If you don't have a wide sweet spot, are you really an audiophile?
Hi, it’s me, professional audio troll. I’ve been thinking about something as my new home listening room comes together:
The glory of having a wide sweet spot.
We focus far too much on the dentist chair type of listener experience. A sound which is truly superb only in one location. Then we try to optimize everything exactly in that virtual shoebox we keep our heads in. How many of us look for and optimize our listening experience to have a wide sweet spot instead?
I am reminded of listening to the Magico S1 Mk II speakers. While not flawless one thing they do exceptionally well is, in a good room, provide a very good, stable stereo image across almost any reasonable listening location. Revel’s also do this. There’s no sudden feeling of the image clicking when you are exactly equidistant from the two speakers. The image is good and very stable. Even directly in front of one speaker you can still get a sense of what is in the center and opposite sides. You don’t really notice a loss of focus when off axis like you can in so many setups.
Compare and contrast this with the opposite extreme, Sanders' ESL’s, which are OK off axis but when you are sitting in the right spot you suddenly feel like you are wearing headphones. The situation is very binary. You are either in the sweet spot or you are not.
From now on I’m declaring that I’m going all-in on wide-sweet spot listening. Being able to relax on one side of the couch or another, or meander around the house while enjoying great sounding music is a luxury we should all attempt to recreate.
Great topic. I would never consider very directional speakers. I am fortunate to own KEFs which although sound best in a nice large area, they sound very good anywhere in direct listening range except in back or equal to them in the middle, which is understandable.
My last speakers, Alons, even sounded ok in that position I suspect because the tweeter and midrange were outside and on top of the cabinet.
Since most people are not always stationary In Dedicated listening rooms, I am surprised this feature/topic does not get more emphasis and more speakers are not designed with this in mind.
This is totally not true. Timing is true in the live music world, but for playback, most of our imaging with the exception of specific dual microphone setups rarely used, imaging is primarily volume, and phase does not play into it, not even one little bit as long as the phase response is consistent on each channel.
TIME is arrival time. Ignoring Xover phase, a flat baffle box with a 8" woofer and dome tweeter has a driver arrival delta of about 500µS or about 2kHz. In a 2 way system, the kick beater will arrive ahead of the fundamental. In a multi woofer system, the direct arrival is at multiple times, PLUS first reflections varying in both time and intensity. Imaging suffers.
PHASE is the synchronicity between fundamental and harmonics. If harmonics arrive asynchronously to fundamental, imaging suffers.
A system with TIME wrong cannot get PHASE coherent.
Most systems make no attempt to get TIME or PHASE coherent.
Imaging is NOT level (volume). Imaging is when the speakers disappear and one can walk into the stage! Most systems fail miserably. Ditto rooms.
on this one, I am afraid I am siding with @mahgister. Time and polarity coherence at a minimum, ideally also phase coherence is of the essence and the reason why point source, single driver speakers have a following. At least with regard to parity, audio engineers are at a minimum careless and the audio industry at least indifferent, to wit: a significant part of all recordings are out of polarity as a simple polarity switch in the digital domain will easily establish. To claim indifference or worse better knowledge isn’t really helpful.
TIME is arrival time. Ignoring Xover phase, a flat baffle box with a 8" woofer and dome tweeter has a driver arrival delta of about 500µS or about 2kHz. In a 2 way system, the kick beater will arrive ahead of the fundamental. In a multi woofer system, the direct arrival is at multiple times, PLUS first reflections varying in both time and intensity. Imaging suffers.
PHASE is the synchronicity between fundamental and harmonics. If harmonics arrive asynchronously to fundamental, imaging suffers.
A system with TIME wrong cannot get PHASE coherent.
Most systems make no attempt to get TIME or PHASE coherent.
Imaging is NOT level (volume). Imaging is when the speakers disappear and one can walk into the stage! Most systems fail miserably. Ditto rooms.
Very clear and very right....Thank you for the post....
Timbre recording technique induce a trade-off that exclude perfect reproduction, and ask for some acoustic room conditions also for his recreation....It was more difficult in my experience to create acoustic condition for naturalness of timbre envelope perception in my room than some imaging...But if someone enjoy very natural timbre perception in his room i am sure that his imaging will be very good....i am not a scientist, i speak only by my experience and wait to be corrected if this is the case....
