Review of the Salk Veracity HT3 loudspeaker

[highfigh]

Dennis- re: "I think you can see from the unfiltered plot that the gently rising top end response is the least of your problems. That huge dip and peak at the bottom end will show up in some form with just about any tweeter, dome or ribbon. It's caused by diffraction effects from sound waves <#> hitting the sides of the baffle and then reflecting back to cancel or reinforce waves that are just emerging."- what is your opinion of using some kind of soft covering on a cabinet with rounded-over corners and/or curved sides?

 

[Dennis Murphy]

Dennis- re: "I think you can see from the unfiltered plot that the gently rising top end response is the least of your problems. That huge dip and peak at the bottom end will show up in some form with just about any tweeter, dome or ribbon. It's caused by diffraction effects from sound waves <#> hitting the sides of the baffle and then reflecting back to cancel or reinforce waves that are just emerging."- what is your opinion of using some kind of soft covering on a cabinet with rounded-over corners and/or curved sides?

Hi The HT3 has the usual roundover on the corners. The frequencies that are at issue at the bottom end won't be all that affected by a more aggressive roundover, and there isn't really a problem at the crossover frequency I'm using with 4th order acoustic slopes. There isn't anything left to treat with, say, felt on the surface.

 

[highfigh]

Hi The HT3 has the usual roundover on the corners. The frequencies that are at issue at the bottom end won't be all that affected by a more aggressive roundover, and there isn't really a problem at the crossover frequency I'm using with 4th order acoustic slopes. There isn't anything left to treat with, say, felt on the surface.

So, what is the best way to minimize the effects of diffraction- calculate the wavelengths relative to the box size and measure the response to verify? What is the best way to measure this without having a true anechoic chamber?

 

[TLS Guy]

Hi The HT3 has the usual roundover on the corners. The frequencies that are at issue at the bottom end won't be all that affected by a more aggressive roundover, and there isn't really a problem at the crossover frequency I'm using with 4th order acoustic slopes. There isn't anything left to treat with, say, felt on the surface.

I have been out all day. I have just come back from a wonderful concert at St. Mary's Basilica Minneapolis, given by the Rose ensemble based in St. Paul and Voces8 from London. It was a superb concert. But now I see the discussion is turning interesting on my return

I see after filtering the G2 is rolling off at 4 kHz.

This is the unfiltered response of the SEAS Exel W 18.

The sudden 4.4 kHz break up mode is what makes this a difficult driver to use, and a notch filter mandatory.

Now the 3db down point of your filtered G2 is 3 kHz. Now that is the start of the base of the large magnitude 4.4 kHz peak of the SEAS driver. Added to which you have a huge peak in the tweeter response centered on 1.5 kHz.

So it seems to me the lower frequency of the base of your notch filter is right at your crossover point. Added to which you have the tweeter peak, not owned up to in the manufacturer's specification, to deal with.

This gives rise to a concern that what was bothering me might not actually have been entirely due to the ribbon, but related to the break up mode of the Exel driver also

I hate to ask you to divulge proprietary secrets, but this has got me downright curious, as I would be highly reluctant to work with that set of circumstances to say the least. So you are a brave man. I would have declared that unpromising and moved on.

This is what makes speakers so interesting, as your set of decisions seems, at first glance, to be very different from mine, when using that SEAS driver. But may be not.

I have composite fourth order slopes centered on 2.5 kHz. The SEAS W 18s have a second order electrical slope transitioning to third. Actually roll off truly starts first order at around 400 Hz before the rising woofer response. There is a notch filter centered on 4.4 kHz. The tweeter slopes are third order electrical transitioning to second. This makes a fourth order crossover centered at around 2.5 kHz when combined with driver roll offs. I'm helped by the fact that the tweeters acoustic roll off does not start until 2 kHz.

The rest of the crossovers in my speakers are active. The lower 10" SEAS is cut rolls off second order electrical above 80 Hz. The upper 10" driver has its response extended to provide the step response compensation. The dual lines are tuned half an octave apart, which was a trick I leaned from John Wright. So my SEAS drivers have an entirely acoustic roll off on the bottom end.

Anyhow I'm glad I have myself to please. I think to be truly happy with a speaker, you have to design it yourself, to avoid the speaker ills that really bug you and provide the sort of sound stage that is to your liking.

