The problem with not using audibility or perceptual science as a reference point is that it's very easy to focus on minutae which we presume to be audible, instead of things that impact sound quality. Entire careers have been spent lowering bass distortion or misunderstanding phase errors in loudspeakers and it didn't make any difference, not to mention all the audiophiles chasing their tail. Seriously, how are we to understand the careers of the great speaker designers of the audiophile era? Von Schwiekert and Vandersteen and Wilson. That wasn't engineering, and it wasn't good art, it was naval gazing.
i agree with that. I have no regard for chasing minutiae, especially for minutiae's sake, which most often means for marketing's sake.
And frankly, the audiophile era (which I blindly followed for a few decades), kinda disgusts me.
I view very few conclusion and impressions formed in that era, as science.
Your analogy to the visual system is interesting, but our model of vision is arguably superior to our model of hearing. We really don't know what makes things sound real. Color perception is the opposite. As ineffable as color is, the textile industry needed a way to match thread to fabric, and this kicked off decades of research that allow us to precisely match colors made up of reflected pigment spectra, phosphors or laser beams. We have no such standard with hearing, because we don't understand how hearing works.
Yes agree again, we do not come close to fully understanding how hearing works.
That's a big part of my admitted faith...that there is significant room for further speaker development.
But we do know how sound works, and I think ignoring principles of time and phase with speakers, is a form of reverse subjectivism/faith, given what we don't understand about hearing.
How did color science develop? Hundreds of tedious studies with observers looking at little patches of color under different illuminate, reporting if they are the same or different.
Reminds me of an old joke about color scientists...."what's a sure-fire way to start an argument?" ask 2 color scientists what color something is ..
sorry, couldn't resist
Worrying about crossovers and drivers brings us no closer to understanding sound reproduction. The only truly innovative loudspeaker engineering happening today is in sound bars I think.
I really disagree with respect to xovers. Lobing can be substantially reduced for wider listening areas, by paying attention to xover order, time and phase alignment.
Sound bars, with their horizontal driver arrangements, have the most acute need to pay attention to these factors.
Even if one thinks phase at the ears is inaudible, the reduction of lobing produces better polars/spinorama results....
which many audio buffs seem to be accepting as the be-all /end-all needed re speaker measurements. (i don't accept that idea obviously
)
Drivers are more like nuts and bolts to me, just parts that need to meet certain engineering tasks....
Its an interesting engineering discipline but I've come to realize after years of building speakers and reading about them, the whole pursuit is built on a bad foundation. There is no pure phase coherent source. Vibrating bodies are not simple. A microphone (phase distorter) cannot capture them, even if they weren't in a room (phase distortor) and even if they weren't equalized and so on. The illusion is not depicted by speakers, it is synthesized by them.
Agreed as to how unlikely a pure phase coherent source exists, with music. Sources in 3-d space, even a single instrument, of course have multiple sound emanating surfaces and regions.
And then a mic collects all those and crams it into 1-d space. And then our speakers try to take that 1-d summation and re-emanate it, as at least 2-d, some will wax on about 3-d.. Impossible task to recreate the real life 3-d musical experience imo...no matter how few or how many speakers are used.
(Recordings of birds, or better fireworks with their full range stimulus , things like that, where natural phase coherence is much more possible,...... are the test signals I'd like to see used in studies of phase audility, with single speakers.)
All that that said, it doesn't mean we throw up our hands and quit, ime. My experience is that time and phase alignment matter. Clarity and transient response are defintely improved.
Whether the improvement is due to having also achieved exemplary frequency magnitude response on-axis, or an improved set of polars off-axis, or having a better impulse and step response arriving at the ears...I dunno...haven't been able to differentiate the partials yet.
I will say this though....it seems pain silly to me to discard the idea phase and time matter. If for no other reason than, making them matter is probably the easiest way to achieve excellent frequency magnitude spinorama results. And why the heck not, when it's so easily doable (if one is willing to use DSP)
Hey, it certainly has more potential to matter, than differences in electronics' sinad ...speaking of minutia lol
Hey, sorry for long post...hope it's all well taken
