2chfreak... I do this for a living. For me it is not a 'audiophool' concept... I know what you are driving at. But, let your old habits not take over. There is no need to have a holier than thou approach.
Speakers that Disappear
- Thread starter Nikhil
- Start date
2chfreak... I do this for a living. For me it is not a 'audiophool' concept... I know what you are driving at. But, let your old habits not take over. There is no need to have a holier than thou approach.
Quick (and dumb) question: is it more important to get the correct tonality, dynamic response, good attack and release, basic L/R imaging with good depth and height, OR to plunge straight into the disappearing act?
corElement
Well-Known Member
I agree with you Malvai, such lines of thought are nothing but one sided. Being taught at a good music school about good music has nothing to do with what good music is to different people. It is simply one way of looking at things.
That depends entirely on what you prefer. If you noticed my post, my take on it was that not to give it much importance because our moods shift too often. Sometimes we prefer the transparency sometimes we prefer the body
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tirthankar
Active Member
I believe that's a matter of what you are looking for in music.
For me the most important thing is tonal and pitch accuracy across the spectrum, followed by resolution, lack of fatigue, imaging, soundstaging and others in that order.
When the right equipment are placed in the right room are placed in the right way, the disappearing will happen automatically, while doing other things right as well.
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2chFreak
New Member
huhhhhh ??
avidyarthy
Well-Known Member
.. hehe ... far too important is tonality, response, attack, release, imaging, depth, height .... than the disappearing act itself.Coming to think of it rationally, I am sure one would prefer the sound (at a concert, like the ones we (I) have attended here) coming out from different speakers. Lets say, a sarod and tabla combo playing in a track, sometimes together, sometimes solo. I personally would prefer to hear one from one speaker and the other from the second, while playing solo. I am drawn into the music that way, as differentiation is crystal clear. I have found myself enjoying the beats more when I am involuntarily 'forced' to look the way the sound is coming from time and again. Obviously, this has been the handiwork of the recording ... The 'disappearing act' would'nt have been sought after in here at all, IMO.
Thad E Ginathom
Well-Known Member
I don't think you can "prioritise" in this way. First, the stereo image is going to happen, with lesser or greater clarity, because that is what stereo is about and what it does, even on low-cost speakers. Second, the truly transparent system is surely the aim of all real music lovers.
Talking to Dr.Bass about sushi and stereo, he commented, "Amazing: years of training to not cook something, thousands of dollars to not hear something..."
Quite. All, in the end, part of that not hearing something.
How sensitive the speaker is or how bad the room acoustics are - plain and simple??!!! How does a speaker react to room acoustics? How does anyone design a speaker that has no interaction with the room? Wait - how does a speaker interact with a room in the first place? I can understand the idea of interaction when somebody talks about a rear ported speaker placed close to the wall - but its not the speaker, its the room and placement. The speaker is not reacting to the placement. Or is it? Beyond the limitations of a driver with its quality of dispersion, it may sound the same at different positions or sound different.
I think you are attributing poor room acoustics to the ability of the speaker...
I cant imagine the speaker reacting to the room...
--G0bble
kuruvilajacob
Well-Known Member
Nikhil,
You had mentioned about the 3D effect.When you get that experience of some instruments coming from the sides of the speakers especially some Indian classical instruments, as if the speakers are not even in the room, I feel one has a fairly well set up room.
kuruvilajacob
You had mentioned about the 3D effect.When you get that experience of some instruments coming from the sides of the speakers especially some Indian classical instruments, as if the speakers are not even in the room, I feel one has a fairly well set up room.
kuruvilajacob
kuruvilajacob
Well-Known Member
Nikhi,
sorry, I was not following this thread during the weekdays. In one question to me earlier whether any room specialists are there to advice about room treatment and placement of speakers etc, I have sought the advice of few studio owners about how to counter standing waves and generally followed Cardas speaker placement formula and I was also inspired to build two huge cupboards on both sides after seeing Ken Kessler's listening room. It has really paid off.
kuruvilajacob
sorry, I was not following this thread during the weekdays. In one question to me earlier whether any room specialists are there to advice about room treatment and placement of speakers etc, I have sought the advice of few studio owners about how to counter standing waves and generally followed Cardas speaker placement formula and I was also inspired to build two huge cupboards on both sides after seeing Ken Kessler's listening room. It has really paid off.
kuruvilajacob
My room has no treatment but the speakers still manage that. Its not the room its a quality of the driver and cabinet.
