Is it possible to cover the whole spectrum, high SPL, low distortion with a 2-way?

I always want to think its going "out" with increasing directivity and if we keep voltage the same it will. Increasing directivity increases efficiency/sensitivity, on axis.
It, being the sound energy. Not so much "out" as "up"....








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This is the DI HR shows for my mock up horn, that has a very slightly higher cutoff (about 15hz off) and is round, but still tractrix. My horn is elliptical, so the high frequency DI might be closer to an even smaller round horn, and the slope of the DI more like below. The above is only ~3.5db per octave. ~1db/oct. Why am I quoting the slope of the DI? Because a flat DI isn't the only version of Smooth DI. Smooth transitions are the key.

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Just like IR... a speaker is really at the mercy of the room not anechoic measurements. Room changes effective DI. Higher frequency is much more readily absorbed then the lower frequencies.

For me the overall directivity is important. The higher the directivity the less important it is for it to be constant.
 
That's more true at LFs than HFs. At HFs we hear more of the direct sound since the ear processes these faster and the reverb field just adds spaciousness. At LFs the room almost completely dominates the situation. Hence, the anechoic response is very important at HFs, but less so at LFs.

Audio reproduction is complicated.
 
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That's more true at LFs than HFs. At HFs we hear more of the direct sound since the ear processes these faster and the reverb field just adds spaciousness.
I would say it adds room, nothing more or less... the spaciousness of the room is set in stone by the character of the room itself. Size, shape, treatment, contents, etc...

I guess by spaciousness you could be implying the same thing... 🤔
 
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I've heard recordings of acoustic instruments recorded in anechoic conditions, listening in headphones. Closest I'll get any time soon....
Sounded fine to me 🤣
Somewhere on the net there's a whole orchestra piece that's recorded instrument by instrument, in an anechoic chamber.
I have it on my computer, I'll share.
It just sounds super dry, what's the big deal? Do you want to hear reality or not lol.

I was able to experiment with my idea about duration versus perception. I pulled up an old track that I made, I found it OK but obviously far from a finished production. Slapped my reverb on it... after some adjustments of wetness, had a long, fairly neutral, resonant tail. The default setting of an IR hall preset, with ER removed, size setting maxed, duration high.. details details... checked and manicured the FR using pink noise and a 1/3oct RTA... which reminds me, I turned the "res" setting on the plug-in to its lowest setting this setting either accentuates or diminishes the resonate notes of the impulses.

I think at this moment I feel that it was the transient tones that became apparent off the bat. I was able to EQ two different snares and a kick with seemingly higher insight that I did not have before, due to the way that I was perceiving the signal with the exaggerated duration, when I switch back to normal listening I did enjoy the changes in EQ that I made...

I did some track balancing as well. I also felt like I could perceive the achievement or failure of punch, when adjusting side chained compression, using the kick as the controller. I improved the eq of a kick where as before the addition of the reverb I made... the issues where apparently there yet harder to diagnose...on headphones, regardless of the smoother FR headphones achieve in comparison to loudspeaker systems
 
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Some years back, Lidia, myself and Jean-Luc Ohl (a friend and DIYer from Paris) did a study on the effects of early reflections from side walls. We wanted to see if a near side walls had more effect on imaging than farther ones. A simulation of a source and a side-wall reflection was created and subjects (many, don't remember #) were asked to evaluate the image location. The subjects found this hard to do and the results had a lot of noise. While this noise prevented a statistically significant result, the trend was clearly that the near wall was the more detrimental to the image stability. They also indicated that the reflections pulled the image towards the reflection (not surprising.)

This room was exemplary of your findings:

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The rendering was so messed up that I had to dissect it to determine anything about the overall signature at all.
Something wasn't right in the mids/highs, which prompted me to wonder if there might be silver in the signal path.
Contrary to the assumption, this turned out to be the case: the voice coils were silver.
 
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Thats not what I'm suggesting, I'm saying that there is a sound, without the room. Its sound is, unique. Rooms, are inconsistent. Analysis of the sound without and with room, is productive, in my opinion. Productive for what exactly? Not sure yet, I just know; The more you know 🌈

I find it very interesting, my experiment with long duration reverb. In my opinion, as long as the spectral decay is balanced, increasing the duration of the signal, by exaggerating decay, increases our perception to tone.
The only thing worse than an out of tune or tonally imbalanced sound is 5 more seconds of it.

"It just sounds super dry, what's the big deal? Do you want to hear reality or not lol."

I'm afraid no classical instrument has ever been made with performance in an anechoic chamber in mind ;)
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I'm saying that there is a sound, without the room. Its sound is, unique. Rooms, are inconsistent. Analysis of the sound without and with room, is productive, in my opinion. Productive for what exactly?
True enough, the anechoic sound is vastly different than the in-room sound, but to me, it's not as pleasant. Granted a good room design is required for the room to be an enhancement.

I do find the differences interesting, which is why I have done the direct/reverberant field testing many times, but I always come away preferring some spaciousness.
 
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So I found my stash of anechoic recordings. I loaded up "Bruckner"....all 37 tracks worth. I listened to the raw recordings and I listened with various reverbs on the master. So this isn't literally anechoic in the sense that I am not in an anechoic chamber. I am in headphones. Non the less, I very dry environment at the least. Without a reverb, the music sounded dry. It sounded like..... there was no... reverb, Big surprise huh. It doesn't sound bad. Just dry. I am listening now.. Switching back and forth from anechoic to various concert hall IR's reminded me of the pieces I played in high school wind symphony... going from the practice room to the performance hall...... I also was reminded of playing outside.... Trumpet is very dry in a very large open flat field. Central Michigan University had plenty of it, for us to do our thing, during band camp.

Attached are mp3's of the Reverbed and Reverbless performances. The IR is from the Yerba Buena Theatre in San Fran.
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