Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: Relevant loudspeaker tests

Rooms and loudspeakers are only part of the problem. Musical instruments and microphones are two other parts of it.

With current "practical" technology, we cannot reproduce a musical instrument sound via a recording and subsequent reproduction system. It cannot happen.

Start with the source - a musical instrument. The sound is different at every position around the instrument. This sound is radiated into a room, which imparts its own aural signature. Couple that with the fact that every instrument has a different radiation pattern.

A microphone only picks up the direct sound of the instrument from one point in space, and picks up the room ambient sound, and imparts its own signature due to frequency-dependent and other characteristics. This then is "reproduced" through a single point via a loudspeaker which has a singular radiation pattern, and re-radiates the single-point sound into another room!

Given this, it's amazing that stereo systems sound as good as they do - even if they don't sound like real instruments!

:)



Edits: 07/11/14

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