That is where you enter a fundamental conceptual mistake. If a band plays in my listening room, that IS the live space and the room reflections are an integral part of the live sound. Yet if a system is to reproduce a band playing in an another venue, it needs to portray the acoustics of that venue. It can only do that if the room that it plays in gets out of the way. That is why you need room treatment, to let your room disappear and the recorded space be reproduced.
I mistakenly used the listening room in my hypothetical of a live band playing in one’s home. I should have said kitchen or dining room just to simplify my point. I’m well aware of at least some room acoustic fundamentals. In one previous room, it took me over 9 months (part time obviously) to locate an optimal placement for my speakers. Nevertheless, if somebody happens to have a listening room that is way out of whack, then perhaps there should be some positive steps taken to return the room to a sense of reasonableness.
But as a minimalist, you give me an empty room with reasonable dimensions, carpeting and pad, an absorptive material chair and 2 ottomans, and enough room to move the speakers into an optimal placement, and I’m good to go. In fact, this is exactly what I’ve done at each of the audio shows I exhibited in back in 2011. I intentionally left every picture and mirror on the walls (uncovered) and in one room I even had the smallest room (5 ft shorter than the others) at the show with large full-range speakers and I was playing at 100 – 105 db routinely. I was a bit nervous whether I could pull it off because stripping 5ft off the front-to-back length of an already not-so-big room can be pushing the envelope. The second most common comment I received from visitors was that these speakers should be overloading the room or these speakers should sound boomy in this room but they’re not. And if it helps any, I was playing what should be inferior recordings like 60’s and 70’s pop music like The Tokens, Herman’s Hermits, David Essex, and 10cc that other exhibitors wouldn’t dare play at a show. But I enjoy proving what some consider impossible.
The interesting thing in my listening situation is that while with the ASC room treatment strings and some woodwinds like flute became less sharp and hard sounding, brass became in a number of instances sharper and more 'shouty' -- all of it more like the real thing, that is. Good room treatment does not 'sweeten' things up, it makes reproduced timbres more real. More like they sound live, and less filtered through the distortions of your living room.
I find it interesting that you think you can make reproduced timbres more real. If that is true, why stop at timbre? Why not really drive your point home by saying superior room treatments also make harmonics, tonality, warmth, and a small host of other coveted attributes sound more real?
What I find interesting is that first, all of these coveted attributes are already embedded abundantly in most any given recording, but for the most part remain inaudible at the speaker output to one great degree or another for every last playback system due to a much raised noise floor. IOW, if you strain or get out your metaphoric stethoscope listening to music you’re intimately familiar with, you might hear a remnant of all these coveted characteristics that really is just part of the overall music info.
Nevertheless, whether these characteristics are already embeded in the recording (but remain inaudible at the speaker) or somehow not included in the recording at all, you are essentially saying that acoustic treatments act as a recovery mechanism to somehow restore some of the missing realism.
Exactly how do you suppose acoustic treatments recover lost music information that never made it to the speaker output in the first place? I’m sure Ethan Winer would love to know the answer to this question.
I do listen at quite high volume levels and I am happy that my system can reproduce natural hardness of instruments, such as brass. I don't want a 'smooth' sounding system like many audiophiles seem to prefer, and fortunately, I don't have one. I listened to the avantgarde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago, live in 1972, at loud volume yesterday and I just loved the often raucous and aggressive sound which showed good natural hardness as well when needed; that clangy sound of metallic percussion at the loudest point of the music is something to behold. And boy, the musicianship in that performance is through the roof.
Although you may thoroughly enjoy what you hear, I can pretty much guarantee you’re hearing far less of all the music embedded in a given recording than you think.
It appears to me that you argue from a point of view that seems theoretically right to you -- it isn't, see my remarks at the beginning of this post -- but that you have little practical experience with what good room treatment can do to a system's performance.
Actually, aside from my wife occasionally playing her flute in my listening room or elsewhere in my home, I have zero experience with live musicians playing anywhere in my home. In the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve actually gone out of my way to remove or abstain from acoustic treatments to demonstrate they are unnecessary. But that alone should not constitute that I’m theorizing.
I probably should have qualified my previous post by stating that since our speakers are not live music instruments but rather 2 sound sources, speaker placement is paramount within a given room. But this is primarily for achieving most accurate bass reproduction, soundstage depth, width, and height only. But it’s a given those items have everything to do with a given speaker’s interaction with a given room and in those cases where optional speaker placement cannot be found or achieved for whatever reason some acoustic treatment can compensate, particularly the bass. Yeah, there’s focus, stereo imaging, etc, but in the grander scale of things those are relatively minor and easy to achieve.
I suggest you engage less in your theorizing (I do find your observations about radiation patterns interesting though) and more in serious experimentation with room treatment to see what it can do for your listening experience.
Hypothetically, if per chance my playback system was able to achieve far greater levels of musicality without any acoustic treatments whatsoever (except for carpeting, carpet pad, and chair) than the levels your PB system could achieve with say $200k in custom room and associated acoustic treatments, would you still say I was theorizing?
I do agree with you that unfortunately many audiophiles mistake smooth and 'clean' sound for 'musicality'. At classical live performances I like to sit close to the stage and I am often amazed at how brutally hard that brass really sounds (just close your eyes in order judge the sound as is and not let visual impressions bias your perception). It seems clear to me that, if these sounds would/could be faithfully reproduced through a system, most audiophiles would judge them to be 'distortion'. But hey, that's live sound, folks. That's as musical as it gets.
Actually, I never made such a comment as it’s neither here nor there pertaining to this discussion. But good point. Maybe.
