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RE: Another First Reflection Trap (FRT) Adventure : Quasi-Ambiophonics

Posted by josh358 on March 2, 2017 at 10:39:49:
OK, so somehow I'd missed this thread when it first appeared. As it happens I've been experimenting with an RFZ so I have some 4 x 6 pieces of styrofoam to play with, and after following the link in the 1.7i thread here, I had to try this.

The mid-tweet panels of my IVA's are already oriented to cancel the sidewall relection. Unfortunately the current setup geometry didn't permit me to try the ambio trick and RFZ barrier simultaneously so I decided to try them independently, RFZ barrier first:

Well, it hit the ball out of the park! The speakers are already 6' out from the wall and displaying good depth, but with the barriers in place, the remaining confusion was gone and the image just seemed to stretch back forever. This was despite the fact that according to the mirrors, the barrier was giving me a sidewall second reflection.

I couldn't compare the barrier with my QRD diffusors because I painted them yesterday and the paint is still trying, but I hope to do that in the next few days.

Next, I tried pulling them forward to make a quasi-ambio barrier. That wasn't as successful -- I heard a bit of an improvement in image width but not what I was expecting. I hadn't read your full post though at the time and I may have been sitting too far away -- 8' rather than in the near field as you describe. I'll have to experiment more systematically with both when I have the time.

Finally, I decided to compare that with a full ambio barrier:

I heard the expected widening of the sound stage. It wasn't actually super wide on the recording I listened to (Kurt Masur playing Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings on Teldec), but the sides of the stage were natural, as they never are in conventional stereo, which either truncates them at the speakers or provides an unnatural fuzzy widening from early sidewall reflections. But what really got me was what happened to the phantom image -- it gained definition and turned rock solid, like three-channel stereo but without the lacunae that occur between the center and the sides. (I'd then only skimmed your post and hadn't read the first paragraph, where you mention the same phenomenon -- I was delighted to see when I came back downstairs that your observations confirm mine.)

So very promising and I'm looking forward to more experimentation. I'm not sure how practical the ambio barrier is though I love the effect of the full barrier and I'll definitely experiment more when I have the time. But the RFZ barrier is far and away the best results I've had with these speakers in my 12 x 14 room, doesn't block the window like diffusers, and would be behind the speakers where you don't really see the barriers. So if this proves the best setup, I can see making a couple of Plexiglas gobos and making the installation permanent.

Very impressive, particularly since I haven't had much luck in my ambiophonics experiments in the past, either with a foam mattress barrier or with crosstalk cancellation, which always seems too tweaky. (Of course, this makes me think that planar technology is ideal for making a phased array -- and that with head tracking, you could aim the higher frequencies at the appropriate ears and then use crosstalk cancellation at the lower frequencies where the wavelength is long enough for it to work well . . . )