My last device in acoustic control:
THE HELMHOLTZ MECHANICAL EQUALIZER
If you own a room only for your audio system "mechanical equalization" is for me superior to electronical one in many aspects ....
Acoustic of irregular or difficult small normal room obey and react to sound in a different way than a theater, or than an ideally acoustically designed audio rrom... Geometry, topology and content matters.... The mechanical equalizer was a cheap way in money to design my own audio room without the need to reconstruct my room...Passive absorbing, reflecting, and diffusive materials, even well balanced are not enough sometimes...Especially in 13 feet, irregular, but square room with 2 windows and with a complex acoustic content.... We must accomodate the response of the room to the speakers not only the speakers to the room... The mechanical equalizer can do the 2 function at the same time without modifying the basic parameters of the speakers directly and according to the specific structure of the user...The different pressures new zones created by the equalizer itself are intermediary between the speakers responses and the room responses in the 2 directions, because the pipes grid begin with a few inches straws from the speakers and increase in lenght to 8 feet high, like observed an astute observer, oldhvymec ,the organ tuning pipe in a church...
We can call the Helmholtz mechanical equalizer, a "silent organ" indeed and i called it so indeed in my first post about it in my thread...
It seems that human ears react better to first wavefront of relatively "large" bandwith called a " voice timbre" in any room location not to a precise test frequency signal one after the others, like a microphone feeding it back to a correcting program for only one very narrow location in milllimeters...
Then i succeeded to correct my room with materials passive treatment but mainly with an Helmholtz "mechanical equalizer" calibrated by the the first wavefront of sound created by the specific timing of the frequencies of early and late reflections adding themselves to the direct waves from the speakers and coming also from the waves modified themselves by their near 80 crossings of the different zones pressure of my room each one second...
This mechanical equalizer is made, not of bottles like the original one, but of tubes and pipes, sometimes one inserted in an another thinner one, with a short or longer neck(various type of straws) which length i tuned with hearing and listening experiments... It takes me a week and perhaps 50 hours to tune the 23 tubes and pipes....Location is important... All refining parameters were dictated by sound like a piano tuner use his ears and are implemented by diagonal cuts in section of various diameter of straws inserted in one another....I used transparent tape to seal the mouth and i insert thinner straw in a new hole if necessary like in a telescopic stick...
I also use "the golden section ratio" in 3 set of 3 pipes among all the other singular 13 tubes and pipes... My longer tube is 8 feet long under my 81/2 feet ceiling.... Correcting these 9 pipes together was the more easy part , they were very impactful ...I also used 5 smaller pipes of various size near the tweeter of one speaker (3) and near the bass driver of the other speaker (2) to create a more audible first wavefront signal without changing the basic identical parameters of the speakers but only their response to the room but not their frequency response more their first wavefront timing response... It worked marvellously.... It was my adding modification of these 2 pieces few inches, near each speaker, the tweeter for one and the bass driver for the other, creating then asymmetrically 2 different front waves from the speakers, it was this modification which is my personal characterization and adaptation from the original Helmholtz mechanical equalizer before the invention of the speakers itself....
I say all that because Helmholtz was able to set a room without DSP better than DSP... WHY?
We forget that, and we called DSP a progress and it is one indeed for "precise" measurements of a tested frequency in relation with a "precise" location in millimeters...
BUT we forgot that human ears is used to hear not a frequency alone, but a wavefront constituted of many frequencies together, usually a human vocal timbre, and we forgot that a room must be tested for itself not from and for a precise location in millimeter mainly ... And a room is not a set of passive bouncing walls waiting for the tested emitted frequency anyway, but an enclosure for the human voice, and an heterogeneous set of variable presssure zones, with the tubes and pipes being some of them...
The mechanical equalizer work on all audible frequencies not only on bass like many think, and they work at same time from near listening location and regular location in the room...not from an ideal "imaging spot" that is never an ideal spot anyway, the ideal spot is not made only for "imaging" but also for the " listener envelopment" factor ....The belief that near listening shield us from the room problems is completely erroneous in "small" room...
DSP is and could be a marvellous tool, but those who think that he can replace human ears must wait that new learning neural algorithm implement it in an A.I. expert system... Soon it will be done.... But the cost will be high.... In few years tough we will use it...
For now my ears is the main tool and it is enough...
It is a good thing also to learn acoustic by ears not by equations mainly or only and applying them without thinking....Acoustic is a fluid flowing poetry and geometry for the ears, not first a computer program...
I am not a scientist at all.... All that is my experiences only and could be wrongly explained .... But here we describe our own experience and i tried....
Cost: peanuts, all is made from straws and discarded plumber and copper pipes and tubes in my basement....
Result: the best sound i ever listen to in a small stereo system with ALL my musical files... Sound fills the room with sometimes, relatively to the original mic recording, voices or instruments around me and even sometimes coming from the back of my head... Impossible to going back to my 7 headphones that i put in a drawer.....
Electronic design is the smaller half part of audiophile experience, the bigger half and most important part is ACOUSTIC.....
