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In Reply to: RE: really? do the math (it's easy!) posted by mhardy6647 on February 23, 2017 at 07:46:04
An issue is, a sound level meter and Volt meter respond to a "short term average" and not peaks. For compressed FM, the instantaneous peaks may be 10 times greater than the average SPL, power or Voltage but many audiophile recordings have 20 or 30dB or more peak to average.
While you can't hear instantaneous clipping as a flaw, when compared to the same signal without it, the without version is more dynamic.
So, lets say you had a P to A of 30dB and you had 100dB 1w1m speakers To reach 80dB at the listening point say 2m away requires 92 dB at 1m and about 1/6 Watt no problem... until you examine what's needed for the musical peaks +30dB or 1000 times larger or 165 Watts.
The up side is modern music is increasingly compressed so we can use MP3 players so dynamic range is no longer as much of a concern and as i said, you can't hear very short clipping as a flaw, but one can easily see it on an oscilloscope looking at the amplifier output Voltage.
Follow Ups:
Do you find that the dynamics of a commercial Jazz recording on a CD to exceed 20 db crest factor?
I have yet to encounter a 30 db crest factor except for live music and a few very special recordings that show off dynamic range, very rarely. Or maybe I haven't come across the right recordings. How would I know for sure?
Claude
"...and you had 100dB 1w1m speakers To reach 80dB at the listening point say 2m away requires 92 dB at 1m..."
Outdoors yes, but indoors, once you are within the reverberant field, the SPL stays the same regardless of distance.
Plus, a stereo has two speakers and two amplifiers you need to add 3db.
BTW I believe 30db P to A is optimistic. Maybe I just listen to the wrong recordings. :-)
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
A few thoughts;
The reverberant field only exists in very large spaces and is as you suggest the point where the SPL stops falling with increasing distance, it doesn't exist at audio frequencies in a living room and once in that field, voice ineligibility and a stereo image is gone, STIpa is VERY low.
The idea behind stereo reproduction is that one has two independent sources, each able to reproduce it's assigned channel of the image.
It's possible that none of your recordings have that much dynamic range, especially if one depends on FM radio as a source or highly compressed pop mp3's etc. If you listen to "hifi" recordings, try analyzing one using Cool Edit, Audacity etc and see what that indicates and examine your amplifier output Voltage using an oscilloscope for instantaneous clipping.
There are reasons why home hifi falls so short of real.
What you are saying about the reverberant field is at direct odds with what Paul Joppa has repeatedly said.
" In a room, you can separate the sound field into two parts, the direct field and the reverberant field. The reverberant field is all the energy that has bounced at least once off a wall. It's very chaotic, but averaged over a region of space or frequency the mean level is uniform in the room - at least, if the room is not too weird.
The direct field falls off with an inverse square law, just as you said.
There is a "critical distance" at which the direct field equals the mean reverberant field. Beyond that distance, the averaged sound level does not vary. In an average living room, with speakers of average directivity, that critical distance happens to be approximately one meter - an extremely lucky, or at least convenient, coincidence."
When I walk around my room I don't hear the SPL drop off due to distance.
4' to 16' would be -12db in an open space. 12db is a lot of volume change.
I'm walking around my room right now with the system playing. Walking up close to the speaker (4') and back (16') and I hear nothing like a 12db change. I hear very little change at all and any change I do hear could be due to standing waves, etc.
Do you hear a 12db drop in SPL in your room going from a 4 foot distance to a 16 foot distance?
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
As Paul points out in your link this is well studied / understood in commercial sound room acoustics is a well known field in commercial sound (as the larger the room volume the more critical all this gets), the reverberant field only exist when the reflected sounds are so random they average out and at audio frequencies this only happens in large rooms. Worth pointing out that when in the reverberant field there is essentially ZERO voice intelligibility and while you can tell the source is music, you are well past understanding words or hearing a stereo image and potentially being able to tell what sound it is. This is the highly muffled / garbled sound one often hears in gyms and some stadiums, a lot of reflected sound and a little direct sound.
What you describe is what happens between the near field (where the direct sound dominates) and reverberant field. The critical distance is as you describe but is not desirable to listen at or past that because of the great loss of articulation AND that distance is strongly dependant on the loudspeakers directivity which increases the near field zone.
"I'm walking around my room right now with the system playing. Walking up close to the speaker (4') and back (16') and I hear nothing like a 12db change. I hear very little change at all and any change I do hear could be due to standing waves, etc."
Hearing isn't measuring it, play pink noise, use a sound level meter to measure it.
Do you hear a 12db drop in SPL in your room going from a 4 foot distance to a 16 foot distance?"
It's about 11dB measured with SH-50's and broad spectrum pink noise.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
"It's about 11dB measured with SH-50's and broad spectrum pink noise."I didn't ask you to measure it. I asked you if you heard it.
Sound meters are very directional and only measure direct sound.
If you can't hear the 11db loss that you say is there, then it's not there.
11db is huge and you would hear it without having to measure it.
Edit, I see now that your speakers have only 50 degrees of dispersion.
That would make all the difference.
I didn't understand that you are basing what you said on directional speakers.
Sorry.
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
Edits: 03/01/17
Hey - what happened to you guys? I just made some more popcorn!
