It is indeed but continuing contradiction of well established knowledge from an uninformed position isn't helpful to anyoneIt is useful for others who are reading as this is a very important topic.
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It is indeed but continuing contradiction of well established knowledge from an uninformed position isn't helpful to anyoneIt is useful for others who are reading as this is a very important topic.
It is indeed but continuing contradiction of well established knowledge from an uninformed position isn't helpful to anyone
Point taken - the discussion of the subject at hand can continue in this thread without engaging the antagonist - even when he replies.My point is not about avoiding the topic, it's about the worth of engaging with the OP on his terms. That's just someone arguing black is white.
The question wasn't "what is the relevance and impact of polar response", it was a statement saying "polar response isn't relevant".
Nope, he said exactly that in the OPActually, he didn't say "...isn't relevant." He said "it's not the key." Two, different statements, in my opinion.
Anyways, the original post title is an interesting turn-of-phrase because it can be interpreted in a few different ways. That's actually one of the hallmarks of a good troll......to posit something that numerous readers will take in numerous different ways. "Audiojim" has a history of trolling various audio forums, so it's not unsurprising to see something like this here.
Taken literally, I don't disagree with the original statement. To me, "not the key" implies something that's not the #1 priority. In my opinion, polar response is not the #1 objective in successful speaker system design......but it's certainly not irrelevant.
Dave.
#1 The benefits I mentioned are actually independent of the triangle size.
#2 can actually be considered a drawback of toe in. The toe in makes the side wall reflection response less similar to the response on the listening axis due to the directionality of the larger drivers compared to the smaller drivers. I would expect this difference to be more audible the closer the driver is to the side wall due to the shorter time delay difference between the listening axis and side wall reflection. Btw I understand your logic in that less driver output is radiated at the wall and I used to think the same but it’s only true in the upper end of the drivers radiation and Olive and Tooles research convinced me this would be more coloured
Even this phenomenon is open to two interpretations, however.If you read the research of Toole et al the off axis response is crucial. This conclusion is entirely common sense in my view. What you hear is not just the direct sound from the speaker, it is a combination of direct and off-axis sound which then gets reflected from room boundaries. The overall radiated sound power is important.
Even this phenomenon is open to two interpretations, however.
1. To the person who believes the standard frequency domain audiophile model which says that the listener hears one 'stream' of speaker combined with room, and that phase and timing accuracy are pretty much obliterated by room reflections (mentioned earlier in this thread, and an oft-cited argument against some of my views about the time domain performance of speakers), this is slightly mysterious. To them, it should simply be possible to use a graphic equaliser to make the room/speaker combination flat. The off-axis versus on-axis discrepancy only results in a change in overall frequency response and so this should be correctable.
2. Off-axis versus on-axis frequency response difference only really makes sense as an uncorrectable problem to the small percentage of people who believe that we hear two 'streams': the speaker's direct sound and the room. i.e. that the listener reads the acoustics of the speaker and room by their time and frequency responses, not just frequency response. To them, it is crucial for the direct sound and the room sound to have been derived from the same frequency profile because if it isn't, the speaker's presence is being signalled by everything in the composite recording being passed through a single non-neutral dispersion characteristic, whereas in a live performance each source has its own dispersion characteristic that became part of the recording. We want this composite recording to be reproduced neutrally both off- and on-axis or we will hear colouration that cannot be corrected with any form of EQ or DSP.
Or another way of looking at it is that the room's time and frequency responses don't tally with the direct sound, and the listener picks up on this as colouration. Clearly this cannot be corrected by changing the direct sound because the room sound is derived from the direct sound. Most audiophiles don't believe in the 'time response' aspect at all, paying attention exclusively to the frequency response.
Summarising it more succinctly:
If humans don't separate room from speaker, how can it matter whether dispersion is non-uniform as long as the frequency response is flattened at the listening position?
But if humans do separate room from speaker then the dispersion issue makes sense. The question then is: what is the purpose of 'room correction', and how can it work?
Both cannot be true: it is not possible for non-uniform dispersion to be a problem *and* for room correction to make sense as a concept.
