the Keynotes at the AES160th by Lars Risbo

[amirm]

Those are interesting. Was that room at Microsoft ever used for music listening?

Yes, it was. But was mostly for show when we had executives from major record labels coming. We would demo our stuff in there. It was a super fancy room that cost us $350K for the room and another $200K for the audio/video system! It was full Revel Salon speakers in 7.1 configuration driven by Mark Levinson electronics.

 

[amirm]

You know this is not a room, but acoustic treatment? Rooms can have different proportions, be built with different materials etc., but you know that...

To what end?

FYI, different listening rooms were characterized by Alan Devantier which formed the foundation for Predicted In-Room Response you see in my reviews. The statistical average worked fairly well there.

 

[Vuki]

To what end?

FYI, different listening rooms were characterized by Alan Devantier which formed the foundation for Predicted In-Room Response you see in my reviews. The statistical average worked fairly well the

Sure. Unfortunately, one still can not predict how would a pair of loudspeakers sound in a room. Educated guess maybe, but every now and then something sounds surprisingly good or bad

 

[PristineSound]

And that exactly what an ABX is.

First, the only factor of speaker placement that matters the most, as it pertains to the speaker itself, is being close to boundaries (walls).

To fix this move it away from walls for the ABX. So none issue.

Second, the room is dependent on the frequency and the location of the originating sound and the location of observation (I will even argue that in my experience, at certain SPL, it will activate room modes to an audible state), so the room is not dependent on the speaker.

By the first two points above, this "Not all loudspeakers perform optimal at the same position" is irrelevant.

Now, that is the purpose of the ABX (for speakers), given the same SPL, the same location of the sound source, the same location of the listen, in the same room, can you tell the difference.

 

[Sokel]

I can't separate speakers and rooms in my mind.
I always think of them as a system, both interchangeably optimized for the other.

The best example of it is soffit mounted speakers in a good room.

 

[Vuki]

For example @amirm said this in wilson tune tot review:
"There is no question that there are some clear objective/engineering errors in the design of Wilson TuneTot. The port is tuned too high and the on-axis/directivity response is poor. What is strange though that the impact of these on the fidelity of the speaker is not at all this obvious. Either I am influenced by the showroom sound as much as the next guy or getting off-axis to be right in my rather reflective room overcomes issues in on-axis response. It is also possible that all the money that has gone to building such an extremely dense speaker and keeping distortion low is paying benefit here. One wonders how much better these would sound if they had had preserved all of this and at the same time didn't have the design errors.

If I were to just goy by the measurements, the Tunetot would not get good marks.

 

[Sal1950]

What is the solution to that equation?

Sorry boss but the math's too far outside my wheelhouse.

Not only did Harman do that for 2 speakers, they did it for 5! It was their MLL room:

Wow, talk about a room full of diffusion
I can't tell from the pictures what was the floor treatment like, carpet or ???

Sure. Unfortunately, one still can not predict how would a pair of loudspeakers sound in a room. Educated guess maybe, but every now and then something sounds surprisingly good or bad

To within +/- 0.5 db, no.
But the science exists to determine it very well, there's no real mystery or magic left today.

 

[Suono]

Now, that is the purpose of the ABX (for speakers), given the same SPL, the same location of the sound source, the same location of the listen, in the same room, can you tell the difference

Each speaker has its own way of "sounding," and a treated room will highlight the differences. Even in a treated room, replacing the speakers will require a period of fine-tuning to bring out the best in them.

 

[NTK]

Wow, talk about a room full of diffusion
I can't tell from the pictures what was the floor treatment like, carpet or ???

You can find the info in this Harman white paper of the (former?) lab.

https://www.harman.com/documents/HarmanWhitePaperMLLListeningLab_0.pdf

 

[gnarly]

I can't separate speakers and rooms in my mind.
I always think of them as a system, both interchangeably optimized for the other.

I can, and often do. I take every DIY speaker I build outdoors, for a good mono evaluation.
The clarity improvement outdoors, over any room I've ever had/worked on, is pretty astounding.
And let's me know what to aspire to indoors, with speaker placements and room furnishings & treatments.

