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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: Speaker Measurements vs. Subjective Listening posted by lenw on February 18, 2007 at 11:26:57:
...to mystify one of the few areas of audio that are fairly well understood. Floyd Toole's 2-part series in the mid-80s covered this pretty thoroughly. Progress has been made since then, but, as he notes in those articles, much of the work that matters most was old even in the '80s (Toole's main contribtion was to do careful subjective tests and correlate them with careful measurements). His conclusions:"Given the proper circumstances, experienced listeners with normal hearing prefer loudspeakers with wide bandwidth, flat and smooth amplitude response, and uniformly wide dispersion." He goes on to define "amplitude response" precisely, telling how it ought to be measured:
"...looking for flat, wide-bandwidth on-axis response, and for consistently repeated patterns in the family of progressively off-axis measurements."
He then points out that, though time-domain effects matter, one need only measure in the frequency domain because time-domain effects are visible there, too.
Toole presents a clear set of priorities: smooth amplitude response (spatially, not spectrally, averaged), directivity, with time-and-phase effects following somwhat distantly. ("The advocates of accurate waveform reproduction...are in a particularly awkward situation. In spite of the considerable engineering appeal of this concept, practical tests have yielded little evidence of listener sensitivity to this factor."
Conclusions? "At present it would seem that almost any form of amplitude-response measurements can identify really poor loudspeakers. More specific measures and perhaps some processing is necessary in order to reliably identify good loudspeakers. But only very specific and possibly special measurements in a combination of domains identify truly excellent products as reliably as thorough controlled subjective measurements. Conventional listening evaluations are essentially uncalibrated measurements; they are likely very often to be in error."
Still, Toole's work is aimed at manufacturers who want their speakers to appeal to as many people as possible. What one individual prefers cannot be determined by any statistical test, no matter how carefully done. Another way of saying this is that there are objective standards for good loudspeaker design, but some special designs may sound good to certain people even if they fail to meet those standards--and some people are just going to like lousy speakers.
Cheers,
Jim
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Follow Ups
- It's not useful... - Jim Austin 07:53:24 02/19/07 (1)
- Agree. For the typical audio enthusiast, - Al Sekela 08:48:31 02/19/07 (0)
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