Does DSP belong in State of the Art Systems?

[Atmasphere]

Just show me the evidence. A waterfall plot will do

You didn't watch the video. There of course has been far too little time. Dr. Toole does put up slides and the like... If you're telling me you know more about this than the good Dr. then my work here is done

This stuff about Distributed Bass Arrays has been around a long time; easy enough to find on Google. Perhaps you can cause your hand to move??

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Why not?

Budgetary, structural and domestic considerations are easy reasons.

 

[Atmasphere]

Budgetary, structural and domestic considerations are easy reasons.

Yes they are!

FWIW the Swarm subs by Audiokinesis are designed to be placed as close to the wall as possible, which minimizes their physical presence in the room, by allowing them to be smaller by taking advantage of the room boundary effect; flat to 20Hz if so placed. They are not expensive.

 

[Analog Scott]

You didn't watch the video. There of course has been far too little time. Dr. Toole does put up slides and the like... If you're telling me you know more about this than the good Dr. then my work here is done

This stuff about Distributed Bass Arrays has been around a long time; easy enough to find on Google. Perhaps you can cause your hand to move??

I’m very familiar with Dr. Toole’s work. But I don’t think he is a god and I don’t think he is right on this one. And there are other experts who are on his level or arguably higher who don’t think he is right on this one. But again no expert trumps objective evidence. Show me a waterfall plot that supports the idea that you can get flat bass with a smooth decay in 200 milliseconds or less with no bass traps, proprietary construction or DSP, just a bass swarm in a normal room and I will believe it. Just saying it’s good is not convincing. Doesn’t matter who is saying it. Not buying argument from authority

 

[Atmasphere]

I’m very familiar with Dr. Toole’s work. But I don’t think he is a god and I don’t think he is right on this one. And there are other experts who are on his level or arguably higher who don’t think he is right on this one. But again no expert trumps objective evidence. Show me a waterfall plot that supports the idea that you can get flat bass with a smooth decay in 200 milliseconds or less with no bass traps, proprietary construction or DSP, just a bass swarm in a normal room and I will believe it. Just saying it’s good is not convincing. Doesn’t matter who is saying it. Not buying argument from authority

I googled 'Distributed Bass array waterfall' and found this thread with measurements without digging. Perhaps you could show how Dr Toole is wrong. That should be easy, right?

No offense intended, but if its between Dr Toole or yourself (and given my own experience in this matter) I'll go with Dr. Toole.

 

[Analog Scott]

I googled 'Distributed Bass array waterfall' and found this thread with measurements without digging. Perhaps you could show how Dr Toole is wrong. That should be easy, right?

very easy. The entire bass region in both plots are north of 300 milliseconds across the board. Each plot has obvious resonances at different frequencies and the overhang that comes with them.
I’m not going to say these are bad measurements but hardly state of the art and nowhere near flat or near the 200 millisecond mark.

No offense intended, but if it’s between Dr Toole or yourself (and given my own experience in this matter) I'll go with Dr. Toole.

And no offense to Dr. Toole but given my experience I will go with other experts such as James Johnston, Edgar Choueiri and Ethan Winer on this one. We do have to pick our experts when experts disagree. Much respect for Dr. Toole but technology has advanced a great deal since his book came out. His opinions expressed in his book are now quite dated.

 

[Holmz]

…

This means that bass is entirely reverberant. But it also means that the bass being reflected by the wall behind the listener can have the ability to cancel the incoming bass before you can even know what frequency it is. This phenomena is known as a Standing Wave.

No amount of power can get rid of that kind of cancellation, which means that if you use DSP and bass traps to fix it, you'll have immense power requirements made of your gear to no avail and bass traps will have to move dynamically about the room to fix the standing waves at various frequencies. Put another way, if there is cancellation, the power you apply to fix it goes to infinity.

…

Actually Ralph, while I generally agree… lets think about a finite number of bass frequency problem areas.
if one can magically suck out all the bass with absorbers, then there is only the power to push the bass out in the first place… and not power to try and overcome a null.

(If the room is reverberant, then the bass would build, and one may likely be able to really excite the room with very little power, in the same way that that a child on a swing and build a lot of amplitude.)