A pretty cool comparative test that tell me just how much rooms degrade our speakers is generation-loss recordings.
Where a track is played and recorded, then the recording is played and it too recorded....then it played and recorded again....etc ..
..until you puke at the sound haha.

The degradation across generations, either from the speaker not being neutral, or the environment/room reflections entering in, is stark and quick.
I've found a really good speaker can survive listenability outdoors for at least three maybe even four generations.
I've never heard the same speaker in an indoor test, survival past two rounds. Usually one round makes me go yikes...rooms suck.

Highly recommended test...I find it ultimately more telling about speaker excellence than any other test, including transfer functions spins.

 

[Sokel]

I can, and often do. I take every DIY speaker I build outdoors, for a good mono evaluation.
The clarity improvement outdoors, over any room I've ever had/worked on, is pretty astounding.
And let's me know what to aspire to indoors, with speaker placements and room furnishings & treatments.

A pretty cool comparative test that tell me just how much rooms degrade our speakers is generation-loss recordings.
Where a track is played and recorded, then the recording is played and it too recorded....then it played and recorded again....etc ..
..until you puke at the sound haha.

The degradation across generations, either from the speaker not being neutral, or the environment/room reflections entering in, is stark and quick.
I've found a really good speaker can survive listenability outdoors for at least three maybe even four generations.
I've never heard the same speaker in an indoor test, survival past two rounds. Usually one round makes me go yikes...rooms suck.

Highly recommended test...I find it ultimately more telling about speaker excellence than any other test, including transfer functions spins.

I guess that an outdoor setup requires very remote location (which can be tricky, as remote locations usually have their own noise floor, wild life, birds, etc, so not the silent environment for stuff like classical) special arrangements for envelopment and the perfect weather of course.

 

[MattHooper]

While I agree (linear) bass performance is extremely important, I sometimes feel like the "bass is 30% of perceived sound quality" is expressed as somehow 30% is more than 70%.

I also think many people conveniently lean into this because it's much harder to fix the rest of the spectrum, as it requires physical, acoustic treatment of the room.

I have two main systems, one in a relatively normal living room with limited acoustic treatment, and one dedicated listening room which is quite heavily treated and with less than half the decay time of the living room.

The sound in the dedicated listening room (using the same speakers) is VASTLY superior to the living room. And I would without a doubt prefer the sound in the dedicated listening room with no EQ in the bass, to the sound in the living room with EQ in the bass.

FWIW…. In my own room there’s various forms of treatment including some bass trapping in strategic places. The acoustician who helped design the room was limited somewhat to what I would put up with because I didn’t want to see anything that said to me “ acoustic treatment” in the room.
So we managed the best we could.

The screen wall in my room is built out a bit, and the sides to the screen were left open, but covered by the tall hanging black velvet panels used for the screen size masking.
That allow us to put columns of bass trapping in the corners that you can’t see behind that velvet. Although I think we managed only something like 6 inch thickness, even though it is tall and wide, so I’m not sure if it’s going to do much even below 70 or 80 Hz (?)

We also took advantage of the bulkhead we built down from the ceiling, which was the steel frame covered by stretched brown, felt fabric. That allowed us to strategically fill areas with more absorption. So for instance, we took the upper corner area spanning the entire ceiling over the screen and made something of a bass trap there - hidden in the ceiling bulkhead: about 13 feet long from corner to corner, about 2 1/2 feet wide out from the wall, and about 6 inches deep. You can see the bulkhead area above the screen that I’m trying to describe here:

We put another one at the back of the room in the bulkhead as well.

As I’ve said the room generally sounds amazing especially for mid and upper frequencies. And bass generally sounds terrific as well. At the same time we did not have the type of heroic bass traps that would address the lowest frequency room nodes. But thankfully, I never found those very intrusive.

Just to see how much better could get I did eventually buy dual subwoofers, a really good crossover system from JL Audio (CR1), and room correction. I did manage to flatten out the bass response nicely. But I found it didn’t really add much… even after living with the closer to perfect bass response I found I enjoyed the sound without the subwoofers and room correction at least as much or more, so I eventually sold all that extra stuff.
Much happier with the aesthetics, the lack of extra cabling and all that.

