If you don't have a wide sweet spot, are you really an audiophile?

A real audiophile never has a wide sweet spot! :-) IME it's not so hard to get a wide(r) sweet spot by simply crossing the axis of your speakers well ahead of the sitting position(s). But what you might lose in doing so is the optimum depth of image you get in the small sweet spot.  For years my focus in set up was on 'depth of image',  to the point of distraction from enjoying the recording/music. I finally gave up on this obsession - moved my chair about 8 inches to the right. Optimum depth of issue was no longer and issue (for me) and now I just enjoy the recording. I also turned in my 'audiophile credentials. FWIW.

Anyway most speakers at any price are so bad without a controlled room that most dont even know what they miss from their own speakers...They called audiophile experience something which is costly.... 😁

Acoustic is so powerful and virtually absent of audio threads compared to electronic.... Save for bass traps or some passive material treatments at best .... And described falsely as non necessary in near listening...Total ignorance of acoustic here... The sound waves cross my 13 feet room near 80 times for 1 second...The air’s room is like a rigid tense set of strings for the ears....I can change and i had changed the S.Q. of my room with the few inches shortening of an ordinary straw... This is how subtle and powerful room acoustic is....

It is amazing....I learned that by experiments....Nothing prepare me for this, reading audio reviews for years...I dont read them at all now...Upgrading being a ridiculous obsession of the past for me...

Then wide spot or not, it is more relaxing listening a real musical natural instrumental timbre....Imaging without good timbre is like making love at best with condom or at worst clothed....


I think i just stir the pot a bit here..... Truth is a hard stick for stirring any pot anyway and better than half truth....

Then never mind the characteristic of the speakers, you must think with the room synergy with them... The speakers give almost NO sound from itself alone, almost all is coming from the walls and pressured interacting zones of the room and this is true for all types of speakers diffusion.... Even in near listening...Helmholtz science...

I never read that in audio thread why?

Consumer market electronic design conditioning.....

It is not acoustician that wrote about audio it is electronic engineers mostly... Alas! If it has been otherwise i would not have lost money and years in upgrading electronics or dreaming to do it... 😂😁😊

I will never upgrade my 500 bucks system thanks to Helmholtz....Why? The piano fill my room with his natural timbre....And no it does not come from my specific very good branded name speakers, dac or amplifier choices mostly .... It comes from my controls over workings embeddings dimensions, acoustic first and last....

I've always liked great soundstaging and a wide sweet spot in terms of tonality, so virtually all my speakers have had that feature (including of course the MBLs I owned until recently - and the Waveform Mach MC monitors I just sold were insanely good for not seeming to have a sweet spot tonally, and for imaging).


My current Thiel 2.7s with their concentric drivers and my Joseph Perspectives (steep crossover) both sound very even out of the sweet spot.


When the tone of a speaker changes obviously when I shift at all it bugs me somewhat.  It reminds me of LCD tvs and rear projection tvs, especially earlier ones, where the image shifted in contrast and color if you moved out from a central viewing point.  Hated that.  (Which is why I went plasma in the early flat screen days).


Still, I think I'm actually less dogmatic about demanding a wide sweet spot at this point.  Mainly because no matter how wide and even the dispersion, there's still only a narrow spot...really only one....where everything locks in and that's the one I'm going to sit in anyway.


I do have friends and guests who like to listen to the system when they come over, but I give them the sweet spot.

When I was using Electrostatics I had a very narrow sweet spot so when I had a buddy over ,he would get the sweet spot and I would be seated behind him.This was not an ideal situation for several reasons and I was determined to correct it. The first step was to move away from the Electrostatic speakers. It has taken me quite a bit of time and more than a few dollars to accomplish my goal of having a sweet spot where me and my buddy could sit side by side and get a balanced stereo image but it was more than worth it. Maybe in the strictest definition my setup is more a balanced stereo presentation than what some may call the sweet spot but it works for me and my guests.

There is another, somewhat unorthodox technique for getting a wide sweet spot, which works well with controlled-pattern speakers.

By way of background: The ear localizes sound by two mechanisms: Arrival time, and intensity. If the arrival times from both speakers are identical, the image will be shifted towards whichever speaker is loudest. And if the intensities are identical, the image will be shifted towards whichever speaker’s output arrives first. With conventional speakers, as you move off to either side of the centerline, the near speakers "wins" BOTH arrival time and intensity, thus the image shifts towards the near speaker, often dramatically so.

What I’m going to suggest is sometimes called "time-intensity trading", as the off-centerline listening locations which have a later arrival from one speaker compensate by having greater intensity (loudness) from that speaker.

Briefly, start with speakers which have a very uniform radiation pattern of perhaps 90 degrees wide (-6 dB at 45 degrees off-axis to either side) over most of the spectrum. Then toe them in severely, such that their axes actually criss-cross in front of the centeral "sweet spot".

For an off-centerline listener, the NEAR speaker naturally "wins" arrival time, BUT because of the aggressive toe-in and relatively narrow radiation pattern width, the FAR speaker "wins" INTENSITY!

For example, the first photo at this link is taken from a listening position which is well off to one side. As you can see, at this location you are on-axis of the far speaker but well off-axis of the near speaker. So the far speaker is actually LOUDER at the frequencies which matter most for image localization!

https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2019/06/17/new-gear-from-audiokinesis-and-resonessence-labs-t-h-e-sho...

With this configuration (and speaker type), these two localization mechanisms - arrival time and intensity - approximately offset one another, and you get an enjoyable spread of the instruments even well off the centerline like where that first photo was taken from. It’s not perfect of course, but it’s arguably about as good as far off-centerline listening is likely to get without advanced signal processing (like the Beolab 90).

The KEY to this technique working well is, the output of the near speaker must fall off SMOOTHLY and RAPIDLY as we move off-axis. In other words, this technique will not work well with most loudspeakers.

Of course the imaging will be best up and down the centerline, but elsewhere in the room the soundstage will hold up considerably better than normal. Spacing the speakers a bit wider apart than normal helps maintain soundstage width. A welcome side-effect of the speakers’ well-behaved radiation pattern is that the tonal balance holds up unusually well throughout the listening area, though a good omni will probably do better in this respect.

Here is a link to an article on the subject, I don’t know who the author is:

http://www.libinst.com/PublicArticles/Setup%20of%20WG%20Speakers.pdf  

Duke