My monitor/subwoofer system
- Thread starter Al M.
- Start date
What I have suggested to Al is to toe-in but then use a resistor to tone down the tweeter, plugged between his dual binding posts on the speakers. When I had a pair of B&W 805s, I set them up in parallel, then realized there is better...
What a fantastic and clearly intelligible report, Peter! Great writing!
Congratulations, Al, on the positive evolution of your system!
Congratulations, Al, on the positive evolution of your system!
That’s because Zu is usually meant to be toed in. It all depends on the speaker radiation pattern/room.
It depends on the speaker if it is a "revolutionary" move or not. As you and Keith point out, speaker dispersion, radiation patterns play a role. I also always had my Ensemble Reference point straight ahead. The same thing was recommended by the manufacturer for my Reference 3A MM DeCapo BE monitors.
On the other hand, the same manufacturer recommends for my current Reflector monitors, because of different speaker geometry, that they are pointed in just a slight angle away from a direct frontal view, which translates to them more or less being frontally directed at the ears. This is rather extreme toe in.
So yes, having these speakers instead fully toed out, pointing straight ahead parallel to the side walls, is quite unusual. While the Ensemble Reference even with full toe out exhibited pinpoint imaging, and the MM DeCapo BE monitors did so too, even though not quite to that extent, the Reflector monitors upon full toe out lose the pinpoint imaging that they are capable of when toed in. In my reply to Peter I will argue that this is a good thing.
Thank you, Peter, for this report! I am glad you enjoyed the system, and how it conveys the music, so much.
I am not sure if I experience the changes as dramatically as you do, but I will try to add some thoughts.
With the full toe out, imaging has changed. As in your system, images are not sharply outlined anymore. There is no 'pinpoint' imaging anymore which is a hifi effect. When you sit live at a good distance from the stage, everything is "one big mono". Yet when you sit within the radius within which the portion of direct sound is still greater than the portion of reflected sound, you can easily localize the instruments -- yet without clear and sharp outlines. This is what I also now hear in both our systems. The precise "hifi" outlines are gone.
Perhaps that is what gives you the impression of the sound being ALIVE, it is in this aspect much more like the real thing now. The lack of neat separation of sounds from one another into their own little entities, which previously was dividing up the sound field as it were, perhaps contributes to your impression of the room being more energized. I assume that the same lack of, artificial, separation is also responsible for the music being a more holistic experience, an experience that I also share.
Apart from my findings that tonal balance of my speakers can be quite significantly modulated by toe in, your full speaker toe out, suggested by ddk (thanks, David!), also inspired me to try that again. At a previous time, when the speakers were 4 inches further apart, it was not successful. I guess what we both have now is more like the "natural sound" that David refers to.
***
Now in the winter, with low indoor humidity and low outside temperatures, the toe out quite well corrects my tonal balance. With more toe in the sound becomes thinner and brighter. The low humidity affects transmission of high frequencies, and the low outside temperatures appear to modulate the acoustic properties of my wooden house walls (3 of the 4 room walls are outside walls).
In the summer the sound would be far too dull with this speaker configuration. Previously I would have compensated for the summer change in acoustics with speaker setup (toe in), now I plan for the summer as much as possible to change the room acoustics around the same speaker setup. I can turn the TubeTraps from their absorptive side to their diffusive side, and perhaps even remove the upper (stacked) corner TubeTraps. I cannot remove room treatment completely; unlike your room mine is an acoustic disaster without treatment. Possibly I will still need some toe in for the summer, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum.
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It's funny to me that I run into these comments in Al's thread - in a different context I was just writing about these same sonic characteristics. Some electronics can yield similar, so they are not unique to speaker position.
Not just image outlines but dimensionality is also impacted.
Many speaker manufacturers suggest some degree of toe-in. (Iirc the only speakers I've had not toed-in were Maggies.) Among those that do, it makes me wonder if the toe-in recommendation is meant to create the very characteristics you find gone missing with a straight-ahead position? In other words do such manufacturers believe the toed-in sound is the best their speakers offer or do they do it because that's what they think audiophiles want?
Is that idealized sound (if I may call it that) perpetuated when manufacturers set up their speakers in reviewer's rooms and it gets reported as such, and typically quite favorably. With the absence of such sound a detractant. How often I read end-user remarks about the whole pin-point imaging thing, crisply defined performer outlines, dimensional performer images stuff as highly favorable indicators of success. Are the marketplace or high-end reviews unwittingly 'teaching' us this type of sound is what we should seek - a self reinforcing notion?
Granted, many do seem to enjoy it.
....
CYA Edit: Upon reflection, I should note my own responsibility (culpability?) in past reviews of praising the "high definition sound" of certain components, though not in terms of speaker position. Acknowledgement, not retraction. Now I have a slightly broader perspective thanks mostly to certain equipment and a bit of forum participation. :-o
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Great questions Tim. Would be really good to be able to use opportunities like this where two experienced listeners both equate a similar fundamental shift in speaker (ie no toe) strategy bringing about what they both determine is a more convincing and natural sound.
