OT
Paging anyone selling a pair of Geddes speakers.
I just e-mailed a link to your post to someone who has a pair of Abbeys for sale (or did as of a week or so ago).
OT
Paging anyone selling a pair of Geddes speakers.
So maybe we should be matching directivity to room size. Maybe there is an ideal range of directivity to room size ratios in which we would all receive roughly similar amounts of reflected wall energy."The idea of an “ideal” directivity will be examined and it will be shown that CD alone is not enough, in a small room one needs a narrow
directivity that is also CD." - Geddes
So maybe we should be matching directivity to room size. Maybe there is an ideal range of directivity to room size ratios in which we would all receive roughly similar amounts of reflected wall energy.
Based on my experience building multiple Linkwitz designs, which are designed to have delayed reflections off the surfaces and ordinary things in a room, I believe Siegfried was probably right that the brain uses the delayed reflections and reduced SPL from reflected sounds as spatial cues to, in effect, process the direct energy in a manner that gives it priority or extra weighting. Relatedly, I found that the Dutch & Dutch 8C, while tremendously smooth in response, did not have the same quality of soundstaging, which I attribute to it having less room interaction than the Linkwitz designs, which are either dipole figure-8 or else cardioid patterns.
if Salon2 is narrow what is wide enough then?I assumed Salon 2 was wide directivity but it might be narrow
... One way of looking at a dipole's figure-8 radiation pattern is this: It's like you take the radiation pattern of a wide-pattern speaker, chop it in half, and fire half of it backwards. So now you have the benefits of a somewhat narrow pattern as far as minimizing early reflections, plus the additional relatively late-onset reflection energy from the backwave, assuming the speaker is far enough out into the room.
if Salon2 is narrow what is wide enough then?
There's definitely a sweet spot. It's pretty obvious that (too) late reflections sound bad. All I have to do to test that is move away from my speakers and notice the increasing amount of echo, or try to listen to music in my hard-floor living room. It's uncomfortable. It's one step away from a gymnasium.By "small room", I think Earl means "the size rooms we normally see in home audio." This is to distinguish from a "medium-sized" room, like a college lecture hall; or a "large room", like a concert hall. At least, that's the way I've heard him use the term.
I do agree with your idea of matching the speaker's radiation pattern to the room. I would look at path lengths and the direct-to-reverberant energy ratios. To a crude first approximation, ime the larger the room (and therefore the longer the reflection path lengths), the lower the direct-to-reverberant sound ratio can be, BUT for the sake of clarity we still want the ear to be able to distinguish the direct sound from the reflections.
... I can only conclude that while the time-intensity trade does indeed happen and quiets down the speaker nearest you when you move to the side (note: this only works with very consistent, but quieter, off-axis sound, like with the Buchardt S400 I have here), I wasn't crazy about the sound overall in the center. It's hard to explain but the system seemed a little too center-focused.
Can't move them further apart. They're 10 inches from the side walls already. The room is very narrow but I'm going to try another approach.Spreading the speakers somewhat further apart than normal may address the "too center-focused" issue. You can test the geometry without having to move the speakers by scooting your chair forward a bit.
I've been dreaming of building a mini 2-way dipole to go above my Linkwitz Orion dipole mains as "height" speakers for auro 3d & atmos.Possibly worth mentioning is the means by which that figure-8 pattern is achieved. For very higher frequencies it is primarily due to ordinary directivity of the driver, assisted by the baffle; for midrange frequencies it is these same effects plus some interference/cancellation where the front and back wave meet at the sides; for low frequencies it is purely the interference/cancellation effect at the sides. To keep these individual effects in the necessary balance, such that the figure-8 has roughly the same shape for all frequency, likely requires exceptional skill.
I have the speakers further into the room now, still crossing behind me. There's more SBIR, but I think the staging is better and the sound is more pleasing. I think this room just isn't big enough to do the wide + extreme toe config.Can't move them further apart. They're 10 inches from the side walls already. The room is very narrow but I'm going to try another approach.
For that, look for constant directivity designs, ones that have largish waveguides, like the JBLs or Buchardts, or larger horns to control directivity even lower, like JTR speakers.Wow...so, lots of Science here. But, like RayDunzi, I've been fortunate enough to compare my 'old tech' beamy system to M2s, so I'll throw in my observations.
In the listening position (also different rooms, mine is much larger than the M2s were in), there wasn't that much difference (yes, the M2s were spectacular wrt HF).
But what really 'got me' was that in the M2 setup, I could move around on the listening couch, or indeed around the room, and 'image' remained largely the same - amazing!!
Definitely a big move up from the 'head in the vice & it's GREAT' experience with my system.
So. Why don't I have M2s now? Cost.
If I were starting from new, and had the budget, I'd definitely go for a well designed, smoothly imaging system, especially if you share a couch with others, and move around a bit.
Experts - carry on.
In general, the conflict is soundstage/spaciousness vs imaging. Wide = spaciousness. Narrow = imaging. Wide directivity leads to strongly correlated early reflections that confuse imaging. Narrow directivity improves imaging at the expense of spaciousness.