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‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ speakers—too many models converging towards too similar a sound

Over the last year I’ve auditioned a good number of speaker makes and models.  Through this process, I developed a kind of shorthand for myself to describe a particular kind of sound profile that I kept encountering, one that I came to call modern/mainstream.

Here’s the kind of speaker I’m talking about: typically a floorstander, fairly tall, narrowish baffle, deeper than it’s wide, tweeter on top, midrange, two or three 7” woofers.  It’s a design you’re going to encounter again, and again, and again.  Dynaudio, Quad, Paradigm, Monitor Audio, Sonus Faber, and many, many others.  (Not picking on those five—just for illustrative purposes).  It’s also a design that tends to come from large companies, some of them conglomerates, and one which consequently finds its way into more stores and more people’s consciousness because of the larger distribution and publicity networks involved.

And the sound.  Highly competent across the board, tending to the more detailed rather than the more forgiving, treble range quite prominent, decent but not incredible bass extension, more than acceptable imaging and soundstaging, perhaps the vaguest hint of a mechanical or electronic veil.  And above all, kind of unexceptional and unexciting.  They can range all over in price, and they don’t really sound that dissimilar one from another.  They are converging towards that single ‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ sound profile that’s becoming a norm.  It’s a safe design, with an acoustic presentation that many people these days seem to prefer or at least accept (or have been conditioned to believe is ‘correct’).  Being fairly narrow, it integrates well into many domestic environments, and the styling usually ensures a decent measure of SAF.

While there are still many individualists out there in the audio world, and the speaker design world in particular, this is a general trend that I lament, because I see it expanding and being more entrenched.


128x128twoleftears
roberjerman
4,319 posts
 
Peter Snell's goal was to design a speaker with a flat power response into ANY room (So room-placement effects upon sound quality were eliminated). This remains a fundamental problem that practically all of today's speaker designers either ignore or are unaware of! With his Type A he succeeded brilliantly!
audiokinesis
2,737 posts
 

Kosst_amojan wrote: "I’ve never heard or read where anybody of authority suggested wide baffle speakers image as well or better than narrow to no baffle speakers. The unavoidably suffer from artifacts relating to edge diffusion and the more pronounced way in which the surface projects sound. It’s just the physics of the thing."

Roberjerman’s example of the Snell Type A is an excellent one. Imo Peter Snell’s approach made far more acoustic sense than any of these narrow-baffle tower speakers.

Here is why a wide baffle speaker can image as well or better than a narrow or "no baffle" speaker:

First, it’s not sound "projecting" off of a wide baffle that degrades imaging; it is the time delay between the direct sound and the arrival of the edge diffraction. Edge diffraction adds false early timing cues that can degrade the image. In general the longer the time delay (up to a point) before those false timing cues arrive, or in other words the wider the baffle, the worse the imaging degradation. BUT if we could significantly reduce edge diffraction, that would reduce these false timing cues to the point of being inconsequential, and imaging would correspondingly benefit. This can be done, but it requires either a very large-radius round-over (the technique Peter Snell used on the Type A), or aggressive absorption, or some other technique or combination of techniques.

None of these diffraction elimination techniques can be accomplished on a narrow baffle because the round-over or absorption or whatever has to be a sufficiently large fraction of a wavelength in order to be effective. Therefore if we are serious about eliminating diffraction, the cabinet width is going to be fairly substantial.

In practice the lowest diffraction enclosure would be precisely flush-mounted into the wall, which is the technique high-end recording studios use, resulting in a baffle the width of the room, along with superb imaging. There will still be a reflection when the sound reaches the sidewalls, but by then enough time has passed that the imaging will not be degraded significantly (I can go into more detail about the timing of reflections and/or diffraction if anyone is interested).

Duke


twoleftears's avatar
twoleftears OP
5,318 posts
 

Thanks, guys, interesting discussion.

What I didn't put in the original post is that through this same experience I was also very impressed by three different speakers all of which could be considered to have wide baffles (certainly by modern standards).  Perhaps they weren't the ultimate imaging champs, but they were all more than sufficient in this regard, and other aspects of their acoustic profile were very compelling.

teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
None of these diffraction elimination techniques can be accomplished on a narrow baffle because the round-over or absorption or whatever has to be a sufficiently large fraction of a wavelength in order to be effective. Therefore if we are serious about eliminating diffraction, the cabinet width is going to be fairly substantial.

And....digital room and digital speaker correction does not fix this.

Does not fix this.

Does not fix this.

It merely makes a smeary fuzzy mess that seems right or better.

For a while.

Then you finally hear it..... and toss the thing down the road to the next person who thinks it will be their savior.

IMO and IME, digital crossovers, room correction and speaker correction, are only charming to those who somehow can’t hear these pervasive and all encompassing distortions that are added into the mix. 

There is a reason that the biggest names in loudspeaker design don’t do digital. I’m not comfortable saying these things but they are indeed true. Citing examples won’t work, as those are exceptions, not the rule, and I’m not sure about the aural capacities and directions of their proponents. First time I heard a digital speaker, I walked way unimpressed. The last time I head a digital speaker, I walked away unimpressed. Ground level faults that brick wall the designs. Ground level faults being inescapable - as they are as - the inclusion of digital.

All things being equal, which they never are..all things being equal...the analog crossover (active or passive) will exceed the sonic quality aspects of a digital crossover.
audiokinesis
2,737 posts
 

Teo wrote:

"And....digital room and digital speaker correction does not fix this.
"Does not fix this.
"Does not fix this."

Agreed!!

Nor can DEQ fix radiation pattern anomalies.  How many audio shows have you done where you spend three expensive days with the speakers fighting the room, and that battle overshadows pretty much everything else you had hoped to showcase? 

Imo acoustic problems can only be fixed in the acoustic domain, because otherwise they will inevitably be super-imposed atop any signal, whether that signal is EQ’d or not.

I think mainstream speaker design today is largely driven by marketing research, wherein the question "what do the people want in a speaker?" leads to acoustically-compromised narrow-footprint towers. Imo this is in part because "the people" usually don’t know any better, but SOME people (those blessed with two left ears come to mind) learn as they listen and put two-and-two together.

That’s actually okay with me - I’d much rather all those big companies with their big R&D departments and big budgets keep trying to make a flawed idea work well, and leave wide-body speakers to us little guys and the people out there who listen with their ears instead of their eyes.

Duke

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