The State of High End Audio

Kinda pretentious and condescending coming from someone who obviously has no grasp of any technical subject we've ever discussed.

Maybe you should think about why you have opinions on subjects you don't grasp?
Sorry didn't mean to be pretentious just a genuine question as to why lateral reflections might be good and ceiling and floor reflections aren't.
Keith.
 
Don't be a party pooper. Nothing wrong with a few Jerry Springerish exchanges. It makes for real entertainment and redeems all the empty blathering going on....

Oi Frantz! You still want this back in your life?

GD

I have some excellent headphones Stax 009, Hifiman HE-6 and 560 and AUdeze LCD... I find the Stax stunning but seem to go to the HE-6 and these days more and more to the LCD... As I have woritten before . A good headphone is an excellent teacher. You learn to listen to the absence of the room, to lack of distortion and to purity in tonal reproduction ... Eminently enjoyable but kind of looking a t a football game with binoculars outside the stadium.. You see it all but lack the feel of it the tactile the sound of things coming from outside your head, of a real soundstage that would have believe even fro a few microsecond that people could well be in your listening room ... Speaking for me I always no I am listening to heapdhones. Oh Boy! They tell you everything that would go wrong in your reproduction chain... but .. something always amiss, at least for me. I can live with headphones for a long time butithe time has come to go back to speakers and multi-subs.
I would have liked a little more input on $30K systems but we don't seem to even want to navigate in those waters. Which reinforces my view that we have gotten too risk-adverse.
This thread has made me realize that, I also do not stray too far from the beaten path. I have not made much effort to audition some Salk speakers or Vapor Audio to name only those 2. I have remained in the safe side of Audio companies... Mosyt of the time, we seem to need some anointment by some Audio authority before venturing. I do understand we are talking about rather substantial sums but some of these out-of-the-beaten-path companies offer in-home audition some with free returns ... We need to shake ourselves a little bit more to have progress in our hobby ..

Getting back at the current turn of discussions... which I very much like being an ardent proponent of multi-subs in any Audio systems. Interestingly the thread has taken that turn and I do not mind one bit.
 
GD

I have some excellent headphones Stax 009, Hifiman HE-6 and 560 and AUdeze LCD... I find the Stax stunning but seem to go to the HE-6 and these days more and more to the LCD... As I have woritten before . A good headphone is an excellent teacher. You learn to listen to the absence of the room, to lack of distortion and to purity in tonal reproduction ... Eminently enjoyable but kind of looking a t a football game with binoculars outside the stadium.. You see it all but lack the feel of it the tactile the sound of things coming from outside your head, of a real soundstage that would have believe even fro a few microsecond that people could well be in your listening room ... Speaking for me I always no I am listening to heapdhones. Oh Boy! They tell you everything that would go wrong in your reproduction chain... but .. something always amiss, at least for me. I can live with headphones for a long time butithe time has come to go back to speakers and multi-subs.

Yes, I too had a headphone system for a long time. In fact, I started out as an audiophile with that system (featuring Stax headphones). Yet compared to speakers I missed all the things you talk about, especially the feel and impact of the music, and not just in the bass. I could never go back, personally.

I did buy Grado headphones some time ago due to limiting personal listening circumstances that don't apply anymore, but when I listened to them again after some system upgrades I was shocked that through my speaker system I could actually hear more detail than through the headphones, especially in terms of timbral resolution. I haven't touched the headphones since.
 
Last edited:
It is the opposite actually. In a concert hall unless you are sitting way close to the orchestra, *all* that you hear are reflections. Indeed it is a fully diffused sound field and hence the reason its bass performance doesn't have the wild swings we get in our smaller rooms.
...

If you're familiar with the sound of an orchestra in a hall, it's quite a shock to hear one in the open air.
 
