«You can create a system that depends purely on the source material. »
This is completely silly and totally wrong...Even headphones own an enclosure shell which is like a room that must be tuned...
Any source or recording process has his basis in trade off choices made in the acoustical settings of the original event... And in the same way you will listen not to some "ideal source" material but to your own room acoustical settings/speakers TIMBRE rendering of this source material... Then it is not about the alleged ideal source material first and last , it is about ACOUSTIC and PSYCHOACOUSTIC first and last....
You speak like this because you have defined your audio system through an electronical equalizer FIRST not with your ears and mechanical devices in control of the room FIRST... BUT NO Electronic tool could replace acoustic...
Then totally ignorant of what you speak about and the consequences of this choice you say:
«With the right source material you can create the dynamics and sound pressure levels of a live performance with a much more detailed image than you would normally get at most venues.»
The cost paid for that inflation of details MAY be a lost in the natural timbre perception experience, and a lost of musical coherency... One could effectively control the TIMING thresholds of early and late reflections that create "imaging" experience by controlling the material treatment of the room and also with the use of helmholtz resonators... This is called mechanical equalization....
It takes a good recording for sure, it is a common place fact, but the main factor is the acoustical control of the relation room/speakers.... No good recording will work fine in a bad acoustical room/speakers settings... And the imaging is NOT the only main factor to get right but NATURAL TIMBRE PERCEPTION first...This is what will guide your ears experience and will give a better feed back controls to improve imaging...You could create a relatively good imaging with an unnatural timbre perception but if you learn how to improve the natural timbre perception first and last, imaging cannot become wrong in the process...It is acoustic and psychoacoustic facts... We must bot confuse head with ass...
Then you go on inversing and confusing head with ass another times because of your electronical equalizer fad obsession and answer to all problem:
«Tone is different than timbre.Tone is a matter of frequency response. 75% of a speaker's character is due to it's frequency response in a specific room. The other 25% is due to it's radiation pattern. Some people prefer bright speakers, others want "warm",etc. This is all a matter of frequency shifts cause by the speaker's inherent frequency response in a specific room. »
Tone is only a PART of the instrument playing timbre which is the CONCRETE, perceived sound quality of the musical event NOT TONE...Tone is part of timbre but is not timbre....
If you read it on wiki the definition of "timbre" is these 5 modelling descriptors where pure tone is only the first:
" -1 Range between tonal and noiselike character
-2 Spectral envelope
-3 Time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
-4 Changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation)
-5 Prefix, or onset of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration
Then when you say that « 75% of a speaker character is due to it's frequency response in a specific room. The other 25% is due to it's radiation pattern.» this is a very bad way to describe reality, because you have decided to describe reality by the tool you decide to use : an ELECTRONIC EQUALIZER AND A MICROPHONE to define the speakers response with some limited set of frequencies or tone... .... It is not even wrong.....It is like the bed of Procustes fallacy, the greek bandit "who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed." WIKI
Like Procustes who modified the man for the bed instead of modifying the bed for the man, you modify the frequencies response of the speakers with a microphone connected to a computer program, instead of modifying first the room response to TIMBRE perception for the ears with material treatment and room mechanical feed back control....
50 % of Speaker character is define by their design first....Then after that....
50% of speaker character perception is caused by the relatively large bandwith response and TIMING of waves (a vocal timbre for example)in some precise acoustical room settings, when a recording is playing FOR EACH EAR listening to the direct and early and late waves coming from EACH SPEAKER and "computed" by the brain, then this is not due to ONLY his specific " radiation pattern" like you said but ALSO to the manner direct , early and late waves are TIMED and synchronized coming from EACH speaker for EACH ear, in the geometry/topology/acoustical content of the room... The way the first wavefronts for EACH ear is marked out by timing tresholds and different pressure zones resulting from the waves crossings of the room many times in around 80 milliseconds is "computed" by the brain ...
And by the way real audiophile and knowledgeable one prefer NATURAL TIMBRE voicing speakers for their ears, nor warm neither bright...This is ACOUSTIC not a TASTE reunion of the electronical equalizer boyclub describing their speakers through their toys and using, instead of natural timbre perception descriptors, 2 abstract characterisation of the frequency scale: high or low.....
And you are wrong another time saying false facts... "warm" or "bright" DOES NOT results from what you just wrote: « This is all a matter of frequency shifts cause by the speaker's inherent frequency response in a specific room. »
you description is tailor-made coming from the manual user of your equalizer... it is not a handbook of acoustic.... It is not even wrong....
The "warm" or "bright" character of speakers, save by concious choices and design, does not come from a "frequency shifts" MAINLY BUT from a relatively large bandwith shifts response caused by the ROOM acoustical settings for a more or less natural TIMBRE perception....We may called too warm or too bright a listened concrete instrument or voice event in a room for our ears but it is not an abstract frequency response for a microphone like you said .... Inversion of head and ass as usual and you are not even wrong....
And using electronical equalizer instead of mechanical equalization of the room, you ALWAYS fail to mention the LIMITATION of your toy: a frequency response lecture, a result which is valid ONLY for a listening location in MILLIMETER in the room.... Go out of this precise spot by 5 centimeter and the audible effect may change dramatically....A mechanical equalization with a large bandwith response control by modification of the different pressure zones of the room did not had these limitations....
Electronical equalization is a useful tool but is SECONDARY and ONLY an help to the creation of room treatment and room control...It cannot replace them at all....
By the way pitch perception cannot be explained nor reduced to frequencies modelling...It is a basic fact of psychoacoustic science.... The map so good it is cannot be confused with the territory....Then electronical equalization program are PARTIAL solution or secondary help tool....
In a word: we must change the room response for our ears first and last, not the speaker response for a microphone.....
We can use the two mode of equalization for sure, but the electronical one must be secondary and subordinated to the mechanical one....Anyway electronical equalization is wisely used for bass optimization but even there we can use Helmholtz resonators instead...
But dont listen only to me read what say this acoustician student of Floyd Toole:
«Measurements are a great way to assess a room’s acoustics, but the main problem we have is that most of the standards that exist for room acoustics have no relation to our perception of good sound in a small room. What value is there in assessing RT60 if the very concept was derived from much larger acoustic spaces. In fact, in small rooms, what most people will find is that the decay time of the room is relatively short, short enough that it’s not a great concern. Most small spaces naturally have too much mid and high-frequency absorption and not enough low-frequency absorption. You don’t need measurements to know that, because it is nearly universally true. Yes, measurements can be helpful in assessing a room’s acoustics, but the reality is most people aren’t able to make much sense of these measurements, and the changes their acoustic treatments make are often unmeasurable using commonly practiced methods.
In general, our ears do a better job assessing a room’s “sound” than does a microphone. The reason for this is clear. Our ears are a very sophisticated tool for perceiving sound and is capable of detecting very small changes in phase, tone, or direction. When we reduce a reflection in a room, our ears can detect this. Our measurements would struggle to notice. Small changes in reflections, especially at high frequencies, would not have a material effect on the steady-state response. That means that the adding of a small amount of absorption to a wall doesn’t really change our measurements much. In small rooms, the decay of sound at mid and high frequencies is so rapid that we would further struggle to see it in time domain plots such as waterfall graphs. » Matthew Poes in "what's more accurate a microphone or our ears?"
https://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/accurate-microphone-or-ears «When we dont know how to use a tool, it is only a toy or a fad»-Groucho Marx
