"Can't Do 3D Like Other Technologies". Fair Criticism of Horn Speakers?

Audiophile Bill

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In my experience more important than the radiation pattern of the rear-firing energy is the delay before it arrives at the listening area. The reason I use horns and/or coaxials is because I'm not using DSP delay, so my rear-firing energy needs to go in a direction which will result in a sufficient path-length-induced delay.

I haven't tried a DSP-delayed wideband driver, but that may work very well. Note that some response shaping may be beneficial, as it's the power response that matters, rather than the driver's on-axis response.
Thank you, Duke.
 
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PeterA

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By projection I mean extending the soundstage well into space in front of where center stage is. Some test tracks I use create full circles around a listener. Others do waves of music that rush at you and then pull back.

Right now my system struggles to really reach those levels because I don’t have my reference dac in the mix. It still generates it, but it only comes out about four feet instead of an almost infinite space around the listener. That is why I don’t like generalizations because there are so many factors that can create or inhibit a single components ability to shine.

Depth isn’t exceptionally hard. Solid images is tougher - I hate the cardboard cutout images so many systems portray. Give me body! Still, projection is the toughest and it seems to be the one big element I come across that separates great gear from exceptional gear. To do that in space, across all frequencies, with strong coherence and body to the images is a very tough objective to meet.

DSkip, I don’t really understand what you mean by projection. I’ve heard a soprano project her voice deep into the concert hall. I’ve spoken to a cellist who told me in a large space key plays differently and projects the sound of the cello into a large space but when he is in a small space he does not need to create the projection through his playing technique.

In terms of listening to reproduced music in our listening rooms, what is projection? Projection of images of musicians in front of the plane of the speakers? You mentioned the centerstage, he is the listener put into the center of the stage with musicians all around him? That does not seem natural to me. That is, I don’t hear that when I am at the concert hall.

What I hear projected in front of the stage or plane of the speakers is the energy created by the musicians in their instruments. I have heard systems where the energy basically stops at the plane of the speakers. The sound of course has to reach the listener, but the imaging in the soundstage and everything is at the speakers or behind the speakers. The really successful systems fill the whole room with energy and the listener feels immersed in the sound field the way he does at a concert hall or jazz club.
 
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Lagonda

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I once spoke to a loudspeaker designer that had done the same two way loudspeakers in two versions: with a horn tweeter and with a ribbon tweeter. He said that when he demonstrated the two different types side by side, the audience was typically split 50-50 in terms of preference.

I got to hear two of his similar speakers: one with horn and one with ribbon. I preferred the horn. It also made me clearly realise the differences.

The ribbon tweeter is over smooth and
compressed. Gives an illusion of resolution and 3d. This can be good and most impressive with delta-sigma digital but it is flawed.

The horn just has more presence and realism. Transients and trumpets are more righteous. You do need 3-4m distance though.

The typical dome tweeter sounds shouty and struggeling and (again) compressed. Old fashioned cone tweeters better but rolled off.

Single driver can be good, but beaming and nasality can be a problem.

Electrostatics a bit like the ribbon but worse and more plasticy sound.

Mbl radial strahler: nice room filling none-hifi rounded sounding. But again again dynamically compromised. Duvet dynamics. Even though it was receiving 50-100 watts according to the vu meters on the amp.

Fwiw and imuho

Jesper
If MBL sounds "dynamically compromised" you are not using the right amplifiers, or setup is sub-par ! ;)
 

DSkip

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I've struggled to describe it because I've only heard a handful of systems do it and that is my fault for not being able to communicate it.

Some systems create a flat plane for the music.
Some systems create a curved plane.
Some create depth which gives it a flat plane with music that happens behind 'main stage' - a box of sound if you will.
Some create a semicircle in front of the listener.
Some create a full circle around the listener.
Some create a full circle around the listener and fill in that space with images.

The last bit is what I am trying to describe - a projection of sound not only behind the speakers, but instead utilize the entire listening space as a soundstage.

The full circle is awesome, but getting the area within that circle to as a soundstage for music is unique and creates the true atmosphere of a performance.

I've discussed these before but here are the two songs that really showcase what I am talking about.

Deadmau5 - 4ware. This song can be quite repetitive on systems that don't fill in the space. There are pulses of sound and you hear them but don't experience them. On a sound with that atmospheric circle, these pulses actually start behind the speaker and end up coming at you in waves at about three or four levels until they reach the listener or extend slightly past the listener. The interesting thing is that they take up distinct space in that circle and 'approach' the listener with each pulse. They don't hug the perimeter of the soundstage.