Last edited:
Well, a good audio friend who owned the same speakers I used to (which were superb) is all hot-to-trot for the new HiFiman HE1000s. He said the bass and sound staging (which was always an issue before) were no CLOSE to his speakers. Another audio acquaintance coupled them with the new Viva headphone amp and is in pig heaven....but I do understand the impetus behind your return. There is something visceral and satisfying about speakers....
 
Yeah, Dipoles can make a decent soundstage, but usually one that's confined to the room because of the backwave. If you want an expansive/immersive soundstage that doesn't sound like it's confined to your room you need to limit close reflections. Simple as that... and the unfortunate truth is, not everyone has experienced it. Once you do it's an like an epiphany.

I've experienced it but I sure didn't hear it the way you did.

Tim
 
The recordings have already captured the hall sound with all its reflections, and the last thing one would want is to have the speakers reflect again. Hall set-up and speaker set-up are two different things.
 
GD

I have some excellent headphones Stax 009, Hifiman HE-6 and 560 and AUdeze LCD... I find the Stax stunning but seem to go to the HE-6 and these days more and more to the LCD... As I have woritten before . A good headphone is an excellent teacher. You learn to listen to the absence of the room, to lack of distortion and to purity in tonal reproduction ... Eminently enjoyable but kind of looking a t a football game with binoculars outside the stadium.. You see it all but lack the feel of it the tactile the sound of things coming from outside your head, of a real soundstage that would have believe even fro a few microsecond that people could well be in your listening room ... Speaking for me I always no I am listening to heapdhones. Oh Boy! They tell you everything that would go wrong in your reproduction chain... but .. something always amiss, at least for me. I can live with headphones for a long time butithe time has come to go back to speakers and multi-subs.
I would have liked a little more input on $30K systems but we don't seem to even want to navigate in those waters. Which reinforces my view that we have gotten too risk-adverse.
This thread has made me realize that, I also do not stray too far from the beaten path. I have not made much effort to audition some Salk speakers or Vapor Audio to name only those 2. I have remained in the safe side of Audio companies... Mosyt of the time, we seem to need some anointment by some Audio authority before venturing. I do understand we are talking about rather substantial sums but some of these out-of-the-beaten-path companies offer in-home audition some with free returns ... We need to shake ourselves a little bit more to have progress in our hobby ..

Getting back at the current turn of discussions... which I very much like being an ardent proponent of multi-subs in any Audio systems. Interestingly the thread has taken that turn and I do not mind one bit.

What are your listening biases? Source preference? Room? I know engineering nerd philes who also espouse the "swarm" or multi-sub approach popularized by Gedlee: Abe

I do believe the subsonic "information" added by subwoofers does effect sound staging, sense of ease, etc. I am just too lazy to use them (and what red blooded woman would tolerate them in a normal living space...)
 
The recordings have already captured the hall sound with all its reflections, and the last thing one would want is to have the speakers reflect again. Hall set-up and speaker set-up are two different things.

Maybe some classical and audiophile recordings, but the overwhelming majority of studio recordings, since around the mid 60s, have gotten their "room sound" from effects. Reverb and delay. And most of them, to my ears anyway, benefit from a bit of live listening room. Take it to the extreme - listen to speakers in an acoustically dead room and you'll hear the end game of what you're accomplishing by eliminating the room. You're just doing it incrementally.

Tim
 
It is the opposite actually. In a concert hall unless you are sitting way close to the orchestra, *all* that you hear are reflections. Indeed it is a fully diffused sound field and hence the reason its bass performance doesn't have the wild swings we get in our smaller rooms.

And which live music presentation has sound coming out of two points, i.e. two loudspeakers?


You will never get that diffused sound field in your small listening room. Your relationship to direct sound is far larger in a home listening space than in a performance hall. No way, no how can you emulate that in any way in your home.


No. Floor reflections are not good and should be absorbed above 500 Hz. They cause colorations. Ceiling reflections are debatable. You can use a diffuser to send them to the side wall to help with widening of the source image.

