They are not Roon exclusive filters as far as I know can be used with anything that supports convolution. He asks for the playback software you are using, if not listed you let him know what you are using.
I think you mean it’s easier to get depth with speakers away from the boundary Nigel? If so I entirely agree. I do get some depth with my SBLs but it’s not a priority for me either. I do get a massive soundstage, the benefit is that I can more easily follow different strands in the music. Imaging for its own sake has always seemed a slightly pointless pursuit IMO.
Stu
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. I go to a lot of live concerts and not once have I thought about the depth, I just enjoy the music. I find speakers with artificial depth and pinpoint imaging rather offputting.
I would have thought that such a depth perception within soundstage comes more from the bass. In so much as giving a greater breadth of foundation for the music to inhabit.
As most bass is non directional, perhaps it doesn’t matter if the speakers are more out in the room or indeed flush mounted within a wall - so long as there is that bass in quantity and quality as the rest of the spectrum.
Headphone listening can give great depth, soundstaging and sense of space and that’s from a speaker clamped on your head.
My experience of ‘room correction’ is that it does degrade one or more aspects of the sound reproduction no matter how it’s done. Yes it can deal with frequency response peaks (but, in general not troughs unless caused by phase shifts) and can to a certain degree give some limited help with timing anomalies, but there is always a cost in another way - such as perceived resolution, perceived instrumental differentiation or perceived timing (i.e. PRaT). I have tried this with miniDSP hardware and also by upscaling and filtering the files (which avoids the A/D and D/A round trip, so should be the ‘purest’ approach).
The solution on which I have settled is to leave the feed to the main speakers unmolested (so as to get the best signal in the frequency ranges where the human ear/brain combination has the most discrimination) but apply a DSP solution just to the analogue feed to the sub. This corrects the sub for the main room modes and integrates the sub into the main sound field by filling in the LF troughs left by the interaction of the room and the main speakers.
Strangely enough you also that get from the very high frequencies that are theoretically inaudible. One of the weird things about supertweeters…
I just cannot get on with headphones. The stereo perspectives all seem wrong and unnatural. I also immediately start to miss my true system sound as soon as I plug them in. Not used mine for over a decade!
I do appreciate their convenience in a family home though. Funny that many believe using them gives you the ultimate listening experience. YMMV.
They may, when listening to binaural recordings.
Certainly they have the great advantage of not being influenced by room, so have the potential to sound the same wherever used (and the same in the listener’s home as the designer’s assessment room). But headphones cannot reproduce the feel of bass through the skin, so can never be like real music with bass content. As with everything there is trade-off and compromise…
Well opposite of my current findings. I just got the full filters running now that Thierry at HAF has made and I couldn’t be more happy. I had done as much with placement as possible and room modifications for audio are just not in the picture. So this was my best bet and I am not disappointed. PrAT in abundance, bass is now more controlled, lovely midrange that was getting drowned out before and its balanced the treble. I am hearing more instruments than before and the vocals are much clearer and to the front of the stage.
I tried to make my own filters based on the same readings and they came nothing close to what Thierry has done with these. Best £100 I have spent in trying to improve SQ, It might not suit everyone or fix everything as some things cant be fixed with DSP but to me its close to magic.
Well perhaps he should start work on Grand Unification theory then.
Since he can write digital filters that exceed the known limits information theory, he should be able to solve that little puzzle as well!
Alternatively perhaps the filters are just written so that among the benefits you’re just not noticing the information losses incurred in getting those benefits.
If it works like this for you fine; however in each case (even simple filters) I’ve noticed the losses as well.
My S1’s are approximately 1.3m from back wall (to the front), sofa 4.5m, speaker distance 2.4m with slight toe in. Speakers placement is not 100% symmetrical since my room is not. I try to find a position with good energy and definition then experiment with slight movements of the speakers followed by toe in.
New furniture arrived today, so I’ve been able to get the speakers wider apart and pretty much to the 0.8/1.0 ratio for our open plan lounge. It’s been a great upgrade, now have the sweet spot from the sofa, with a lovely soundstage where the speakers disappear. Wife says it’s sounds the same, but nice all the same , which I’ll take as a win.
Remember that placing speakers symmetrically does not necessarily give you the best sound. You might need, for example, to toe one speaker in more than the other because of non symmetrical room surfaces.
To the nth, I have now my speakers set to .8.
Can report that overall tonality seems more natural out of room.
In room hot spot - after moving both speaker out into the room by two inches to compensate for more bass.
Superb. Thank you.
Interesting. My ratio is exactly 0.8:1.0, and arrived at it not because I read that’s what it should be, but because I tried different speaker positions over the course of a half year or so and settled on what sounded best, and give me the best soundstage for everything from solo lute music to large scale orchestra music, using both my turntable and NDX2 as sources. I also have a slight toe-in on the speakers, and they are .5 meter off the walls (Dynaudio’s recommended minimum).
Interesting how theory followed practice for me on this. I trusted my ears first and worried about conventional wisdom after the fact.
I have now hit the magic ratio, and this “out of room” factor was quite remarkable for me to.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what the 0.8:1.0 ratio is?
Not heard of it before and can’t quite put it into perspective
It’s the ratio of the distance between tweeters and the distance of the tweeters to your listening position. So if the speakers are 8 feet apart measured between tweeters, then that it would measure as 10 feet from a tweeter to your ears when sitting in your listening position.
It’s just a rule of thumb you can use to start with for speaker positioning relative to your listening position.
Thanks … I mistakenly thought it was something to do with distance from rear and side walls
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