You probably kept the Zu’s in one place and then started rotating them outward. My personal experience is that you probably need to move the speakers closer to each other for them to interact correctly with less toe in. Downfiring sub woofer section interacts somewhat different than front firing part of the speakers. My MBL’s are omnis and toe in should not matter much as long as the listening position is far enough away for driver integration, but i clearly prefer them with no toe in, as the bass sections integrates best with the room and each other that way. I had to move the speakers closer to each other to achieve best result.
Sublime Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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Some manufacturers make their higher frequencies be a higher volume so that off-axis is normal volume and on is higher than normal.
+1. Toe in isn't a "synthetic hifi effect" at all.
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There is a tendency for us audiophiles to try to maximize our listening rooms, and especially the width part of the room, for many the smaller distance. Sometimes the distance between the speakers become to large for good room/speaker integration wich can be partially compensated with toe in. Your room is especially difficult because of the roof Marc, and having to potentially reset your sub crossovers points is not a attractive proposition either
But if you properly mark your current position in room and crossovers, its at least a no expense, fully reversible proposition Zus need toe-in by design. Sean Casey himself setup my Definitions and his method is working from the bottom up (as you know). He also used only one speaker to do it, then laser aligned the second with the first.
Keith, is anyone referring to toe in these terms? I missed that reference, and I am certainly not calling it that. For me, in my system, full toe in resulted in a more pronounced and delineated sound with starker image outlines and specificity. It was an enhancement of what I hear live. I decided I preferred a different speaker orientation. I maintain that people should set up their speakers in a way they prefer to hear them.
Conversely, do you agree with Ian that toeing the speakers out results in an "editorialized" sound but toeing them in does not? Are we not editorializing with everything we do in audio?
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Who said that it was? To me pinpoint imaging is the relevant hifi artifact here. You can have more natural imaging also with more or less toe in, depending on the speaker. I do have some slight toe in, and it works for me to still get more natural imaging. With my previous monitors I had pinpoint imaging also with full toe out, so the artifact was independent of toe in.
I used the phrase "synthetic effects" so perhaps Keith and others are picking up on that. What I described with that was the psycho-acoustic differences, the experiences one has between listening to a stereo system set up to produce them and the experiences one has listening in a concert hall.
I don't intend the phrase as evaluative of what should be the case for any individual - it's a short hand description. I say 'synthetic' because the conditions behind having such are created in a listening space and may or may not be the result of a particular setup or combination of componentry or both.
Edit: One could say conditions are created in a listening room to mimic what one hears with live acoustic music and are thus likewise synthetic. Okay. But they are not synthetic in drawing on a reference from life, whereas a different sui generis approach does not.
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Tim, can you refer to your "synthetic effects" as being inherent to a no toe-in speaker orientation? It sounds more like you are describing a system set up in more general terms, and depending on the choices one has made, the result is either synthetic or not, or perhaps in degrees, nothing to do specifically with zero toe in. Or am I mistaken?
Are they really synthetic? They are the recording, and you choose how much of it you want to try to hear.
That's a reasonable question as I struggle to work out the words. No guarantee it will come out making sense.
There's probably a scientific explanation for why a particular stereo configuration has a tendency to yield certain experiential results. That's interesting but not where I'm exploring. I think of it the other way around, where one seeks or prefers a certain outcome, a certain sonic experience, then obtains it by doing a setup in a way to achieve it.
Yes. Inasmuch as many (most?) don't have the experience in the concert hall. One needs to create the conditions for having these synthetic effects. They are non-reproductive of the live music experience. One may prefer that or prefer their own version.
Sure but how do you approach it if you don’t even bother to understand what it is? “Doomed to repeat” is the phrase that comes to mind.
The conditions are having a full frequency response, low distortion, and sitting in front of the speakers. All three are direct criteria for being an audiophile supposedly.
My recommendation for getting more natural sound, better sound, starts listening outside of the room. From there you can figure out A LOT. It ends with in room tuning but you’ll spend 100x the amount of time sitting in it trying to figure out what you like better.
Most HiFi sounding stereos when heard outside of the room sound gutted. They have no middle octaves, and bass doesn’t have character.
Are they really the recording? Or is it an artifact that comes after the recording, by the way speakers portray the information? How would we know?
(I am referring to firmly outlined pinpoint imaging, or the typical audiophile 'soundstage' if you will.)
Folsom, Nice comments about the out of room listening experience. I started doing this a few years ago in the hallway outside of my listening room and walking up the stairs a bit leading to the second floor. I also listen at times from the dining room across the entry hall when putting together wooden jigsaw puzzles on the large table. I noticed that what I hear from outside the room is becoming increasingly convincing during my year of experiments.
The best way I can think of describing what I hear from the stairway or the dining room is a sound coming from my listening room which is more alive. Somehow there is a more even distribution of energy that holds together from a distance and around the corner and removed from the listening seat.
The analogy has been made before about someone walking down the street and listening to a person practicing piano through his open window. I ran into a neighbor last spring who stopped me outside my house and told me she didn’t know that I knew how to play the cello. I laughed and told her that it was Janos Starker playing Bach’s cello Suite. I jokingly told her that she knows how to flatter an audiophile.
The best way I can think of describing what I hear from the stairway or the dining room is a sound coming from my listening room which is more alive. Somehow there is a more even distribution of energy that holds together from a distance and around the corner and removed from the listening seat.
The analogy has been made before about someone walking down the street and listening to a person practicing piano through his open window. I ran into a neighbor last spring who stopped me outside my house and told me she didn’t know that I knew how to play the cello. I laughed and told her that it was Janos Starker playing Bach’s cello Suite. I jokingly told her that she knows how to flatter an audiophile.
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As I mentioned earlier think about how close mics are. They are unnaturally close to thing. You’ve never heard heavily outlined music from 1 mic recording that wasn’t close to the music source because there is no such thing.
Besides that how can it be an artifact if what you’re hearing is the music? How do you a new signal that is somehow also the original signal? You would have to generate it with software and you’d need ADC then DAC for 100% of the signal not just a portion. Besides that why do we hear it on stereos with the lowest distortion? It would easily show in measurements if it were an artifact.
I don’t understand this obsession with thinking the source is too pure to be the cause of a type of sound we don’t like, yet we praise better recordings?
Just because one way of talking about this is easier than putting in the work to understand doesn’t make it right. The more we progressively define things in some obscured way that’s not related in any way to the reality of what’s going on, the more manufacturers will make horrible sounding gear to meet non-sensical words. Ask for garble, get garble.
There's a science and art to good recordings and there are many of them and even many more average but decent ones, they're not all as bad as shitty pop ones. Leaving the poor quality recordings aside the average good recording can sound quite realistic and natural on an better system that it does on a crappier one, equipment can and do destroy the sound. Same with poor setup you get more from a proper setup. If you say was true about recordings always being wrong then there's no point to any of this!
david
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