But Siriusly, a studio's echo/reverberation chamber has a pretty long decay time, even though they're pretty small rooms. On the other hand...
It's pretty hard to measure ANY notable reflections in an anechoic chamber of the same size.
Reverberant field, or not?
Just sayin'.
:)
.
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
Hey Tre', thanks for that link. This is part of what I've been talking about for decades! I don't remember if Leo Beranek first analyzed and named the phenomenon, but the "critical distance" is an important measure of the soundfield at any position in a room (AND outdoors!), and is an important contributor to achieving good intelligibility and musical detail where speech and instrumental detail is important. (Be aware that the Critical Distance varies somewhat with frequency and with angle from the source.)It is important to note that the explanations on the linked site are a bit over-simplified in a few areas, but overall, this is a very good basic explanation of what's going on in a room, sound-wise. It would be good if the author would state such, so that the uninitiated reader won't take it as "the gospel truth".
Anyway...
Even though we know several fundamental factors, the soundfield in a room is not easily described. For the purposes of discussion here, even "typical" living rooms are anything but "typical". Although they do often share some common traits with regard to absorption characteristics, as soon as we start talking about architectural plan design, things go way off the rails very quickly! An "open plan" house is acoustically very different from a more "segmented" house, even though they may share similar "room treatments".
Back to "reverberant field, or not". Clearly, in any "normal" home room where a high fidelity system is employed and some degree of ambient sound is present, there is a reverberant field, however "dry" it may be. Whether or not it achieves a state which can usefully be measured as an RT60 is another matter.
:)
Edits: 03/05/17
Hi
The issue is "where does the reverberant field begin".
Picture a low frequency one below the lowest room mode, at these frequencies your room is a leaking pressure vessel and this "containment" of the bass pressure is the only free lunch in audio, "room gain".
Be aware too that a flexing wall or floor etc is also a diaphragmatic absorber and a sink hole at that frequency.
AS soon as you increase the frequency past the first mode, one is in the modal region where a measurement easily identifies large peaks and dips in the response in the room.
The larger the room, the lower the first mode is and the more numerous the modes are as you go higher up. With a large enough, live enough room one can reach the critical distance and the reverberant field at that point no longer has large peaks and dips, the modes are so dense they have averaged out. There is zero voice intelligibility as well as the time information has been completely scattered and all is left is a noise with the same power spectrum as the acoustic power of the source.
That condition is pretty normal in very large spaces and when public address announcements are barely intelligible as a result of the direct sound not being high enough over the "noise" or reverberant sound.
At the dimensions of a living room and typical loudspeakers it is usually the specular reflections close to the loudspeaker which harm imaging the most, and the side walls are often the source.
One way to "see" where absorption will help is to place a mirror on the wall where you can see the tweeter of the closest speaker from your sweet spot and then replace the mirror with a sound absorbing panel, do both sides..
Remember that critical distance and rt-60 are all terms that were originated for and apply in large scale acoustics and do not apply where the modal density is sparse.
Thanks for your thoughful and useful post.
Room modes are definitely an issue. Here's a related story: Back in 1982, I wrote a BASIC program to calculate room modes and print the results. Whoa, dude, 1982?! Yeah. I was sick and tired of calculating and plotting everything by hand! Hey, remember slide rules?! Fortunately, they were past their prime when I was in high school.
"At the dimensions of a living room and typical loudspeakers it is usually the specular reflections close to the loudspeaker which harm imaging the most, and the side walls are often the source. "
This is common "wisdom" and is total bullshit.
But then, I'm a recording engineer and a musician, so what the heck do I know?
:)
:)
"But then, I'm a recording engineer and a musician, so what the heck do I know? "
Well think about it, in a real studio, which end is dead and close to the loudspeakers when traditional front sofit mounted speakers are used?
When near field / meter bridge mounted monitors are used, how far away in time and level are the closest wall reflections?
To preserve stereo image, suppressing any strong reflected sound within say 0 to 10 ms of the source is usually audibly beneficial, something like directivty in the way it increases the nearfield where the direct sound dominates late reflections.
Actually, I have thought about it. A lot. :)The room is an integral part of the sound, and, early reflections contribute to the sound.
But, speaking of soffett-mounted speakers, when I moved to Dallas decades ago, my (now) old buddy Russ Berger invited me to his home, and guess what?... He had Altec 604's soffett-mounted in his house! Just like they had at the Mastering Lab in L.A. back in the day.
Anyway, here's a recent pic of a room where the stereo imaging was absolutely EXCELLENT without any absorption on the rear or side walls.
Edit: The guy on the right is Siegfried Linkwitz. I don't know who the guy on the left is.
:)
Edits: 03/07/17
So your saying that more dynamic sound means no instantaneous clipping? In essence a high powered amp would sound better?
"Sounds better" is subjective but so far as producing what's in a recording with 30dB peak to average level, yes that's it.
You can hear prolonged clipping and it sounds bad, but instantaneous clipping you cannot hear as a flaw, only a difference in dynamics comparing with and without.
The final arbiter of it is examining the amplifier output voltage, any clipping at any stage of the electronics chain shows up there.
That being said, is there some sort of a table for a good match between power and Effeciency? Something like cartridge and tone arm mass matching? If you know what I'm saying.
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