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If you don't have a wide sweet spot, are you really an audiophile?

Hi, it’s me, professional audio troll. I’ve been thinking about something as my new home listening room comes together:

The glory of having a wide sweet spot.

We focus far too much on the dentist chair type of listener experience. A sound which is truly superb only in one location. Then we try to optimize everything exactly in that virtual shoebox we keep our heads in. How many of us look for and optimize our listening experience to have a wide sweet spot instead?

I am reminded of listening to the Magico S1 Mk II speakers. While not flawless one thing they do exceptionally well is, in a good room, provide a very good, stable stereo image across almost any reasonable listening location. Revel’s also do this. There’s no sudden feeling of the image clicking when you are exactly equidistant from the two speakers. The image is good and very stable. Even directly in front of one speaker you can still get a sense of what is in the center and opposite sides. You don’t really notice a loss of focus when off axis like you can in so many setups.

Compare and contrast this with the opposite extreme, Sanders' ESL’s, which are OK off axis but when you are sitting in the right spot you suddenly feel like you are wearing headphones. The situation is very binary. You are either in the sweet spot or you are not.

From now on I’m declaring that I’m going all-in on wide-sweet spot listening. Being able to relax on one side of the couch or another, or meander around the house while enjoying great sounding music is a luxury we should all attempt to recreate.
erik_squires

Showing 3 responses by larryi

larryi
3,715 posts
 
It largely depends on how rigorously one defines the sweet spot.  The position where the center image is perfectly centered and everything else is ideal is almost always very small. 

The few occasions where I thought two people could sit side by side and still get a reasonably decent image involved gigantic systems.  One was in a dedicated listening room that was over 1,000 square feet and the speakers were enormous horn systems.  The other was a set up in a conference room with three of the large Wilson speakers (I believe Alexandria) form the front channels and two small Wilson speakers provided the back channels.  

In other very large rooms, omni-directional speakers, such as the MBL and German Physics speakers also delivered a wide acceptable listening area, but, even with these systems, there is a smaller, ideal sweet spot.
larryi
3,715 posts
 
Way back in the 1970's or early  1980's, Leslie (the organ speaker people) came out with a home speaker system that had a narrow dispersion, but uniform frequency response on and off axis, and the drivers positioned so that the response axis crossed well in front of the listener even when the boxes were pointed straight forward.  The Leslie speaker is doing exactly what is shown in the video for trading volume intensity and the timing of arrival.  I thought the trick sort of worked, but, the speaker did not sound that great.  

I've tried the extreme crossing angle myself, and I did not really like what it did to other aspects of imaging, such as the sense of depth and the sense of sound enveloping the listener.  Still, it is a "free" upgrade if it works, and a reversible one if it does not.
larryi
3,715 posts
 
I agree that if you arrange the speaker and room to obtain a wide area with some stereo imaging, you will compromise the imaging at the ideal spot in that area.  If you utilize the extreme toe-in described above to trade off cues for loudness against early and late timing of arrival, you are presenting the ear/brain with conflicting cues that may may create a hazy picture or maybe fatiguing to resolve.  Also, location is not merely determined by timing and intensity of the signal.  When sound arrives at your head it hits both ears, and with some of the sound hitting one side diffracting around the head to also hit the other side.  This changes timing, phase and the spectral content (frequency response) and these are also cues that the brain detects. 

You can get a Chesky Test CD that has some very interesting computer generated signals that exploit these properties to create a signal that seems to create images that both extend beyond the speaker position and appear to rise up from the speaker and move forward until the image is almost overhead.  The illusion is hurt by nearby reflections, so these signals (scratching sounds) are used to help you locate trouble with room interactions.  They also don't work very well when one is not in the extremely narrow, ideal, sweet spot.
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