Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
Someone with your wealth of knowledge should immediately see the flaw in the Stradivarius testing. You even refer to it in one of your previous posts.
|
Someone with your wealth of knowledge should immediately see that their test has far fewer flaws than any test where the violinist and listeners know what's being played. A barrage of confounding variables like a herd of stampeding elephants.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
Your points about imaging are perfectly valid except you're forgetting one important thing.....when designing systems for use in the home, the designer has no control over room size, shape, construction, acoustics, partnering equipment etc. so designs and tunes for the average. On installation, unless you use a processor to measure and correct for room response, you are stuck with trying to install a fixed system in a fixed acoustic space.
|
Welcome to what I do for a living. :-)
Any professional hi-fi installer that doesn't do acoustic analysis is incompetent and not worth the call-out fee. You can achieve substantial improvements in a room with surprisingly subtle acoustic treatments, and with analysis-driven speaker positioning. After the room has been physically treated (given aesthetic constraints) room correction software can then smooth the response towards flat. Room correction software is an essential part of any hi-fi, but there's limits to what it can do -- it can't turn shit into wine.
My current drive is a Mazda 3 MY09, with the standard hi-fi. I've stuck my analysis gear in there and ran a barrage of tests. The first thing I noticed was that the default tone settings were so far off it's not funny. (For anyone who cares, the settings which gave the best measured and subjective result are Bass -4 and Treble -4.) The second thing was that resonances within the door cavities were completely out of control, and that the right deadening material could probably make an enormous improvement to the sound. And the third thing I noticed was that the acoustics were completely out of control, far beyond the realm of digital processing.
I did try though -- I have a nifty little DSP processor with many bands of finite impulse response filtering, and I loaded it with a profile that should have made modest improvements. But the end result was worse: the filtering was futility fighting against resonances all around the cabin, and just excited trouble-spot frequencies.
The end result is I just don't listen to music in the car. Which is okay; a lot of my audio diet is radio and spoken word. Hopefully though my new BMW will change this -- I do enjoy music on occasion!
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
He can adjust for reverb time
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
But could you actually design and tune a system to sound good in a bathroom? There's absolutely no reason why not.....
|
Tell that to the guys who do sound reinforcement in halls and churches.
Assuming the listener has two ears and/or free movement of their head, it's impossible to usefully adjust away reflected sound. It's similarly impossible to stop a projected film from illuminating a white room -- the light bouncing off the screen is going to scatter everywhere and there is nothing you can do about it.
Look, I'm sure you're a nice guy, but I'm not going to get anywhere arguing with someone who so beautifully epitomizes the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I don't blame you -- the entire hi-fi industry makes a motza reinforcing the unscientific mumbo-jumbo so readily swallowed by their customers. Some people sincerely believe they can hear the difference between brands of same gauge wire. Most agree that's nonsense, but fail to acknowledge the sincerity of that belief, and the existential jeopardy this places on other confidences. Few are willing to acknowledge that their brain can and does lie to them. Fewer still even realise how manipulable our sense of hearing is.
I work on the principle that if you can't see the difference or measure the difference, it's not worth paying for. It's a horribly imperfect principle, but it works very if you have limited funds. And I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't.