advertisement


Directivity

RoA

pfm Member
Is it important to you?

To be honest, Directivity never really featured on top of my list. If I listen other than just background I tend to sit in one place, a small sofa. As long as I get a good stage and not too much frequency deviation whilst shuffling around on said sofa I am fine.

Over on ASR Speaker Directivity seems at or near the top of desirable speaker attributes. Nothing wrong with that I may add.

I bring this up as my larger Actives, the Formation Duo's fare rather worse in that aspect when measured. - I also use a set of Wireless II's which have an audibly larger sweetspot due to their co-axial driver/s.

In my use this doesn't bother me too much. How do you feel about it?
 
Listening to music is a family experience that I want us all to enjoy. I am not interested in sitting in a dedicated room on my own so to that end I prefer speakers which have some level of omni directivity. I can live with their flaws much more easily than being out of the sweet spot with a highly directional design.
 
The reason speaker directivity matters is not just so that listeners can sit in a range of listening positions - it also affects the sound in the main, central listening position. If a speaker has very uneven off-axis frequency response, then the reflected sound reaching the listener will be uneven in frequency response, even if the on-axis response is flat. (Of course, different surfaces will absorb and reflect in an uneven way anyway - but it will all get worse if the speaker's off-axis response is uneven.)
This can affect perceived tonal balance, to some extent, and the tonal qualities of the sound. Research suggests we prefer the sound of speakers that not only have a reasonably flat on-axis frequency response, but also have smooth directivity.
 
It is somewhat ironic that recording studios will often choose a speaker with wide and even dispersion so that the sound balance doesn’t change when they move around the desk, and then spend a fortune treating the walls so that most of the reflections are lost and never heard. Domestically you can make arguments both ways. I had some Quad ESL57s which have the narrowest directivity possible and they sounded great (at least as long as I locked my head in the right place), and more recently have used ATCs which have much wider dispersion, especially in the midrange, and they sound good too. Quad used to say that the narrow dispersion of their speakers gave you more freedom with room positioning. (Not so much freedom with head positioning though). ATCs argument is that the balance of the reverberant sound field should be similar to the direct sound.
 


advertisement


Back
Top