Great discussion. I wonder if anyone can focus on bass. With Magen pan 1.7 planar speakers I’ve lately focused on bass. Since adding two REL subs I’ve realized how much perception of image and air in a recording comes from the air pressure described in this thread. And since very low bass is omnidirectional, I think it’s more critical to my enjoyment of the system. Also even more critical is bass at lower listening levels. The loudness control. If you have powerful bass at low volumes it’s pretty compelling. I used to have to play everything much louder to get satisfying sound. Now it’s just tweaking the subs a bit. Er, well quite a bit since matching the subs isn’t easy.
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.
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.
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- 233 posts total
^^ see
ieLogical SubterraneanHomesickBlues for a little insight into integrating subs. Moving my head over 8-10 inches either side, lost the sweet spot. Standing up? Fugetaboutit! Sounded good as long as I sat completely still. Nah, Not for me.I doubt I've ever moved my head 8-10 inches either side at a live performance. Or stood up. Properly set up and integrated, HiFi can do an amazing job at recreating a performance bet it Joe Pass playing acoustic alone, The Who or The London Phil. The trade off, due to physics, is the sweet spot is somewhat constricted. In a live performance, if one has the ability to wander about, one will find there are gross variations in the sonic field, sometimes in as little as a foot. It's my experience that a wide sweet spot never elicits comments like "Joe Pass is sitting RIGHT THERE!" |
I used the Sumiko Masterset method with some small Thiels (CS1.6) and got a very wide sweet spot, even beyond the width of the speakers. It’s useless for the Naim NBLs I use at the moment as they’re designed for back against the wall placement, 5.5cm in my current room. I can still get a wide image but not as wide as with the Thiels, though it goes deeper into the wall. If my next room permits I’d like to give Omnis a go, Duevel Bella Lunas are available locally. |
@ieales -- I doubt I’ve ever moved my head 8-10 inches either side at a live performance. Or stood up. But I gather you’re not handed the same, specific seat that says "Reserved to Mr./Ms. [insert name]" as the one and only place to have a proper concert experience, in fact there’s a range seats centered to the stage that will be quite excellent sound-wise. Once seated, if that’s what you do, you could easily move your head about a foot shifting occasionally from one side in the chair to the other, and even so it’s hardly relevant with regard to any changes in sound. If you believe there is something tells me the you’re projecting the head-in-vise experience from your home set-up. Properly set up and integrated, HiFi can do an amazing job at recreating a performance bet it Joe Pass playing acoustic alone, The Who or The London Phil. The trade off, due to physics, is the sweet spot is somewhat constricted. No domestic set-up I’ve heard has come even fairly close to resembling a live acoustic concert, not to say some set-ups aren’t more successful in their approximation here than others, which is also to say: the effort isn’t futile. Let’s not fool ourselves though - the trade off is the recreation itself; you’re not there at the live event, you’re not going to fully experience it as such. A surplus in mage specificity, to a certain point, takes away from the holistic experience of music and in turn makes it more about something that’s supposed to impress sonically rather than musically, but that’s also about frequency response and the target curve at play. In a live performance, if one has the ability to wander about, one will find there are gross variations in the sonic field, sometimes in as little as a foot. Isn’t this the audiophile tendency to miss the forest for the trees? Just sit down and enjoy the damn music. A few changes in seating position shouldn’t make it a hit or miss; you still get to experience the totality of the event, something your home set-up can’t recreate - even perfectly positioned right smack in the middle. It’s my experience that a wide sweet spot never elicits comments like "Joe Pass is sitting RIGHT THERE!" Wide, narrow - to me it’s finding the proper balance somewhere in between here. |
- 233 posts total