Opalchip, I gotta tip my hat to you for consistently holding to your convictions, even if they're very different from mine. I have a feeling your ideas are more the norm than what you're finding on this thread - I think you've stumbled into a hotbed of believers in planars and/or poly-directional loudspeakers (to borrow Dick Shahinian's term).
A comment about one of your arguments, if I may: While it is true that the microphone picks up hall ambience cues, microphones are usually placed much closer to the performers than listeners would normally be. So, relatively speaking, they pick up a much higher proportion of direct to reverberant sound than what a listener would hear in the same venue. This isn't always the case, but usually is.
Also, the direction from which reflections arrive make a difference in how they are percieved, and in most venues the reflections arrive from all around rather than from the exact same direction as the first-arrival sound. Reflections that arrive from the sides, and well delayed in time, are particularly beneficial in conveying a sense of ambience and acoustic space.
My father has done research in anechoic chambers, and he reports that music live or reproduced in an anechoic chamber has incredible clarity but also sounds dead and boring. I have not listened in an anechoic chamber, but having severely overdamped my listening room as an experiment let's just say I'm sure it wouldn't be my cup of tea.
My conclusion from fairly extensive research in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and other publications, and from my own crude experiments, is that the ideal would have the direct sound to arrive completely free from early reflections, then for the reflected energy to begin to arrive perhaps 10 or more milliseconds later, and then that reverberant energy would build up and decay over about 50 or so milliseconds.
However, if I understand your position correctly, you hold that all reflections are colorations - even those inevitably part of a live performance. So there is little point in me arguing that there's a right way and a wrong way for a loudspeaker to interact with the room if you see all room interactions as inherently detrimental. I doubt you and I will find much common ground here other than our passion for audio well reproduced, whatever that may mean. Hey, that's enough for me. I'd love to hear your system some day, and if you're ever in New Orleans give me a holler and come hear mine.
Cheers,
Duke
A comment about one of your arguments, if I may: While it is true that the microphone picks up hall ambience cues, microphones are usually placed much closer to the performers than listeners would normally be. So, relatively speaking, they pick up a much higher proportion of direct to reverberant sound than what a listener would hear in the same venue. This isn't always the case, but usually is.
Also, the direction from which reflections arrive make a difference in how they are percieved, and in most venues the reflections arrive from all around rather than from the exact same direction as the first-arrival sound. Reflections that arrive from the sides, and well delayed in time, are particularly beneficial in conveying a sense of ambience and acoustic space.
My father has done research in anechoic chambers, and he reports that music live or reproduced in an anechoic chamber has incredible clarity but also sounds dead and boring. I have not listened in an anechoic chamber, but having severely overdamped my listening room as an experiment let's just say I'm sure it wouldn't be my cup of tea.
My conclusion from fairly extensive research in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and other publications, and from my own crude experiments, is that the ideal would have the direct sound to arrive completely free from early reflections, then for the reflected energy to begin to arrive perhaps 10 or more milliseconds later, and then that reverberant energy would build up and decay over about 50 or so milliseconds.
However, if I understand your position correctly, you hold that all reflections are colorations - even those inevitably part of a live performance. So there is little point in me arguing that there's a right way and a wrong way for a loudspeaker to interact with the room if you see all room interactions as inherently detrimental. I doubt you and I will find much common ground here other than our passion for audio well reproduced, whatever that may mean. Hey, that's enough for me. I'd love to hear your system some day, and if you're ever in New Orleans give me a holler and come hear mine.
Cheers,
Duke