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
This is the ultimate reason for exploring Omnis such as Shahinian, Duevel and a few others. The ‘head in a vize’ approach is never going to be right. Like real music, good reproduction depends on the right mix of direct and indirect sound waves. This btw is also an argument against large baffles with speakers strewn all over them; a point source (Tannoy, Shindo, Duevel, Fostex) creates much better integration of direct and indirect sound as well as a larger sweet spot
Just to poke fun, I'll say you're merely a casual listener if your sweet spot is any wider than your head.  :-)

I hear ya, Erik.  Unfussy is a virtue.  But I totally don't mind sitting just where it's best to sit for the best sound experience I can cultivate.  
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....