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In the Forum: Audio For Dummies ™
In the Thread: Romy the Cat's Audio recommendation: the biggest bang for a back
Post Subject: Why so happyPosted by Bill on: 7/28/2023
I would bet that Romy prefers to sit from mid hall to the back of the hall, as I do, and our penchant for for large orchestral music. Thus, while sitting up front gives the orchestra stage maybe 120 degrees wide, with little hall sound, it tends to be strident and too up front. At an outdoor concert, the sound is also only direct, even though one sits far away from the orchestra, so one loses the warmth of a great concert hall.
At Mid to back hall, the stridency is removed and anywhere from 50 to 90% of the sound is reverberation from the hall reflections. Thus, the reverberations from the hall add tremendously to the warmth and glory of a full orchestra, with the best halls producing the best feelings in the listener. Thus Romy's feeling he has listening only to the Hall effect speakers. Why do you think that it costs more to sit back there than up front in most concert halls.
Where I differ from Romy is how he obtains that “hall effect”. Yes, Yamaha and other companies do a great job using the artificial reverberation fields they obtained from various venues, but they are still artificial. Also I feel that while you don't need $30,000 speakers for the field, you do need speakers and amplifiers that will be able to handle the fff's without distorting. Even in Romy's room his surrounds would distort on loud passages.
Second, in order to obtain a true Hall effect, one needs at least front and rear height stereo speakers and stereo surrounds. A concert hall has four walls a ceiling and floor all producing hall reverberations. Adding a central channel, LIke RCA did with their early stereo recordings, also can improve some early stereo recordings with all left or right staging.
Third, I prefer to use a preamp processor such as my trinnov altitude using AURO 3D processing, not Dolby
or DTS, to either recover the Hall effect sounds from the front main speakers and direct them to the surrounds, or produce them through processing. If one is worried about affecting the sound of the main channels, One does not need to run them through the processor, but use the second amplifier outputs from the preamp to power the Hall effect processor, like Romy does with his setup. That does have the I’ll effect of leaving the Hall effect sounds still coming through the main channels, which is a distortion.
But I do use the trinnov as my main processor as it allows me to do room and speaker correction, and active crossovers of the front speakers eliminating power robbing passive crossovers, time aligning the drivers, and removing much of my rooms fast reverberation times that distort the sound field. There will also be a future update which is supposedly able, with the use of added subwoofers out of phase with the main woofers and subs, to remove bass standing waves that give the peaks and valleys to the bass in home listening rooms.
While I haven't been able to come close to what he has obtained with Macondo, and if I were 30 again, would emulate what he has, cost be damned, I do feel that up to a point, with correct processing, the more good quality Hall effect speakers one has, the more lifelike and stimulating listening can be..
Bill
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