General Asylum

General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

Return to General Asylum

Message Sort: Post Order or Asylum Reverse Threaded

What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?

73.34.22.109
Posted on July 18, 2014 at 22:26:21
AbeCollins
Audiophile

Posts: 46302
Location: USA
Joined: June 22, 2001
Contributor
  Since: February 2, 2002
What exactly is 'near field'? Is there a solid definition based on room size, speaker size, speaker placement, and how close one sits to the speakers?

If not, one man's spacious listening room might be considered 'near field' by another with a larger room.

So what is it?



 

Hide full thread outline!
    ...
Yes ... , posted on July 18, 2014 at 23:01:49
three_sox
 ... Whatever you want it to be.

I doubt there is an ISO standard or any other standard.

One definition I have heard which seems to make *some* sense is near field is where the sound one hears is directly radiated from the speaker without being adulterated by the room.

I'm sure you will get lots of answers here.

I suspect headphones are the best bear field speakers :)

Good luck finding out, I am not into labels and pigeonholing.

Cheers :)



 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 18, 2014 at 23:24:15
Todd Krieger
Audiophile

Posts: 37333
Location: SW United States
Joined: November 2, 2000
 In a nearfield setup, the speakers and the listener are in relatively close proximity. The listener seated in the "sweet spot", equidistant to both speakers. The speakers are voiced where the listener hears most of the soundstage "behind" the speakers, seeming close to lifelike in size. Like what someone else stated, most of the sound taken in by the listener is directly radiated from the speakers, with minimal room reflections. The speakers usually have well controlled dispersion characteristics.

Nearfield setups often excel in image placement. And can sound lifelike and/or "big" from the ideal listening position. But the presentation breaks down and becomes "lightweight" (lost bass energy) once you leave the listening chair.

My computer system behaves like a nearfield setup. Nearfield is a good setup if you don't like headphones, but want to confine sound to the proximity of the system. It is also popular with studio engineers, because they minimize reflections, and do well in the cramped confines of a mixing board. But not the system if you have friends over, and want everybody to enjoy the music anywhere in or near the room.

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 01:39:02
Frihed89
Audiophile

Posts: 15703
Location: Copenhagen
Joined: March 21, 2005
 In a huge room with lofty ceilings, one can generally put some mini monitors in the middle of the room and get an experience that would technically be near field (no wall interaction), but which is amazing.

The idea, more generally, is just to get the speakers far enough away from all the walls, so that first reflections and bass reinforcment from the back walls aren't a problem, using mini-monitors.

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 07:43:05
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 An excellent description.

My near field setup is located in a corner. The image that I hear goes far beyond the walls of the room in both width and depth. It is possible to control this (optimize for a particular recording) by moving my chair forward or back no more than a foot. My usual distance from ear to speaker is about 3 feet. To get this effect my system was set up to give flat response from 30 Hz to about 2000 Hz and slowly roll off to -3.5 dB at 10 Khz. Nearly all recordings have a natural tonal balance with these settings, once the volume and polarity have been set to the optimal position for the recording.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

sitting near enough to greatly reduce the room effect......., posted on July 19, 2014 at 08:15:42
mikel
Audiophile

Posts: 2773
Joined: July 4, 2000
 .....and get primarily direct sound from the speaker and little reflected sound. extreme near field might be getting as close to the speakers as possible while allowing the speaker's drivers to still be coherent where you don't hear individual drivers.

also; 'near-field' can refer to sitting inside the equilateral triangle made up of the speakers and the listening position.

mikel

 

+1, posted on July 19, 2014 at 08:38:26
Awe-d-o-file
Dealer

Posts: 21037
Location: 50 miles west of DC
Joined: January 10, 2004
 on both counts as I see it. Some will say 6ft. I do mine at between 6 and 7 feet and have a HUGE image. Of course this image improved greatly when I added room treatment.


ET
ET

"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking till you do suck seed" - Curly Howard 1936

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 08:47:23
fantja
Audiophile

Posts: 15524
Location: Alabama
Joined: September 11, 2010
 Abe-

to me , near-field listening constitutes a distance of 5 feet or less from your rig.

