Reddit reviews Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms (Audio Engineering Society Presents)
We found 15 Reddit comments about Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms (Audio Engineering Society Presents). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Focal Press
He's often mentioned here so some might be interested in his personal system.
Source: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/89-speakers/710918-revel-owners-thread-321.html#post52485977 and the linked comment is worth a read.
Toole was the VP of engineering for Harman (the parent company of JBL and a few other big names in audio), author of Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms, and has published quite a few significant AES studies on listener preference studies w.r.t. room interactions. So when he says "it is as good as any sound I have ever experienced", it carries some weight.
One thing I'd advise is that while Benchmark is honest, they sometimes straddle and exaggerate a bit at times. Some papers/resources I suggest:
I'm sure I will think of more as time goes on. I also tend to reference white papers from trusted authors and organizations known for being experts in their fields when doing research on specific subjects.
Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms is a superb book (the author is well known in the industry). Very detailed, very factual and all about how you'll hear the music in a room. Tons of data and graphs from studies and measurements. Deliciously, also has details on how the specs of a product can be manipulated. You can see a shorter paper by the same author at Loudspeakers and Rooms for Sound
Reproduction—A Scientific Review.
Master Handbook of Acoustics is also good.
Winer's book is not that great. I'd recommend Floyd Toole's Sound Reproduction although it's admitted more technical minded.
http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Acoustics-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers/dp/0240520092
> I am curious to know why you think headphones are immune to smear of the "imaging of the signal" as you put it.
Headphones largely work in the pressure-chamber effect - the front volume (volume of air between diaphragm and eardrum) is larger than the wavelengths of sound we're dealing with. In these conditions pressure does not "travel" as a wave, but instead rises and falls uniformly across the whole volume. It also does not depend on the acceleration of the diaphragm (as it does with loudspeakers), but on the excursion of the diaphragm.
> Generally speaking as long as you get the speaker to sound flat, you're good
It's a little more complicated than that. Floyd Toole explains this perfectly in this "paper" (more of a book really).
The TL;DR of this paper is:
Ideal loudspeaker is:
Even shorter TL;DR:
on-axis is important, but off-axis is just as important.
> But try putting a flat sounding speaker close to your ear and tell me what you hear?
The acoustic axis of a loudspeaker doesn't start right at the diaphragm - you need to be a certain distance away from woofer/tweeter (assuming a loudspeaker with more than 1 driver if we're talking about serious loudspeakers) in order for them to properly couple to each other.
> Not to mention all the phase error issues due to the close proximity.
Please do mention the phase errors.
Check this one out https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092
My understanding of music theory is rudimentary but that a huge chunk of it is expressed in terms of ratios/intervals. It tends to stay within the musical scale, but since you can directly map that to frequencies it's all ultimately frequency ratios.
I'm not sure how much music theory you could derive from the direction of physics however, as a lot of it seems to depend on what we perceive as harmonious or dissonant. Why we like certain specific ratios and whether that's determined by something fundamentally physical is a super interesting question imo. I hope someone else can reply and shed light.
If you'd like a book on acoustics, that covers the physics of how speakers/instruments rooms and perception interact, Dr Floyd Toole wrote a great one: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092
You don't really grasp the concept.
>Any room will sound better with a better speaker, as a general rule
Learn anything about acoustics and you'll swiftly learn this is not the case. This shouldn't been to be explained. Context matters. Speakers need to be suited to their environments.
>In what way would a better speaker sound worse than a bad speaker in any given room?
All your saying here is a better speaker is better... Nobody is denying this. My argument is that after having spend a certain threshold on a good setup, you will almost never feel significant progress to your 'endgame' spending much more, no matter your gear. Acoustics quickly becomes your issue to solve, and it's the hardest one as you can't just buy it. It's not hard to create a flat speaker, it's not hard to create a low distortion amplifier, we live in 2019, a close-to-perfect setup is achievable for under £5k.
>I have a terrible room (almost square, small, hardwood floors, couch, curtains) and I still haven't hit a wall with what I can get by buying better speakers.
