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RE: Why does everybody hyper focus on frequency response?

Posted by tomservo (M) on February 9, 2023 at 16:20:40

In Reply to: Why does everybody hyper focus on frequency response? posted by geoffkait on February 9, 2023 at 05:37:19:

Not sure if you are musician but if you were a bass player and had a bass with a funny neck that had one or more dead spots or was missing the low E string, these flaws would be there regardless of what room you played it in. Listen to your loudspeakers outside (an excuse for a bbq) and you hear them without the room progressively containing the bass, so outside it's very thin but good stereo image, usually better than inside.

The emphasis on loudspeaker frequency response is that magnitude uniformity if possible at least at the source is ideal like flat response is elsewhere, an indicator of linearity, no dead notes.

The frequency response is what lets you distinguish a subwoofer from a portable radio before you recognize the song.

How it interacts with the room is effected by the speakers directivity, the more directive, the larger the "near field" area is where the direct sound is significantly louder than the reflected / late sound. The larger the room, the more difficult the room becomes to have a large nearfield. One could very rightly argue it's the response at the listening position, rather than 1m response that matters and that is more tied to directivity not 1m response.

Your descriptive vocabulary is that of reviewers "Air, transparency, richness, naturalness, soundstage dimensionality, coherence, presence, things of that nature." All describe the experience, the impression if you know the hifi terms, but the connection Heyser sought was between the hifi vocabulary of the day like you use and the engineering aspects of the loudspeaker. Remember those terms are mostly from for hire writers trying to capture / sell an impression .

Put your self on the other side off the product lifespan line.

The or at least one of the dilemma the speaker designer is in is that how do you make it sound the best regardless of what or who's music is played? What's the best anyway?
For me, the only blind indicator of anything like being "signal faithful" to any music was the generation loss test. With that you can hear what's wrong as it is exaggerated but it doesn't tell you what to fix.

I know people who's musical taste is shaped by what their speakers can do and that won't do here where i have no idea who will use them..

For speakers closer to the listeners. how do you also make them disappear in the stereo image, so that your not aware of the speakers and the singer is standing concretely sonic ally but invisibly in front of you more "real" than a center channel?

Those are some of the questions i have used Heyser's measurement system to investigate since our lab got one of the first ones in the late 80's

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