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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
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Simple test: close eyes, hold still, drop pencil. Notice you can tell where to look by sound alone. Of course humans can locate by sound alone. Not gonna last long if you run towards the growling tiger, snarling wolf, hissing snake. Anyone unable to do this, find another hobby, you suck at this and always will.

So irrefutably it is natural. Next question: is it desirable?

Well now this depends. If you don't care at all about accuracy in any form then its a low priority at best.

Pretty much all recordings however, the whole reason they exist is to let all us who could not be there for the performance share and experience what it was like. Well since we already proved localization is part and parcel of perception then by extension reproducing the performance means capturing and reproducing that location information as well.

As for the Allison quote, he may be a famous speaker designer who knows about speakers but he could maybe stand to learn a little about human hearing. Trying to recreate the sound of a concert hall might make him happy when playing symphony recordings, but that diffuse sound is gonna just ruin any chance of getting palpable presence from one person singing.

So again it depends on what you want. Want to mess around? Then imaging is low priority. Want accuracy, truth, fidelity? Then imaging rules.
erik_squires OP
15,646 posts
 
I think you missed the point a little, Miller.

How natural is pin point imaging in acoustic music? Roy argued, as do I, that it’s really not.

The second question is whether you want it, and want it more than other features of reproduction.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
It’s just an expression. It doesn’t mean anything. 
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