Sorry to say this, but you likely just don't have a good ear for these things. A lot of rooms can be nullified by just turning the speakers up to a point where you're just hearing the shape of your room as a tuned box and not really hearing many reflections. Sounding Different =/= Sounding Better.
As connoisseurs for sound - especially when chasing 'endgame' as is our topic here. We're looking for a few key elements - a consistent, flat frequency response with no harsh inconstant peaks, we want to be able to hear stereo separation with minimal phasing of sound.
That last part matters the most, minimal phasing. suboptimal rooms make phasing a huge problem. It's something an expert audio engineer understands how to look out for, and is often those with little acoustics knowledge have no idea exists, or what to even look out for if it does.
All I'm trying to say in my post, is that it's easy to get chased up into the gear for your true audio 'endgame', when really doing so will never net you the results you truly are looking for - unless you've never heard a perfectly acoustically treated room.
My best piece of advice for anyone is to go and listen to a non-environment room, or a non-reflection zone room, it's an experience that will completely change your mind, especially when you get to A/B between different speaker arrays.
>You seem to have strong opinions on room treatment, why not start a thread or offer up some advice/rooms you've worked on to educate people here?
Honestly, the best advise I can give anyone here is to read 'The Book' on speaker placement. It goes against a lot of what people believe, especially in a hi-fi context of acoustics.
Audiophiles just seem to care too much about the gear opposed to how it actually sounds, there are some relatively dogshit speakers (compared to their contemporaries) this sub recommends just because they're expensive. Most acoustics posts on this sub and any hifi forum get buried. Although if I do see some demand for it I may actually compile something someday.
TL;DR: After a certain point, speaker quality really doesn't get much better, and acoustics rapidly takes over in honing your perfect setup. Different does not equal better, and in a good enough room, a lot of the time a vastly more expensive speaker will not perform better.
Mad_Economist just turned me onto this book
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092
For very in depth speaker design.
Do you have much of a science background and/or are you willing to read some interesting papers? If your interest is in the speaker to room interface (as mine is), I would love to point you towards some great books and articles.
I can post a longer list later or PM you, but I would definitely suggest starting with Floyd Toole's book, Sound Reproduction. It is definitely not perfect, there are statements he makes that deserve real pushback, but nevertheless it is definitely a "must-read".
This is called psychoacoustics. Simply put, it is the framework for looking at specs. There are definitely issues that are not resolved (like any science), but I think starting with a book like Toole's is a good way to get into it.
I'd also read Linkwitz's website and Geddes' book. JBL and Sean Olive (their head of research) publish a great blog. Getting access to the AES library is not cheap, but may be worth it to you.
read this, twice:
[https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092] (https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092)
Good points overall, but the big gap in my opinion is that we do not understand the science of sound reproduction as it relates to perception. We understand a lot (e.g. read stuff by O'Toole, Winer, Linkwitz, etc.) but there are pretty big gaps too. A good example is how to optimize reflections and other interactions, e.g. compare open baffle designs with line arrays with active cancellation like in the Kii Three.
For more detail, check out Linkwitz's long list of "frontiers" in practical sound reproduction that are not well understood:
http://www.linkwitzlab.com/frontiers.htm
> So how do you determine what sounds good to a person with bad ears?
Bad ears as in they have never listened to quality products in the first place.
> Besides, a speaker that measures well is not necessarily one that is pleasing to listen to.
Actually pretty much wrong. There has been a TON of study on what sound characteristics people prefer. And it's almost always a flat measuring speaker with good off axis response.
https://www.harman.com/sites/default/files/white-paper/12/11/2015%20-%2005%3A54/files/AudioScience.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/104588-harman-kardon-want-standardised-sound
So until a speaker can be shown to do reasonably well at achieving those goals. It's not the best idea to jump on hype trains.
Someone got mad.
A good primer if you have the inclination to learn about how subwoofers work in a room and why you should use 4.
Dr. Toole uses 4 10's in his own personal system and he's one of the most respected people in the field.
https://twit.tv/shows/home-theater-geeks/episodes/14
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His book is excellent. It's a heavy read though.
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092
Dude, just buy a book. There are lots of good ones out there. This one. is a good one. This one by Everest is classic. and so on.