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Audio Discussions
Topic: Curves usually sound better

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Posted by fulcrum on 09-21-2010
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Hello all you sound experts out there. Let me preface this by saying I know zero about the subject and I am tone deaf!However, we were recently approached by a local architect to create a system for making curved corners, integrated with standard drywall construction.We did and they were well pleased with the result.  As more people have seen them, I have been bombarded with questions and suggestions about applications beyond the initial reason that was just interior aesthetics.  One of the most common questions/suggestions was that having radiused corners would benefit acoustics.  I can't quite decide if they would or not - hence this post.  I attached a picture showing an internal corner. External and wraparound corners are also possible but looks like you can only attach one file.  What do you think? Would the curves help? cedwards@fulcrumcomposites.com

Posted by fulcrum on 09-22-2010
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Looks like a whole bunch of people looked at the thread but nobody replied.Does that mean nobody knows, nobody cares or I just posted it in the wrong place??Seems like nice curvy corners ought to help but maybe I'm woofing up the wrong tweeter!cedwards@fulcrumcomposites.com

Posted by unicon on 09-22-2010
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Fulcrum ,

 sure it helps to get better sound but the curves you have just made is not sufficient to any serious improvement.

if you are serious about room treatment and acoustics basically you should know what happens in corners ... it can get complicated too, but I summarize it in few words : in corners the sound waves break and try to travel back. so there pressure increases and causes  problems like dips or increased sound levels in bass region and comb filtering which can easily change the main form of sound wave. so corners are always best to be avoided & treated in room. and making round corners helps to distribute the energy in different paths so you get better form of reflections.

Try to make bigger curves at least then ...
but before that try to make a proper post of what you want to do in your room
then people here can help more.


Posted by Paul S on 09-22-2010
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Like unicon said, only the dimensions and relative dimensions and surfaces play into it a lot more than your "round' versus square corners.

Sorry to be a deadbeat, but I somehow got the idea you were mostly looking to capitalize on your "invention".

Best regards,
Paul S

Posted by fulcrum on 09-23-2010
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Thanks for all the comments.  Seems like everyone is pretty much agreed that curves improve things but large radius curves are better than small.  We have made curved panels with a radius from 4 inches to 35 feet.  I attached a pic of one of our more 'normal' jobs.  This was part of a 250' long curved wall that ultimately ended up as part of the Please Touch! museum in Philly.  Sorry to whoever it was that thought this was too commercial - I thought my comment about being tone deaf in the first post would have clued you in that I wasn't doing this for my own listening pleasure!  We are a tiny company that has a process for making very lightweight curved panels.  For the most part we produce for museum manufacturers when they want to make cool, unusual exhibits.  When we made the drywall corners for a local architect we had a ton of people ask about it for improving acoustics.  I was just trying to find a way to understand the issues.   

Posted by scooter on 09-23-2010
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cedwards@fulcrumcomposites.com, you will note there are no commercial postings or ads on this site. Based on some of your recent postings on various internet boards it is difficult to conclude that you are not trying to drum up business for your "goods." Let's agree this was you last post here and that you will stop wasting the bandwith of others. Best of luck.

Posted by oxric on 09-23-2010
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Mr Edwards (I think that's your name):

I find the issue you raise, rather inadvertently, a very interesting one. As a matter of habit, I come across a lot of people, a bit like yourself, who know absolutely nothing about audio, and in fact are deaf (or 'tone deaf', for the present purpose, it makes no difference), but propose to make audiophile products based on what they have read here and there on forums or Wikipedia. May I ask you, if you are incapable of discriminating results from an audio perspective, why you think that suddenly you might be competent to make or develop a product intended for this particular field? Is this because, quite correctly, you have worked out that this is a hobby dominated by irrationally superstitious and self-deluded individuals, who are a perfect clientele for all sorts of premium products of doubtful efficacy?

After all, you no doubt would agree that a structural engineer who had no understanding of the maths involved in calculations of loads would be ill qualified to design the foundation, wall and roof structure of a house. You would think that someone who is blind would not offer himself for a career as an airline pilot no matter what level of competence he might have in other related fields. But somehow the fact of being tone deaf does not stop you from pursuing an area which requires an ability to discriminate in terms of sonic results. Well, I am baffled!

In addition to being tone deaf, you have no training or clear understanding of room acoustics, and the interface between loudspeakers (not to mention the different designs with their own set of problems) and their surroundings but you feel that with some research here and there you can come up with a commercial product. Well, I wish you good luck; in these economically uncertain times, we all need to make a living, but I must say that your approach and the domination of audio generally by individuals of your ilk is what makes this the most difficult hobby to pursue. Please let me know the name of your company and products, so I make sure I label it alongside the many others that I would avoid like the plague.

Again, please do not take any of this personally, it is just an interesting topic and your rather, shall we say, cynical opening gambit made it difficult for the rare contributor that I am to resist a comment about audio, which your initial post truly wasn't after all. You only want to know whether there is money to be made in offering walls with curved corners. By the way, have you ever wondered why our heads have a slightly ovoid shape with no square corners? And why our ears are the shape they are? Maybe the answer is lurking in these considerations.