 

RE: sitting near enough to greatly reduce the room effect......., posted on July 19, 2014 at 08:56:09
Bill the K
Audiophile

Posts: 8385
Joined: June 3, 2006
 I think nearfield is when we use a small equilateral triangle, maybe a max of 5 feet sides. We could also sit inside this triangle.

Nearfield can also be a single speaker 5 feet away.

Imagine a single KEF LS50 5 feet away.

Cheers
Bill

 

This, posted on July 19, 2014 at 08:58:59
Bill Way
Audiophile

Posts: 1884
Location: Toms River NJ
Joined: May 28, 2012
Contributor
  Since: December 14, 2012



Nearfields can be great, if only because they free you from fixing the room. Many speakers can be good for nearfield listening, as long as their drivers are fairly close to each other. Coaxial speakers can be really good for nearfield listening.

In college, we loved Quad 57s and Braun LV-1020s as nearfields, but I'll blame that on the drugs.

WW
"Put on your high heeled sneakers. Baby, we''re goin'' out tonight.

 

They still treat recording studios..., posted on July 19, 2014 at 09:25:16
cfraser
Audiophile

Posts: 3208
Location: Pickering, Ontario
Joined: April 30, 2000
 It is a false belief (and that's all it is) that you might remove room effects by listening near-field, but as you say, you can certainly reduce them ("somewhat").

I do agree with your assessment of the concept though.

Everybody comments about me listening in the near-field, it's certainly apparent to people ("audiophiles") who visit my room, for some reason people seem to notice it immediately and comment on it. So I guess it's not that common overall. It's not really obvious until you sit down and get a view of things, because the speakers are sufficiently large that you're not really really close.

It is much easier to treat a room to get a good sound when you listen in the near-field...fortunate for me. It might be awkward to arrange things unless you have a dedicated room, and can work around speaker/chair placement instead of "decor". It is the only thing that worked well for my room, it's not like I designed the room to be that way = discovered by trial and error.

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 09:48:50
tomservo
Manufacturer

Posts: 8210
Joined: July 4, 2002
 Outside of the home hifi area and possibly there too still, near-field has always meant that the direct sound is sufficiently greater than the level of reflected sound to dominate what is heard.

When you see monitor speakers on the back of a mixing board it is to achieve that condition as it puts the nearest reflections farther away and so down in level.

The advantage large panel speakers and horns have is that by directivity, they also have a larger near-field than shoebox speakers.

 

Quad 57's, posted on July 19, 2014 at 10:06:54
mbnx01
Audiophile

Posts: 7956
Location: Eagle, Idaho
Joined: October 22, 2004
 Make good headphones.





'A lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on'. -Mark Twain

 

This may or may not shed some light on the subject, posted on July 19, 2014 at 10:40:25
Penguin
Audiophile

Posts: 7116
Location: Delaware
Joined: August 5, 2001
 you'll be the judge.

dee
;-D

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

quote by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Cleared it right up for me, posted on July 19, 2014 at 12:06:07
JeffH
Audiophile

Posts: 4574
Location: Orange County, So Cal
Joined: April 5, 2000
 that was ancient sanskrit right?

 

one place that exemplifies near field is.., posted on July 19, 2014 at 12:12:14
hifitommy
Audiophile

Posts: 15388
Location: canyon country califiornia, orig from buffalo ny
Joined: June 9, 2000
 at your computer with its speakers very close. i get a pretty good image off my $200 klipsch comp speakers, and decent bass too.

at a friend's house, he has a fairly large room with the speakers at about 4-6 feet from the listener, sub in the far field. with most speakers in his room, the speakers just disappear and some instruments are as far away as the wall way behind the speakers.

not all speakers are appropriate for this, with large multi driver systems, the drivers don't meld the sound into a believable image. his current speaker has an AMT that crosses over to two 12" eminence woofers at 500 Hz. they work because of the capability of the AMT (air motion transformer folded ribbon) to cross at 500.
...regards...tr

 

Hhmm..., posted on July 19, 2014 at 12:58:31
b.l.zeebub
Audiophile

Posts: 9361
Location: 52deg 28'N,1deg56'W
Joined: April 17, 2006
 I have a modestly sized space but depending on the recording the acoustic space they paint extends way beyond the walls of my room.
Choral works for example depict the size of the space the recording was made in regardless of how big it may have been.
But of course the trick is not to look. Once you look there is a disparity between what my ears hear and my eyes see and since humans sense of vision always takes precedence over acoustic input the illusion will not work anymore.

