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
Headphones are like a room, we must adjust the response in frequencies of the driver and the frequencies responses of the shell room... Between the 2 there is a hiatus in this hiatus are where we can inplement  our possible controls and tuning between the 2 ...

The timbre perception in an headphone is the most important characteristic like in a room... We can improve it by modifying the damping of the shell or his geometry...Like in a room...And like in a room the recording sources does not contain all the information necessary for the ears to recreate the timbre or imaging perception, we must complementarily add what is missing for a perfect illusion, we must control the shell like we control our room for the best possible illusion... For sure we can listen to intra headphone and here we have more of a direct experience of the direct sound in a sense of what was the recorded information at the live event it seems but is it right?

No because the recording live original event was incomplete or better said imperfect because of the trade off related to the recording process, locations and types of mic.

It is for this reason that internal headphones are not better than speakers for recreating timbre perception....And probably less efficient to recreate the illusion of a live performance as if the musicians were playing right now in our face....We can improve the room shell of normal headphone, and the room with many controls but it is more difficult with very small internal headphone...

The best experience of music is for the time being always with speakers in a controlled room....


In other for me to get wider sweet spot I use four identical speakers two on right and two on left 
my preamp has XLR and RCA inputs both active at the same time 
two separate amplifiers that’s it sounds so amazing in my room and to my ears 😌😌😌
Post removed 
I wanted to share what Richard Vandersteen thinks about sweet spot.  This is a direct quote:

Most speakers today especially those with narrow baffles have a wide dispersion pattern and therefore will have a decent stereo image off axis. Having noted this if there is only a small improvement when sitting in the “sweet spot” this is a sure indication of low resolution as imaging is created by small differences in time, phase, amplitude and differential time between left and right channels. Most of these ingredients are at least compromised when the listener is not equal distance from the two speakers. Evidence of high resolution, time, phase accuracy and reasonable acoustic symmetry within the room is a significant improvement of all things coveted by most audio enthusiasts when seated in the “sweet spot”. The only way to make the “sweet spot” larger is to lower resolution and homogenize the signals enough to make the presentation mediocre everywhere. RV