Imaging is NOT level (volume). Imaging is when the speakers disappear and one can walk into the stage! Most systems fail miserably. Ditto rooms.
I am happy to say that i enjoy this phenomena in my room...
But i must add that if some systems fails miserably, it is probably most of the time, with relatively good design audio system and speakers, it is i said probably most of the times because the acoustical settings of the room is not adequate and in synergy with the acoustical properties of the speakers....It was my case ....
The only arrival time that matters is differential arrival time, i.e. the time difference between the time a sound reaches each ear.
Arrival time is how we localize sound in the world.
Phase coherence is how we tell if it's live or Memorex.
Unfortunately, many tests are performed on the unwashed. Just as some can't tell if a piano is in tune, some can tell you how much it's out, how much it's stretched and the reference A.
If time delay is inaudible, why would manufacturers bother? Spica, Vandersteen, Wilson. Marketing hype? Methinks not.
Today, it's trivial to use DSP to remove displacement delay in multi-amplifier systems. One can model up the analog crossover, make direct driver connections and calculate the driver offset. Next create two presets with and without offset compensation. Switch between them. Let us know.
IF you want “stero” everywhere I will sell you my old pair of Bose 901’s very cheap. That is the only thing they do well is sound the same anywhere you are in a room.
the problem w time and phase and the very related pistonic motion is that it is difficult engineering and requires precise execution, few can do it, take the time to do it.
the ear brain can localize to stay alive, a few years of television, bad audio and know it all’s on the web can’t erase x years of evolution.
for those interested in what just a few well placed microphones can do, listen to the classic RCA Red Seal work done w Fritz and Chicago.....
also, let’s be very clear, your credentials relative to Vandersteen are zip. Since 1977 building time and phase correct speakers that are well reviewed AND widely accepted in the global market. Quarter million model 2 sold and an improved variant still in production, supported by a dealer network, factory parts and service.
I built stuff for professional recording studios as well. Not one offs either, but production equipment. I have done this in the commercial world, and in the academic world, under proper controlled conditions and with the equipment to know exactly what was happening.
I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe the research into head related transfer functions (HRTF) can teach us is that we localize sounds based on the complicated comb filtering caused by the shape of our heads, body, ear and even our hair styles.
It's not phase, it's amplitude that seems to matter here.
Speakers play a role, their internal design for sure....Their relative electrical audio synchronisation also...
But take relatively good speakers and the imaging will magically appear with the right acoustical settings, location in the room et their relative positions...Decreasing electrical noise and mechanical noise will help also but will be secondary to acoustic settings...
We NEVER hear the sound directly from the speakers ONLY and MAINLY we listen to the speakers/room....EVEN in near listening....In ANY small room....
It was my experience with imaging in my room which is now very good in my 2 listening locations....Not so at all before acoustical controls...My speakers are averagely good, it was not their superlative precise design that was creating imaging here.... But the room/speakers link and interactions did ALL my work....
For sure i am NOT at all competent nor an engineer....An attentive listener.....
I haven't built anything so I'm not really sure if this is addressing the same issue of phase as applied to the discussion but Floyd Toole in his
summary of research at the NRC into loudspeaker performance that is described in two classic 1986 papers [32, 33], concluded thusly: "The advocates of accurate waveform reproduction, implying both accurate amplitude and phase responses, are in a particularly awkward situation. In spite of the considerable engineering appeal of this concept, practical tests have yielded little evidence of listener sensitivity to this factor...the limited results lend support for the popular view that the effects of phase are clearly subordinate to amplitude response."
I do know what ’timbre’ means in music, but I confess I have absolutely no clue what that word means in the context it’s being used here.
Serious question: could someone explain it in such a way that a normal listener can understand what it means here?
Thanks.
Try wiki read it 2 times.... You will at least understand the complexity of the acoustical mathematical modeling of the problem and understand why without acoustic right settings in a room timbre sound perception is degraded...
