[Audio Empire]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:45:01 -0700, ScottW wrote
(in article ):

On Apr 26, 6:23=A0am, Robert Peirce wrote:
For me, stereo is about the imaging. =A0I can't tell if my room is down
3db at 400hz, and frankly, I don't care as long as it sounds good. I
don't even go in for room treatment of any sort. =A0Every room, including
a concert hall is going to have peaks and dips. =A0I just live with that.

Right now I have a pair of Apogee Divas in a room that is about
15.5'x25'. =A0Maybe I just got lucky, but I can walk just about anywhere
in the room and the image is locked in place. =A0The only place this fail=
s
is if I stand within a foot directly in front of one of the speakers.

I am planning to move and most of the rooms I am looking at tend to be
on the order of 10-12'. =A0Sometimes they are almost square. =A0I was all
hyped up on one product as a possibility for such a room until I found
out it was more about getting correct response from the room then the
kind of imaging I am after.

So, are there any imaging nuts out there who are dealing successfully
with small rooms? =A0What are you doing?

I find some of your comments contradictory to my experience.
Imaging, IME, is somewhat inversely proportional to sweet spot size.
Speakers that offer an image that doesn't change much around the room
might be satisfactory for you, but have not offered to me that
pinpoint image precision in the sweet spot which can be quite beyond
realistic.
Best imaging speakers I ever owned were Quad 63's with a sweet spot
about the size of a cubic foot. As dipolars they need some space
behind them and even then benefit from a rear wave diffuser (I
fabricated a device similar to Soundlabs Sallie) for peak image
clarity. But I don't think they (or any dipolar) will work well at
all in a 12' room.

For a small room I'd explore some decent bookshelfs with a sub. I
heard some Spendor S3s in a small room at a dealer once with a Hsu sub
that I thought really lacked nothing except the ability to drive a
large room. Imaging was excellent and the separate sub allowed you to
position and contour the bass to what the room could handle. Full
range speakers forcing you to basically co-locate the bass drivers
with the mid/hi freq sources creates an insurmountable problem and
usually costs more as well.

ScottW


I agree that most speakers image properly only in a fairly small "sweet
spot". That spot is usually the locus of the pick-up of the stereo pair of
microphones used, and there is only one for each recording.

One of the things about stereo recordings (and this is something that most
audiophiles never think about) that differs from a live performance is that
when you are there at a performance and move around from place to place, the
stereo perspective moves with your ears. When listening to a recording, this
does not happen because even though YOU move, your "surrogate ears" (the
microphones) do not. They maintain the same perspective in the space where
the recording was made and don't move with you. That's why the only place
where the imaging is best is when you, the listener, are located in the
acoustic focal point of the microphones. I could illustrate what I mean with
a diagram, but I don't believe that graphics are supported on bulletin boards
such as this one.

Of course, what I just said presupposes a REAL stereo recording, not some
multi-miked fiasco where there is a forrest of microphones all pan-potted
into position and where the only "image" the recording has is of a bunch of
musicians lined up in a straight line from the left side of the sound-stage
to the right side.