advertisement


Speakers ability to disappear in the room?

Stilgoe1972 said:
So from these replies it would seem that you don't need expensive equipment to achieve this, just good acoustics and well designed equipment. Actually ,not even good acoustics.
Click to expand...

indeed you don't, just well designed speakers. bar placing spkrs sensible distance apart- nothing else at all. Ive had royds & (£20 stop-gap) heybrooks in rooms with dreadful acoustics/big furniture up against, one whole crap wall 2 layres of plasterboard.. even unsteady spkrs as floor so crap! (a badly coverted old cottage). But guess what, they both do the same nr holographic disappering trick every time.

So Im afraid chaps Ive proved with this simple experiment that alot of the replies here re positioning & acoustics on the subject are complete nonsense. (and recording too: with a so-so mono S.Bassey lp in my piss-poor 'listening room' she's barking at me not from spkrs it seems but from the middle of the lawn outside the window).
 
*Speakers can be made to disappear by simply leaving windows/doors open.

*other objects may also disappear
 
Still said:
*Speakers can be made to disappear by simply leaving windows/doors open.

*other objects may also disappear
Click to expand...

arf.

Ynwoan. royd minstrels are known to be absoltely fantastic at this trick, reknown for it; in all honesty, the next nearest that do the 'out me flippin box' trick that ive heard are electrostatics (which do it best of course as a rule.. in fact esl's are the short cut to my point).

its speakers i tells ya. bllx to the other stuff: its ya typical hifi-fo-fum-for-um-bum-fluff :rolleyes:).
 
demotivated said:
Early pop did this. The beatles UK 60s stereo stuff being notoriously annoying and nicer in mono. But anything with with musicians that played with Jazz or orchestra generally was good in the days of the ampex 3 track etc ie around the 50's. Try 'genius hits the road' by Ray Charles for a blast of somewhere else in space/time.
Click to expand...

Some early stereo jazz is awful as well. Dave McKenna's "This Is The Moment", from '59 I think, is an example - I can't listen to it unless I hit the mono switch.
 
Screaming out for 'natural sound depth' if the sound demands it?
Suffering from a wall in front of you completely 'alive' yet the rest of the room 'Its bugger all'! Firstly it goes back to the simple behavior of speaker systems. Bass is naturally circular -projected, out over a wide area. As the frequencies go up more often than not , the sound dispersion becomes narrower in front of a listener like directing and adjusting a garden hose water jet. We are back in good old 'polar response problem ' country, regarding speakers.

To mitigate against it, all sorts of remedies have been used and tried over the decades. Shifting and placing speakers here, there and everywhere,, or toeing in - yet trying to stop nasty wall reflections. Then narrower slim cabinets and careful placements of miid and high frequency speakers to stop diffraction effects as the sound leaves the cabinets -have become 'the fashion'. Manufacturers of course keeping an ddlose eye on how to gain the most public appeal for their efforts while doing who they do, for the cheapest amount. The cabinets became small and slim pencils with former mid range speakers NOW becoming bass speakers. All part of their big illusion - that finally one day, hits the reality brick wall of physics.
.
If people are skeptical about what I am saying...go back and get hold of the polar response 'dispersion' graphs for the original Quad Electrostatics and big IMF transmission line speakers etc. Steadily enveloping the room in sound without any signs of 'suck-out' throughout their frequency range ...both shown on paper, and also ....in reality. Funny, that! How it just coincided!!! Nor did transmission line principled Omni' type speakers suffer either, from the 'flatness in depth presentation' fault. The listening room is the 'final cabinet' for the sound.. ; Both types of systems did not need being 'ramming back against some ringing wall' to create a false impression for real bass or cheap accentuation.
I wonder how many people auditioning speakers , also actually get up and take a simple walk in between two speakers ...,then walk in an arc around or
across JUST one of the speaker's path - while it is playing. Treating that speaker as if - it was performing 'in mono'. It is a quite surprising test ...for quite, some speakers
To see if its frequency response performance tapers off if, either you are not exactly dead center of the speaker or close enough to the front edges of the speaker system.

IMHO Any so called Hi Fi speaker that fails that simple test...deserves the trash heap.
 
My neighbour has a set of royd minstrels. They sound far from box free. He uses them with denon amps... So electronics must make a difference . He has the same size lounge as me (semi detached house).
So the theory of "any set up can do it" doesn't really match my experience.
 
My Virgo 2's do this quite well, much better than other speakers I have had. Whether or not it's important is another question, but when I have brought some other speakers by, I sometimes am really struck by how boxy they can sound.

I usually associate this in someway with narrrow baffles, but this is based on a very small sample size

Bruce
 
I treated myself to the 'how John Martyn would want you to hear it experience' a few weeks ago, even on my missus' little JPWs, lights down, the music just floated around the entire room.
 
The Captain said:
So Im afraid chaps Ive proved with this simple experiment that alot of the replies here re positioning & acoustics on the subject are complete nonsense. (and recording too: with a so-so mono S.Bassey lp in my piss-poor 'listening room' she's barking at me not from spkrs it seems but from the middle of the lawn outside the window).
Click to expand...

The dual mono sounds from the speakers and it bouncing from the wall placed the singer's voice there. It would work with any speaker as thats how the brain processes noises that reaches the ears and brain at different instances in time, it is not some special well engineered trick from them bloody royds.
 
Stilgoe1972 said:
My neighbour has a set of royd minstrels. They sound far from box free. He uses them with denon amps... So electronics must make a difference . He has the same size lounge as me (semi detached house).
So the theory of "any set up can do it" doesn't really match my experience.
Click to expand...

Not my theory. but yes some watts a good idea- Id add then that an amp of certain ammount of welly min up the spkrs? and of decent quality? (in my case just a humble nap 140). Mind you welly-not with esl's as a nait 1 or an A60 can drive quads.

I also rememeber some big 80's JBL's from a quad 405 doing the disappearing trick well.. but not quite as well as the few pairs of minstrels Ive had.

Its the 1st thing I go for in a spkr you see- most important facet to me (I long for esl 57's one day!). any spkr as good as it may be on paper, or reviews/ whatever the cost/ that doesn't do this trick Ive absolutely no interest in sitting & listening to whatsoever. It should be fundamental to (good) spkr design IMO, but its not, rather it seems a bit of a fluke or a holy grail.
 
I was at Tom Evans "factory" in South Wales and he had produced a loudspeaker which he sells in low volumes which do the disappearing trick better than anything I have heard (much better than my good Tannoy Kensingtons). If I understood correctly he said a very flat impedence curve was the main way he had achieved this.

Nic P
 
I've got a pair of Harbeth SHL5 that won't disappear despite a bargain price and repeated advertising.

Tony.
 
Lot of good information folks thanks much.
For me I find my Revel f52 cannot disappear like my Old (sold them)Vandersteen 2c, but good recording seem to help alot.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top