Actually, my seats in Boston Symphony Hall are row G, center aisle. I hear the direct sound of the front instruments in the orchestra long before I hear side reflections. And the distances are not at all comparable to what we have in domestic settings. Yes, one hears reflections in a symphony hall. But from my seat, it is hardly "ALL" that I hear. I have heard fully diffused systems in domestic listening rooms, and the sound is not for me, thank you. And that sound does not resemble what I have heard from live solo instruments in chamber settings.

For a similar perspective, you can read Al M.'s comments about his recent listening session in my house:

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?12853-Sublime-Sound/page10

Al has a very nice way of putting his thoughts down in writing. He and I have heard live solo cello performances together a few times and understand what it sounds like. I have heard few systems even begin to portray the sheer level of energy or timbral information that the cello, or piano, or violin present when heard live and fairly close. I do tend to prefer smaller scale performances in moderate sized halls or large domestic rooms. Chamber style.

Symphony scale is also nice, and I agree that a live performance can not be emulated in my home listening space, nor in anyone else's. I think most of us agree on that one.

We also agree that floor reflections are bad. If you put the speaker near the side walls of the room so that the midrange and tweeter are a similar distance from the side wall as they are from the floor, do you think those side wall reflections are beneficial? Could you explain exactly why you think floor reflections are bad, but side wall reflections which are not absorbed or diffused, and are close to the speakers, are good? That has not been my experience.
 
Maybe some classical and audiophile recordings, but the overwhelming majority of studio recordings, since around the mid 60s, have gotten their "room sound" from effects. Reverb and delay. And most of them, to my ears anyway, benefit from a bit of live listening room. Take it to the extreme - listen to speakers in an acoustically dead room and you'll hear the end game of what you're accomplishing by eliminating the room. You're just doing it incrementally.

Tim

Tim, I don't think that ack is advocating the complete elimination of the room. He is talking about absorbing the first refection point. We have all been in overly damped listening rooms. The sound is dead. I don't think many hear dispute that. I am talking about a balance. A room that sounds, pardon the dreaded descriptor, "natural". If a room sounds natural while conversing with others in it, then that is a pretty good sign. Speakers are of course, different. I prefer dampening first reflection points. I have tried diffusors in those locations, and did not like them as much.
 
Actually, my seats in Boston Symphony Hall are row G, center aisle. I hear the direct sound of the front instruments in the orchestra long before I hear side reflections. And the distances are not at all comparable to what we have in domestic settings. Yes, one hears reflections in a symphony hall. But from my seat, it is hardly "ALL" that I hear. I have heard fully diffused systems in domestic listening rooms, and the sound is not for me, thank you. And that sound does not resemble what I have heard from live solo instruments in chamber settings.

For a similar perspective, you can read Al M.'s comments about his recent listening session in my house:

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?12853-Sublime-Sound/page10

Al has a very nice way of putting his thoughts down in writing. He and I have heard live solo cello performances together a few times and understand what it sounds like. I have heard few systems even begin to portray the sheer level of energy or timbral information that the cello, or piano, or violin present when heard live and fairly close. I do tend to prefer smaller scale performances in moderate sized halls or large domestic rooms. Chamber style.

Symphony scale is also nice, and I agree that a live performance can not be emulated in my home listening space, nor in anyone else's. I think most of us agree on that one.

We also agree that floor reflections are bad. If you put the speaker near the side walls of the room so that the midrange and tweeter are a similar distance from the side wall as they are from the floor, do you think those side wall reflections are beneficial? Could you explain exactly why you think floor reflections are bad, but side wall reflections which are not absorbed or diffused, and are close to the speakers, are good? That has not been my experience.