I'm with Toole and the papers cited here. I've heard Vandersteen and Thiel and I could not really tell you they were better in any respect which was outstanding compared to other speakers which did not pay attention to perfect phase response.
imaging champions is I believe the quote, you are welcome to build something better and bring the over to Poverty Bay Sound mastering, we use Vandersteens, the amps and 7 mk2. bring the torso along, i assume it likes a nice Pinot. We serve SeaSmoke Ten. of course i have a head transfer function setup, like the Acony recordings, it yields fantastic and frustrating results....
like i said, get off the web and do something.....i will eat crow when you best Vandersteens, but ya best show up with real hardware..not BS
and you obviously have never figured out where those “ quiet “ tympani are......you spend wayyyyyyy to much time in multi track land.....like i said, flavors you or the producer like....it ain’t moving the ball forward....cat chasing its own tail....
To illustrate my point from my last posts here about "imaging" and the link between imaging and room acoustic....I copy some text from a book of Toole and some paper research from japan scientists who wrote something very interesting in 2008 about The law of the first wave front and the early and late reflections in room and the way a listener live the experience of localization of a source or the experience of being surround by sound...
You will remark that it is not question here of the speakers drivers type and characteristic but ONLY of acoustical elementary law...The reason is simple imaging is fundamentally an acoustic phenomenon not a speakers driver phenomenon, even if drivers types can play a part for sure...And it is not the recording technique and concepts that make us able to recreate imaging, it is basic acoustical law. Period. It is the acoustician field not the recording engineer field first....
That was my point from the start....Time and timing between ears and the speakers/room acoustic relation are fundamental in the experience of imaging...
Give me any speakers i will make it imaging well modulo the right acoustic controls of the room... I will use passive materials treatment but also ACTIVE Helmholtz pressurized tubes and pipes, different resonators and others devices i will not name to start a new debate.... All that will also modify the relation of the frequencies waves intensities or amplitudes in the room...
I am not a scientist at all.... But i know what i did in my room for gaining imaging at my 2 listening positions.......And natural timbre perception....The second experience is way more difficult to recreate and encompass than the first one...
Forget branded name speakers company concentrate on live acoustic law if you want to understand imaging.....
And there is no reflexion about BITS recording technique here in these text nor DRIVERS speakers debate names naming in these texts...... 😁
And to conclude i will repeat here that the TIMBRE experience is more difficult to recreate in a small room than only some imaging.....Timbre experience is the benchmark test to know if an audio system is good or not.... Not imaging....Not bass perception... Tonal instrumental or voice TIMBRE perception.....
In audio in the past, the terms Haas effect and law of the first wavefront were used to identify this effect, but current scientifi c work has settled on the other original term, precedence effect. Whatever it is called, it describes the well-known phenomenon wherein the fi rst arrived sound, normally the direct sound from a source, dominates our impression of where sound is coming from. Within a time interval often called the “fusion zone,” we are not aware of reflected sounds that arrive from other directions as separate spatial events. All of the sound appears to come from the direction of the first arrival. Sounds that arrive later than the fusion interval may be perceived as spatially separated auditory images, coexisting with the direct sound, but the direct sound is still perceptually dominant. At very long delays, the secondary images are perceived as echoes, separated in time as well as direction. The literature is not consistent in language, with the word echo often being used to describe a delayed sound that is not perceived as being separate in either direction or time.Haas was not the first person to observe the primacy of the first arrivedsound so far as localization in rooms is concerned.
Sound Reproduction The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms Floyd Toole Chap.6 P.73
In 1989, Morimoto and Maekawa demonstrated that spatial impression comprises at least two components and that a listener can discriminate between them [1]. One is auditory source width (ASW) which is defined as the width of a sound image fused temporally and spatially with direct sound image, and the other is listener envelopment (LEV) which is defined as the degree of fullness of sound images around the listener, excluding a sound image composing ASW.