Kind regards
Rakesh


Posted by fulcrum on 09-23-2010
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Wow, you guys are a really tough crowd.If I wanted to sell crap to "irrationally superstitious and self-deluded individuals" it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. So many people looking at what we make, jump to the assumption that they will help acoustics. It would have taken little or no effort on my part to persuade them. However that is not what I wanted to do, so I set out to seek experts who might be able to advise.  As a result, I have found some great contacts who we will work with to determine what value, if any such curves would bring. Your logic, by the way is flawed.  My personal hearing deficiency is not an impediment to figuring out how to manufacture products for the audio industry any more than my being color blind prevented my from working on the design of components for color TVs, or my friend with an artificial leg from developing cutting edge materials for racing skis - just means somebody else has to judge the results. Anyhow, thanks for all your replies, I really did get a kick out of them.

Posted by oxric on 09-23-2010
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 fulcrum wrote:
Wow, you guys are a really tough crowd.If I wanted to sell crap to "irrationally superstitious and self-deluded individuals" it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. So many people looking at what we make, jump to the assumption that they will help acoustics. It would have taken little or no effort on my part to persuade them. However that is not what I wanted to do, so I set out to seek experts who might be able to advise.  As a result, I have found some great contacts who we will work with to determine what value, if any such curves would bring. Your logic, by the way is flawed.  My personal hearing deficiency is not an impediment to figuring out how to manufacture products for the audio industry any more than my being color blind prevented my from working on the design of components for color TVs, or my friend with an artificial leg from developing cutting edge materials for racing skis - just means somebody else has to judge the results. Anyhow, thanks for all your replies, I really did get a kick out of them.


Mr Edwards,

If we have to flog the logic or so of my comments we could be here all day. I would just point out that people with deficiencies, like Beethoven who gradually lost his hearing but still composed some monumental works, and presumably your friend, the racing skis designer, have a competence in the fields where they are active. Your lack of knowledge of this particular field is what I was trying to point out, compounded by your hearing deficiency, make you particularly unsuitable for developing a solution to the biggest problem every audiophile faces in his room.

Your initial post was that you know nothing, but somehow you have in the meantime sought the opinions of experts in this field. If you had, you presumably would have gained a better understanding of what it is that makes this such a complex area that few people would claim that an idiotic curve would provide some sort of universal panacea. One would presume that you find the topic so hard to understand that you post randomly on the subject ( prompted by Scooter, I looked at your empty posts elsewhere on the net, like the opening one above, copied and pasted  with only minimal amendments) in the hope that the ensuing discussion will enlighten you in spite of your personal limitations in understanding the subject.

What I find really annoying is that this is a subject which really deserves discussion but it had to be your vacuous notions which raised it.

Regards
Rakesh

Posted by fulcrum on 09-23-2010
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I am so happy that my " vacuous notions " have cause all you "irrationally superstitious and self-deluded individuals" to debate what apparently is  " biggest problem every audiophile faces".  Makes me feel the time was well spent - nihilistic tendencies notwithstanding Wink Not wishing to flog your logic further but it's polite not to misquote.  I did not claim that " hat an idiotic curve would provide some sort of universal panacea".  I merely asked if it would help.  Seemed to be a fairly reasonable question.   It's true, I have no competence in acoustics, I'm just pretty good at figuring out how to make unusual stuff at reasonable cost. A few people did contact me with useful suggestions, and for that my thanks. 



Posted by Paul S on 09-23-2010
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fulcrum, I think the "problem" immediately perceived here is that although you "act interested" in hi-fi your only real interest is in quickly gathering low-hanging fruit that will fuel your nascent "product evolution" and marketing "efforts".  Believe it or not, this sort of thing may be taken for selfish duplicity, and it actually annoys some people; it even annoys me a little.

Reaction here notwithstanding, there's no need to bust your hump doing "research" on your "round corners".  By all current indicators, all you need are extravagant claims to sell just about anything supposed to do with hi-fi.  If you are ready to be swamped with orders, and you can afford to part with some in-kind, call on any one of the well-known audio-hos.  They'll rock your world and put you on the Hi-Fi Road to Success.  And don't worry about the product, itself; hi-fi is a special case where it actually pays you, big time, to discover and solve problems with the product after you establish a market.

Good luck,
Paul S

Posted by jessie.dazzle on 09-24-2010
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I didn't read the entire thread, but enough to get the gist...

This guy admits he's tone deaf, but he's likely also a good fabricator, is not afraid of large-scale work, mentions reasonable cost and seems willing to listen. Doesn't that make him a potentially good source for someone who knows what they want and can supply a set of plans; someone looking to do a custom listening room or even a pair of bass horns? 
 
On top of that, he's from Michigan (!), home of some of the world's best fabricators, prototype builders, resourceful, practical engineers and generally sincere people. Granted, he'd have been better received had he simply come out and proposed his services as a skilled fabricator, willing to listen.

jd*

Posted by oxric on 09-24-2010
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 jessie.dazzle wrote:
I didn't read the entire thread, but enough to get the gist...

