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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
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
12,545 posts
 
I assumed what we heard in relation to timbre was on the recording
Try any recording in a bad system and try to distinguish clearly the different instruments playing and their timbre distinctive voicing...

Good luck....

After that try that on a good system, with a low noise floor in all his three working dimensions especially acoustical....


You will understand...


The information about timbre in any recording source is uncomplete by definition and by the choices of the recording engineer.... Trade-off inevitable choices...This is the bad news...

The good news is we can compensate this in our own room settings by making our gear able to sound at his best potential.... Imaging, soundstage but especially timbre is the test that our controls of the noise floors are right....It will never be the REPRODUCTION of the original event which is impossible but a good partial RECREATION...

You room never reproduce your source but recreate it....



mahgister's avatar
mahgister
12,545 posts
 
If you’re listening through headphones then you can toss out the room and it’s all up to the equipment.
What do you think the shell of a headphone is?

A ROOM.... Most of the times a bad room... a room with hard trade-off that you can modify and control better with damping for example.... i modified with success all my headphones because they were all unsatisfying...

I trash my 7 headphones in a drawer: 2 stax, 2 dynamic, 2 magneplanar, one hybrid.... Only the hybrid one has a good timbre recreation but other limitation....

My room now is SO good at 2 locations for listening thay listening to headphones is unbearable....

Some years ago it was the opposite, listening to the same speakers was unbearable at times because of his limitations... in fact the problem never were my gear but the 3 noise floors uncontrolled: mechanical electrical and acoustical....
djones51
4,947 posts
 
I don’t know my old AKG 701s sound pretty good. I could tell drums from pianos so they get the timbre.You can also EQ headphones.
djones51
4,947 posts
 
I'm glad you have a really great room, mine is my living room so I do what I can but I don't have any complaints.
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
12,545 posts
 
I don’t know my old AKG 701s sound pretty good. I could tell drums from pianos so they get the timbre.You can also EQ headphones.
Djones me too i was thinking at first that my headphones was good...

It is only with many dofferent headphones comparisons, and my speakers increased S.Q. that i begin to love them less, and at some point never use them...

Eq is like my modifications, only partial solutions...

I never realized directly using them at first what i was missing, it comes whith my room and gear control improvement...

Iike a i said elsewhere NOBODY can directly experience  the impact of the three noise floors of his system, which all together if uncontrolled affect greatly our S.Q' without even we know it at all....

Nobody ever listen directly to his electrical house noise floor and say: " i know where you are"....

 It takes some form of controls to realize the level of the  noise floor.... 

Nobody listen to his speakers say to them i know you vibrate and negatively impact he sound.... You put anything under them and you listen to a change. ,ore positive or more negative.... It is through these experiments that i learn about my specific noise floors presence...
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