Here’s the thing with all this.
Single reflections in small rooms are fast and energetic because they have no distance to lose amplitude. However if the reflections match the direct sound spectrally they are summed and you get a single sound with a single location. But in a small OR large listening room, its not a single location because the sound is coming from 2 locations, 2 loudspeakers, so the brain has more work to do....it takes the sounds from both ears, detects early arriving reflections, sees they match spectrally so combines (sums) them and uses the summed amplitude difference to pinpoint location of the sound.
If those early arriving reflections are different in amplitude L&R.....which they would be in a non-symmetrical room, then the sums of the direct and reflected sounds are not going to be the same as those launched by the loudspeakers and therefore the imaging is going to change, based on different amplitude relationship between the 2 ears. That’s where your early reflections in a small room change the overall imaging.....
Referring to the passage about strong sidewall reflections causing poor imaging outside the speakers...again logic precludes this. If strong reflections were the cause for aberrant side images, they wouldn’t only be present with strongly left or right panned images that appear outside of the speaker boundary. They’d be present whenever the speaker reached a certain level. The speaker output is ALWAYS the same shape from a polar response point of view and strong reflections will always be present when a loudspeaker outputs sufficient sound energy. But if the images occur only for strongly left or right panned signal, its not only reflections that are causing the outside of speaker boundary images.
My system will produce these types of super wide images several times a listening session, depending on the recording. The images are sharp, focused and just as energetic as all other images....in other words they are a completely valid part of the signal being reproduced in exactly the same way as the rest of the images....no blurring, no veiling, no lack of focus....just perfect images of instruments or voices outside the speaker boundaries. Also these images do not have to have a great deal of energy. Many of them are subtle, whisper quiet or even just a feeling of air and ambience. So they are on the recording and are supposed to be played outside the speaker boundary. The context in which they play is simply too coherent to be any other way.
Finally lets consider listening room reflections vs recording venue reflections.
Because the speaker’s polar response and the room dimension don’t change, listening room reflections are going to arrive at the same time for every recording. In a small, uniform room, you shouldn’t hear them as they are combined with the direct sound under the ‘Law of first Wavefront’ . So, if you are listening in a small room and your imaging sounds 3 dimensional and highly focused, things are working well. When you play a recording you may or may not hear the recording venue’s reverberation, depending on the size of the studio or hall. For items recorded in a small studio with very short reverb times, the reverb of the recording will be treated by the brain in exactly the same way as the listening room‘s early reflections, namely combined with the direct sound (summed). Recordings done in a large hall or room, will have much later arriving reflections, which, as long as we‘re talking a really good recording, you’ll hear as spaciousness and reverberation....the air of the hall should have presence and some texture....that hall’s ID.
So can a small room sound spacious? Of course it can...it can play the large room‘s delayed first reflections and the hall’s spacial identity should be present. For studio recordings its often the case that sound engineers add reverb and panned decay Into the sound, creating an artificial large hall ambience. These recordings should also be highly ‘immersive‘ in a small room that’s been treated to remove multiple reflections.
In principal, if a small room is getting out of the way i.e only very short delay reflections with no multiple bouncing (so lots of diffusion) it should be able to sound like a large space, as its the recordings soundwaves and their arrival time that denotes ‘space’. In the best, most resolving systems that space has presence and texture so you can ‘hear’ you in a large venue, even when you’re actually sitting in a small room, with your eyes closed of course
Single reflections in small rooms are fast and energetic because they have no distance to lose amplitude. However if the reflections match the direct sound spectrally they are summed and you get a single sound with a single location. But in a small OR large listening room, its not a single location because the sound is coming from 2 locations, 2 loudspeakers, so the brain has more work to do....it takes the sounds from both ears, detects early arriving reflections, sees they match spectrally so combines (sums) them and uses the summed amplitude difference to pinpoint location of the sound.
If those early arriving reflections are different in amplitude L&R.....which they would be in a non-symmetrical room, then the sums of the direct and reflected sounds are not going to be the same as those launched by the loudspeakers and therefore the imaging is going to change, based on different amplitude relationship between the 2 ears. That’s where your early reflections in a small room change the overall imaging.....
Referring to the passage about strong sidewall reflections causing poor imaging outside the speakers...again logic precludes this. If strong reflections were the cause for aberrant side images, they wouldn’t only be present with strongly left or right panned images that appear outside of the speaker boundary. They’d be present whenever the speaker reached a certain level. The speaker output is ALWAYS the same shape from a polar response point of view and strong reflections will always be present when a loudspeaker outputs sufficient sound energy. But if the images occur only for strongly left or right panned signal, its not only reflections that are causing the outside of speaker boundary images.
My system will produce these types of super wide images several times a listening session, depending on the recording. The images are sharp, focused and just as energetic as all other images....in other words they are a completely valid part of the signal being reproduced in exactly the same way as the rest of the images....no blurring, no veiling, no lack of focus....just perfect images of instruments or voices outside the speaker boundaries. Also these images do not have to have a great deal of energy. Many of them are subtle, whisper quiet or even just a feeling of air and ambience. So they are on the recording and are supposed to be played outside the speaker boundary. The context in which they play is simply too coherent to be any other way.
Finally lets consider listening room reflections vs recording venue reflections.
Because the speaker’s polar response and the room dimension don’t change, listening room reflections are going to arrive at the same time for every recording. In a small, uniform room, you shouldn’t hear them as they are combined with the direct sound under the ‘Law of first Wavefront’ . So, if you are listening in a small room and your imaging sounds 3 dimensional and highly focused, things are working well. When you play a recording you may or may not hear the recording venue’s reverberation, depending on the size of the studio or hall. For items recorded in a small studio with very short reverb times, the reverb of the recording will be treated by the brain in exactly the same way as the listening room‘s early reflections, namely combined with the direct sound (summed). Recordings done in a large hall or room, will have much later arriving reflections, which, as long as we‘re talking a really good recording, you’ll hear as spaciousness and reverberation....the air of the hall should have presence and some texture....that hall’s ID.
So can a small room sound spacious? Of course it can...it can play the large room‘s delayed first reflections and the hall’s spacial identity should be present. For studio recordings its often the case that sound engineers add reverb and panned decay Into the sound, creating an artificial large hall ambience. These recordings should also be highly ‘immersive‘ in a small room that’s been treated to remove multiple reflections.
In principal, if a small room is getting out of the way i.e only very short delay reflections with no multiple bouncing (so lots of diffusion) it should be able to sound like a large space, as its the recordings soundwaves and their arrival time that denotes ‘space’. In the best, most resolving systems that space has presence and texture so you can ‘hear’ you in a large venue, even when you’re actually sitting in a small room, with your eyes closed of course
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