Tool - Chocolate Chip Trip. About 1:35 into the song a drum starts in the front right corner of the room and will do a full 720* around the listener. In most systems, including many components that I sell, this won't happen. It will circle around to directly left of the listener, collapse back to the left speaker, pan to the right speaker, then jump back out directly right of the listener. This is an example of the semicircle. While you get a sound that 'reaches out', it doesn't actually reach out completely. It cannot create the full circle and cannot fill in the space within that circle.

One thing I don't know fully yet is if you create that full circle, does the space automatically fill in? I don't think I've experienced one without the other yet.


Right now I don't have my reference DAC and my current DAC is a bit of a compromise. It creates the circle with atmopshere, but it is 'squished' like an oval in front of the listener, never getting parallel or behind. It does fill in the space that it is capable of reaching out to though. It's a weird situation but even using that, I'm able to showcase what exactly it is that I am talking about and they can grasp what happens when the reference DAC is in place.
 

microstrip

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Perhaps my original question needs to be clarified or rephrased: Do you consider projection or 3-dimensional imaging as mostly limited to stereo listening room phenomena or do you experience those sonic characteristics (and they seem to be sonic characteristics rather than characteristics of music) when listening to live acoustic music such as in a concert hall or in smaller venue performances such as a jazz club or even a string quartett in a living room?

Projection exists in real music - we associate some characteristics of timbre to space due to our experience gained with the help of our eyes and our interaural localization capabilities.

Seeing Mark Levinson dialing the proper equalization in the Audio Palette was the real proof that projection is possible in stereo and depends on room and recording. Mark turned slowly the buttons up and down and suddenly an apparently flat recording converged in focus and materialized in 3D in the room at a definite dial set up and level. At that time I was so filled with enthusiasm that after his sessions that I got the Audio Palette. Unfortunately the setting of the six dials depended on recording and I was not an expert, it took a too long time and I found I was not listening to music any more, just fiddling with the buttons, and sold it.

Stereo imaging is not 100% predictable and depends a lot on recording - it is why we must use a good selection of recordings to tune a system. Otherwise we risk having a system that only images well with some particular type of recording - the kind of system that goes from divine to horrible imaging when we change the recording.

In some aspects the localization of sounds in space is an acquired (trained) capability - I remember reading that after some types of ear surgery we must re-learn how to interpret the monaural cues.

BTW, this summary paper is extremely interesting "Classic Stereo Imaging Transforms—A Review" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228381059_Classic_stereo_imaging_transforms-a_review
 

DaveC

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I've struggled to describe it because I've only heard a handful of systems do it and that is my fault for not being able to communicate it.

Some systems create a flat plane for the music.
Some systems create a curved plane.
Some create depth which gives it a flat plane with music that happens behind 'main stage' - a box of sound if you will.
Some create a semicircle in front of the listener.
Some create a full circle around the listener.
Some create a full circle around the listener and fill in that space with images.

The last bit is what I am trying to describe - a projection of sound not only behind the speakers, but instead utilize the entire listening space as a soundstage.

The full circle is awesome, but getting the area within that circle to as a soundstage for music is unique and creates the true atmosphere of a performance.

I've discussed these before but here are the two songs that really showcase what I am talking about.

Deadmau5 - 4ware. This song can be quite repetitive on systems that don't fill in the space. There are pulses of sound and you hear them but don't experience them. On a sound with that atmospheric circle, these pulses actually start behind the speaker and end up coming at you in waves at about three or four levels until they reach the listener or extend slightly past the listener. The interesting thing is that they take up distinct space in that circle and 'approach' the listener with each pulse. They don't hug the perimeter of the soundstage.

Tool - Chocolate Chip Trip. About 1:35 into the song a drum starts in the front right corner of the room and will do a full 720* around the listener. In most systems, including many components that I sell, this won't happen. It will circle around to directly left of the listener, collapse back to the left speaker, pan to the right speaker, then jump back out directly right of the listener. This is an example of the semicircle. While you get a sound that 'reaches out', it doesn't actually reach out completely. It cannot create the full circle and cannot fill in the space within that circle.

One thing I don't know fully yet is if you create that full circle, does the space automatically fill in? I don't think I've experienced one without the other yet.


