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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: The air is an excellent ultra-high-frequency absorber -- the data measured at 4 feet from a trumpet are meaningless ... posted by Richard BassNut Greene on April 24, 2007 at 09:22:38:
I don't know who you are arguing with.Just to repeat: no one here thinks this line of questioning is directly applicabile to audio engineering in some unproblematic way that has immediate consequences for consumer designs. No one thinks we should all run to the store to buy a supertweeter all of a sudden. And none of this has anything to do with hearing, either, for the n'th time.
The issues are hypothetical and that's where their interest lies. David A. has summarized this intelligently below. For me (and I'm assuming you are interested in my perspective since you seem to believe you are somehow arguing against my take on this), it is the what-if type of questioning that gives the fascinating angle on all this. If moderate LF content enhances listening pleasure, and extreme LF content can induce neuropsychological effects on "listeners" (inaudible subsonic vibration resulting in anxiety reactions in test subjects, etc.), could we then ask whehterhypersonic HF content, too, might have some comparable but maybe qualitatively different effect on the experience of sound perception.
What sort of an effect might that be? What prompted me to think about all this in the first place (in the context of hi-rez audio) was the uniformly positive response that some new speaker designs utilizing "supertweeters" have been met with in listening tests; a response moreover that seems to steer away from the banal "liquid midrange" and "smooth highs" discourse in describing the listener reactions. The auditing experience is usually summarized with the rather simple bottom line as being "very, very nice" in some hard-to-pin-down kind of a way (the point being about noteworty presence of subjective listening pleasure). What if in some way it's about the HF content that these models can reproduce?
Whether this hypothetical effect has anything to do with IM distortion is another matter. If it does, what would happen if through design solutions this distortion could be eliminated? Would the effect then be equally or even more pronounced? Or is it precisely IM distortion that causes this response in the subjects in the first place - in which case we could maybe conclude that here we have yet another possibility for euphonic solutions in sound reproduction devices? Or is the whole IM distorion issue something that exists apart of the engineering matrix, as some general property of soundwave behavior in the atmosphere? (In which case it would be interesting to consider why we have the perceptive capability for it somehow built into the design of our anthropological apparatus.)
The more directly consequential questions for someone thinking of a speaker upgrade lie obviously elsewhere, most immediately in things like the accuracy of frequency response within the audible range, lack of coloration & distortion, and good interaction with the environment in which the system is set up. Without these you will have no satisfying sonic experiences whatsoever.
It's important however to remain open to questions and have some fun in the process even if the issues seem purely speculative at present. Who knows, maybe tomorrow they are a feature you can choose for your system setup, too. Obstinacy combined with a single-issue mindset is never a good thing to have, and we all know we have enough of ideology and dogmatism in this field already (for the record, I'm not claiming these are what you stand for). Why not be open-minded and exploratory? The research problem in the study was intriguing, pregnant with implications, and it certainly merits further consideration.
But enough of this already.
TL
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Follow Ups
- The issues, once more - tlyyra 03:04:57 04/25/07 (1)
- I responded to mkuller: "When people add supertweeters, they usually report an increase in sound quality " - Richard BassNut Greene 08:20:59 04/25/07 (0)
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