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‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ speakers—too many models converging towards too similar a sound

Over the last year I’ve auditioned a good number of speaker makes and models.  Through this process, I developed a kind of shorthand for myself to describe a particular kind of sound profile that I kept encountering, one that I came to call modern/mainstream.

Here’s the kind of speaker I’m talking about: typically a floorstander, fairly tall, narrowish baffle, deeper than it’s wide, tweeter on top, midrange, two or three 7” woofers.  It’s a design you’re going to encounter again, and again, and again.  Dynaudio, Quad, Paradigm, Monitor Audio, Sonus Faber, and many, many others.  (Not picking on those five—just for illustrative purposes).  It’s also a design that tends to come from large companies, some of them conglomerates, and one which consequently finds its way into more stores and more people’s consciousness because of the larger distribution and publicity networks involved.

And the sound.  Highly competent across the board, tending to the more detailed rather than the more forgiving, treble range quite prominent, decent but not incredible bass extension, more than acceptable imaging and soundstaging, perhaps the vaguest hint of a mechanical or electronic veil.  And above all, kind of unexceptional and unexciting.  They can range all over in price, and they don’t really sound that dissimilar one from another.  They are converging towards that single ‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ sound profile that’s becoming a norm.  It’s a safe design, with an acoustic presentation that many people these days seem to prefer or at least accept (or have been conditioned to believe is ‘correct’).  Being fairly narrow, it integrates well into many domestic environments, and the styling usually ensures a decent measure of SAF.

While there are still many individualists out there in the audio world, and the speaker design world in particular, this is a general trend that I lament, because I see it expanding and being more entrenched.


128x128twoleftears
kosst_amojan
2,095 posts
 
I've never heard or read where anybody of authority suggested wide baffle speakers image as well or better than narrow to no baffle speakers. The unavoidably suffer from artifacts relating to edge diffusion and the more pronounced way in which the surface projects sound. It's just the physics of the thing. 

That said, speakers of all sorts have been converging in terms of character for a long time now. Long past are the days of East Coast, West Coast, and British sound. Even horns are getting better at not sounding like horns. I don't think it has anything to do with styling. I think there's been a consensus developing as to what flat response is and it's becoming easier to implement as materials and design tools evolve. We've ended up with the speakers we have to today because every single speaker designer has woke up the next day wanting to build something that was better than anything they ever heard before. If they'd stumbled upon perfection, they'd have stopped, wouldn't they? But so far that hasn't happened. That leaves me to conclude that nobody thinks speakers today are as good as they could be tomorrow or next year and that speakers today are better than they used to be. 
roberjerman
2,086 posts
 
Snell Type A's with wide baffles and against-the-wall placement belie the belief that today's narrow and out-into-the-room speakers are the best at imaging! I have the AIII's and because of smart design handily still outperform most of today's conventional boxes!
roberjerman
2,086 posts
 
Peter Snell's goal was to design a speaker with a flat power response into ANY room (So room-placement effects upon sound quality were eliminated). This remains a fundamental problem that practically all of today's speaker designers either ignore or are unaware of! With his Type A he succeeded brilliantly!
audiokinesis
1,872 posts
 

Kosst_amojan wrote: "I’ve never heard or read where anybody of authority suggested wide baffle speakers image as well or better than narrow to no baffle speakers. The unavoidably suffer from artifacts relating to edge diffusion and the more pronounced way in which the surface projects sound. It’s just the physics of the thing."

Roberjerman’s example of the Snell Type A is an excellent one. Imo Peter Snell’s approach made far more acoustic sense than any of these narrow-baffle tower speakers.

Here is why a wide baffle speaker can image as well or better than a narrow or "no baffle" speaker:

First, it’s not sound "projecting" off of a wide baffle that degrades imaging; it is the time delay between the direct sound and the arrival of the edge diffraction. Edge diffraction adds false early timing cues that can degrade the image. In general the longer the time delay (up to a point) before those false timing cues arrive, or in other words the wider the baffle, the worse the imaging degradation. BUT if we could significantly reduce edge diffraction, that would reduce these false timing cues to the point of being inconsequential, and imaging would correspondingly benefit. This can be done, but it requires either a very large-radius round-over (the technique Peter Snell used on the Type A), or aggressive absorption, or some other technique or combination of techniques.

None of these diffraction elimination techniques can be accomplished on a narrow baffle because the round-over or absorption or whatever has to be a sufficiently large fraction of a wavelength in order to be effective. Therefore if we are serious about eliminating diffraction, the cabinet width is going to be fairly substantial.

In practice the lowest diffraction enclosure would be precisely flush-mounted into the wall, which is the technique high-end recording studios use, resulting in a baffle the width of the room, along with superb imaging. There will still be a reflection when the sound reaches the sidewalls, but by then enough time has passed that the imaging will not be degraded significantly (I can go into more detail about the timing of reflections and/or diffraction if anyone is interested).

Duke


twoleftears's avatar
twoleftears OP
1,457 posts
 

Thanks, guys, interesting discussion.

What I didn't put in the original post is that through this same experience I was also very impressed by three different speakers all of which could be considered to have wide baffles (certainly by modern standards).  Perhaps they weren't the ultimate imaging champs, but they were all more than sufficient in this regard, and other aspects of their acoustic profile were very compelling.

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