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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.
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
16,049 posts
 
No need to fret on endlessly about this one.


That is the entire point of a discussion forum. :-)

larryi
3,974 posts
 
It largely depends on how rigorously one defines the sweet spot.  The position where the center image is perfectly centered and everything else is ideal is almost always very small. 

The few occasions where I thought two people could sit side by side and still get a reasonably decent image involved gigantic systems.  One was in a dedicated listening room that was over 1,000 square feet and the speakers were enormous horn systems.  The other was a set up in a conference room with three of the large Wilson speakers (I believe Alexandria) form the front channels and two small Wilson speakers provided the back channels.  

In other very large rooms, omni-directional speakers, such as the MBL and German Physics speakers also delivered a wide acceptable listening area, but, even with these systems, there is a smaller, ideal sweet spot.
james633
1,019 posts
 
I have found Thiel, Revel and Kef to have wide sweet spots. B&W to be one of the worst offenders for box speakers and Wilsons (Sophia 3, original Sasha) to sit somewhere in the B&W and Revels.
Martin Logans has the smallest sweet spot of all.
The only down side of wide dispersion is room interactions are stronger and the room becomes more important.

interestingly while the sweet spot is very small on B&W 800 line I feel like they had the deepest sound stage I have ever heard and seem to disappear for me better than anything else. I could not live with some of the other issues though and moved on. 
erik_squires OP
16,049 posts
 
The only down side of wide dispersion is room interactions are stronger and the room becomes more important.

Yes, indeed, though the Ohm Walsh crowd seems to be OK with this.  Maybe because some were only omni's up to a point?
djones51
4,947 posts
 
The thing with wide directivity speakers is the off axis intensity of each front speaker interferes with the other throwing the timing off to get a good even sweet spot. A narrow directivity speaker will have less off axis intensity if you cross them in front of your listening area the timing from the speakers will be more even giving a larger sweet spot has to do with time intensity trading.
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