If you don't have a wide sweet spot, are you really an audiophile?

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.

The most important is learning to be happy....You have it.... then you are lucky.... All the rest is only hobby matter....

But it is true that owning a dedicated room tough is one of the more important asset in audio experience.... Not the gear most of the times like always everybody think....It is simply because acoustic controls is so powerful.... Using all his facets is more easy in a dedicated room....


My best to you and i apologize for my sometimes  rude answers.... Here we lost sometimes controls of ourself.... I am too passionnate.... You are more wise than i am....

djones51-

I’ve never understood what Mahgister was talking about, especially concerning timbre.

I’ll give my layman version, timbre is how I can tell a trumpet from a clarinet playing the same notes.

Right. We don’t even need a fancy audiophile definition for timbre the regular dictionary one is plenty good enough:

the character or quality of a musical sound or voice as distinct from its pitch and intensity.

The character or quality we are talking about is what distinguishes a violin from a viola, alto sax from tenor, flute from piccolo. Even when both are playing the same note at the same volume. Because that note is never a pure tone, it is always a complex combination of harmonic overtones. The particular way the relative values of all those harmonics combine is timbre.

What acoustic embedding has to do with it I don’t know I don’t even know what acoustic embedding even is much less the other two though I have tried to figure out what he’s talking about.

Okay well the way I read mahgister is embedding is just another way of saying tune or control. Helmholtz resonators for example are one sort of acoustic control. Air pressure goes through an opening, in a bottle or straw, into a space, and back out again. In the process of going through the restriction it gives up energy. So a Helmholtz resonator is like a shock absorber. In reality it is just another sort of tube trap. It is also fundamentally the same or related to porting in a speaker cabinet. All the same sort of thing.

Your room, any room, has it’s own particular set of resonant frequencies. Why do you think it is so many people have the same bass problems in the same areas? Because the rooms are so similar in dimension. The helmholtz resonator can be tuned by its size and shape to damp these room resonance modes.

Okay so now take a look at what we have so far: timbre is the exact combination of harmonics that tell us which instrument is which. Room resonances affect different frequencies differently. Therefore, controlling them will help reproduce timbre accurately, making each instrument sound more like it should.

Replace "controlling" with "embedding" and you got it. Same for the other two embeddings, vibration and fields. Got it?

Mahgister--  OK. Now I'm following this. Your later posts seem (at least to me) to use the ordinary meaning of timbre.  What I did not understand was the relation of this to things like "imaging" or "soundstage", which I believe in this context are essentially 'something else' (perhaps not 'red herrings', but not crucial to what you're talking about).  But yes, surely the reproduction of timbre correctly will improve our experience of music (and even perhaps enhance the feeling that instruments are 'right there' or 'over there'.)

Thanks for the translation.... 😊

Save there is other means of controls in acoustic, and others in mechanical and electrical dimensions for sure...

A remark:

If you coupled this Helmholtz idea with the ideas of the 2 Japanese scientists i cited already in a preceding post about the law of the first wave front and his relation to the source width (ASW)and the listener envelopement concept(LEV) who gives us a very precise set of experiments to understand how it is possible by room material treatment and by room controls to create a balance which will make us able to create an image width also compatible with an enveloping listener sound, we have some idea about how it is possible to make the room an activated entity in the recreation of sound, imaging and timbre and no more a set of passive walls...

I will give their introduction here and their conclusion....


«In 1989, Morimoto and Maekawa demonstrated that
spatial impression comprises at least two components and
that a listener can discriminate between them [1]. One is
auditory source width (ASW) which is defined as the width
of a sound image fused temporally and spatially with direct
sound image, and the other is listener envelopment (LEV)
which is defined as the degree of fullness of sound images
around the listener, excluding a sound image composing
ASW [1,2],»




«In conclusion, it seems that the results of three experiments shown in this paper evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the components of reflections under and beyond
the upper limit of validity for the law of the first wavefront
contribute to ASW and LEV, respectively. Accordingly, it
is possible to control ASW and LEV independently by controlling physical factors for each component. The important is that it is necessary to provide reflections beyond
the upper limit in order to generate LEV. Furthermore, it
is clarified that the reflections beyond the thresholds of
LEV do not always lead to disturbance. In other words,
it is possible to make the listeners perceive LEV without
causing disturbance.»

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223804282_The_relation_between_spatial_impression_and_the_l...

I will repeat what is the LAW OF THE FIRST WAVEFRONT:


«In audio in the past, the terms Haas effect and law of the first wavefront
were used to identify this effect, but current scientifi c work has settled on the
other original term, precedence effect. Whatever it is called, it describes the
well-known phenomenon wherein the fi rst arrived sound, normally the direct
sound from a source, dominates our impression of where sound is coming from.
Within a time interval often called the “fusion zone,” we are not aware of
reflected sounds that arrive from other directions as separate spatial events. All
of the sound appears to come from the direction of the first arrival. Sounds that
arrive later than the fusion interval may be perceived as spatially separated
auditory images, coexisting with the direct sound, but the direct sound is still
perceptually dominant. At very long delays, the secondary images are perceived
as echoes, separated in time as well as direction. The literature is not consistent
in language, with the word echo often being used to describe a delayed sound
that is not perceived as being separate in either direction or time.Haas was not
the first person to observe the primacy of the first arrivedsound so far as localization in rooms is concerned.»

Sound Reproduction The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms Floyd Toole Chap.6 P.73