Right now I don't have my reference DAC and my current DAC is a bit of a compromise. It creates the circle with atmopshere, but it is 'squished' like an oval in front of the listener, never getting parallel or behind. It does fill in the space that it is capable of reaching out to though. It's a weird situation but even using that, I'm able to showcase what exactly it is that I am talking about and they can grasp what happens when the reference DAC is in place.


Amon Tobin has some material with low-frequency bass effects that create an amazing soundstage effect, he has tons of material, probably Supermodified and Bricolage are a couple of my favorites. Get your subs warmed up... ;)
 
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jdza

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Hi jdza,

Yes agree with all your points. In this instance the dsp approach I am using is just a quick testing fix as it is easy to implement for me in parallel leaving all else (as is) untouched. Also because it allows on the fly adjustment of its specific crossover point (allowing me to test a few drivers quickly) and on the fly delay adjustments.

In terms of the horn loading point. Yes it did occur to me that it might be a consideration. I suppose it is really the goal of the rear field. My assumption at present (and of course I might well be wrong) is that wide dispersion was welcome for this application versus strictly controlled directivity. What was your rationale for wanting to control that rear directivity or was it that in your application, you wanted to channel that rear wave specifically into your bass horn because of your setup? My starting point was that wider dispersion would be helpful for this specific application in order to give space and openness in the reverberant field. I even wondered whether a fixed position of such a driver would be a bad thing and whether it will ultimately be room dependent to gain the optimum illusion.

Best.
I think Duke answered better than I could-as always!. Also, my fundamental approach has always been compression drivers to as low a freq as possible, so I sometimes forget that cones can be horn-loaded outside of bass duties too!
 

Audiophile Bill

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I think Duke answered better than I could-as always!. Also, my fundamental approach has always been compression drivers to as low a freq as possible, so I sometimes forget that cones can be horn-loaded outside of bass duties too!

How low are you going right now with the CDs?
 

Duke LeJeune

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How low are you going right now with the CDs?
Some of the specifics are details that I'd rather keep to myself, and that's one of them. I hope you understand.
 

Audiophile Bill

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Some of the specifics are details that I'd rather keep to myself, and that's one of them. I hope you understand.

Sorry Duke I was referring to Jdza’s system :)
 

tima

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Acoustic instruments and unamplified singers project and take up a singular point in space. You get the body because the instrument itself resonates and makes itself known. You don't hear a pinhead singing at you.

Some of the effects I speak of are more prominent in electronic music like Deadmau5 and Trentmoller. With this music, you can hear elements really develop across the entire room and the music becomes less of a repetitive trance and more like a world of sound. It is quite the experience when it happens. Most music doesn't have these strong projection elements, but sometimes they even poke their head out in more traditional genres unless they are live recorded in lively rooms.

I'm not sure if that is what you are after or not.

Sure, you told me what you hear from live acoustic music - which is what I asked about. So thanks for that.

My own experience is different, at least with my eyes closed. I find 3D-imaging and projection more likely or prevalent in a stereo listening room and much less likely to occur at a live acoustic event. In a concert hall, for example, I am able to hear individual instruments coming from different locations and somewhat based on seating and hall acoustics I sense relative depth.

At a live event I do not typically experience a palpable 3D image of musicians or their instruments. I don't sense projection, if that means the soundstage is perceived forward of its place of origin. Whereas in listening rooms I have experienced those phenomena. If I am located very close to musicians or singers say within a few feet (rare), I will hear the body of some string instruments as a resonance and sense a singer projecting sound from their body, but the sound does not cause my mind to create a 3D image of the instrument or person when my eyes are closed. To my ears, conditions in a listening room are much different than conditions at a live event with correspondingly different psycho-acoustics.
 
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DSkip

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Understood Tim. In live performances at venues I don’t get the effect as much. I had uncles and cousins who all played guitar and sang at family gatherings in regular rooms. I always got the sense of weight and body to the guitar and the singer. I would suspect this has a lot to do with proximity to the instrument as even in my own system I’ve noticed if I pull my seat further back, the dimensionality of the image suffers. For me, this is an important aspect to the immersion and I generally listen closer to the speakers than they are from each other. Interestingly enough, on orchestral and band the soundstage shifts further back and I get a similar experience that you describe above. The atmosphere is still there but there isn’t as much depth to the instruments.
 
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PeterA

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Sure, you told me what you hear from live acoustic music - which is what I asked about. So thanks for that.

My own experience is different, at least with my eyes closed. I find 3D-imaging and projection more likely or prevalent in a stereo listening room and much less likely to occur at a live acoustic event. In a concert hall, for example, I am able to hear individual instruments coming from different locations and somewhat based on seating and hall acoustics I sense relative depth.