In the field of room acoustics, it is popular belief that the early and late reflections contribute to auditory source width (ASW) and listener envelopment (LEV), respectively. However, some papers have demonstrated results not necessarily in agreement with the belief. In this paper, a hypothesis is proposed to clarify the essentials of ASW and LEV from point of view of the auditory phenomenon. The hypothesis is that the components of reflections under and beyond the upper limit of validity for the law of the first wavefront contribute to ASW and LEV, respectively. Two experiments were performed to evaluate the hypothesis. In the first experiment, the results showed directly that the components of reflections under the upper limit of validity for the law contribute to ASW. In the second experiment, four kinds of threshold were measured to evaluate the relation between the effect and LEV: image-splitting which corresponds to the upper limit of validity for the law, LEV, reverberation perception, and reverberation disturbance. The results showed that the threshold of image-splitting coincides with the that of LEV. This suggests that the components of reflections beyond the upper limit of validity for the law contribute to LEV. In conclusion, it seems that the results of experiments shown in this paper favor the hypothesis.
Mahgister: with all due respect, I didn’t ask you to explain the normal meaning of timbre, with which I am familiar.
I asked you to explain in simple terms how you were using this common musical term in this context. I actually think you may be on to something, but I still have no idea what that is.
(The reason I ask is that I have spent most of my life reading and writing articles on specialized topics of no interest to anyone here and of no real import generally; but I did learn during those decades, that the only arguments, however banal or abstruse, that have any validity are those that can be explained or summarized in ordinary language. I do not consider it a moral failing not to be an electrical engineer or not to be an expert in any other field.)
Mahgister: with all due respect, I didn’t ask you to explain the normal meaning of timbre, with which I am familiar.
I asked you to explain in simple terms how you were using this common musical term in this context. I actually think you may be on to something, but I still have no idea what that is.
I apologize for my first answer to you first...Here there are many useless arguing and personal attack then sometimes i react too speedily or too rudely.... I am sorry....
Second- i am not a "scientist" especially not an acoustician...
Third- i only wanted to use my audio system at his best....Some years ago and with no big money in my pocket then upgrading cannot do for me what it did for many in the chasing tail race...
Four-I discovered in an incremental sets of listening experiments 2 years ago that "tuning" a system could be way more important than the system itself or his price...I called that improving by controls the 3 working embeddings dimensions of any system... I created this concept to clarify a situation obscured by electronic market engineering and by "tweaks" as secondary addition ONLY to a system and often equated to snake oil or placebos... It may be the case for many but not for all.... And my listening methods use anyway homemade devices at low cost, then i dont sell or recommend any product.... I recommend instead to pay attention to these 3 working dimensions...
Five- The benchmmark ears test for listening experiments is voice or instrumental naturalness of timbre.... Why? because it is by far the more complex factor to recreate.... Why?
There is 2 reasons, the first is that you can recreate imaging in a relatively good manner with playing with acoustical factors .... But you cannot recreate timbre with only playing with acoustical factors linked to acoustic noise floor and timing only in many cases...You must also play with tools to decrease the mechanical and electrical noise floor also of the room/house/ gear...
And the acoustical factors needed to be put in place for the recreation of the timbre experience are more complex than in the case of imaging.... And also this is the second reason, the conceptual mathematical modelling of the timbre constituting factors are way more acoustically complex than for example imaging comcept... In audio and in acoustic ....
Six- i discover the complexity of the experience of timbre and the necessary multudisciplinary approach ne cessary to define it through recent articles and books...In audio thread it seems people, except pro musician dont even understand the concept sometimes...
Seven- any acoustician will do a better job than me to define conceptually "timbre".... The musician frogman here send posts that illustrate to me that ANY musician must perceive timbre correctly and be conscious of the complexities linked to the conditions that make possible this perception...This is for sure... Why then audiophile ignore it and others players?
My take for a partial answer to this question is this :
I used the timbre experience concept here when i realized that many people erroneously underestimated the role that acoustic settings and controls plays in audiophile experience, hypnotised by other useless debate like tube/S.S., vinyl/ digital , branded name high quality product/versus mid fi quality product, etc all debates motivated by engineeriong design market not by acoustic nor science anyway....
Then people talks about anything except the fundamental question:
Is my audio system able to give a natural timbre experience in my specific room with these specific pieces of gear? If not, why?
My answers to this was given with my listening experiments in my own room with my gear and are about the controls of the 3 working embedding dimensions related to any audio system potential optimal working anyway...