I think, like others that have similarly implied, that for the OP to make such specific statements about a clearly technical topic which takes a significant understanding of the area, and yet he apparently has performed no research or reading about it is very, very odd.
If you have no knowledge of the area why would you even start commenting on such a specific and technical area?
1. To the person who believes the standard frequency domain audiophile model which says that the listener hears one 'stream' of speaker combined with room, and that phase and timing accuracy are pretty much obliterated by room reflections
2. Off-axis versus on-axis frequency response difference only really makes sense as an uncorrectable problem to the small percentage of people who believe that we hear two 'streams': the speaker's direct sound and the room.
But most audiophiles don't believe in the 'time response' aspect at all, paying attention exclusively to the frequency response.
But if humans do separate room from speaker then the dispersion issue makes sense. The question then is: what is the purpose of 'room correction', and how can it work?
Both cannot be true: it is not possible for non-uniform dispersion to be a problem *and* for room correction to make sense as a concept.
I suspect @Audiojim reads a lot of "audiophile" magazines, and that qualifies as "research" to him.
Donning-Kruger, and in particular unconscious incompetence. If they are conditioned by audiophiles magazines and marketing, they might very well believe they know a lot about the subject, and might not realize that their entire evidence base is extremely distorted.
Yes this might seem like a paradox, but I believe that if you look at it quantitatively, not qualitatively, you might find that it's not a paradox after all. Room reflections involve delays of multiple milliseconds and more. These delays are typically much greater than phase shifts induced by other parts of the chain (speaker, electronics). So the answer to this conundrum is that the statement "time domain doesn't matter" is true only up to a point. (An observation that is self-evident when you think about it: no-one in their right mind would argue that a delay of 1 second is inaudible, for example.) Delays induced by electronics and speakers are below that threshold, while room reflections are above it. See also: precedence effect.
Another thing that is of crucial importance here is the fact that side reflections do not only induce delays, they also induce inter-aural differences because they reach one ear before the other. This also explains why our brains can distinguish between reflections and direct sound, and it doesn't have anything to do with time response per se. Assuming that hypothesis is true, then we would expect our brains to be very good at separating side reflections from the direct sound, and less good at separating floor/ceiling reflections from the direct sound. Guess what: this is exactly what studies show. Toole's book contains lots of details about these studies and their findings.
Room correction makes sense at low frequencies, where the brain cannot effectively separate direct sound from reflections, and the frequency response aberrations are huge. To my knowledge it has never been shown conclusively that room correction is effective above the modal region. So yes, they can both be true, they just don't hold over the same parts of the frequency spectrum.
"Audiojim" has a history of trolling various audio forums, so it's not unsurprising to see something like this here.
II wasn't aware of his trolling track record you mention, but it fits precisely with my view of what he has posted and why. Also supports my reaction to hit the ignore button.
I didn't say, dreite did, but it fits. It seemed exactly like a statement to provoke a reaction and was considered that way by multiple members.So just because March audio says I have a history of trolIng, you believe him without questioning the veracity of this claim? That's a good indication that your views on the topic being discussed here are probably not well founded.
I do, but I try to read reviews with measurements such as stereophile. I supect that you are not actually an audiophile but just care about measurements and research. You have to understand music just as much as the measurements if you want to really understand sound quality.I suspect @Audiojim reads a lot of "audiophile" magazines, and that qualifies as "research" to him.
Why not above?pply some low frequency positive shelving below ~ 250Hz to target the Harman trained listener target attached.
I do, but I try to read reviews with measurements such as stereophile. I supect that you are not actually an audiophile but just care about measurements and research. You have to understand music just as much as the measurements if you want to really understand sound quality.
The point is that the research of Toole does define the correlation between subjective opinion and measurement. It does this with amazing accuracy. They could predict from measurement in an anechoic chamber which speakers would be preferred when listened to under blind controlled conditions. It also demonstrated how utterly useless and inaccurate sighted comparison and assessment of speakers is.
Specifically that speakers with flat and smooth on axis response and smooth off axis response were preferred subjectively.