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Re: Relative to your theories...

In my "second assertion" 10% is direct, 90% is indirect. It takes ten times as much sound power to produce 100 db as 90 db. This means that if you were to be able to block out the direct sound completely, the total sound would be imperceptably softer. Try it next time you are at a concert by placing your open hands directly in front of your ears. Most of what you will hear will be the sound that's reflected.

In his famous white paper written around 1967, Dr. Amar Bose, professor of Acoustics and Electrical Engineering at MIT reported that a mere 19 feet from the performing stage at Boston Symphony Hall, he measured 11% of the sound reaching the listener came directly from the musicians, while 89% came from sound reflected off the surfaces of the hall. Furthermore, his graphs showed that the further back you went in the hall, the higher the percentage of reflected to direct sound you would hear. If there is nothing else to be gained from his paper or anything else he ever did or said, this one fact should stick in the minds of anyone interested in understanding what they hear at a live concert. He is effectively saying that the reflected sound is the big enchalada, the prize anyone who wants to drastically improve sound reproduction should go for. But after the miserable efforts of the 1970s which resulted in the quadraphonic sound fiasco, neither manufacturers nor audiophiles had much appetite for it.

Neither his speakers nor anyone else's products have been able to recreate anything like that acoustical effect. The room you hear a live concert in may have cost tens or even a hundred or more million dollars to build and more millions to tweak. It's hundreds of times larger than your listening room. Tuning it is part art, part science, part luck. To imagine that you could substitute ten times as much of the sound you have for the 90% of the sound you don't have which is so qualitatively different and still get something which sounds like a live performance even to a non critical listener is an obvious self delusion. So even if your amplifier doesn't clip, it is still not reproducing anything like what you ought to be hearing. It's not the amplifier's fault, it is a basic flaw in the limited concept of 2 channel stereophonic sound as we know it.

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