 

[Dennis Murphy]

It's probably best not to turn this into a technical discussion, but I will answer your main questions. The W18 break-up is centered at 5.2 kHz in the Salk cabinet, and is very responsive to a simple trap circuit. But you are quite correct that the lower you cross the W18, the better. The crossover point is around 2.2kHz on the HT3, which requires steep slopes to keep the G2ribbon out of trouble at the bottom end. I've attached (I think) the simulated response showing the filtered and combined response of all the drivers. I cut the lower frequency response at 100 Hz, because at that point my measurement program starts showing room effects not inherent in the drivers (hence the bump at the very bottom--and you don't want to even see the mess that is a real room below that point). The main woofer break-up point is suppressed more than 30 dB.

As for the tweeter hump that the manufacturer "isn't owning up to," that's an artifact of the actual baffle it's placed in. All tweeter manufacturers show you the infinite baffle response to get rid of those diffraction effects that will vary wildly depending on baffle dimnesions, shapes, and roundover. So I can't fault G2 for following standard industry practice.

 

[Dennis Murphy]

So, what is the best way to minimize the effects of diffraction- calculate the wavelengths relative to the box size and measure the response to verify? What is the best way to measure this without having a true anechoic chamber?

Fortunately there's software that will allow you to see the diffraction effects for a given size tweeter placed in a given location in a given baffle size. Jeff Bagby has an excellent program.

 

[tonmeister]

To check whether our trained listeners are biased towards a certain type of sound quality, we routinely use people from outside Harman to evaluate our products. The biggest study employed over 350 people and as a group they preferred the same loudspeaker products as our trained listening panel. I would post a link to that study, but I haven't given the prerequisite 5 postings to allow links to be included.

Cheers
Sean Olive
Director of Acoustic Research
Harman International

 

[TLS Guy]

It's probably best not to turn this into a technical discussion, but I will answer your main questions. The W18 break-up is centered at 5.2 kHz in the Salk cabinet, and is very responsive to a simple trap circuit. But you are quite correct that the lower you cross the W18, the better. The crossover point is around 2.2kHz on the HT3, which requires steep slopes to keep the G2ribbon out of trouble at the bottom end. I've attached (I think) the simulated response showing the filtered and combined response of all the drivers. I cut the lower frequency response at 100 Hz, because at that point my measurement program starts showing room effects not inherent in the drivers (hence the bump at the very bottom--and you don't want to even see the mess that is a real room below that point). The main woofer break-up point is suppressed more than 30 dB.

As for the tweeter hump that the manufacturer "isn't owning up to," that's an artifact of the actual baffle it's placed in. All tweeter manufacturers show you the infinite baffle response to get rid of those diffraction effects that will vary wildly depending on baffle dimnesions, shapes, and roundover. So I can't fault G2 for following standard industry practice.

Thanks for that post Dennis. As I said may be our approaches are not very different and the end result the same. My mids start rolling off at 1200 Hz and the tweeter around 4 kHz. Your mid starts rolling off at 1k Hz, which puts your crossover 300 Hz below mine. However both of us end up with drivers 24 db down an octave either side of crossover.

So the major difference seems that you used a ribbon, and I used a soft dome.

I was playing the speaker at a very conservative level, but it is possible that the tube amp was clipping at that level, but I doubt it.

I have to say the bass was excellent, but I had a hunch the bass would be even more solid with a more potent amp. A very nice speaker, and being a small company, being able to offer it with ribbon or dome allows your customers to choose their poison.

Thanks for all your comments. The bottom line is that that speaker is very good value for money. There are very few speakers in that class, and especially at that price.

 

[Matt34]

To check whether our trained listeners are biased towards a certain type of sound quality, we routinely use people from outside Harman to evaluate our products. The biggest study employed over 350 people and as a group they preferred the same loudspeaker products as our trained listening panel. I would post a link to that study, but I haven't given the prerequisite 5 postings to allow links to be included.

Cheers
Sean Olive
Director of Acoustic Research
Harman International

Please, don't be shy.

 

[tonmeister]

I find it interesting that we search for the most "realistic" sounding systems when the whole recording process is a series of steps aimed at making a realistic-sounding recording of the sounds that were produced in a space, often using a large number of microphones, when the listener's room can't possibly be the same except by a huge coincidence or some obsessive act.

Yes, but the recordings made in Carnegie Hall are made over loudspeakers in small rooms. Therefore, as consumers all we have to do is choose loudspeakers (and perhaps rooms) that are similar in performance in order to hear what the artist intended. Also, it is much easier to recreate the sense of a large space in a small room through multichannel reproduction than vice versa. You can get a sense of intimacy in your home theatre which you can't get when listening to a performance in Carnegie Hall or watching a film at you local Cineplex.