At a live event I do not typically experience a palpable 3D image of musicians or their instruments. I don't sense projection, if that means the soundstage is perceived forward of its place of origin. Whereas in listening rooms I have experienced those phenomena. If I am located very close to musicians or singers say within a few feet (rare), I will hear the body of some string instruments as a resonance and sense a singer projecting sound from their body, but the sound does not cause my mind to create a 3D image of the instrument or person when my eyes are closed. To my ears, conditions in a listening room are much different than conditions at a live event with correspondingly different psycho-acoustics.

Tim, your post gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion. Often times people seem to compare the sound of systems to other systems or to some ideal. The more I listen to live music, which unfortunately is difficult right now, I realize that most systems are set up not to sound like what we hear live. This may be why the language we use to describe the sound of systems and the sound of live music seems to be so different.

I look forward to someday going back to live music to refresh my memory of what it sounds like. I suspect I will not hear palpable, outlined, or pinpoint images.

EDIT: I have not heard many horn speakers, so I cannot really answer the question asked in the title of the thread. Perhaps if horns don’t do 3-D images like other technologies it is one reason so many people find them to sound so natural.
 
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the sound of Tao

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I wonder if (as others have mentioned before) that the reason we look to image localisation in a reproduced experience because it puts part of our essential needs to understand where things are and what they are more at ease.

At a live music event our localisation has the visual perception to do most of the heavy lifting in identifying the what and the where. We might only default to our hearing for localisation in real life where the object we are hearing is just not visible.

I’m not sure we can turn off the instinct to know where and what the things that we are trying to perceive actually are.

But in a replayed music experience sufficient localisation is fine (and way more natural) for me but perhaps for some also the experience of pinpoint localisation might become a trait that can become a conscious focus in our evaluation and a perceived value and reward in our system building... a bit like hyper-detailing and having unnatural black backgrounds in typical natural acoustic sound-fields.
 
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microstrip

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At a live event I do not typically experience a palpable 3D image of musicians or their instruments. I don't sense projection, if that means the soundstage is perceived forward of its place of origin. Whereas in listening rooms I have experienced those phenomena. If I am located very close to musicians or singers say within a few feet (rare), I will hear the body of some string instruments as a resonance and sense a singer projecting sound from their body, but the sound does not cause my mind to create a 3D image of the instrument or person when my eyes are closed. To my ears, conditions in a listening room are much different than conditions at a live event with correspondingly different psycho-acoustics.

Considering your post I feel we must carefully separate what is meant by 3D and by projection in stereo imaging and in a live event. For example, I was not assuming that projection means forward of its place of origin.

And yes, imaging conditions of stereo recordings can be very different from real. Stereo sound engineers do not want to recreate binaural experiences.

See, for example, this comment about Kenneth Wilkinson , the man behind the famous Decca sound:

No purist, Wilkie augmented the Decca Tree's three omni microphones with outriggers and spot mikes—whatever was required to communicate the music. He felt that a coincident mike technique was not capable of reproducing a realistic hall sound, with a natural sense of ambience, compared with techniques using omnidirectional microphones. https://www.stereophile.com/news/011904wilkie/
 
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Duke LeJeune

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I wonder if (as others have mentioned before) that the reason we look to image localisation in a reproduced experience because it puts part of our essential needs to understand where things are and what they are more at ease.
I think you're right. Perhaps a system's localization and spatial attributes might offer a "substitute" for actually seeing the performance.

In his book "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms", Floyd Toole refers to a study conducted by Wolfgang Klippel (the measurement guru) which examined the relative contributions of sound quality and spatial quality to "naturalness" (how realistic the speakers sound), and "pleasantness" (how enjoyable they are).

He found that “naturalness” (realism and accuracy) was 30% related to sound quality (coloration, or the lack thereof); 20% related to tonal balance; and 50% related to the “feeling of space”.

“Pleasantness” (general satisfaction or preference) was 30% related to sound quality and 70% related to the “feeling of space”.

In other words, according to Klippel, the "feeling of space" was 50% of what made speakers sound realistic, and 70% of what made speakers enjoyable.

I'm NOT claiming that these percentages are necessarily accurate, but imo they do indicate that spatial qualities matter quite a bit.
 

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I think you're right. Perhaps a system's localization and spatial attributes might offer a "substitute" for actually seeing the performance.

