A ruler flat response on axis only matters in an anechoic chamber and/or listening very close to the speakers. The room response is likely to be much different which is what my post speaks to.
I do not think overall that most people consider a ruler flat response too bright, especially since it is the room response they respond to, not the anechoic measured on-axis.
It would be much easier to "tune" a high end too bright for a user outside of the speaker, whether electronically, or with room treatment and positioning. Cross-over design is tightly tied to phase integration and physical speaker parameters. It would be difficult to tune any given speaker to your tastes without impacting the fine balance of other parameters the speaker vendor was targeting.
|
This is why I specifically stated on-axis anechoic response as opposed to integrated energy response or something similar.
|
audiokinesis, we may be in agreement and we may not be. A speaker that is ruler-flat on-axis, anechoic chamber, will have a typical room response that slopes off at high frequencies. It is this response, the room response that slopes off that people prefer predominantly. Generally first reflections will always be sloped as they are off axis. I copied pieces of my post below as I wanted to be quite clear that ruler-flat on axis anechoic response is much different from room response and it is room response that people respond to and determine as too bright. In Floyd Toole’s latest presentation he heaps praise on a speaker with ruler flat on axis anechoic response. He also states in his excellent 00 paper on Maximizing Loudspeaker Performance the need for a "flattish, smooth, axial frequency response". His personal preference at that time was room friendly loudspeakers (i.e. most rooms). Do you know when that first study was done? If it was old, it could be an artifact of speakers at the time? The real solution, for professionals as well as consumers, is loudspeakers that deliver similarly good timbral accuracy in the direct, early reflected and reverberant sound fields. This can be described as a loudspeaker with a flattish, smooth, axial frequency response, with constant directivity (which together result in flattish, smooth, sound power). audiokinesis2,102 posts10-30-2019 4:49pmKenjit wrote: "a ruler flat response... is too bright for most folk."
Floyd Toole, Bruel & Kjaer, and I all agree with Kenjit on that point.
Atdavid wrote: "I do not think overall that most people consider a ruler flat response too bright."
Toole conducted extensive double-blind listening tests and found that most listeners prefer a gently downward-sloping response trend, both for the first-arrival sound and for the early reflections. Most people perceive a "flat" response to be "bright", and a gently-downward-sloping response to be "flat". atdavid OP12 posts10-30-2019 3:14pmA ruler flat response on axis only matters in an anechoic chamber and/or listening very close to the speakers. The room response is likely to be much different which is what my post speaks to.I do not think overall that most people consider a ruler flat response too bright, especially since it is the room response they respond to, not the anechoic measured on-axis. |
In an anechoic chamber, typically what we are showing is the on axis response typically tailored to be perfectly flat.
The room response is a combination of the direct and reflected. Higher frequencies are typically absorbed more by things in the room, even just painted drywall, but they travel farther distances, so also attenuated more by the air. Add in the highest frequencies tend to be the most directional, so it may be flat on-axis at 20KHz, but 10db down at some angle off axis, and room response is sum off on axis and reflected off axis.
|
This would come down to personal preference and likely room response as well. For me, I am not a big fan of this design technique, though the reason to implement it, to invert the peak in the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness countours and "soften" the sound makes sense. From a methodology standpoint, it is similar to the "loudness" setting that boosts bass response at low volumes where we have poor sensitivity to bass. It is sneared at in audiophile land, but there is a solid reason to do it when you can’t turn the volume up. I would not be surprised if there was a variation in the level of dip in the loudness contours from person to person. teo_audio1,177 posts10-31-2019 11:52amI find that the most natural and comfortable to listen to speakers are the ones that employ some subtle version of "The BBC Dip".
Highly revealing, spacious, well done lower slope crossovers, fast, tuneful, all of it, with a slight BBC Dip. Clean and warm, as the mix demands. A properly done BBC Dip, in my design experience....has the lowest part of the dip centered around 3.5khz and then goes back up again, and is about 2db deep, overall, as a best potential compromise.
|
Duke,
That is an fantastic post!
I had a feeling the general "view" may have also been tied to typical tweeter emission, but did not feel confident enough in what the "typical" speaker was in this community to suggest it.
I always put effort into room treatment and response trying to achieve flatness which could be why I am not a fan of the dip since I have addressed excess energy already.
|
I wish I could bold this in 100 point font. THIS!!! Volume has an enormous impact on perceived tonal balance, far more than almost anything. I think I may even make a topic about it! mijostyn1,269 posts11-01-2019 2:11pm Without loudness compensation each recording has
one right volume level. |