It doesn't stop us, though. Our opinions are based on so many things that one "best speaker in the whole, wide world" may sound like absolute garbage in the majority of listening rooms. I play guitar and have been astounded by how similar the sounds on some recordings are to my guitar and amp sitting near my speakers and other than the fact that the brand and model are the same, everything else is absolutely different. On the other hand, having been close to drums and cymbals in live situations, I do find them to be fatiguing but that's usually because of the acoustics in that location. Other times, it's just the drummer/percussionist. Overall, I want a balance of realism and "easy to listen to". Nothing could be worse than the sound being totally realistic and hard to listen to for any length of time.

If the "best speaker in the whole, wide world" sounds like absolute garbage in the majority of listening rooms, then it's not the "best speaker" but rather more likely the "worst speaker in the whole, wide world". Good speakers generally sound good in most rooms. It's only below the transition frequency (300 Hs or so depending on the size of the room) where the room largely determines how good the speaker sounds, and there judicious placement, equalization and multiple subwoofers can fix those problems.

Most instruments don't sound very good when you're sitting very close to them in dead recording studios since you are only hearing a narrow slice of its spectrum. Instruments have complex frequency=dependent radiation patterns,, and you need to put them in decent (reflective) rooms to capture their full timbral palette.

Cheers
Sean

 

[highfigh]

Yes, but the recordings made in Carnegie Hall are made over loudspeakers in small rooms. Therefore, as consumers all we have to do is choose loudspeakers (and perhaps rooms) that are similar in performance in order to hear what the artist intended. Also, it is much easier to recreate the sense of a large space in a small room through multichannel reproduction than vice versa. You can get a sense of intimacy in your home theatre which you can't get when listening to a performance in Carnegie Hall or watching a film at you local Cineplex.

If the "best speaker in the whole, wide world" sounds like absolute garbage in the majority of listening rooms, then it's not the "best speaker" but rather more likely the "worst speaker in the whole, wide world". Good speakers generally sound good in most rooms. It's only below the transition frequency (300 Hs or so depending on the size of the room) where the room largely determines how good the speaker sounds, and there judicious placement, equalization and multiple subwoofers can fix those problems.

Most instruments don't sound very good when you're sitting very close to them in dead recording studios since you are only hearing a narrow slice of its spectrum. Instruments have complex frequency=dependent radiation patterns,, and you need to put them in decent (reflective) rooms to capture their full timbral palette.

Cheers
Sean

"Yes, but the recordings made in Carnegie Hall are made over loudspeakers in small rooms."

Do you mean 'played'?

I used quotes on "best speakers..." because so many speaker manufacturers' write advertising copy that tells people they make the best- I probably should have put 'supposedly' ahead of that.

But, as a manufacturer, what is the goal of the product- make speakers that sound good in rooms that are common or make them so they sound best in rooms that are rare and very expensive for most people to build? A lot more speakers will be sold if people don't have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be satisfied with their purchase. I have to assume that's why so many speakers used to come with level controls on the mids and/or tweeters. I can't think of many speakers that sound good in a room that's all hard, flat, parallel surfaces but I can think of a lot that don't really sound good in rooms that can be found in a large number of houses, even though they're supposed to be really good speakers.

Dead recording spaces, as we know, are for producers who want to control every aspect of the finished product by adding their version of "space" or "ambiance", electronically (or by micing a speaker in a reverberant space later). That's what I meant in the first part you quoted. Recordings are really an illusion of sound, although I know some people try to get the most natural sound in jazz and classical recordings by using fewer mics of extremely high quality in various configurations and at various distances and adding more or less of the far mics to control the sound of spaciousness.

While people who frequent forums like this one are often interested in experimentation in order to get the best sound, I have to think the vast majority of people who spend the money for speakers in the upper middle of the price range want to plop them down and have good sound with a minimum of tweaking.

Since you mentioned the fact that most speakers sound fine down to about 300Hz and this is more a topic for a separate thread but I have to wonder why receivers with Audyssey, YPAO, etc only have 1 octave resolution for their equalizers. If problems in the ≤300Hz is the hardest range to solve, why don't they use 1/3 octave EQ up to 300HZ, or parametric EQ, with sliding center frequency and variable Q?

 

[tonmeister]

"Yes, but the recordings made in Carnegie Hall are made over loudspeakers in small rooms."

Do you mean 'played'?

