Member
Joined 2009
I disagree. Wide dispersion speakers can be extremely detailed on good recordings. The Linkwitz Orions are a case in point.
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On a few occasions I would play a new song and be convinced there's something wrong with my stereo. I would start diagnosing the problem and discover with surprise that there's nothing wrong and well recorded material sounds great.
The phenomena of mastering music for low-hi systems is quite interesting and deserves attention. This is usually done with heavy processing which suggests that extra noise on the recording can effectively fool our auditory system into accepting lower levels of clarity. We are probably sensitive to disturbances at particular frequency regions but we are less susceptible to noise all over the spectrum.
The Orion's are dipoles in the bass and midrange. Below ~600Hz they're considerably more directional than typical narrow baffle "wide" dispersion speakers, and have a 90 degree off axis cancellation right through the bass and midrange, which may or may not align with the ipsilateral wall reflection depending on toe in angle.
Not a good example to use when citing "wide dispersion" as a virtue
Dipoles are a special case, having a completely different pattern to monopoles, and can't really be directly compared or characterised as "narrow" or "wide" in relation to monopoles.
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Member
Joined 2009
The Orion's are dipoles in the bass and midrange. Below ~600Hz they're considerably more directional than typical narrow baffle "wide" dispersion speakers, and have a 90 degree off axis cancellation right through the bass and midrange, which may or may not align with the ipsilateral wall reflection depending on toe in angle.
Not a good example to use when citing "wide dispersion" as a virtue
Dipoles have a completely different pattern to monopoles, and can't really be directly compared or characterised as "narrow" or "wide" in relation to monopoles.
My understanding is that Linkwitz advocates wide dispersion throughout his web site. He states very often that the Orion sounds almost identical to the Plutos and he has hard time distinguishing between the two. If I understand correctly he aims at ample illumination of the untreated room.
However the Linkwitz Pluto is often regarded as virtually indistinguishable from the Linkwitz Orion on all but the most dynamic material (several owners of both speakers have told me this) yet one is regarded as an omni the other is mostly dipole. Pluto does not lose out on detail only on weight and scale when trying to fill a large room.
As a user of Pluto and an owner of many, many box speakers and some electrostatics over the years I can say that Pluto is extremely detailed and sometimes brutally revealing loudspeaker, certainly it is not a cuddly sweet romancer, Pluto picks up everything. That said I listen in or around the nearfield. listening further away only lessens the loudspeaker effect of pinpoint soundstaging, however detail retrieval is as clear from a healthy distance.
I wonder if the more directional speakers are more popular in larger living rooms where listeners will normally be listening to more of the room.
As a user of Pluto and an owner of many, many box speakers and some electrostatics over the years I can say that Pluto is extremely detailed and sometimes brutally revealing loudspeaker, certainly it is not a cuddly sweet romancer, Pluto picks up everything. That said I listen in or around the nearfield. listening further away only lessens the loudspeaker effect of pinpoint soundstaging, however detail retrieval is as clear from a healthy distance.
I wonder if the more directional speakers are more popular in larger living rooms where listeners will normally be listening to more of the room.
I didn't keep track of any links. Sorry. I must have gone to over 100 links and downloaded about 100 songs. After listening to them I decided most were pretty bad for one reason or another. After two levels of sorting, I've got about 25 good samples. About 10 of these are what I would call very well recorded. Most of them are that boring kind of music that is designed to show off or exaggerate the binaural effect, at the expense of the song being something you want to hear again. You might be better off creating a head mic and recording local bands yourself. It isn't as hard as you think. I did it once with $17 Radio Shack 1/2 inch omni electret mics and an 8 inch flower pot for the head, aiming the mics forward on either side, puff balls (wind screens) touching the pot, and the results were quite good. Positioning the head mic is the trick. Get it close in to the musicians, maybe hung from the ceiling, like some pros do when recording orchestras with so called tree mics. I'd email them to you but the file size is about 600M. I don't know how to email a file that big.