My solutions are NOT always practical for everyone nor esthetically attractive.... But my goal was not selling products, my goal was achieving Hi FI experience at very low cost for me first, and after that suggesting here some idea and concepts which may be useful or not in some case...
The most important asset for my audiophile experience was not the quality of my gear, which is only average and good tough, it was the fact that i was able to enjoy the luxury of owning a room that could be only dedicated to my audio experiments...
I realized that i have not answer really your question... What is timbre? Timbre is the factor that make each of us able to distinguish with the same musical tone the playing of any different instruments very precisely.... If you listen a brass orchestra if your audio system is not good all hues and colors linked to the microdynamics of the playing gesture of the musician will be lost.... Lost also the distinctive tonal voice of each instrument related to his physical and materials properties constitution and his own vibrating microdynamics...
This is why tonal timbre perception is key to audiophile experience...
I will not enter to the details of the mathematical modelling of timbre in acoustic science but they are very complex....I beging only to read about that weeks ago because of heated debate here where i realized some people undersetimated totally the timbre experience in music. audio and acoustic in general... These 3 fields are different fields completely by the way and each has his own perspective about the timbre concept...
At some point Mahgister will learn or realize what he calls "timbre" is really just frequency response, though he will scream otherwise.
First- at some point audio2design will understand that the timbre concept being a complex one cannot be understood FROM only one field but by many at the same times... And most importantly cannot be reduced by recording engineer to frequency response ONLY at all...even if he scream otherwise... 😁😊
Second- the reason why this is so is that when we speak of timbre in audio system playback experience we speak of timbre not from the musician perspective only, not from the recording engineer perspective only, but from an acoustical more general viewpoint including for sure the neurophysiology of hearing but also the particular listening history of the tested and testing subject, here an audiophile listening to his system in his own specific room and perspective.... The ears listening history of the subject play a part, the playback installation gear specific system play a part and the specificity of the room acoustic another part.... Reducing all that to frequency response is an engineer joke....Or a bad reply to a complex subject....
Third- reducing TIMBRE to frequency response only is so limited and beside the point, and reflecting a purely technological narrow view that someone saying this just prove he has no idea what the timbre perception or production is... Why? Because the complex phenomenon associated with timbre perception or production cannot be reduced to linear or non linear frequencies responses .... A problem spanning human perception, acoustic physic and neurophysiology and art and psychology or linguistic cannot be ONLY "really just frequency response"....
Four- Not only then did you seems to know nothing about timbre but you dont even seems know that you dont understand the stating of the problem itself at all...
Five- i will give you a clue:
Read this text from a textbook on timbre about the limitations of the Helmholtz definition of timbre, and if you are able to understand this few sentences you will understand WHY timbre cannot be reduced to only frequency responses:
Regarding timbre, Helmholtz stated: “The quality of the musical portion of a compound tone depends solely on the number and relative strength of its partial simple tones, and in no respect on their difference of phase” (Helmholtz 1877, p. 126). This exclusively spectral perspective of timbre, locating the parameter in the relative amplitude of partial tones and nothing else, has dominated the feld for a long time. But it is interesting to note how narrowly defned his object of study was, the “musical portion” of a tone: “… a musical tone strikes the ear as a perfectly undisturbed, uniform sound which remains unaltered as long as it exists, and it K. Siedenburg et al.7 presents no alternation of various kinds of constituents” (Helmholtz 1877, p. 7–8). By assuming completely stationary sounds, his notion of tone color was indeed a strong simplifcation of what is understood as timbre today. Most obviously, attack and decay transients are not considered by this approach. Helmholtz was quite aware of this fact: “When we speak in what follows of a musical quality of tone, we shall disregard these peculiarities of beginning and ending, and confine our attention to the peculiarities of the musical tone which continues uniformly” (Helmholtz 1877, p. 67). This means that Helmholtz’s approach to timbre had its limitations (cf., Kursell 2013). 1.2.2 Timbre Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition by Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, Stephen McAdams, Arthur N. Popper, Richard R. Fay Page 7
Helmholtz was conscious in his definition of timbre that he must put aside some characteristics very fundamental but secondary for his purely mathematical approach with Fourier series... But in the modern more complete definition of timbre what was putting aside is at the core center of the timbre interdisciplinary studies....