I meant that when the recordings are being "made" (i.e microphones selected and placed, balanced, mixed, equalized, etc) this is done while monitoring them through loudspeakers, typically in a small control room. If you look at the most popular professional monitor loudspeakers used (e.g. JBL LSR or Genelec,etc), their frequency response is wide, flat on-axis and smooth off-axis. Therefore, it stands to reason that these recordings will sound best when reproduced over similar loudspeakers.

I used quotes on "best speakers..." because so many speaker manufacturers' write advertising copy that tells people they make the best- I probably should have put 'supposedly' ahead of that.

Yes, everyone says their loudspeakers are the best, but few companies can provide any hard data or evidence to prove it. Some are clearly deluding themselves or simply lying. The sad thing is that loudspeaker science is sufficiently mature today that a set of technical measurements exists that can quickly indicate how good the loudspeaker sounds. But the loudspeaker manufacturers generally don't want consumers to know this.

But, as a manufacturer, what is the goal of the product- make speakers that sound good in rooms that are common or make them so they sound best in rooms that are rare and very expensive for most people to build? A lot more speakers will be sold if people don't have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be satisfied with their purchase. I have to assume that's why so many speakers used to come with level controls on the mids and/or tweeters. I can't think of many speakers that sound good in a room that's all hard, flat, parallel surfaces but I can think of a lot that don't really sound good in rooms that can be found in a large number of houses, even though they're supposed to be really good speakers.

I can't speaker for other manufacturers, but our engineering goal is to make the loudspeaker as accurate as possible in as many rooms as possible, given the constraints in its design and cost. If the loudspeaker has good on-axis response, smooth off-axis response and directivity, then it will sound good above 200-300 Hz no matter where you sit in the room, regardless of how reflective the room is. This much is well known. Below about 300 Hz, the room will largely dictate how good the bass is over the listening area. The dimensions of the room, stiffness of the walls and placement of the loudspeakers/listeners are the critical factors.

If one subwoofer is used then you can equalize the acoustical interactions for one listening spot. If you use multiple subwoofers you can get good sound over a wider listening area.

Dead recording spaces, as we know, are for producers who want to control every aspect of the finished product by adding their version of "space" or "ambiance", electronically (or by micing a speaker in a reverberant space later). That's what I meant in the first part you quoted. Recordings are really an illusion of sound, although I know some people try to get the most natural sound in jazz and classical recordings by using fewer mics of extremely high quality in various configurations and at various distances and adding more or less of the far mics to control the sound of spaciousness.

I think you are mostly referring to pop recordings. Many jazz and most classical recordings are made in reflective rooms. I agree that many recordings (nearly all pop ones) are artificial close mic/pan pot creations/illusions. Whether or not the recordings are intended to sound real or artificial, is up to the recording engineer and artist -- not the loudspeaker company. Our job is not to editorialize the art but rather to accurately reproduce it. This cannot be easily done unless there are standards that define the playback chain both where the recordings are made and where they are reproduced.

While people who frequent forums like this one are often interested in experimentation in order to get the best sound, I have to think the vast majority of people who spend the money for speakers in the upper middle of the price range want to plop them down and have good sound with a minimum of tweaking.

Agreed. If you buy decent loudspeakers with decent automated room correction you are 99% of the way there. The problem is that most room correction systems require way too much tweaking to get your there, and some can even more your audio system sound worse.

Since you mentioned the fact that most speakers sound fine down to about 300Hz and this is more a topic for a separate thread but I have to wonder why receivers with Audyssey, YPAO, etc only have 1 octave resolution for their equalizers. If problems in the ≤300Hz is the hardest range to solve, why don't they use 1/3 octave EQ up to 300HZ, or parametric EQ, with sliding center frequency and variable Q?

I'm not sure you are correct about the resolution of the receivers mentioned. But clearly 1/1-octave or 1/3-octave resolution filters with fixed center frequencies are completely inadequate for the task as I have shown in some previous AES papers. Such room equalizers are toys, and incapable of solving real-world acoustical problems between loudspeakers and rooms.

Cheers
Sean

 

[AJinFLA]

To check whether our trained listeners are biased towards a certain type of sound quality, we routinely use people from outside Harman to evaluate our products. The biggest study employed over 350 people and as a group they preferred the same loudspeaker products as our trained listening panel. I would post a link to that study, but I haven't given the prerequisite 5 postings to allow links to be included.

Cheers
Sean Olive
Director of Acoustic Research
Harman International

Hi, Sean (welcome aboard)

In these studies with your loudspeakers in the Harman room, how many of the competing loudspeakers were piston source, first order gradient systems?
Was it a test of all source types available, or mainly those most likely to compete market wise with your products?