Would be great to pin down what is specifically the outcome in listening that shifts the focus into a more calmly centred and evenly perceptually balanced place.
Is it just shelving down to a more mid-centric place where we are just better seated in the core flow of the music and less driven to be drawn to chase across the varying upper sensations and distractions of the soundfield.
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But Keith, Wilson's are meant to have specific toe in, yet Christian now has them straight out.
Dear Tao, pardon my presumptuousness ... if I may parse:
"... Would be really good to be able to use opportunities like this (where two experienced listeners... determine [what] is a more convincing and natural sound) ... to pin down ... specifically" ... [what leads them to be no longer] ... "drawn to chase across the varying upper sensations and distractions of the soundfield. ..."
Yes - I agree.
Perhaps a road to Damascus moment more so for Peter than Al? I would call it more a shift in perspective about what matters - a basis of preference. But better to let principals speak for themselves.
If this fusses up your thread Al, we can skip this.
Wilson are voiced for people with smallish rooms
that want big speakers
Christian moved to a house beyond
his speakers
Unfortunately nothing I’ve tried worked for summer sound, I’m very sensitive to summer’s compression and distortion and it’s everywhere. You hear it even listening to the car radio and movie theaters with their horrible thx sound are even more distorted and painful in summer.
david
Perhaps it is because I live a block from the ocean, but I do not hear much variation between Summer and Winter sound. The humidity level does change on the coldest days, but the water moderates fluctuations somewhat in both temperature and humidity. I used to live near Al, years ago, and the few miles from the water does indeed affect the weather. Or my system/hearing is not acute enough. I might hear a difference next Summer as my system evolves and my priorities continue to change.
I think that Al was preferring his Summer sound and adjusted his speakers in the Winter to compensate for the lack of humidity. Initially, he was after a tonal shift and increasing "body" which seemed diminished in the Winter compared to the Summer.
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Fransisco, my post is not making any such claims about a revolutionary move. Speakers interacting with the room boundaries, and dispersion patterns, have been long discussed. I am simply describing the difference in sound that I heard in Al's system the other night, and confirming for me, that a similar effect occured in my own listening room when I did the same thing.
Having said that, there are differences. To my ears, Al's sound is more blended and overlapped relative to the way it was before than my relative change. I retained the tonal qualities I had before, while Al's shifted somewhat. And his sound is more diffuse than mine is, though I did reduce the "detail" and outline effect of the images. Sound does fill the room more in both of our cases and is a more wholistic, natural experience.
I suspect this will not be universal, and I make no such prescription. I am only describing two sounds in two systems within the individual system contexts. Speakers and rooms are all different, so the effect will vary, I'm sure. No revolution here in the physics. The change for me is more of evolving perception and what I value. That's all. For me, Al's system took a major step forward with this change.
Tim, I'm glad you mentioned dimensionality. I forgot to discuss this in my report of Al's new sound. Interestingly, one of the first things I notices, within a few minutes of hearing his system the other night is that some instruments, not all, changed in image size, as well as projected sound size. Some of his recordings sounded pretty much as they had in this sense, and others changed somewhat or a lot.
I noticed this too in my system until I played more with speaker position in terms of distance apart and from the listener. I played with that until I was able to have an appropriate scale/size of musicians while retaining the larger size of the projected sound. The stage did change to become less trapezoidal and more square with wider rear staging. Depth layering was retained or even improved in my case, and image size is now consistent and seems appropriate to the recording, but in most or all cases, the sound projected from these the images of the musicians increased in scale and ability to fill the room.
In Al's case, some of the images have changed in size based on my memory and perhaps he will also play around with speaker distance apart and from the listener to see how the sound is affected.
ddk suggested in one post that positioning speakers when they are aimed straight ahead is more difficult to get right than when they are toed-in. I found this to be the case in my system.
I think Al will be well served to experiment a bit more with this and with rotation or repositioning or removing of some of his acoustic treatments. There don't seem to be hard/fast rules about this, experimentation is essential, and it is free. If things remain the same, at least something will have been learned, imo.
ddk lives at 5800 feet (1950 meters) elevation, in what is essentially a high desert. higher than Denver.
thinner air + humidity changes.
i live at 1100 feet, but in the mountains in a temperate rain forest with lots of trees around. so it stays mildly humid summer and winter; my room has HVAC and room inside a room with 2 small but blocked windows, so stays fairly constant.
also; my drivers are all a ceramic matrix or metal ribbon, except my powered subwoofers (under 40hz) which are a treated rubberized paper membrane.
an all paper cone (especially from the mid bass on up) might be more effected by humidity.
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