Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

What you're describing is very different from a concert hall

Relatively few speakers do this. Room acoustics obviously come into play, but unless we're ready to spend a lot of money, the room's ability to "fix" the speakers is limited.


It isn't the speakers that need fixing. It's the room.

The reverberation you hear in a good concert hall is complex, diffuse, omnidirectional. You hear a large number of multiple reflections from different directions at different delay times summing together. There must be enough reflections with enough diversity in direction and arrival time that the result is a statistical distribution rather than a recognizable pattern of echoes. That's what makes it sound like you're in the middle of an enveloping sound field rather than just in a really big room.

It is not possible to make the reverberation of a small room sound like the reverberation of a concert hall. Most untreated domestic listening rooms sound like echo chambers. By that I mean that their reverberant sound is dominated by temporal patterns from a few strong echos. Changing the radiation pattern of the loudspeaker can alter the balance of direct vs. reflected sound and the frequency response of the reflected sound, but that doesn't alter the reverberation characteristics of the room. You can never make a listening room sound like a concert hall, but you can make it not sound like an echo chamber by controlling room dimensions and room treatments.

My hunch is that your preference for bipoles is mostly related to the spectrum of the power response, and doesn't have much to do with the arrival time of the front wall reflection. The delay time for the front wall reflection in a typical listening room is 15-25 ms, which is still an early reflection that in no way resembles anything you hear in a concert hall.



This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Western Glow Tube Service  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.