Now for your understanding read this definition of timbre in wikipedia, a very elementary and simplified one and try to distinguish clearly WHY timbre cannot be reduce to frequency response ONLY...
Range between tonal and noiselike character Spectral envelope Time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release") Changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation) Prefix, or onset of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration
A clue: the mechanism to produce and perceive "timbre" is not reducible to pure linear mechanic only,nor to the body/gesture of the singer or to the microdynamic gesture of the musician, neither to simply acoustic perception and acoustic variable and changing conditions but also implied changes in the brain subject and his precise listening specific history ... When a singer produce a tone there is way more factors at play than frequencies response only....It is the same thing for an audiophile recreating for himself in a specific room with specific gear the timbre experience and perception for himself....It is the same thing for speech sound recognition....Impossible to reduce this complex problerm to frequency response.....
«For an idiot using all the times a hammer all is nails, and sometimes even for a wise man, if the hammer is near his hands, all he see is nails»-Anonymus Smith
It's definitely been one of my objectives to have a system that sounds good all around the room, even though it's still best when directly between the speakers. Speakers with smooth off axis performance and some degree of directionality in the treble seem to do the trick when given an appropriate toe-in.
It is not always possible to reduce a very complex problem in simple term.... The tensor curvature problem in geometry cannot be simplified....especially not here...
The "timbre" comcept and perception is in the same order...
But some here are very able to explain it with 2 words...
I've never understood what Mahgister was talking about, especially concerning timbre. I assumed what we heard in relation to timbre was on the recording. I'm glad someone could decipher his tome like posts.
I'll give my layman version, timbre is how I can tell a trumpet from a clarinet playing the same notes. What acoustic embedding has to do with it I don't know I don't even know what acoustic embedding even is much less the other two though I have tried to figure out what he's talking about.
- We have no control during playback, except w.r.t. dynamic range of our system, i.e. potential volume and noise floor, the rest is inherent in the recording.
How do i control this attribute in my room?
Controls of mechanical and electrical and acoustical noise floor....With the many homemade devices you mocked and whichi used successfully at NO COST....
Time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
- With the exception of decay, which is room dependent, we have very limited control of this on playback
controls of decay with MY acoustical settings is KEY here.... In my room...
Changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation)
- Again frequency response
Yes frequency modified response potentials of my room by my Helmholtz tubes and pipes modifying the original response of my room....
Prefix, or onset of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration
- Again, either in the recording or affected by the room.
Precisely the acoustical controls in my room play a greater part here also than the source recording Why?
Because the best source in the world with the best system will NEVER give a good and natural perception of timbre in a BAD ROOM....
Have you forget the CRUX of this discussion possessed by the urgency to be right against all at all cost repeating this mantra of frequency response in the face of a complex problem ?
The recording source is one HALF of the story when we speak about timbre perception, the most important half is the acoustical control of the room which will permet or not a good or very good RECREATION of the information encoded in the source....Remember that this information encoded in the source is NEVER complete nor perfect by reason of trade-off locations and types of mic. in use by the recording engineer esthetical or practical choices....
Then playback experience can never be equal to lived experience... This is the reason why RECREATION of timbre perception being a complex acoustical and fundamental experience is the BENCHMARK test if we want to know if our system is good or not.....
If you're listening through headphones then you can toss out the room and it's all up to the equipment. I think you're over reaching with room treatments. I'm not saying some are important to smooth out the FR but I'll take DSP to finish the job.
I assumed what we heard in relation to timbre was on the recording
Try any recording in a bad system and try to distinguish clearly the different instruments playing and their timbre distinctive voicing...
Good luck....
After that try that on a good system, with a low noise floor in all his three working dimensions especially acoustical....
You will understand...
The information about timbre in any recording source is uncomplete by definition and by the choices of the recording engineer.... Trade-off inevitable choices...This is the bad news...
