Omnidirectional speakers. The future?

Hi Summitav a.k.a. John Casler,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm not going to try to rebut your individual points, as I think we've both put sufficient effort into stating our positions.

However, since you dispute the quote I included, just for the record let me say that Dr. Earl Geddes is a long-time loudspeaker industry professional, author of numerous research papers and several books, wrote his doctoral thesis on small room acoustics, is probably the world's foremost authority on waveguides, holds seventeen patents with seven more pending, and recently gave a loudspeaker design seminar at ALMA in Las Vegas and will be doing so again in Europe this summer for the Audio Engineering Society convention there. I did not take his remarks out of context - he was referring to the reproduction of sound in a small room ("Premium Home Theater, Design & Construction", page 95). You might want to check out his website, www.gedlee.com - not because his website supports any of my points, but because he's on the frontier in many areas, such as refining our understanding of what kinds of distortion matter to the ear and what kinds don't.

By the way I have listened to my stereo outdoors (well, a stereo I used to have), and it did sound better than inside my room. Timbre was more natural, and imaging and clarity were much improved. But those speakers were poorly designed from a room interaction standpoint, and poorly setup within my room (zero attention paid to minimizing early reflections, for example). In all fairness I have not heard a genuinely high quality home stereo system outdoors - that would be an interesting experiment that I hope to try one day. I have turned my living room into a virtual padded cell by means of panels of thick open-cell foam on frames leaning against the walls, and I did not like the results at all - very precise, but lifeless. In my opinion, the best in-room reproduction I have heard has been from setups where (among other things) care has been taken to establish the kind of late-arriving, well-energized, diffuse reverberant field I've described above.

Duke

Summitav wrote: "Those who state that live recordings will not sound 'real' in an anechoic environment have not listened (properly) in that environment."

You are quite correct that I haven't had the opportunity to listen to anything, much less a good stereo, inside of an anechoic chamber. That's a chance that's tough to come by for most of us. I have no doubt that the experience would be revelatory in many ways. (I have listened, and worked, in studio control rooms where recording, mixing and mastering are done, know that these are not anechoic environments but rather controlled environments, and have prefered using ones - and gotten better results - where the monitoring options are not limited to just the nearfield.)

But I'll still stick by my contentions A) that a stereo system would sound best in an anechoic chamber if the speakers (and the recordings played through them) were designed with that as their intended environment, and B) that a well-implemented multi-channel scheme would sound more naturally convincing in that environment than would stereo (there's nothing sacrosanct in theory about limiting ourselves to 2 channels as some sort of ideal paradigm for sound reproduction, it's just much simpler to do well than a higher number of channels).

Those statements imply some corollaries:

>That speakers intended for home use will sound better if they are not designed solely on the basis of anechoic measurements, but take into account more typical listening room acoustics.

>That a well-implemented multi-channel scheme could also sound better than stereo in the home, but also that this would not only be highly dependent on the efficacy of the recording process used, but on closely controlling things like dispersion and room acoustics as well. Or in other words, the room properties, or distortions, that can actually make 1- or 2-channel reproduction go down more easily as a subjective matter, will become more problematic as we continue to add channels and speakers. The more we do to try and supply some semblence of the 'real' recorded performance space acoustic, the less we will be able to tolerate overlaying the arbitrary and unrelated listening room acoustic as a kind of a ameliorative substitute.

A little off topic, but on theme, is the build, and sonic differences between The bipole Apogee Scintilla, and other dipole Apogees. In Apogee circles, it is a recognized fact the Scintilla's performance is touched with magic. I attribute the difference to the wrap over tweeter ribbons of the Scintilla. This creates two fan shaped radiation wave patterns front and rear, out of phase with each other.

Never done any serious outdoor listening, but I have heard speakers (Maggies) syspended from the ceiling near the center of a barn that was so big that I'm sure there were no reflections to speak of. The best IMHO. But not everyone has a barn.

Muralman1: The radiation pattern and phase relationship you describe is dipole, not bipole.