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 15:39:44
Rick58
Audiophile

Posts: 1118
Location: No. California
Joined: January 24, 2001
 Yes, there are probably no 'official' definitions of this.

I would say that the speakers are less than 6' from your ears, and likely 4' to 6' or maybe a little farther apart. ALSO, the wall(s) should be far away (>4') from either speaker, altho I guess if you're at a desk this may not be applicable (nor what I think the question is asking). I'm thinking it's a question applied to a 'standard' stereo arrangement.

I guess one could call it nearfield if you're less than 6' from the speakers but they are near/against a wall or near a corner in a diagonal setup too ... I may have that some day at my 'corner' computer hutch/desk ...

I think of my main system as nearfield, speakers are on stands are 6' from my ears, 6' or so apart, and ~3.5' from the side walls and 7' from the front wall (behind the speakers). Sub is over to the left against the front wall. I sit a little 'back' from halfway in the long dimension of the room (13x23x10').

There is no sense that the sound is coming from the speakers or sub, and 99% of the time the image is a little behind to way behind the speaker plane. I like the image to be in this location.

If the sounds are 'supposed' to be further back in a recording, I tend to hear them as more a part of a reverberant field, more diffuse than solid image. I suppose with treatments/better components? the images would be solid and sound as if they are 'behind' the wall. I do get a bit of that in some recordings, and Q Sound recordings.

I do also get some other phase-related effects (whether intentional or not) that place images out from the speakers, to the sides, and even to the rear. There's a faint guitar solo in 'Firecracker' (Lisa Loeb) that starts back in the soundstage, moves toward me, swooshes over my left shoulder to the left 'rear', then comes back into the soundscape. Pretty cool, I don't know if a non-nearfield setup can do that sort of thing as well, I don't recall trying it ...

In a more distant/standard setup, at least with my speakers/room, the image is still between/behind the speakers, further away and not as intimate. I've always returned to the nearfield setup after having tried it over the years.

If I ever get larger/floorstanding speakers ...? I guess I'll have to see what I want to do then. I think I'll always want the 'intimacy' with the soundstage tho.

 

Well, whatever the definition..., posted on July 19, 2014 at 17:53:32
JeffH
Audiophile

Posts: 4574
Location: Orange County, So Cal
Joined: April 5, 2000
 your Tannoy's are good at it! Happy near field listening.

 

RE: Hhmm..., posted on July 19, 2014 at 17:53:32
middleground
 How can anything go beyond the walls of your room in that fashion, how does that work, objectively speaking that is, as I have no doubt you hear what you hear.


Like your walls all disappear and you are out on the open range or something...acoustically speaking of course.

 

Now that made it perfectly clear and...., posted on July 19, 2014 at 18:46:57
AbeCollins
Audiophile

Posts: 46302
Location: USA
Joined: June 22, 2001
Contributor
  Since: February 2, 2002
 ...I followed along until the part about "first-order Taylor expansion of the square root". Yeah, right. ;-)


 

Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 20:32:35
E-Stat
Audiophile

Posts: 37666
Joined: May 12, 2000
Contributor
  Since: April 5, 2002
 The best recordings always create the auditory illusion of a greater space than the physical confines of your room. When you close your eyes, you are transported to the size of the recorded space, however large that may be.

That was always the magic of hearing HP's systems at Sea Cliff - the walls of his room disappeared and you found yourself laughing out loud hearing the music in a huge apparent space with a clearly defined width and depth. While that happened more frequently using classical content, there were some pop recordings that created the illusion. I remember first hearing Madonna's Frozen on the big Nola Grand References. The apparent stage width was about forty feet and the hall as deep.

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 19, 2014 at 21:18:51
middleground
 And what is the explanation for this?

How does near field listening create this illusion with only two speakers, how can reducing the effect of the room make the room seem bigger?

 

RE: Hhmm..., posted on July 20, 2014 at 00:43:58
Todd Krieger
Audiophile

Posts: 37333
Location: SW United States
Joined: November 2, 2000
 "How can anything go beyond the walls of your room in that fashion, how does that work, objectively speaking that is, as I have no doubt you hear what you hear."