--G0bble
In any good system, the speakers have to disappear. That they do not is largely due to room acoustics and system placement and largely the speaker interaction with the room. If you sit in a studio during a mastering session, the speakers at the studio completely disappear.
That some may not like the speakers to disappear because they feel it reduces separation as discussed in the thread is purely a personal preference.
Fundamentally speakers have to disappear. Thats how usually the mixing and mastering is done.
That some may not like the speakers to disappear because they feel it reduces separation as discussed in the thread is purely a personal preference.
Fundamentally speakers have to disappear. Thats how usually the mixing and mastering is done.
Its normally easier to make a single driver disappear as compared to a 3 way but that does not mean a 3 way design like for example a B&W 801 will not disappear. With proper treatment and placement, they completely disappear.
Many times its much easier to make bookshelves disappear because it only does that much and as a result you do not have bass problems which normally is the main culprit for most of these problems
Many times its much easier to make bookshelves disappear because it only does that much and as a result you do not have bass problems which normally is the main culprit for most of these problems
Ya right, speakers/drivers can be designed which are more room friendly, or say to which the room acoustics are excited to a lesser degree.
Right, bigger the foot print of the sound the more the room reacts and more is the difficulty for the speaker to disappear.
I think nowadays speakers are amazingly well engineered. There used to be a time when the best imaging was only had from bookshelf speakers or single drivers or electrostatic panels etc. but I have recently heard some amazing multi-driver full-range floor-standing speakers - Magico Q3, my Marten Design Django, Focus Audio from Canada, several Rockport models - that are absolute champs at disappearing.
That's quite a Zen-like statement:thumbsup:. I guess it comes from years of audio journey. Learnings distilled into a few words, almost like an axiom.
To continue with my dQ (should I Marka Registrada this?
):1) does your setup do heights? I mean just as one can hear left and right spatial separation and fore and aft spatial separations, do you hear vertical spatial cues? Example: consider two windmeisters - one on a trumpet, another on a soprano sax, standing side by side separated by 3-4 feet, both blowing away to glory. If the recording mic is placed on a stand somewhere between them at some equidistant location in front of them at normal mouth height, one would hear the trumpet's sound emanating from normal ear level, and the sax at stomach or groin level. Do you hear this?
Thad E Ginathom
Well-Known Member
I'd say that stereo is, essentially, a two-dimensional phenomenon, on top of which we allow such clues as knowledge of orchestra placement and level adjustments by the recording engineers, to work in our imaginations. I think that our imaginations are an absolutely essential and valid part of painting the whole musical picture.
In fact, I would have said that anything other than left-right imaging, outside of imagination, is a quirk of room reflections.
I would have said that, before I came across this: LEDR - Listening Environment Diagnostic Recording Test. the technology to make stereo-speaker-produced sound move up and down and around does exist: it is very real. To what extent that technology is used in recorded music up to this time, though, I don't know, but I suspect not much?
I think I get what you are trying to say
But this perception of greater size is mostly due to smearing of images due to various reflections. This smearing gets more intense when you increase loudness. You can see that this phenomenon is not very evident if you play a music system at various volume levels in a professionally treated room. If you play your music in an open ground, this will be almost non-existent. The intensity and loudness of each instrument will increase but the size of the instrument will remain the same.
Speakers that use a crossover network to integrate the drivers from low to high freq will have some kind of level adjusting and transition issues due to the every changing impedance of the drivers at various frequencies. The music we hear are quite complex waves and its very difficult to design a cross-over with ever changing impedance of the drivers and there is always some margin of error.
Full range drivers to a large extend can prevent this issue and also have better time and phase coherence due to point source radiation. Cross-overs have always been a kind of necessary evil and if by using some other technology / designs we can avoid it, then better opt for it. Its useless to aim for wide frequency response at the expense of better sound staging, imaging and natural response from a speaker. Even a speaker with response of 50Hz to 15KHz should be good enough if it faithfully reproduces the sound spectrum with total harmonic balance, rather than aiming for a speaker with response of 20Hz to 25KHz which does not do justice to the sound stage.
Masking of frequencies or dominance of a particular frequency over others could also be due to improper timber balance or harmonic balance of the sound waves. Typically multi driver speaker could suffer from this phenomena due to level matching issues or also due to varying impedance across the frequency spectrum. Phase coherence across the spectrum, step response is more preserved in a full-range driver compared to a multi-driver system that can help in disappearing of the speakers.
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