 

[Paul7777x]

Ok after reading the whole thread I gotta say something.

This thread is itself the cleanest example of what Lars Risbo's keynote was about. Call them tribes, camps, colleagues, POVs, whatever you want. The pattern is the same on both sides. One camp says the measurements settle it. The other says the measurements are missing something. And neither is really asking new questions anymore.
We just spent 25 pages re-litigating Toole, the McGill pilot, sidewalls, hysteresis, etc. and almost nobody is actually engaging with what Lars concluded, which was NOT "buy Purifi" and NOT "subjectivists were right all along". It was this:

Thats the whole thing, compressed. Knowledge in audio, like in ANY engineering field, is an evolving thing. Measurements get better, mechanisms we couldnt capture become capturable, caveats the original researchers put in their own papers get quietly dropped downstream. The right posture isnt to defend last decade's answer, its also not to dismiss it. Its to keep asking what the current metric set might be missing.

And honestly, kudos to Lars Risbo, he modeled exactly that posture inside this very thread. At #209 he tightened a claim under pressure from @amirm. At #217 he conceded a wording error to KSTR. At #317 he thanked a critic for "exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for." Thats it. Thats the engineering attitude in action. The guy literally did the thing he was preaching, on this forum, in front of all of us, and most of the responses since have been about whether he attacked Toole or not.

He didnt attack Toole. He pointed out caveats Toole himself wrote into the original work and asked what happened to them. There's a difference.

@Lars Risbo your thesis still stands imo. Stay curious isnt a slogan, it's the whole point. IMHO anyway.

This is the only seriously readable post on this entire thread.

 

[pablolie]

This is the only seriously readable post on this entire thread.

there clearly are no clean separate tribes that are completely aligned, give us a break. We clearly bicker here among each other just as much as on any internet forum, we don't need whatever a "subjectivist" is to duke it out.

 

[Timcognito]

 

[Paul7777x]

View attachment 537600

That made me laugh. Cheers

 

[Sal1950]

You can find the info in this Harman white paper of the (former?) lab.

https://www.harman.com/documents/HarmanWhitePaperMLLListeningLab_0.pdf

That was fun 100k words later.
"In the MLL room, the only significant first order reflections are from the floor, and these
are attenuated at higher frequencies by the carpet."

 

[gnarly]

I guess that an outdoor setup requires very remote location (which can be tricky, as remote locations usually have their own noise floor, wild life, birds, etc, so not the silent environment for stuff like classical) special arrangements for envelopment and the perfect weather of course.

It doesn't !! That's how amazing the contrast in clarity is. My outdoor comparisons are in a setting of incredible outdoor noise... a power boat lake.

Imo, judging speakers by in-room envelopment does lump room and speakers together...which ironically precludes finding the most excellent speakers one can...and thus precludes finding the most excellent envelopment one can.

 

[RickS]

I suggest these tribes are more likely illustrative hyperbole on @Lars Risbo part. Could not find any market research that would suggest any such extreme segmentation. Even within ASR member polls, these "tribes" would represent very limited minorities...

Suggesting that this thread somehow supports this extreme segmentation from Lars's keynote is highly speculative and not supported by the data we have. Based on moderator reports over the last year, the Ultra Subjectivists have likely declined and unlikely to be represented here to any significant degree. Will we argue science amongst ourselves? Well, you can find that all over the forum! The only folks I see claiming that ASR members are purely measurement-based are ignorant of the reality (as clearly shown above) or have ulterior motives.

 

[Buckeye Amps]

A hypothesis, no matter what observation or thought it is based on, is nearly as useless as an opinion if you are not setting out to answer the hypothesis honestly with objective data. You don't even need to answer it yourself, merely putting in an honest effort to further the step towards answering it is crucial.

I met plenty of "big brain thinkers" on college campuses who loved to just throw stuff out there based on their own observations or understanding of existing science but never making any concerted effort to advance their hypotheticals. About as fun of an interaction as dudes who brought guitars to house parties and played Jack Johnson songs.