I'm never going to hear a megaspeaker in a good room am I?

@erik_squires wrote: "So in a small room, I can’t imagine actually wanting to enhance the reverberant amplitude or timing per se. To my ears, the congestion in clarity, especially dialogue suffers too much."

Might that "congestion" be due to an excess of early reflections? Quoting Dr. David Griesinger:

"When presence [clarity and immediacy] is lacking, the early reflections are the most responsible."

If Griesinger is correct, then chasing a reduced RT60 is like trimming the tail of the dragon... it helps, but your main problem is at the front end.

I don’t doubt your observations, but unless I am mistaken, you are making them based on using speakers which have a wide enough radiation pattern that early reflections are virtually inevitable, and those reflections probably are not a particularly good spectral match with the direct sound. Please don’t take this as an insult of your speakers - their designer and I simply have different ideas about "what matters most", and he may be right and I may be wrong, or we may both be wrong.

I would much rather make my adjustments to the direct-to-reverberant sound ratio at the loudspeaker, rather than by using room treatments. I’m NOT down on room treatments - diffusion can be delicious - but imo there are issues which are better addressed elsewhere in the chain.

I probably should have make it clear that I’m coming at this from a very different and unorthodox direction, loudspeaker-wise: I’m starting with a narrow-pattern, controlled-directivity speaker which will sound overly dry (but have great clarity) in just about any room, then adding just enough reverberant energy to enrich the timbre and spatial qualities without degrading clarity. And in my experience "it sounds right" seems to be a fairly specific and consistent point on the continuum in a given room.

Duke

Hi Duke,

I can't say I can refute your claim.  To do this I'd have to do controlled experimental testing to find out if the issue I'm having is excess reverb or excess early reflections. 

This is where having a simulation tool would be more useful. :)

I'm sure one could be written, but that's beyond my level of energy right now.

Best,

Erik

Hi Erik,  

I certainly don't expect you to simply accept my claims, and I thank you for hearing me out. 

Best wishes, 

Duke

Hi Duke,

@audiokinesis

Thanks so much for the thoughtful engagement.  I have learned a great deal already.  In a way I think that this will have to remain purely theoretical for me for a while.  It's like lung cancer and trying to figure out which of it's effects on the body will cause you more pain sooner.

I don't see a reasonable model of room treatment where early reflections are not controlled, echoes removed, and reverberation is NOT naturally reduced.  It's rather hard to control one and not the other, like temperature and pressure.

I'll have to defer to those who have experience measuring and treating many more rooms than I will get a chance to.

Best,


Erik

i guess i am lucky, i heard a then state of the art system in 1982 at definitive hifi in north seattle. it was a pair of maggie tympani IIIs in a well-treated room, powered by a pair of dorm fridge-sized class I monoblocks that doubled as room heaters, don't remember the cartridge and TT other than they were Koetsu and some linear tracking job that cost as much as a house then. it was a direct-disc recording of some pipe organ in some cathedral somewhere, and aside from the surface noise which seemed to float in mid-air between the speakers and me, it was like i was IN THAT CATHEDRAL hearing that organ! NEVER had i heard such pure music before. it was audio nirvana. since then i've not heard anything that charmed me more.