@Kvalsvoll, Pätynen defende his PhD, a work during which professor Tapio Lokki was his instructor. Lokki followed up the PhD with an ISRA article a couple of years later:
http://www.caa-aca.ca/conferences/isra2013/proceedings/Papers/P040.pdf
It would be suprising if you from armchair’s distance were in a position to write off both the whole PhD idea and later work based on that idea.
@Floyd Toole commented previously on Lokki and did not at all write him off as a “hopeless” experimenter. When you use strong words, I expect strong arguments.
With regard to your mentioning of “omni”, this word (omni) is mentioned 37 times in the PhD thesis. So this is not a point lost on the author. In Lokki (2013), the author writes:
“
2 OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENTS OF CONCERT HALLS
As the subjective comparison of concert halls is difficult and often biased by matters of taste, re- searchers have tried to invent objective ways to measure some features of the acoustics. This work has lead to the definition of acoustic parameters described in the international standard ISO3382- 1:200927, illustrated in Figure 1. The standard requires that room impulse responses should be measured with an omnidirectional loudspeaker from a few source positions on the stage to 6-10 receiver positions in the audience area. The capturing microphone has omni or figure-of-eight directivity. The parameters are computed from the sound energy decays at different frequency bands.
The ISO3382-1:2009 standard has been criticized from many angles28,29. For example, the algo- rithms to compute the parameters are imprecise, the applied frequency range is inadequate, and a single omnidirectional source does not correspond to real orchestra, which, in reality has dozens of sources with varying directivity characteristics. Moreover, averaging results over several receiver positions hides information as the parameters vary at different distances quite a lot. However, it is generally accepted that some of the standard parameters correlate quite well with subjective perceptions, e.g. Strength (G) with loudness and early decay time (EDT) with reverberance. In contrast, other perceptually relevant factors, e.g., intimacy, have no corresponding objective pa- rameter and values for parameters that correlate with subjective preference judgements are very cumbersome to define.
In order to overcome the inherent simplifications in standard ISO parameters, we have recently taken a novel approach to measure concert hall acoustics, illustrated in Figure 2. The sound source is the same loudspeaker orchestra used to simulate symphony orchestra for subjective studies. The directivities of the loudspeakers differ from the directivities of real instruments, but we have tried to minimize the possible errors by choosing appropriate loudspeakers18. The spatial impulse responses for objective analysis from all source positions are captured with a microphone array, currently with six omnidirectional microphones. We have developed a spatial decompo- sition technique (SDM)24 to analyze the spatial distribution of sound energy from every source loudspeaker. Moreover, new time-frequency and spatiotemporal visualization techniques allow examination of sound energy levels in many dimensions: time, frequency, and space (azimuth and elevation). Our recent article30 proposes initial ideas to link the development of the spatial sound field over time to the plan and section drawings of the measured concert halls (Figure 2)”.
So your remark on a “hopeless experiment” seems rushed considering the fact that the researchers have thought both long and well about radiation.
Having said that, my main point was that figures 4.2 to 4.5 (see my post #35:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ments-and-do-you-care.7422/page-2#post-171823) from Pätynen’s PhD thesis document a gap between an instrument’s power response and the recorded power response through a speaker. The systematic bias in the speaker response (too little high frequency power?) is surprising, at least to me, and nobody has come up with an explanation for the gap.