This guy admits he's tone deaf, but he's likely also a good fabricator, is not afraid of large-scale work and seems willing to listen. Doesn't that make him a potentially good source for someone who knows what they want and can supply a set of plans; someone looking to do a custom listening room or even a pair of bass horns? 
 
On top of that, he's from Michigan (!), home of some of the best fabricators, prototype builders and generally sincere people in the world. Granted, he'd have been better received had he simply come out and proposed his services as a skilled fabricator, willing to listen.

jd*


Hi Jess:

I know for a fact I am sorry to have posted as I did as it turned out the gentleman sounded genuine. So if you are still reading this, Mr Edwards, my sincere apologies.

But his first post was rather poor form and when he had no response, he deliberately provoked controversy in his second post asking whether amongst other things, people who had read his post were either without understanding of this area or without interest.

Truth is I have myself been looking at building a listening room where I was hoping to avoid parallel walls and treat the unavoidable corners, so this guy was not exactly preaching to the unconverted. I was looking at 'Isorast', an ICF build developed by a German company that enables designing part of a house without square corners. (On top of which, the house could be specified to conform to the Passivhaus standards but that's a completely separate topic for another forum, but it would have enabled me to do my bit for the environment).

But as you put it rather mildly, it was some very 'clumsy first steps' indeed.

Regards
Rakesh


Posted by fulcrum on 09-24-2010
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Hi guys, no harm – no foul.    However incapable I am of appreciating music and however ineptly or provocatively I asked the question, truly my only aim is to understand if the curved corners make sense.  As I said, we are starting to sell the drywall corners (and literally can’t make them fast enough).  The thing that bugs me is that probably 1 in 3 of the folks who want them have already decided that they are going to improve acoustics.  It would be the easiest thing in the world to nod & take their money but that isn’t what we are about.  So at the risk of revealing more ignorance: The top to bottom frequencies of a piano are something like 4200Hz to 32Hz.  Likely there are both higher and lower frequencies of interest so for the sake of argument call it 20Hz to 10,000Hz.  That means the wavelengths of interest range from 56 feet down to barely an inch.  Presuming the reason rounded corners help is that they reduce the instances of ‘rogue waves’ heading in different directions as the sound bounces off corners then it seems like pretty much any radius above an inch helps some portion of the sound.  Everyone in the know seems to want bigger radii than the 4” picture I showed so I presume that means low frequencies are most troublesome or most noticeable when distorted?

(BTW - the Isorast system looks pretty neat)



Posted by unicon on 09-24-2010
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 fulcrum wrote:

Hi guys, no harm – no foul.    However incapable I am of appreciating music and however ineptly or provocatively I asked the question, truly my only aim is to understand if the curved corners make sense.  As I said, we are starting to sell the drywall corners (and literally can’t make them fast enough).  The thing that bugs me is that probably 1 in 3 of the folks who want them have already decided that they are going to improve acoustics.  It would be the easiest thing in the world to nod & take their money but that isn’t what we are about.  So at the risk of revealing more ignorance: The top to bottom frequencies of a piano are something like 4200Hz to 32Hz.  Likely there are both higher and lower frequencies of interest so for the sake of argument call it 20Hz to 10,000Hz.  That means the wavelengths of interest range from 56 feet down to barely an inch.  Presuming the reason rounded corners help is that they reduce the instances of ‘rogue waves’ heading in different directions as the sound bounces off corners then it seems like pretty much any radius above an inch helps some portion of the sound.  Everyone in the know seems to want bigger radii than the 4” picture I showed so I presume that means low frequencies are most troublesome or most noticeable when distorted?

(BTW - the Isorast system looks pretty neat)


fulcrum
I do not like the way you try to approach the room acoustic .,
I suggest you just stay away from it and just sell the curves in custom design and sizes and let the customers decide what size to choose.
and sure folks trying to approve their room acoustics can have your services as well.
 
rgz
 unicon

Posted by Paul S on 09-24-2010
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fulcrum, although doing high-end drywall is honest work, I still wonder if you are really being honest with yourself (or "us") here.  However, since you keep asking: With over 40 years in building and remodeling and 45+ years at hi-fi, I would have to say your hi-fi-oriented prospects would better spend their money elsewhere for more benefits at any given "frequency range".   I suppose this fact won't matter if you are more interested in developing an "honest (sounding) spiel" than you are in letting go of a specious opportunity.  Like I said initially, the room dimensions and proportions and surface treatments, etc. will trump your corners pretty much every time.  'Bet you still take the next "hi-fi job"...

BTW: I can easily see how you sweep the inside corners, but I can think of plenty of cases (loads, utilities, etc, etc.) where putting a large radius on an outside corner could involve a lot more than drywall and paint...  Drag in an engineer and a few specialty trades and the cost/benefit ratio could get downright ugly (for the client...).

BTWII: Take a few minutes and look around at some of the crap hi-fi psychos buy! I am not kidding when I say there is really no need to "research" this in order to "succeed" at it.

Beswt regards,
Paul S

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