Yes, well, Peter, I go regularly to Philadelphia Orchestra concerts in Verizon Hall. The problem with much of the reflected sound energy in any hall is that it is masked by the direct sound. You only hear reflections discretely if there is sufficient time delay, as in echo and reverb. Otherwise, you can only hear the shorter term reflections by their absence!! But, that is not something you can experimentally reproduce in the concert hall. Your ears simply do not have infinitely small time resolution. But, the reflections are there, with major effects on the sound we perceive. There are huge amounts of excellent empirical science on this. For starters, Google the Haas or Precedence Effect. There is much more.

Coming to this realization is a key reason I have switched almost exclusively to discretely recorded, Mch playback vs. stereo. For me, it brings me much closer to the live concert hall experience. Yet, it is often quite hard to tell you are listening in Mch, until you switch back to stereo. I have fooled many a first time listener in my room, telling them falsely that the surround speakers are just for movies. They think it is just a great sounding stereo. Then, I switch to stereo, everything collapses sonically, and they get it.
 
Actually, my seats in Boston Symphony Hall are row G, center aisle. I hear the direct sound of the front instruments in the orchestra long before I hear side reflections.
There is one direct sound, but countless indirect reflections. The energy of reflections overall is far higher than the one direct beam coming at you. The "Critical Distance" or Dc of Boston Symphony Hall is just 21 feet. That is the distance at which the power of the direct sound is equal to indirect. So even if you sat at 21 feet, fully half of the contributions you hear is from reverberations in the hall.

And the distances are not at all comparable to what we have in domestic settings. Yes, one hears reflections in a symphony hall. But from my seat, it is hardly "ALL" that I hear. I have heard fully diffused systems in domestic listening rooms, and the sound is not for me, thank you. And that sound does not resemble what I have heard from live solo instruments in chamber settings.
It is impossible to have fully diffused sound in home listening spaces. I think you are confusing a live room with a diffused room. They are very different things. A diffused room has no room modes. You are just not going to get there as the physical dimensions of the room won't allow it no matter how live it is.

We also agree that floor reflections are bad. If you put the speaker near the side walls of the room so that the midrange and tweeter are a similar distance from the side wall as they are from the floor, do you think those side wall reflections are beneficial?
Again that is SIBR, it is not side reflections. Side reflection is a triangle between you, the speaker and the wall where the reflection would happen. It is not just any surface next to the speaker.

Could you explain exactly why you think floor reflections are bad, but side wall reflections which are not absorbed or diffused, and are close to the speakers, are good? That has not been my experience.
It is based on research and listening tests. We have two ears and a brain that analyzes these things and arrives at different conclusions than simple visual model we have in our mind of how sound travels.

Huge amount of research has gone into effects of reflections and direction of sounds as we perceive them. Almost none are intuitive. With respect to floor reflections for example, there is excellent two-part paper in the Journal of Acoustic Society of America (ASA) titled, "Timbral Aspects of Reproduced Sound in Small Rooms" by So”ren Bech. As the name indicates he is researching whether the timbre or tonal quality of sounds change when they combine with reflections. With respect to the floor bounce, they indeed do. Here is a summary from abstract:

"The results have confirmed the findings of the first report that the first-order floor reflection is likely to
individually contribute to the timbre of reproduced noise. However, for a speech signal none of the
investigated reflections will contribute individually to the timbre. It is suggested that the threshold
of detection is determined by the spectral changes in the dominant frequency range of 500 Hz–2
kHz.
"


Hence the reason I said absorbing frequencies above 500 Hz is what is needed for the floor. And that is good news because relatively thick carpet would do that. Whereas if the spectrum changed when down much farther, you would have had to have blankets of many inches thick on your floor! Sometimes physics is on our side :).

He goes on to say:

"For increases in the level of individual reflections, the most likely to be audible is the
first-order floor reflection, for speech and noise
. For a noise signal, additional reflections from the
wall to the left and behind the listener also belong to this group."


Notice how for voices, the spectrum did not change with the left wall reflection whereas it does with floor.

