Yes. My brain fart. Will correct it. Thanks.
Thank you - that was throwing me for a loop! I didn't want to start an argument with you over your own words, but now feel comfortable quoting from your Stereophile article:
"[Geoff Martin of Beolab] was not suggesting an omnidirectional speaker, but one whose on-axis frequency response remains unchanged through, say, +/- 45 degrees, so that the room boundary reflections of waves in different parts of the room have the same tonal balance as one another. Since those reflections tend to dominate the spectral color of all listening other than in the nearfield, a technology such as Martin described would help mitigate the room's influence on the sound." (The accompanying polar map shows very effective pattern control down to 100 Hz, which is amazing.)
YES!!!
Less room influence (because the reflections are
spectrally correct) = you hear MORE of the original venue!
First we had constant-directivity horns optimized to give no audible hint that they are horns, the JBL M2 being a notable example of the breed. Now we have a non-horn system apparently beating the best of the modern horns at one of their own games, namely radiation pattern control.
Of course good radiation pattern control with negligible coloration is a cat that can in more ways than one be skinned. Siegfried Linkwitz, Jorma Salmi (Gradient), and Roger West (SoundLab) have been effectively doing it for years, using neither the JBL nor Beolab approaches. (Imo Earl Geddes did it before JBL, but that's another can of worms best opened on another fishing trip.)
I would expect the Beolab approach to be amplifier-power-intensive, as the more aggressive the radiation pattern control at lower frequencies, the more energy lost to shaping the pattern as desired. This is because such shaping is done by cancelling out energy in directions that you do not want it to go, and at low frequencies, the energy wants to be omnidirectional because the wavelengths are so long in relation to the source size.
