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Gary Eickmeier Gary Eickmeier is offline
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Default Need advice for a small room

"Andrew Haley" wrote in message
...
Robert Peirce wrote:


That's the problem. Apparently, what I am looking for is a speaker
that has an off-axis response very similar to its on-axis response.


In practice that's extremely hard to do: the best you can hope for is
something that's reasonably well-behaved. Even that won't guarantee
you a good soundstage everywhere in the room, because stereo isn't
really adequate for that. A separate subwoofer is good advice,
though, because the ideal speaker placement for lower bass may not be
the same place as that for the rest if the spectrum.


Not hard to do. It's called an omni.

But omni is not necessarily the ideal radiation pattern. What you want is
time/intensity trading in both the direct and early reflected domains. This
plus a certain speaker positioning scheme that is very easy to do and very
beneficial no matter what speakers you have. Just think of your walls as
mirrors, and position the two stereo speakers 1/4 of the room width in from
side walls and out from front wall. If you make a drawing of this, you can
see that the two actual and six reflected (virtual) speakers are positioned
in an even lattice equidistant from each other, for a solid, even, deep,
wide soundstage that can "project" any program material like a 3-dimensional
canvas on which you paint the recorded sound. Notice also that we position
speakers for imaging, not frequency response. For that, we can EQ and use
subwoofers placed in the corners of the room.

Take a look at my earlier response below, the last post in the current
thread. I said it would be fun to take a bunch of small speakers, like
computer desk speakers or home theater sattelites and hang them from the
ceiling and position and aim them to create this magical sound field that
has all of the characteristics of depth, imaging, time/intensity trading so
you can walk all around and get even imaging everywhere. It would be done
with techniques similar to Mark Davis's experiment in creating the
Soundfield One speaker. Add a center channel and surround speakers placed
ideally for your small room, and voila - a sonic Holodeck.

Gary Eickmeier