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In Reply to: RE: Harbeth Nelson posted by Bill the K on October 23, 2024 at 22:58:26
Righty-O!
Follow Ups:
For those who like that "warmth of sound" bit,There is simply no gettin' around it.
Reinforcing the mid-bass hump,
Makes the music jump !
Edits: 10/25/24 10/25/24
Not a chump for
Reinforcing the mid-bass hump
with its unnatural thump!
Never enjoyed a caricature presentation of music. It would seem that Harbeth doesn't either with stated goals found on their website :
" We've incorporated every genuine advancement into the latest Harbeth speakers, which are, as you'll hear yourself, in a class of their own for natural sound ."
Even as a teen, I thought the JBL L100/4310/4311 was a joke with its Boom Sizzle tonal profile. And lack of first octave bass. I chose double Advents.
The sad part for loudspeakers is that if one had a magic wand and could make any driver parameters imaginable instead of what is limited by physics, one still finds that the sensitivity, the -3dB lf corner and cabinet volume area all tied together.
Pick two and the third is determined.
Worse, sensitivity sells, switching between two speakers, the louder one is often chosen.
BUT if you had the same cubic volume cabinet but you wanted a different alignment with the -3dB point to be an octave lower, you have lowered the best case sensitivity about -9 to -12dB. No way around this.
A wise person in audio (Don Davis) once coined (best as i remember) the only free lunch in audio is when you can take advantage of the room gain slope.
To best do this, one needs a sealed box subwoofer with the resonance at around the frequency of the rooms 1/2 wavelength.
IF this is done, one can get in room bass response flat with no eq into mid single digits.
It's easy to do this in a room as small as a car cabin and is why one can have a small sealed box that (in the car) goes down WAY below resonance, you are in the pressure mode below about 50Hz where you have this gain. This is also why vented boxes are rarely used in car audio, the sealed alignment is perfect for the size of the sealed car cabin..
This is not the same "room gain" that turns a speaker with flat response close up to a sloped response that Floyd Toole and others have found to be ideal / preferred at the listening position, that is tied to directivity as well as response.
Why (or how) is that "ideal" sloped bass response tied to directivity ?
They say that bass below 80 hz or so is basically omni-directional.
Or maybe I'm not understanding what it is you've just said ?
Deep bass is totally omnidirectional. It can't be located by human hearing. If the deep bass comes from a separate sub woofer with a fast low pass crossover you can stand next to the sub woofer while deep bass is blasting away and you won't hear any bass from the sub woofer bass box even if you put your ear close to it. It will seem to come from the main speakers. All the deep bass directionality comes from higher frequency harmonics.
Well a great deal of research has been done to find what is the ideal response curve at the listening position and expert listener or not the preferred response shape is a gradual roll off.
goggle this topic, look for Floyd Toole he was one of the earlier researchers into this.
Now the confusing part is, for small speakers that due to their size have little directivity, the response on axis at 1 meter is flat. But as one goes down in frequency where the wavelength is larger and larger, the room is acoustically smaller with less and less absorption.
Below the room's lowest mode, your in the pressure mode where "IF" one had a woofer that was flat to say 10Hz, the room SPL would rise up to +12dB/oct hence a sealed box in that case is idea.
If you have a speaker with significant directivity (and less room involvement), you may have to apply some /all of that slope to get it right at the couch.
.
the only free lunch in audio is when you can take advantage of the room gain slope.
I enjoy that in my nearly Golden Ratio dimension room with the big stats upstairs. The gradual lift in the bottom two octaves complements the comparatively low average output levels I prefer. I can, however, flatten it with the bass control on the backplate if necessary. Sometimes I choose the -3 db setting for more headroom when playing exceptionally dynamic content like Rite of Spring .
It is an almost universal experience for me to find the bass control maxed out with rental cars since lots of folks like thump. That was definitely the case this week with our trip to ABQ. I took out all the boost and listened mostly to the classical station. :)
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