Below about 300 Hz, the room will largely dictate how good the bass is over the listening area. The dimensions of the room, stiffness of the walls and placement of the loudspeakers/listeners will be the factors here.

If one subwoofer is used then you can equalize the acoustical interactions for one listening spot. If you use multiple subwoofers you can get good sound over a wider listening area.

I asked Dr Geddes the same question as I'll ask you. How do you employ multi-source spatial smoothing to 300hz and avoid localization issues?
TIA

cheers,

AJ

 

[Swerd]

Those with sharp eyes may have noticed that I should have said, 3 ohms impedance.

One of you did notice. Thanks

And the sharp-eyed monkey who first told me was indeed Alex.

 

[TLS Guy]

We are now off topic. However I should state right away that I do not listen to pop music.

For classical music minimalist mic techniques sound the best on good speakers. However minimalist mic techniques can sound very poor on poor speakers I have noticed.

I made hundreds of recordings for the Public radio station over many years.

The vast majority were made with my Neumann SM 69 FET stereo condenser microphone. This results in an intensity difference recording rather than the more usual phase difference recording.

I used to used either crossed figure of 8 or the MS technique, The the figure of eight sideways to the players, and the other capsule set to omni. I used the MS most often as mono radio listeners would have a perfect mono signal and the figure of 8 capsule is canceled in mono.

I think this type of technique gives the most accurate playback on good speakers in rooms of any size.

You can download a CD of a recording of mine using this technique here.

Or if it is easier I can send you one Sean.

 

[tonmeister]

Hi, Sean (welcome aboard)

In these studies with your loudspeakers in the Harman room, how many of the competing loudspeakers were piston source, first order gradient systems?
Was it a test of all source types available, or mainly those most likely to compete market wise with your products?

The majority of loudspeakers we test are what we produce (direct radiator with and w/o constant DI horns) and compete against. I have tested some electrostatic, magnetic planar, distributed mode types, and models with unusual directional characteristics (line sources, 180 degree radiation via acoustic lens, omni-directional, bi-pole, dipole).

I asked Dr Geddes the same question as I'll ask you. How do you employ multi-source spatial smoothing to 300hz and avoid localization issues?
TIA

cheers,

AJ

I'm not quite sure what you mean. We do employ spatial averaging in our anechoic and in-room measurement curves to remove and separate diffraction effects from resonances.

Cheers
Sean
Audio Musings

 

[Dennis Murphy]

Hi Sean Thanks for the many useful comments. One subject in particular has always bugged me as very minor speaker designer. I certainly agree that smooth on and off-axis response is a top priority, and I work as hard as I can to get rid of off-axis flares in the tweeter response. But if we confine ourselves to vertically arrayed driver configurations (and that's the vast bulk of the market), then we're really only talking about smooth off-axis horizontal response. For the most popular crossover designs, vertical response will be anything but smooth in the crossover region(s), and that should be reflected in the power response. But that raises another question--how does the ear process more direct arrival times vs. more delayed room reflections with different frequency profiles? A really good model of human hearing is critical to understanding just how important off-axis (vertical and horizontal) deviations are. All of which is to say that, although we have a pretty good understanding of what goes into accurate speaker design, we're still a good piece short of a complete understanding.

 

[highfigh]

I meant that when the recordings are being "made" (i.e microphones selected and placed, balanced, mixed, equalized, etc) this is done while monitoring them through loudspeakers, typically in a small control room. If you look at the most popular professional monitor loudspeakers used (e.g. JBL LSR or Genelec,etc), their frequency response is wide, flat on-axis and smooth off-axis. Therefore, it stands to reason that these recordings will sound best when reproduced over similar loudspeakers.

Yes, everyone says their loudspeakers are the best, but few companies can provide any hard data or evidence to prove it. Some are clearly deluding themselves or simply lying. The sad thing is that loudspeaker science is sufficiently mature today that a set of technical measurements exists that can quickly indicate how good the loudspeaker sounds. But the loudspeaker manufacturers generally don't want consumers to know this.

I can't speaker for other manufacturers, but our engineering goal is to make the loudspeaker as accurate as possible in as many rooms as possible, given the constraints in its design and cost. If the loudspeaker has good on-axis response, smooth off-axis response and directivity, then it will sound good above 200-300 Hz no matter where you sit in the room, regardless of how reflective the room is. This much is well known. Below about 300 Hz, the room will largely dictate how good the bass is over the listening area. The dimensions of the room, stiffness of the walls and placement of the loudspeakers/listeners are the critical factors.

