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Re: Good points here, different experience

"Yes and no. If you choose a distant listening perspective where the indirect sound dominates the field, then yes"

You misunderstood what I said. I said "radiated" into space, not the percentage of reflected sound reaching your ears. Most of the sound from a musical instrument whether low or high frequencies is not radiated directly at you. How much of the indirect radiation reaches you and at what frequencies depends on besides the spatial radiating characteristics of the source, the acoustics of the room, the location and orientation of the source, and your realtive location to the source. In an anechoic chamber a live source and a speaker with flat on axis response like AR3a will sound identical. In a real room they won't be even close because of the differences in sound radiating indirectly and reaching you as reflections. And this can be much, even most of the sound. The musical instrument radiates most all all of its sound uniformly as a function of frequency in whatever directions it radiates. That is if it radiates 50% of its middle frequencies at the back wall, it will radiate about 50% of its high frequencies at the back wall too. This is becasue it comes from the same vibrating source like a vibrating string and the box. But a speaker can be nearly omnidirectional at middle and low frequencies and highly directional at high frequencies. This is why they sound so shrill and different. The sound energy as a function of direction and time from each note reaching your ears is entirely different. My experience is that short of correcting this problem, there is no way to make the speaker sound like the instrument.

BTW, insofar as direct versus reflected sound you hear reaching you at a live concert, according to Dr. Bose's measurements at Boston Symphony Hall, the sound is 11% direct and 89% reflected when you get to 19 feet from the performing stage and his curves show that as you go further back in the audience, the percentage of reflected to direct sound gets even greater. Why this justified a speaker which radiated 89% of its sound indirectly is unclear....in fact it is entirely irrelavent.

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  • Re: Good points here, different experience - Soundmind 14:05:41 08/30/06 (1)
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