The best 'speakers are the width of a human head - discuss

[Yank]

I played bass clarinet in school. The french horns were in the next row right behind us. I was very glad their bells faced the other way.

 

[tuga]

This might work for recordings which are studio constructs; for recordings which are intended to be reproductions of the sound heard in a concert hall, I am not convinced.

My standard is (well was, until March...) to go to a concert which is being broadcast on Radio 3, then to re-live the experience via BBC Sounds through my system the following evening. The broadcast, as played at home through omni speakers, often portrays the sound heard live remarkably convincingly. The main difference is usually that the BBC engineers create a sound picture that is even more persuasive than the one heard from my specific seat. I have tried this experiment repeatedly, booking seats in different parts of the halls I visit regularly, and learned something in the process - mainly that as long as I am in my current listening room I need not bother to think about changing my speakers. As fas as that part of my system is concerned, and for the kind of music I favour, I have arrived at the ideal.

The only way to accurately record the original soundfield is by using a mult-channel spherical mic array and listening inside a spherical array of speakers with as many channels in an anechoic chamber. Only then will you use the correct channel for direct, reflected and reverb sound.
The failure of 2-channel stereo is that is is reproducing both direct and reflected sound from the same point-sources (and why for example audience clapping and cheering sounds so strange – it's coming from the front not sides and back as it should).
What Bose and omnis do is use the speakers to reproduce the cues to every direction of the room and thus creating reflections than contain both the direct and the reflected sound captured by the mics. This makes for a more enveloping or immersive experience but not a more accurate one. Whether it's more or less convincing depends on who you ask, it's a matter of preference.

 

[tuga]

My standard is (well was, until March...) to go to a concert which is being broadcast on Radio 3, then to re-live the experience via BBC Sounds through my system the following evening. The broadcast, as played at home through omni speakers, often portrays the sound heard live remarkably convincingly. The main difference is usually that the BBC engineers create a sound picture that is even more persuasive than the one heard from my specific seat.

Apart from the aforementioned problem of having both direct and reflected sound come from the same point sources, stereo has also another shortcoming which is the lack of visual cues. Perhaps the engineers are compensating for that.
On top of that, a normal good-sounding listening seat in the audience would not be an adequate position for a pair of mics because the sound would be too diffuse, with the ratio of direct/reflected sound overly emphasising the latter.
And nowadays most record labels have resorted to multi-mic'ing orchestras, probably because it's a more effective way of defending themselves against recording as well as playing errors and imbalances and allows for adjusting the presence of soloist parts to taste. This in my view has two downsides: closer mic'ing changes the timbre of instruments from what we're used to listening in the audience (see f.e. HOW MIC PLACEMENT AFFECTS TONE by Bruce Bartlett) and it messes up the imaging, resulting in a perhaps more exciting and spectacular but ultimately less realistic soundscape. A good example would be Reference Recordings' vs. Dorian's recording of Stravinsky's Le Sacre Du Printemps.

 

[camverton]

Ric! I was going to reply to your post a way back but you’ve posted so much, including that misleading diagram of mirrors, that I think I’ll pass. Please try listening to the presentation of speakers that you dismiss by theory, you might be surprised. It is a matter of preference as to which is right for the individual listener, but that is best decided by practical listening not theory.

FWIW I, for years, thought that omni speakers couldn’t possibly work effectively. I was applying theory based on what i had heard and read; goodness me, how wrong I was! Then Jerry “jandl” bought a pair of MBL and, instead of moving them on a few months later, as was his custom, he has kept them for over ten years. We share a similar taste in music so when an entry level pair of MBL speakers turned up at a very reasonable price I thought I would give them a go. Bit of a nuisance in a way, not even the excellent Quad electrostatics work as well, and to get really good bass in the MBL range costs over £20k! Once tried nothing else will do!

They aren’t for everyone but they are worth listening to before making a judgement, not judging by theory, shows using hotel rooms, recommendations of manufacturers with a supposed omni mode (clue is that omni and highly directional speakers require very different positions in the room and cannot be swapped at the flick of a switch), but listening, at length to the music you enjoy. Then, you can tell what might work best, for what listener and with which genres of music.

 

[tuga]

Please try listening to the presentation of speakers that you dismiss by theory, you might be surprised. It is a matter of preference as to which is right for the individual listener, but that is best decided by practical listening not theory.

I agree with this and said so many times. One likes what one likes regardless of the theory.
Sure, I can't say with certainty that I don't like them until I've listened but I can make an educated guess by combining listening experience of many speakers and theory (and correlation between measurements and listening is possible).

 

[Gervais Cote]

I agree with this and said so many times. One likes what one likes regardless of the theory.
Sure, I can't say with certainty that I don't like them until I've listened but I can make an educated guess by combining listening experience of many speakers and theory (and correlation between measurements and listening is possible).