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The first version of the Linkwitz Orion just had one front firing tweeter. Recent versions also have a rear firing tweeter. I heard the recent version with two tweets and was quite thrilled with how a high quality recording of the Portland Chamber Orchestra sounded. The midrange and treble was second to none.The Orion's are dipoles in the bass and midrange. Below ~600Hz they're considerably more directional than typical narrow baffle "wide" dispersion speakers, and have a 90 degree off axis cancellation right through the bass and midrange, which may or may not align with the ipsilateral wall reflection depending on toe in angle.
Not a good example to use when citing "wide dispersion" as a virtue
Dipoles are a special case, having a completely different pattern to monopoles, and can't really be directly compared or characterised as "narrow" or "wide" in relation to monopoles.
Because of the radiation pattern (nulls at the sides below about 600HZ), they have real good imaging at the sweet spot, but if you're significantly off axis, the rear output reflection off the front wall of the listening room fills in what would be a void (very uneven response due to driver off axis inconsistency), with a relatively smooth and more ambient kind of sound. The speaker itself is no longer in the way of the rear output reflection path. In a way, you get to have your cake and eat it too. The ambience lovers get their fill (pun intended), and the imaging nerds at the sweet spot get their little thrill. Maybe you could argue that this is the ideal radiation pattern for speakers in general...
Didn't Elias somewhere post that his opinion is that the ideal radiation pattern is a directional low/midrange and a wide dispersing tweeter?
EDIT: Found it: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/161299-directivity-dipole-tweeters-10.html#post2418749
An advantage of wide dispersion above about 1 kHz is that the stereo crosstalk dip becomes less audible compared to very narrow dispersion speakers (although a centre speaker fixes this problem better; and it removes HRTF-colouration of a phantom source).
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"spatially homogenise the pinna cues" - doesn't make sense to me, what will it result in?
What is needed is a center speaker.
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The other 50 % of the population who do not perceive phantom images at high freqs no longer need to suffer from perceiving the two tweeters !
- Elias
If you put on Opera music, you'll be hearing Phantom of the Opera...
Apparently the ear does quite a bit of compression. This suggests that if you listen to speakers at low levels (just loud enough to hear most everything), the effective ratio of direct to room reflected sounds will be significantly higher than when the program content is played back at a high level. Comparing the two would make more clear what the room does to the sound. If the difference is big, it could be argued that more directional speakers might work better.
Apparently the ear does quite a bit of compression. This suggests that if you listen to speakers at low levels (just loud enough to hear most everything), the effective ratio of direct to room reflected sounds will be significantly higher than when the program content is played back at a high level. Comparing the two would make more clear what the room does to the sound. If the difference is big, it could be argued that more directional speakers might work better.
Hey Elias, let's continue from post #1404
additional question - have You got any ideas for practical implementation of Your ideal setup - directional <1 kHz, stereolitic >1 kHz?
You're jumping to conclusions without hard facts. It might be the room, the speakers, anatomical features, learned, etc. We - and that includes you too - simpy don't know. I'm fine if it turns out that it's true that people perceive phantom sources differently but it doesn't change the paradigm for the other 50%.
My question is still unanswered: what perception do "spatially homogenised pinna cues" lead to? I'd think to even more sources than just two single tweeters, no high frequency localization at all or to a multitude of sources coming from the same direction as any reflection that is loud enough to override precedence.
By the way, how do you perceive instruments like a hi-hat in a standard stereo setup?
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When recording engineers mic a hi-hat or other cymbals, they usually put the mic above, rather than at the side, which is theoretically more what you'd hear if you were there in person. My far the most sound output from cymbals, and some of the other drums, is straight up (or down). So much of what we hear with drums, especially cymbals, is what bounces off the ceiling and perhaps off other walls. This might be why many people really liked the sound of the Infinity Walsh tweeters. They radiated 360 degrees, AND straight up. I think that's the one frequency range that would necessarily benefit from having the so-called "flooder". This concept might be less desireable with Classical music.
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