This is why nearfield minimizes the reflections of the room. You sense an image that seems larger than the confines of the room.

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 00:45:30
Todd Krieger
Audiophile

Posts: 37333
Location: SW United States
Joined: November 2, 2000
 "How does near field listening create this illusion with only two speakers, how can reducing the effect of the room make the room seem bigger?"

It doesn't make the room itself seem bigger. It removes the room reflections so you sense the venue instead of the room.

 

Why not try it for yourself?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 02:29:06
Jaundiced Ear
 Get yourself some monitors from Guitar Center (they brag about a 30 day MBG) and then set them up on your desk, as carefully as you would set up floor standers in your room and positioned so that you are within two or so feet of them when seated at your desk. If you don't have appropriate stands then use piles of books. Follow the basic rules: tweeters at ear heights and an equilateral triangle between you and the speakers.

Then sit down and play some tunes!

You may be very pleased with the results you get. You can get shockingly good sound from monitors priced US$300-400.

Here's the real test. After you set up the nearfield speakers, turn them on and then try to get some work done while they are playing!

JE

Edit: Oh, and by the way, choose wisely at the shop. I suspect you'll want to keep the speakers after you've had the "near field" experience.

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 05:20:05
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 With two speakers the room is in front of you, not behind. In addition to the Left vs. Right from the two speakers you get depth information from the instruments based on reverberant sound vs. direct sound and also volume. You can also hear reflections off of walls in the hall, e.g. the back wall of the stage and the side wall and the stage floor. The wet computer between the ears figures out the sounds. This process works best if there are only a few microphones, e.g. one for left channel and one for right channel in a Blumlein pair.

It seems rather hard to believe that someone could call themselves an audiophile and not have experienced the walls disappearing and then sought out an explanation.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 05:25:30
middleground
 So you basically require a recording made in a real acoustic space that has the proper spatial cues and a belief that, somehow, the listening room's reverberations will be subdued enough merely by placement of the speaker pair and the listener's ears in relation to it to have the direct wave swamp out the delayed ones.

Two speakers simply are not enough to make a room disappear, unless that is there is magic involved.



 

Has nothing to do with how close the speakers are..., posted on July 20, 2014 at 06:47:35
genungo
 .., except in the relative sense. In many instances the speakers will be close to the listener. Even a cramped desktop system may not qualify as "near-field" if reflected sounds are contributing too much. You can be sitting very close to your speakers and still not be in the near-field (if reflections from backwalls, sidewalls, desktops, and other enclosures are competing with the direct sound of the speakers)!


Whenever direct sound dominates reflected sound, we have "near-field". In a very large room the speakers could be a fair distance from the listener.

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 07:36:41
rick_m
Audiophile

Posts: 6230
Location: Oregon
Joined: August 11, 2005
 "Two speakers simply are not enough to make a room disappear, unless that is there is magic involved."

You nailed it! There IS magic involved and it's all in your head. The stereo just creates a sound-field that emulates an actual event sufficiently that your ears and brain can accept it as valid input and interpret it correctly.

Every used a view-master or seen a well done 3D movie? Same deal.

Using even more channels can improve the experience, because then your pinnas interference patterns add to the data, but two channels are definitely adequate to mostly make the room go away...

Rick

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 08:43:32
b.l.zeebub
Audiophile

Posts: 9361
Location: 52deg 28'N,1deg56'W
Joined: April 17, 2006
 What good stereo reproduction does is to open an acoustic 'window' into the recording venue between your speakers.
All the acoustic cues needed are already present in the recording either because the way it was recorded by careful mic placement or by judicious adding of artificial reverb during the mix process. (Obviously not all recordings are the same in this respect.)

Unfortunately this effect is counteracted by visual cues in our rooms. When ears and eyes disagree the brain will practically always side with the eyes, this was determined by the evolutionary pathway humans took ie trusting our eyes over our ears leads to an increased survival rate.
Which presumably is why many believe that free-standing speakers have more spacious soundstaging than wall-mounted speakers. They don't, you just have to close your eyes to remove their input from your brain to give both types of speakers a level playing field.