So removing the cancellation would generally make for a less power hungry system.

One can also get the decay to be shortened in time.

 

[Chops]

That's clearly your opinion and not fact. It's like saying that the bass section of an orchestra requires support from a couple of other bass sections placed elsewhere in the concert hall. What rhymes with rollocks?

Again, wrong. It is not "clearly" my opinion. It is a fact.

Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very rarely will you ever get a flat, even bass response at your listening seat IF and WHEN your loudspeakers are properly positioned in the room for optimal sound stage and imaging.

99% of the time, this does not happen, hence the need for multiple subwoofers with any and all loudspeakers types and capabilities.

You can call it whatever you want, but in the end, it is the fact.

And no, DSP alone will not correct for it.

 

[Analog Scott]

Actually Ralph, while I generally agree… lets think about a finite number of bass frequency problem areas.
if one can magically suck out all the bass with absorbers, then there is only the power to push the bass out in the first place… and not power to try and overcome a null.

(If the room is reverberant, then the bass would build, and one may likely be able to really excite the room with very little power, in the same way that that a child on a swing and build a lot of amplitude.)

So removing the cancellation would generally make for a less power hungry system.

One can also get the decay to be shortened in time.

Exactly

 

[Analog Scott]

Again, wrong. It is not "clearly" my opinion. It is a fact.

Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very rarely will you ever get a flat, even bass response at your listening seat IF and WHEN your loudspeakers are properly positioned in the room for optimal sound stage and imaging.

99% of the time, this does not happen, hence the need for multiple subwoofers with any and all loudspeakers types and capabilities.

You can call it whatever you want, but in the end, it is the fact.

And no, DSP alone will not correct for it.

I’m calling that made up stats

 

[MarkusBarkus]

...g-wiz. I wish we could get past this notion of *trapping* or *absorbing* bass in an audio room.

 

[Analog Scott]

I googled 'Distributed Bass array waterfall' and found this thread with measurements without digging. Perhaps you could show how Dr Toole is wrong. That should be easy, right?

No offense intended, but if its between Dr Toole or yourself (and given my own experience in this matter) I'll go with Dr. Toole.

By the way those plots were achieved with a massive amount of absorption on the front wall. There was plenty of room for improvement using more absorption and better targeted absorption. AKA bass trapping.

Now if you can find some waterfall plots that are actually state of the art, not just pretty decent, that are achieved in a regular room just using swarm arrays and no bass traps or DSP I’d love to see them

 

[Analog Scott]

...g-wiz. I wish we could get past this notion of *trapping* or *absorbing* bass in an audio room.

Why?

 

[MarkusBarkus]

...'cause it ain't happening. We're distorting/delaying/diminishing some wavelengths by converting some energy to heat, but they are more powerful than can be "trapped" or "absorbed" through the usual products we discuss. That includes incoming low freq energy coming from outside the room. We are doing what we can to manage this energy, in our room, components etc.

 

[Analog Scott]

...'cause it ain't happening. We're distorting/delaying/diminishing some wavelengths by converting some energy to heat, but they are more powerful than can be "trapped" or "absorbed" through the usual products we discuss. That includes incoming low freq energy coming from outside the room. We are doing what we can to manage this energy, in our room, components etc.

It ain’t happening if you aren’t doing it.

Absorbing bass energy isn’t distorting it or delaying it or diminishing certain frequencies. That’s exactly what happens when you don’t trap.

bass traps only help. There is no downside to using traps. Whatever other bass management you want to use will work *with* bass traps.

 

[MarkusBarkus]

...I have a metric ton (fig. speech) of various management products in my room. I'm 100% on-board with managing things as best as possible. What I am saying is the notion of *trapping* or *absorbing* bass is a misnomer of sorts. You can alter it a bit, but there is a lot of energy in these waves. For me, in my room, I have stuff hidden everywhere. Inside walls. Under furniture. Behind the bar is 6" of rigid fiberboard. Walls are z-clip hung, double-wall constrained-layer build. Etc. Etc. But when they idle a couple of diesel engines in the yard about 1/4 mile away, you ain't trapping those incoming waves. Similarly, my bass makes it to my neighbor. And I hear her pounding the keys when she's getting ready for a performance. A lot of energy in those low frequencies. Carry on.