If one subwoofer is used then you can equalize the acoustical interactions for one listening spot. If you use multiple subwoofers you can get good sound over a wider listening area.

I think you are mostly referring to pop recordings. Many jazz and most classical recordings are made in reflective rooms. I agree that many recordings (nearly all pop ones) are artificial close mic/pan pot creations/illusions. Whether or not the recordings are intended to sound real or artificial, is up to the recording engineer and artist -- not the loudspeaker company. Our job is not to editorialize the art but rather to accurately reproduce it. This cannot be easily done unless there are standards that define the playback chain both where the recordings are made and where they are reproduced.

Agreed. If you buy decent loudspeakers with decent automated room correction you are 99% of the way there. The problem is that most room correction systems require way too much tweaking to get your there, and some can even more your audio system sound worse.

I'm not sure you are correct about the resolution of the receivers mentioned. But clearly 1/1-octave or 1/3-octave resolution filters with fixed center frequencies are completely inadequate for the task as I have shown in some previous AES papers. Such room equalizers are toys, and incapable of solving real-world acoustical problems between loudspeakers and rooms.

Cheers
Sean

Your first paragraph has to do with one of the points I want to make- those recordings are monitored/mixed using near-field speakers, right? I can't think of a mobile recording facility that's large enough to act like a typical room, and actually, I don't think it should, so large monitors would seem to be wrong for that application. Then, it may be mastered using a wider variety of speakers in a different room, in an attempt to match some of the situations that could likely occur.

"The sad thing is that loudspeaker science is sufficiently mature today that a set of technical measurements exists that can quickly indicate how good the loudspeaker sounds. But the loudspeaker manufacturers generally don't want consumers to know this."

Pffft! How would they sell their speakers if they showed how theirs stack up? That's just crazy talk!

"Below about 300 Hz, the room will largely dictate how good the bass is over the listening area. The dimensions of the room, stiffness of the walls and placement of the loudspeakers/listeners are the critical factors."

I'm dealing with this very issue in a home theater right now (big hump from about 60Hz to ~130Hz). Three walls were foamed and insulated on the backside and the right wall is like a kick drum head. I assumed it had been constructed the same way but when I pounded on it to compare with the others, I found that it resonates for far too long, so I'm going to open it up and see exactly what insulation was used. Then, I'll add a layer of drywall to the backside and see how the response changes. I don't want to try to deal with it electronically because, while the amplitude of the problems will change, the distribution won't and when I placed absorbers next to the row of seats, it smoothed out considerably, even if the RTA didn't show as much improvement.

Unfortunately, this client has a Denon AVR-3805 that he won't be replacing yet, because the War Department said so. It only has 1 octave resolution.

"Our job is not to editorialize the art but rather to accurately reproduce it. This cannot be easily done unless there are standards that define the playback chain both where the recordings are made and where they are reproduced."

I think it was Duke Ellington who said, "There are two kinds of music. Good and bad." and I think it would be a public service for speakers to turn off when bad music is played through them.

The proliferation of home studios and the wide variation in setup, equipment and sound quality make it hard for any repeatability or consistency to exist in recordings, IMO. It used to be that if a record was recorded on the West Coast, it had a certain sound and if it was done in NYC, it had a completely different signature. Then, people started recording in their bedrooms and basements, using whatever speakers they had and it became chaos. Some of the more glaring differences in sonic signature are Blue Note, Verve, EMI, CTI, Capitol. Warner and ECM.

I worked for a contractor who did a lot of LDS facilities and when the final setup was done with EQ/analysis, he used JBL RTA software and White equalizers to get Atlas ceiling speakers to produce a really nice, smooth curve that was very close to flat. When we walked around the rooms, it sounded like the person was speaking from the podium without amplification.

 

[highfigh]

I know you asked Sean specifically but in your question "But that raises another question--how does the ear process more direct arrival times vs. more delayed room reflections with different frequency profiles?", everything I have read states that the sound that gets to the ears first determines the localization cues.

I need to dig out my Master Acoustics Handbook that's almost 30 years old. Would it be worth buying a new copy so I can be more up to date?

 

[highfigh]

I know you asked Sean specifically but in your question but if I may, "...that raises another question--how does the ear process more direct arrival times vs. more delayed room reflections with different frequency profiles?", everything I have read states that the sound that gets to the ears first determines the localization cues.

I need to dig out my Master Acoustics Handbook that's almost 30 years old. Would it be worth buying a new copy so I can be more up to date?