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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Preferred shapes for acoustics... posted by Doug Schneider on March 16, 2015 at 12:16:01:
Well they can be a problem, depending on the acoustic size and what aspect you speak of. One can ignore what happens to the sound once it leaves the radiator or deal with it intentionally. What I was talking about is acoustical engineering and not what something looks like or in this case if it looks "right" as the behavior of sound is often counter intuitive..
For example, taking a bass horn and filling in the corners and bends to make it look aerodynamic usually harms the efficiency and low cutoff both (if one measures the with and without condition carefully).
By wavelaunch, I take it you mean something about the directivity or 3d spherical balloon pattern but I rarely see any of that kind of information for hifi speakers.
Don't get me wrong, I love what I will call hifi, what was hifi my hobby 30 years ago and the pursuit of good sound in fact "faithful to the input signal" sound. It's just that SO much of what I see in this area now is based on what people expect or focused on one nuance at the expense of much else.
No wonder the area is in doldrums.
Doug, I noticed your connection and punched in your web site and have a couple thoughts.
In he beginning of our company 11 years ago, we were making a different kind of speaker, not for hifi but commercial sound with the intention of large scale hifi.
An old hifi reviewer friend once said "there are speakers that sound good and speakers that go loud but none that do both" so for commercial sound that was the target.
Once you get to a certain point, anything you change will cause a slightly different set of measurements and will usually sound a little different. The issue was that often one recording might sound better, another worse. Which way to go?
In the old days a generation loss test was often used to listen to recording tape, electronics etc. The idea being the better the tape, the more generations it could undergo before being unlistenable.
We did this with a small tower and measurement mic and loudspeakers, with the thought being the more faithful it was to the signal, the more generations it would go. Here we used a 24/96 recorder and at first did a gen loss recording of the music looped back but that effect was negligible.
If you have the gear to do this, set up a loudspeaker mid room and put a measurement grade mic in front of it. Monitor the mic with good closed back headphones, wear them for a bit first getting used to room noises and other peoples voices (establishing a base line for your level and realism). Now play some music through one speaker and revelation one is how most loudspeakers sound once you remove the action of our 3d hearing process which seeks acoustic information and discards problems.
While any other part of the chain can undergo many generations before significant degradation, some loudspeakers often sound bad / colored just listening to them via measurement mic, few are acceptable after 3 generations. Loudspeakers do so much to the signal.
It had been our intention to have these recordings on our website as we also did them for a few of our competitors but never got around to that. Since being "signal faithful" is often desirable and if one listens to existing recordings one is evaluating that as well, the Gen loss recordings are a way to hear what is wrong because only what is wrong accumulates into the caricature, what is faithful is unaltered.
Maybe this would be a way to fine tune loudspeaker reviews as each generation provides a much clearer sonic snapshot of what isn't right making it easier to describe and then here are the number of generations it can do.
Also If you play pink noise and move the mic around the speaker slowly, you can hear interference patterns, revelation two is to a degree we can hear how a loudspeaker radiates. That is why some speakers disappear as sources producing a mono phantom while others stand out as a right and left source or make a wall type phantom image.
Naturally your room will be part of all this just as it is when listening to music but if working on the loudspeaker itself, a tower outdoors on a quiet day reveals just the loudspeaker (the part you can address /modify)
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
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Follow Ups
- RE: Preferred shapes for acoustics... - tomservo 13:34:43 03/16/15 (0)
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