 

[Analog Scott]

...I have a metric ton (fig. speech) of various management products in my room. I'm 100% on-board with managing things as best as possible. What I am saying is the notion of *trapping* or *absorbing* bass is a misnomer of sorts. You can alter it a bit, but there is a lot of energy in these waves. For me, in my room, I have stuff hidden everywhere. Inside walls. Under furniture. Behind the bar is 6" of rigid fiberboard. Walls are z-clip hung, double-wall constrained-layer build. Etc. Etc. But when they idle a couple of diesel engines in the yard about 1/4 mile away, you ain't trapping those incoming waves. Similarly, my bass makes it to my neighbor. And I hear her pounding the keys when she's getting ready for a performance. A lot of energy in those low frequencies. Carry on.

I get what you are saying. It comes down to what you are willing to do. But true state of the art only happens with dedicated construction and full use of bass absorption as part of the formula.

 

[Brucemck2]

I’ve used a wide array of DSP products in two different purpose built rooms. Both rooms were professionally designed for specific speaker types, both had extensive room treatment, and in both great care was taken with speaker and listener positioning. In those two, admittedly atypical, settings, DSP still made a material improvement to the sonics. And in both rooms, across a wide array of equipment, the sonics improved with the addition of well integrated subwoofers. However, it took a lot (a whole lot) of time and effort, and professional support, to get the DSP and subwoofers really dialed in.

In several other less-ideal rooms the addition of DSP and multiple subwoofers made much larger improvements - noting that those too required considerable time, attention, tweaking, and professional assistance to really dial things in.

 

[Analog Scott]

I’ve used a wide array of DSP products in two different purpose built rooms. Both rooms were professionally designed for specific speaker types, both had extensive room treatment, and in both great care was taken with speaker and listener positioning. In those two, admittedly atypical, settings, DSP still made a material improvement to the sonics. And in both rooms, across a wide array of equipment, the sonics improved with the addition of well integrated subwoofers. However, it took a lot (a whole lot) of time and effort, and professional support, to get the DSP and subwoofers really dialed in.

In several other less-ideal rooms the addition of DSP and multiple subwoofers made much larger improvements - noting that those too required considerable time, attention, tweaking, and professional assistance to really dial things in.

Can you recall the specifics? This sounds like a lot of interesting information

 

[cjf]

IMO...If you currently like how your gear sounds in your room but you have never actually took the time or had an interest in measuring the room/gear to verify if what you are hearing isn't just a bunch of room anomalies "Enhancing" the sound of the musical content beyond what the original artist intended, then I think you are robbing yourself of hearing your system to its full potential.

But back to the DSP topic.

Assuming an ideal physical placement of the Speakers/Subs in the room....first and foremost (Is this even possible without measurements?), and then using only the physical controls on the Sub to "Dial it in" the rest of the way, you still wont have an ideal Phase, Time Aligned Sub with the Main speakers without the use of DSP.

Does the above matter? IME, Yes. Until I did this in my own system my feelings of the addition of Subs was that they made a nice difference only. But, after injecting DSP into the system, the Sub/Speaker integration went to unbelievable levels. I could never go back after hearing it.

You have to take the time to measure the room, view the results, make adjustments (either physically and/or via DSP FIR filter tweaks..etc), measure again, and again, and again...until you know everything is as good as it can be given the current equipment, room, budget and patience level/willingness to go through it all to find out. How important is the sound of music playing as best as possible in the room?

I feel, until someone does all of the above, then I find it odd how one can say that doing tweaks in the digital realm to a music stream via DSP before it even touches the DAC Input can be more destructive to the sound you hear compared to all the other likely room, placement issues you have lurking in the background which you are currently not aware of and how they are influencing what you are hearing.

I don't disagree that the use of DSP in a SOA system has drawbacks (especially when implemented incorrectly) but I consider any issues miniscule in the grand scheme compared to all the other benefits using DSP provides that are just not possible without it.

Tuning "By Ear" should still be included while playing with DSP but only tuning by ear on its own will only get you so far.