Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Not really a good analogy

Weight may or may not have anything to do with the sound quality. Listening in another room is throwing a spotlight on one of the more initially elusive but long-term significant factors.

A speaker can sound initially impressive from the sweet spot but can become fatiguing over time. I can cite studies that show a correlation between radiation pattern and long-term listener preference. Briefly, a speaker with an irregular power response (which typically arises from radiation pattern issues) is more likely to generate listening fatigue over time.

Let me explain one reason why this can happen. The ear/brain system is constantly analyzing incoming sounds to see if they are new sounds or reflections of a recent sound (recent meaning like within the last 40 millisconds). The ear looks primarily at the spectral balance when deciding whether it's a new sound or an old one. With naturally-occuring sounds, the spectral balance of the reflections is very similar to that of the first-arrival sound. With loudspeakers, whose directional characteristics change with frequency, the spectral balance of the reverberant energy usually starts out skewed - there's more reverberant energy at frequencies where the radiation pattern is wide and less where the radiation pattern is narrow. The ear/brain system has to work harder to correctly classify these spectrally-skewed reflections, and over time the result can be a headache. I'm not saying this is the one and only source of listening fatigue, but I believe it's a fairly significant one in many cases.

Listening from another room is a quick way to hear what's going on with the reverberant field, and the reverberant field matters because most of the sound that reaches your ears in a normal home listening setup is reverberant sound. Note that live voices and instruments sound realistic from the next room, but few speakers do. If we're looking for speakers that do a good job of recreating a live music event, generating a natural-sounding reverberant field is part of that. Note that the choice is not between speakers that do or do not generate reverberant field energy - the choice is between speakers that do or do not get it right.

The little NHT 3-way speakers John Ashman believes in use a very intelligent spacing of driver diameters and crossover frequencies to minimize the spectral discrepancy between the direct and reverberant energy. I would bet that, if these speakers sound good from the next room (and since John uses that test I'm sure they do), they are also very non-fatiguing to listen to long-term. I have gone a different route in my own designs, but if I wasn't playing around other radiation pattern control techniques I'd be working on 3-ways or 4-ways philosophically very similar to the little NHTs.

And as John noted, there's something special about a speaker that can recreate the illusion of live music without any help from imaging and soundstaging. Nothing against imaging of course, but some people are less interested in where the musicians are on the stage than in why they are on the stage.

Duke


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  • Not really a good analogy - Duke 18:45:20 03/19/07 (0)


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