Speaking of voices, research after research shows that our comprehension of speech increases with level of reflections. Let me repeat: the more reflections, the better we understand speech. Improving student learning is a big deal and has a ton of government funding behind it. And that is one of the main reasons this has been researched so much. And what is speech for us than the talent singing? Reflections increase the total sound energy and hence help us understand speech better (up to a point).

This is a *very* complex field. I am just touching on the surface. The key lesson again is not to use intuition. The perceptual system we have does not in any form or fashion yield itself to such analysis. Reflections are not distortions to annihilate a priori.
 
Sorry didn't mean to be pretentious just a genuine question as to why lateral reflections might be good and ceiling and floor reflections aren't.
Keith.

2 reasons...spatial, the perception of width and also the fact that the physical arrangement of drivers on the speaker baffle is usually vertical, which means path length differences from vertical reflections you don't have from side reflections. This leads to comb filtering in the crossover regions in vertical reflections, and timbral shift so there is a larger difference in the direct vs reflected sound.

Anyway, ack's post that the recording has spatial cues in it that you don't want to have altered or obscured by the room is right on. A good recording is capable of transporting you to the space it was recorded in, but when those details are masked the closest you'll come is having the event happen in your own, much smaller space. Conventional speakers are highly dependent on the right acoustic environment to achieve that level of performance, directive speakers less so.

Again, a lot of preference is acclimation, especially when you don't have much experience. Just like preferences for distortion, some people prefer the less accurate sound of more reflected vs direct sound because that's what they are used to. IMO, the ideal acoustic environment for hearing every detail in the recording possible involves far less side reflections than what people generally prefer, but people's preferences tend to change once they are used to something better.
 
There is one direct sound, but countless indirect reflections. The energy of reflections overall is far higher than the one direct beam coming at you. The "Critical Distance" or Dc of Boston Symphony Hall is just 21 feet. That is the distance at which the power of the direct sound is equal to indirect. So even if you sat at 21 feet, fully half of the contributions you hear is from reverberations in the hall.

A key point though, is that the brain locks onto the direct sound and mostly disregards the reflected sound if the delay is long enough, which is the case in a hall. Big difference from a home environment when that usually isn't the case.
 
A key point though, is that the brain locks onto the direct sound and mostly disregards the reflected sound if the delay is long enough, which is the case in a hall. Big difference from a home environment when that usually isn't the case.
???

i-wKXwcMt.png
 
The key lesson again is not to use intuition. The perceptual system we have does not in any form or fashion yield itself to such analysis. Reflections are not distortions to annihilate a priori.

Thanks for that Amir. I'm not using intuition. I have tried absorbing the first reflections, diffusing the first reflections and not using any acoustic treatment. I prefer absorption based on my experience with my speakers in my room. I am also not advocating over damping the room or eliminating all reflections. I am advocating a balance that sounds natural to my ears and is reminiscent of what I hear live. This is purely subjective. Yes, it does seem to be a complex topic.

It seems we both, as most members here, shape our systems' sound according to our preferences. I do it with my choice of equipment, media, and room treatments, and you seem to do it with a target curve in the digital realm at the source component and then feed that altered signal through the rest of your audio chain in an attempt to get correct sound by eliminating the contribution of the room. Both approaches seem valid and provide enjoyment.

Sailors, just like motor boaters, enjoy being out on the water.
 

About us

  • What’s Best Forum is THE forum for high end audio, product reviews, advice and sharing experiences on the best of everything else. This is THE place where audiophiles and audio companies discuss vintage, contemporary and new audio products, music servers, music streamers, computer audio, digital-to-analog converters, turntables, phono stages, cartridges, reel-to-reel tape machines, speakers, headphones and tube and solid-state amplification. Founded in 2010 What’s Best Forum invites intelligent and courteous people of all interests and backgrounds to describe and discuss the best of everything. From beginners to life-long hobbyists to industry professionals, we enjoy learning about new things and meeting new people, and participating in spirited debates.

Quick Navigation

User Menu