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RE: Why does Magnepan get no respect from Wilson and Magico people?

Posted by josh358 (P) on January 11, 2015 at 17:13:18

In Reply to: RE: Why does Magnepan get no respect from Wilson and Magico people? posted by Satie on January 11, 2015 at 11:14:27:

Back when I was experimenting with my MMG's, the two setups that worked the best were what one might call conventional -- Blumlein triangle, angle in on axis, at the sweet point for planars which in a small room like mine is as far from the front wall as practical -- and something along the lines of the HK setup, which I'd say was second best.

Agree with you on the cylindrical wavelaunch. Someone once said (Harry
F. Olson?) that there were only two correct dispersion patterns for a speaker, point source and line source. And only full-height line sources reproduce height cues. The reason for this I think is twofold; They dnn't mask the floor bounce (learned that from you, way back when) because they don't have a point source floor bounce of their own, their floor bounce merely makes them seem like a longer line source; and they "average out" the vertical transfer function of the pinna, head, and torso, which deprives the ear of the other cue it normally uses to localize sources vertically.

However, it just occurred to me this morning that this could have something to do with the ethereal quality that affects dipoles. Part of that is wonderful, like a window opening up on the original soundfield. But part of it ma be that the vertical pinna cues are gone *missing*. It's sort of like the phantom image in stereo, isn't it? In that unless the sound is panned left or right it lacks the solidity of a physical driver for much the same reason -- wrong pinna cues. Center channel speakers reduce this effect in stereo and tri-center reduces it even more, in fact two-channel stereo listening *doesn't work* after you've been listening to tri-center for a while.

I've also heard a lot of that ethernial quality with the image that spreads beyond the ears with crosstalk cancellation.

Of course there are other possible explanations and the dipole null could be one. It isn't natural after all to have no sound coming from the first reflection point at the sides. All I know about this is that it has the same effect as any early room reflection, that is, it acts like artificial reverb, and that people tend to prefer it in listening tests to front wall reflections, and that it tends to extend the image laterally. It also, like any reflection, tends to smear the image, and effect I heard clearly when I used mirrors to put the dipole null right at the first reflection point.

Not quite sure what's going on with the double Maggies, I didn't have time to read those threads closely. The field of a quadrapole has nulls so it would depend on the orientation of the speakers wrt the room and listener.

I think decoupling the woofers from the mid/tweets could be effective, as long as you can maintain the phasing.

Room modes have a huge effect on bass performance so no golden ears required! Not only do they cause major peaks and nulls in low frequency amplitude response but they cause ringing which smears the sound. Of course dipole woofers don't excite as many room modes as omnis which I think is one of the main advantages of planar bass. So they're much less of a problem with Tympanis than with dynamics. I can't claim that the problems of my wall's geometry were detected by my special golden ears either, since when I was trying to get the MMG's to work in front of the mantle I invited my very non-technical stepmother to listen to the best result. As usual, no prompting. She immediately said "It sounds like everything is coming from the mantle!" Which left me with a frown on my face since I'd half convinced myself that I'd solved the problem.

I've also heard smaller room features like windows but the effect is much subtler, except where one side opens up onto a hall -- then the sound on the left wraps on the left wall as dipoles normally do because of the oblique reflection at the corner, while the sound on the right has much more depth.

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