Pin point imaging isn't for everyone


A subject my posts touch on often is whether pin point imaging is desirable, or natural. While thinking about wide-baffle speakers in another thread I came across this quote, courtesy of Troels Graveson’s DIY speaker site. He quotes famous speaker designer Roy Allison:

I had emphasized dispersion in order to re-create as best as I could the performance-hall ambiance. I don’t want to put up with a sweet spot, and I’d rather have a less dramatically precise imaging with a close simulation of what you hear in a concert hall in terms of envelopment. For that, you need reverberant energy broadcast at very wide angles from the loudspeaker, so the bulk of energy has to do multiple reflections before reaching your ear. I think pin-point imaging has to do with synthetically generated music, not acoustic music - except perhaps for a solo instrument or a solo voice, where you might want fairly sharp localization. For envelopment, you need widespread energy generation.


You can read Troel’s entire post here:

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/Acapella_WB.htm

This goes, kind of, with my points before, that you can tweak the frequency response of a speaker, and sometimes cables, to get better imaging, but you are going significantly far from neutral to do so. Older Wilson’s were famous, and had a convenient dip around 2.4 kHz.
erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by bdp24

I prefer a system "editorialize" as little as possible. The recording contains the imaging (and the instrumental and vocal timbres, etc.); the hi-fi system's (including and especially the loudspeaker’s) job is to reproduce the recording as is, not to create imaging that isn’t contained in the recording. That’s anarchy!

When I’m in a small club, with no mics on the drumset or guitar/bass amps---just the vocal mics, yes, the location of each instrument is very concrete. But what does that have to do with reproducing the imaging contained in any given recording? Nothing!

Expecting a loudspeaker to recreate the ambience and instrumental/vocal imaging heard in any given space---whether a concert hall or Jazz/Blues/Folk/whatever club---is folly. That’s one reason the Bose 901 sucks!

Recording engineers choose their mics, the locations of those mics in relation to the performers, how the numerous mic signals are mixed, in order to create a "sound field"---a sonic picture. It is the loudspeaker’s job to reproduce that recording, not to create the sound of a concert hall, small club, etc. If the recording contains pinpoint images, the loudspeaker should recreate them. If the recording contains diffused image locations, that's what it should sound like when played on your loudspeakers. Duh.