In his book "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms", Floyd Toole refers to a study conducted by Wolfgang Klippel (the measurement guru) which examined the relative contributions of sound quality and spatial quality to "naturalness" (how realistic the speakers sound), and "pleasantness" (how enjoyable they are).

He found that “naturalness” (realism and accuracy) was 30% related to sound quality (coloration, or the lack thereof); 20% related to tonal balance; and 50% related to the “feeling of space”.

“Pleasantness” (general satisfaction or preference) was 30% related to sound quality and 70% related to the “feeling of space”.

In other words, according to Klippel, the "feeling of space" was 50% of what made speakers sound realistic, and 70% of what made speakers enjoyable.

I'm NOT claiming that these percentages are necessarily accurate, but imo they do indicate that spatial qualities matter quite a bit.
I totally concur with Toole on this and thank you Duke for this information. Feeling of space is one of my absolute priorities. I can fill in or forgive tonal balance often largely dependent on the budget of the speaker. I can not tolerate the absence of space.

I don't expect recording engineers to record exactly the space. They are there to embelish. In theater there is animating , projecting and heavy make up . I'm ok with that for the entertainment.
 

jdza

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I don't know, I just realised again that my brain is wired in a much more simplistic way than the august members here.

When I am experiencing live music, I can see I am in a space, over there are the musicians, there is this one, there is that one. Invariably, around me are other people. They are talking, burping and maybe even farting. There are smells of other people, the venue etc.

When I am alone in my room, listening to recorded music, I have none of that. I need those clues that my eyes and other senses cannot provide. Before I can relax to any source of music I need to know exactly where it is coming from in a space that needs to be described to me. I, therefore, need the equipment and the recording to give me the information I cannot see or feel even if, in absolute terms, this information may be considered over descriptive or localised. To me, for those reasons, comparing live to recorded music in any aspect outside of tonal balance is an apples to oranges, bicycle to BMW absurdity.

To argue that one can close your eyes when listening live or to reproduction to even the differences is silly as you would already have seen the venue and the performers before closing your eyes. Once seen, nothing can be un-seen.
 

tima

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Tim, your post gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion. Often times people seem to compare the sound of systems to other systems or to some ideal.

Yes, exactly. As I wrote somewhere:
When you close your eyes in the concert hall do you sense vivid three-dimensional images of performers and instruments? In your mind's ear are there precisely delineated rows of violins playing or musicians laid out in bas relief? Does your seating offer "illumination of the furthest corners of the soundstage?" My experience largely finds such effects not in concert halls but in listening rooms, where electronics along with room factors and speaker positioning help produce them. In the concert hall do you hear "velvety black backgrounds?" Do transients "pop like fireworks against a night sky?" Many audiophiles like these sonic characteristics and reviewers do write about them as the quotes (taken from real reviews) suggest. To my ears they are audiophile "virtues," psycho-acoustic idealizations of the live experience.

The degree to which these idealizations are pronounced or exaggerated reflects a relative sense of 'believability' or realism obtained in the listening room. The greater the exaggeration, the less believable, imo, at least to those holding live acoustic music as a reference. I speculate there is a 'tipping point' where once past the brain no longer accepts the sonic experience as natural, and that tipping point may vary from person to person and of course from system to system.

From a discussion I had with Ralph Karsten, another interpretation of 'tipping point' is where certain perceptual rules are not being followed - when that happens the brain transfers the processing of sound from the limbic centers to the cerebral cortex, that place where we turn back into audiophiles(!) - sonic describers rather than being emotionally involved with music.

And for me:
On big orchestral works, my suspension of disbelief requires solid, articulate mid-to-low bass along with a sense of space, scale and perspective—a sense of an orchestra laid out in a hall. Dynamics, timing and tonal character must hold together across the frequencies. The system must offer coherent resolution across orchestral peaks and shifts.

I find the experience of spatiality a necessary (though not sufficient) condition to the suspension of disbelief when listening to acoustic classical music reproduction. Maybe think of it as sense of 'sound in air' (@PeterA may call this 'energy'), where the air is the air of the venue, not the listening room. As I think Graham (@the sound of Tao) was suggesting we cannot turn off or invoke a sense of where things are in space.

It (spatial information) is on the recording, but equipment, setup and room must not screw it up. Nowadays it seems easy to cause or create exaggerations of sonic characteristics and sometimes difficult to back away from their novelty or even accept them absent a reference against which to gauge. Such as wondering whether the claim that 'horns can't do 3D' is a criticism - as if they should.

 
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