As for the oboe...........
Yes I heard some live and then through many different speakers and despite I am not a fan of this design at all, they always seemed to be more accurate and realistic when played on LS3/5A kind of speakers.
Or maybe I should say the vibrato is more involving ?

 

[John Phillips]

This might work for recordings which are studio constructs; for recordings which are intended to be reproductions of the sound heard in a concert hall, I am not convinced.

For me the key issue for a good reference is personal experience. I certainly don't have experience of the studios used in recorded music production so it makes no sense to me to think of their sound as a reference. However I do have quite a lot of (now fading) experience with a large range of concert halls.

My standard is (well was, until March...) to go to a concert which is being broadcast on Radio 3, then to re-live the experience via BBC Sounds through my system the following evening. The broadcast, as played at home through omni speakers, often portrays the sound heard live remarkably convincingly. The main difference is usually that the BBC engineers create a sound picture that is even more persuasive than the one heard from my specific seat. I have tried this experiment repeatedly, booking seats in different parts of the halls I visit regularly, and learned something in the process - mainly that as long as I am in my current listening room I need not bother to think about changing my speakers. As fas as that part of my system is concerned, and for the kind of music I favour, I have arrived at the ideal.

This is how I see it. In my room BBC R3 broadcasts of concerts (largely ones I didn't attend) do, broadly speaking, create reasonably believable windows onto performance spaces I have experienced. Having now eliminated the imperfections that for me impair achieving that reference, in very non-audiophile fashion, I have no desire to go further.

In my case it isn't via omni speakers or cardioid or narrow directivity, as favoured (sometimes rather strongly) by others. It's with fairly regular boxes with the reasonably well controlled directivity.

Just where a home listener is persuaded to think his/her position is with respect to the performance space being reproduced probably differs. It's clear this matters some audiophiles. But IME concert venues are all different. And in at least some venues different seats make a big difference. Even so I enjoy them all (and the BBC engineers do seem to emulate the best seats IMHO and, indeed, sometimes do better).

I do like to know something about how loudspeakers work, but I will not be didactic about what's best, whether for human voice or any other "original" sound. If how the music is produced based on my personal reference dominates over how it is reproduced here at home then in my book that's success. I'm not sure that success is easily pinned down to one loudspeaker characteristic such as baffle width.

 

[RJohan]

Physically they are both wrong, as any flat baffle is wrong. Hence many speakers having a tilted baffle like a Spica TC50, SBL etc as you want the tweeter and the bass-mid dust-cap (or phase plug) in vertical alignment assuming the crossover isn’t doing too much odd stuff.

The thing that interests me in the 149 vs 3/5A comparison is what exactly the BBC did to electrically time align the LS3/5A as its mid band is extraordinarily good. I have read many comments that phase alignment was part of the brief, but I don’t know how they achieved it. Looking at the speaker suggests they started from quite an odd place given the tweeter is substantially ahead of the B110 dust-cap! My electronics knowledge just isn’t sufficient at this stage to pick apart the crossover differences. Crossovers certainly make or break phase and timing, different order filters shifting phase by different amounts etc, and in far more bizarre ways than simple inversion. I know that the LS3/5A tweeter and bass unit are wired in opposite phase (as say are Tannoys to align the compression horn that is quite a distance behind the cone), but there will be a lot of additional phase angle stuff going on as well, it is always far more complex/flawed than it first appears. Multi-way speakers are by nature hugely flawed things. There is a reason say a Quad ESL 63 sounds so, so different to any multi-driver box, and it certainly isn’t all the box!

It might be that what the Beeb strived for was a crossover where the bass and tweeter has the same phase response, meaning they shift the phase the same way over the frequency band, they are in phase with each other over the frequency band. It gives the most even frequency response when you move off axis vertically, and is typical of even order crossovers and is achived with the drivers in opposite polarity. They can not in any way reproduce a square wave (*).

According to KEF the modern day active version of LS-50 (which has active filters in the digital domain) does reproduce a decent square wave. What imoprtance it has I don't know.

* B&O is mentioned. Their 1970's 'uni phase' designs had a 12 dB filter between bass and tweeter with them connected with the same polarity. This did produce a hole in the frequency response that was 'filled in' with an extra driver working around the crossover frequency and resulting in an even frequency response and phase response. As long as the listener was placed excactly in the right place...

 

[Tony L]

According to KEF the modern day active version of LS-50 (which has active filters in the digital domain) does reproduce a decent square wave.

It certainly implies they are phase accurate over the crossover, and the overwhelming majority of speakers certainly aren’t. FWIW, looks aside, I’ve very much liked the LS50 whenever I’ve heard them. A genuinely innovative modern speaker, though it needs a serious amp to wake it up IME. If I was Kef I’d make a high-end version out of nice curved ply in an Eames style for folk like me who hate the painted MDF aesthetic!