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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
ieales's avatar
ieales
1,201 posts
 
Also, the problems with their imaging is not so much that they don't image, it's' that they need so much width or extremely well treated rooms.
The room where I heard them had treated walls, carpeted floors and seemed very well behaved. There was as much room outside the speakers as between.

While quite enjoyable, not all boxes were ticked for yhs. [I do consider that my perspective may be suspect vis a vis non-professionals.]
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rauliruegas
13,029 posts
 
Dear @mijostyn : "" I have listened to corrected point source speakers particularly a friends Watt/Puppy JL Audio subwoofer system and dead on center it produces a beautiful miniature image. Move off center and it falls apart as you would expect.
It is sort of the exact opposite of what the OP says, the more noticeable the sweet spot the better the system ""

everything the same your statements are absolutely rigth and one way or the other @audio2design is in agreement with and the @mikem experiences are exactly the same too.

Yes @erik_squires OP is exactly the other way around.

Even in a music hall the specific sweet spot is only one where if we change to the next l/r " chair " things change because that critical timing. We could think that there the sweet spot is wider, certainly not: if we move things will comes different.

Obviously that many of us think different and even I read that a gentleman posted that has two sweet spot positions.
Not me, I have one and only one specific sweet spot position and yes when we have it MUSIC reproduction experiences are just amazing.

That’s why is so important the intrinsical relationship between room treatment, speaker/subs positions and seat position, these overall accurated set up just makes the true differences.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.
antigrunge2
1,397 posts
 
While I concur broadly with @rauliruegas, there are speakers that image better than others. And there are speakers with narrower and wider sweet spots, Generally point source speakers have better imaging and because of more consistent room reflections wider sweetspots.  A special case are Omnis, they can have good imaging provided their radial dispersion is even.
erik_squires OP
16,021 posts
 
You know, I think of the "sweet spot" for speakers completely differently than I do for live music, especially acoustic.

To me, the sweet spot for a speaker is tonal and spacial. That is, that it preserves a stereo image within it AND sounds good.

In a live environment, the idea of losing the stereo image does not apply to me at all. The musicians and instruments exist in the space and as I move around the "quality" of the image remains constant. There’s no concept in my mind of finding a listening location where I have "good imaging" in a live performance.  It is all good.

Of course, being too close and too much at an angle of a symphony orchestra I won’t hear all the instruments equally well, but the imaging is always accurate.

This is not the same of course as wanting to be surrounded by  the musicians.
deep_333
1,307 posts
 
Skip trying to perfect a grossly inadequate number of speakers (i.e 2) for the ultimate music listening experience and go to 5.2.2 atmos setup powered by a good surround processor and amp. Some very smart guys declared that you need a lot more than 2 channels to make it work and they were not wrong.

My 15k multichannel setup beats the living daylights out of 100k+ 2 channel setups i have/had. 2 channel setups will have you chasing your tail forever. It's the very nature of 2 channel setups!
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