wrote in message
...
John Matheson wrote:
You may be feeling smug and your speakers will do some weird
imaging things that you may like - but they are utterly
incapable of recreating the sound of a real acoustic source
as it would sound if it was in the same room.

Gee, that sound like the basic problem with stereo itself, as was
well established by some pretty smart people based on first
principles some 70 years ago.

They have a power response that has severe and extreme
discontinuities,

A property that EVERY musical instrument in existance shares to
degrees FAR worse than loudspeakers do. Ever seen the frequency
dependent radiation patterns or power response of a violin, a
trumpet, a flute, timpani, pipe organ, piano, guitar? By your
implicit criteria, they'd sound perfectly awful in a room.

But they don't. If you think that a speaker with perfect power
response and non-frequency dependent radiation pattern will
accurately recreate the sound of a real acoustic source such as
the examples above, then you need to seriously rethink your
assertion. If a real acoustic source has a highly non-uniform
power repsonse and radiation pattern, how will reproducing the
sound of such from one or two points that have a completely
different radiation pattern sound the same (hint: it won't because
it can't)?


Dick, I don't disagree with most of what you say above. But I also can't see
why it contraindicates what I said either. You do seem to be implying that a
loudspeaker with a severely discontinuous power response should be
acceptable because all real acoustic sources are like that. I can't agree
that mitigates the need for a smooth power response in a speaker intended to
replay a variety of types of recorded sounds.

On a slightly unrelated matter, given that: 1. noise induced hearing loss is
a V-notch centred around 4kHz; 2. nearly all conventionally designed
speakers have a power response hole in this region due to driver and
crossover design; 3. sibilance is important to intelligibility and 4; the
human auditory system integrates the first few tens of milliseconds of
energy as far as speech intelligibility is concerned, it is no wonder that
many older people (particularly men who tend to get more exposure to noise)
have real problems understanding dialog, for example lyrics in songs or
dialogue in movies, when played through real speakers in real rooms.

I find supplying speakers with ones that don't suffer such a deep power
response hole is a very personally rewarding occupation for me because of
the very real joy it brings to so many of my clients' lives. That joy comes
from the ability to hear and understand dialogue at normal speaking volumes
in real rooms without strain. The same property makes music reproduction
better too - all other things being equal (which I accept they never are).