 

I have a 12 X10 room..., posted on July 20, 2014 at 09:23:54
excelit
Audiophile

Posts: 111
Joined: September 6, 2000
 I use a front ported Sonus Faber Concerto stand mounted monitor set up against the longer wall, 19" from the side wall, of which one side opens up to another living area. Its set 32" from the rear wall and 64" apart from the inner corner tip of each speaker. My head is positioned around 70" away from each speaker. Seated, the back of my head is approximately 15" from the back wall.
Due to the almost cubical nature of my small listening room, the nearfield set up reduced, but not completely eliminated, bass overhang and improved the imaging and sounstage by reducing the "smear" caused by the bouncing around of soundwaves around the cubical room before reaching my ear.
I don't think there is an exact measurement for nearfield listening,it's just an idea to make sure that the sound waves that reach you are direct and unaffected by secondary soundwaves in a small room.
But each speaker is different. I tried the Meadowlark Kestrel II in the same room with nearfield principles and the speaker locations were different.
There's a lot of trial and error involved, before finding the optimum position for your room size, which, in my case , is the weakest link in my system.

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 10:16:22
middleground
 Have I ever called myself an "audiophile"? Perish the thought!

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 10:42:44
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 This is a forum for audiiophiles. If you are not an audiophile then what are you? You are registered as an (A). However, if you are a music lover and not an audiophile why are you commenting about image depth?

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Is that a new experience for you?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 10:50:45
middleground
 I fully agree with your last paragraph.

Where I disagree though is that there are more terribly dry recordings out there than you can shake a stick at.

Also, every real room that music is played in has an acoustic signature, real concert halls always have pros working overtime to get the acoustics just right and it is a simple fact of life that the acoustics of the room recorded music is played in will be added to whatever ambiant cues are on the record.

I understand full well what good speakers in a good room can do and the fact that when the sound appears really detached from the boxes you get a most pleasing effect, one that I have called for a good while now the "spook factor". What I think is that this can only work when the listener sees the speakers. Hide any kind of good speakers behind a curtain that is acoustically transparent and the sound remains the same but the spook factor is not as, well, spooky.

It's too bad multi-channel systems have never been implemented properly as my long gone one could do things that actually made one beleive he/she had been transported to different size venues.

Generally audiophiles are like believers in homeopathy in that they think a tiny dose of whatever is better than actually taking real medicine.

Near filed listening falls into that category as far as I am concerned, but whatever lifts your dirigeable I guess...

 

RE: Hhmm..., posted on July 20, 2014 at 11:19:08
cfraser
Audiophile

Posts: 3208
Location: Pickering, Ontario
Joined: April 30, 2000
 Exactly right. It is kind of strange at first, and I don't know if it's "right", but I love it. Free "sonic space". Treatments rein it in, and you get to hear more the space captured in the recording, or designed in.

Not for everyone, some prefer a certain type of "sonic space", but I like to hear what's in the recording, for better or worse.

In case I gave the wrong idea before, this is not at all just sitting closer to your speakers, it was a *lot* of time and work and listening. Could never quite get it when not using a near-field setup.

 

RE: What exactly constitutes a 'near field' setup ?, posted on July 20, 2014 at 21:51:12
MylesJ
Audiophile

Posts: 1259
Location: Oregon Coast
Joined: October 25, 2001
 My listening area is a geodesic dome. Ceiling is 21 feet and a 34 foot diameter. Speakers are Dynaudio 52s with Dr. K's Cambridge subwoofer (no ports). Speakers and seating position about an 8 foot triangle, 8 foot to the wall behind the speakers, 26 foot to the other wall. First reflection on both sides is about 6 foot outside of the speaker positions. You get up to about 85db at the listening position before the room starts to get excited. At 95db the backslap becomes apparent.

I figured I wasn't going to get too far with room treatment in the dome. Sound is good all over the room. Detailed imaging happens in the near field sweet spot.

 

Lots of interesting input. Thanks!, posted on July 22, 2014 at 22:39:04
AbeCollins
Audiophile

Posts: 46302
Location: USA
Joined: June 22, 2001
Contributor
  Since: February 2, 2002
 .

 

RE: Yes ... , posted on July 24, 2014 at 21:37:08
pictureguy
Audiophile

Posts: 22597
Location: SoCal
Joined: October 19, 2008
 That's where I'd start. sound gets to YOU before it starts bouncing around.
Too much is never enough

 

Page processed in 0.052 seconds.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]