Good call, topjetboy! Thanks for posting that; I can see that you’re pretty hard-core. I agree with Matt’s analysis.
(Incidentally the time/intensity trading image that Matt is talking about when your link opens up at 17:02 has a mistake: The FAR speaker should be a little bit LOUDER because the rabbit is on-axis of that speaker but well off-axis of the near speaker. This is of course only true for frequencies where the speakers have the desired directional characteristics, but we get our imaging cues mostly from that range anyway so in practice with the right kind of speakers it works despite imperfections.)
I learned the cross-firing technique from Earl Geddes many years ago, and there’s a pretty good chance that Earl is Matt’s source as well.
Where I depart from Earl and Matt is this: I like to add a bit of relatively late-onset reverberant energy to supplement my highly-directional monopolar main arrays. In my experience the spectrally-correct backwave energy of dipoles can be highly beneficial. With correct set-up, imo that backwave energy does a very good job of presenting the spatial cues on the recording. You mentioned that your Maggies are out five feet - isn’t the spatial improvement you hear in going from two feet to five feet FAR GREATER than can be explained by a few more milliseconds delay? It’s not that your playback room seems marginally bigger; it’s that the spatial signature of the recording venue (whether real or engineered) is dominating over your playback room’s signature, given a good recording. Well, that’s what I’m trying to bring to the table, but in a somewhat more placement-friendly and amplifier-friendly package than Maggies and SoundLabs.
Duke
(Incidentally the time/intensity trading image that Matt is talking about when your link opens up at 17:02 has a mistake: The FAR speaker should be a little bit LOUDER because the rabbit is on-axis of that speaker but well off-axis of the near speaker. This is of course only true for frequencies where the speakers have the desired directional characteristics, but we get our imaging cues mostly from that range anyway so in practice with the right kind of speakers it works despite imperfections.)
I learned the cross-firing technique from Earl Geddes many years ago, and there’s a pretty good chance that Earl is Matt’s source as well.
Where I depart from Earl and Matt is this: I like to add a bit of relatively late-onset reverberant energy to supplement my highly-directional monopolar main arrays. In my experience the spectrally-correct backwave energy of dipoles can be highly beneficial. With correct set-up, imo that backwave energy does a very good job of presenting the spatial cues on the recording. You mentioned that your Maggies are out five feet - isn’t the spatial improvement you hear in going from two feet to five feet FAR GREATER than can be explained by a few more milliseconds delay? It’s not that your playback room seems marginally bigger; it’s that the spatial signature of the recording venue (whether real or engineered) is dominating over your playback room’s signature, given a good recording. Well, that’s what I’m trying to bring to the table, but in a somewhat more placement-friendly and amplifier-friendly package than Maggies and SoundLabs.
Duke
