Sean,

I would be more interested in your reaction to my second post, the one
on the 24th at 9PM. It does a better job of bypassing all of the
chit-chat and suggesting some avenues of research that are perhaps
different from what you are used to. Also shows a picture of my speaker
that I made some 15 years ago. And no, I am not trying to hawk something
- I am basically a failed industrial designer (career got sidetracked in
the Air Force during Viet Nam era) and am doing more with photography
and video than audio. I haven't been able to pursue my big ideas because
I don't know much about building, measuring, and re-building the damn
things. My engineer friends aren't all that interested in developing
someone else's ideas either.

But I would be interested in your reaction to my ideas. I never could
get Floyd's complete attention, because he was always so busy. I respect
his vast knowledge and fastidiousness, but sometimes (back when I was
into all this stuff) I wanted to just stand in front of him and say STOP
IT! Stop all this conventional thinking about measurement, accuracy,
resonances, directivity, decreasing the effects of reflections in rooms
- reformat and reprogram.

For your inspiration read the original Bose research paper, where they
went into the concert hall and discovered the spatial nature of sound
and its importance; read Mark Davis's paper on the Soundfield One; some
of Dave Moulton's work, Art Benade's "From Instrument to Ear in a Room:
Direct or Via Recording," and then, if you're not howling with laughter
yet, my magnum opus at

http://aes.org/publications/preprint...nts_search.cfm

Finally, here is a paradigm for you to think about: take three perfectly
omnidirectional loudspeakers into a good sounding concert hall. These
will represent typical instruments or sound sources (perfect point
source and all that). Place them at stage left, center, and right, run a
series of test signals thru them so that you know exactly what is going
into them - signals such as pink noise, impulses, and some steady tones.
Measure everything you want about the resultant sound from back in a
good seat in the audience, and also make a binaural recording from that
spot. This is your reference source. Now record the output of that setup
with typical modern recording methods such as John Eargle might use.
This is your reference recording. Now, take that recording into a home
type listening room and reproduce it with speakers of various designs,
looking for which ones come closest to both the measurements taken in
the concert hall of the original, and the binaural recording of the
original. You can even make a new binaural recording of the playback and
compare it with the original one. Measure the IACC with a binaural head
at the listening position and graph it. Compare that with the concert
hall measurement. Measure the direct to reflected ratios in the two
spaces. All of these things are related mainly to audibility of
differences between the live event and the playback, and NOT to accuracy
as compared to a RECORDING. That is the difference in direction I would
propose for your company or any other that wants to try something
different from the same old same old.

Of course, it has all been done before, but not everyone agrees with the
type of speaker that resulted from it...

Gary Eickmeier