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Speaker coupling - it's an actual thing

“Get it wrong and the results can be devastatingly bad. But get it right and you’ll hear a presentation that defies belief.”

I think it was the OP’s quiet understatement that drew me into this thread. ;)

Personally I prefer the term “acoustic synchronicity” but “coupling” works too. No doubt the PFM community can rummage through their collective rectums (recta?) and pull out an even better term.
 
There are really only two considerations with loudspeaker placements. Three if you use DSP and care about directivity and time-of-flight minutiae. For passive loudspeakers, you want them positioned to produce the most even bass response in the room. If you don't have a perfectly symmetrical room, it is better to locate this one loudspeaker at a time. Don't forget there are three dimensions to contend or experiment with. Correctly positioned loudspeakers will produce fairly even bass response in most parts of the room.

The second consideration is toe. This will alter the stereo effect.

I suppose when you nail both, you have "coupled" loudspeakers. I prefer the expression "optimally positioned". Yes, and it is real.
 
Of course, if someone is limited to the "officially accepted" definitions of sound terminology, then anything outside those can easily be dismissed as bollox. You know who you are! ;)
 
martin clark said:
Yes; we do, and our intra-aural ability to 'locate' comes down to out wetware's ability to correlate time differences of c. 5uS resolution- or as little as 20mm of path difference!
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And yet the author of the above video claims to hear significant changes in 3D imaging/soundstaging by moving a speaker as little as 1mm.

I'd love to know how he manages to adjust the toe-in without changing the distance from the drivers to the room's boundaries and listener?! Not only that but even just a small amount of toe-in can IME have a major impact on the severity of bass nulls. So, after fine-tuning the toe-in you then need to go back and find the new optimal location for the speaker, which will invariably require a new optimal toe-in, and so the process goes on, and on, and on!...
 
windhoek said:
And your point is?

Seriously, I can only imagine that your speakers aren't coupled which is why you have no idea what I'm on about.
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I don’t watch dumb YouTube videos but I have read several papers and books on speakers design and room acoustics. There's no such thing as coupling two speakers with each other, the room or the listener.
It's BS.
 
martin clark said:
There's a level at which this hobby (- as with many, many ..most??) can readily devolve-into ,or maybe fuel ... obsessional disorder(s).

Different for all of us.
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Even if I had the inclination to do so, my cerebral palsy prevents me from moving my loudspeakers in increments as fine as 1mm! 😂
 
awkwardbydesign said:
Of course, if someone is limited to the "officially accepted" definitions of sound terminology, then anything outside those can easily be dismissed as bollox. You know who you are! ;)
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I'll quote Chuck Todd's reply when he interviewed Trump's Campaing Manager and Counselor Kellyanne Conway:

"Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."

WTF
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
My take is that this is about the level of precision with which we should position loudspeakers. You can get 'good enough', 'nearly right' and 'wow, everything just snapped into focus', and these can be just millimetres apart.
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Don't forget to keep your head in the same, very specific position relative to the speakers... consistent to less than a millimeter. A straightjacket may help; that and a vice.
 
‘digital glare’
Coupling’

Is this the New Testament of hifi, what’s next ‘cable massage’
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
My take is that this is about the level of precision with which we should position loudspeakers. You can get 'good enough', 'nearly right' and 'wow, everything just snapped into focus', and these can be just millimetres apart.
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Personally I've never noticed that level of precision, but definitely agree with this in principle. Certainly a cm or two can make all the difference IME.
 
windhoek said:
I'm not convinced you're right. I've heard my speakers sounding pretty good with a really solid centre image but right now they're performing as one in an almost Gestaltian way. I never came up with the term coupling but it does seem to describe what I'm hearing quite well all the same. That said, I'm open to the possibility that there's a better or more accurate way of describing it.
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Holistic? Synergistic?
 
tuga said:
I don’t watch dumb YouTube videos but I have read several papers and books on speakers design and room acoustics. There's no such thing as coupling two speakers with each other, the room or the listener.
It's BS.
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I'd say that depends on your definiton of coupling. Quantum coupling is a thing. So could it not be said that the fact there is acoustic energy passing between speaker and listener that they are "in some form" coupled? After all energy is created by the speaker and the only way for humans to perceive that energy is to absorb it, thus they're (in one sense at least) coupled to the speaker.

NB: the Quantum coupling reference was just a separate example of a principle of coupling in Physics, not claiming that it has anything to do with coupling speakers to listener.
 
gez said:
I'd say that depends on your definiton of coupling. Quantum coupling is a thing. So could it not be said that the fact there is acoustic energy passing between speaker and listener that they are "in some form" coupled? After all energy is created by the speaker and the only way for humans to perceive that energy is to absorb it, thus they're (in one sense at least) coupled to the speaker.

NB: the Quantum coupling reference was just a separate example of a principle of coupling in Physics, not claiming that it has anything to do with coupling speakers to listener.
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Quantum sounds rather drastic... Maybe I'll try blu-tack.
 
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