The good news is we can compensate this in our own room settings by making our gear able to sound at his best potential.... Imaging, soundstage but especially timbre is the test that our controls of the noise floors are right....It will never be the REPRODUCTION of the original event which is impossible but a good partial RECREATION...
You room never reproduce your source but recreate it....
If you’re listening through headphones then you can toss out the room and it’s all up to the equipment.
What do you think the shell of a headphone is?
A ROOM.... Most of the times a bad room... a room with hard trade-off that you can modify and control better with damping for example.... i modified with success all my headphones because they were all unsatisfying...
I trash my 7 headphones in a drawer: 2 stax, 2 dynamic, 2 magneplanar, one hybrid.... Only the hybrid one has a good timbre recreation but other limitation....
My room now is SO good at 2 locations for listening thay listening to headphones is unbearable....
Some years ago it was the opposite, listening to the same speakers was unbearable at times because of his limitations... in fact the problem never were my gear but the 3 noise floors uncontrolled: mechanical electrical and acoustical....
I don’t know my old AKG 701s sound pretty good. I could tell drums from pianos so they get the timbre.You can also EQ headphones.
Djones me too i was thinking at first that my headphones was good...
It is only with many dofferent headphones comparisons, and my speakers increased S.Q. that i begin to love them less, and at some point never use them...
Eq is like my modifications, only partial solutions...
I never realized directly using them at first what i was missing, it comes whith my room and gear control improvement...
Iike a i said elsewhere NOBODY can directly experience the impact of the three noise floors of his system, which all together if uncontrolled affect greatly our S.Q' without even we know it at all....
Nobody ever listen directly to his electrical house noise floor and say: " i know where you are"....
It takes some form of controls to realize the level of the noise floor....
Nobody listen to his speakers say to them i know you vibrate and negatively impact he sound.... You put anything under them and you listen to a change. ,ore positive or more negative.... It is through these experiments that i learn about my specific noise floors presence...
I’m glad you have a really great room, mine is my living room so I do what I can but I don’t have any complaints.
The most important is learning to be happy....You have it.... then you are lucky.... All the rest is only hobby matter....
But it is true that owning a dedicated room tough is one of the more important asset in audio experience.... Not the gear most of the times like always everybody think....It is simply because acoustic controls is so powerful.... Using all his facets is more easy in a dedicated room....
My best to you and i apologize for my sometimes rude answers.... Here we lost sometimes controls of ourself.... I am too passionnate.... You are more wise than i am....
I’ve never understood what Mahgister was talking about, especially concerning timbre.
I’ll give my layman version, timbre is how I can tell a trumpet from a clarinet playing the same notes.
Right. We don’t even need a fancy audiophile definition for timbre the regular dictionary one is plenty good enough:
the character or quality of a musical sound or voice as distinct from its pitch and intensity.
The character or quality we are talking about is what distinguishes a violin from a viola, alto sax from tenor, flute from piccolo. Even when both are playing the same note at the same volume. Because that note is never a pure tone, it is always a complex combination of harmonic overtones. The particular way the relative values of all those harmonics combine is timbre.
What acoustic embedding has to do with it I don’t know I don’t even know what acoustic embedding even is much less the other two though I have tried to figure out what he’s talking about.
Okay well the way I read mahgister is embedding is just another way of saying tune or control. Helmholtz resonators for example are one sort of acoustic control. Air pressure goes through an opening, in a bottle or straw, into a space, and back out again. In the process of going through the restriction it gives up energy. So a Helmholtz resonator is like a shock absorber. In reality it is just another sort of tube trap. It is also fundamentally the same or related to porting in a speaker cabinet. All the same sort of thing.
Your room, any room, has it’s own particular set of resonant frequencies. Why do you think it is so many people have the same bass problems in the same areas? Because the rooms are so similar in dimension. The helmholtz resonator can be tuned by its size and shape to damp these room resonance modes.
Okay so now take a look at what we have so far: timbre is the exact combination of harmonics that tell us which instrument is which. Room resonances affect different frequencies differently. Therefore, controlling them will help reproduce timbre accurately, making each instrument sound more like it should.
Replace "controlling" with "embedding" and you got it. Same for the other two embeddings, vibration and fields. Got it?
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