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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: What Passes for "Space" in Home Audio?
Post Subject: The True purpose of space, in my viewPosted by Romy the Cat on: 4/8/2024
I agree with Rowuk, but I would like to add one more aspect
that, I feel, is much more important than anything else. We universally
understand that bedroom pajamas are clothing to wear at home and not clothing to
go, let's say, to work. Why? Over thousands of years, the choice of materials,
designs, and colors for the pajamas was mentally associated with people as
something private. The very same is true with sound. Our hearing mechanisms and
the capacity of the human brain to process acquired sounds are based upon which
our musical instruments are designed, and the theory of musical harmony,
orchestration, and many other musical aspects are recognized. If we have a
simple guitar playing in our living room and we are completely blind, we
clearly understand if it is a private play or a public performance. Our brain
has a deeply sited mechanism to knowledge reverberation time in heard sound and
reconstructs a mental picture of performing avenue. Am I saying that we know if
it is a public or private performance? Yes, but it is not the objective.
Here is where the second factor of hearing kicks in. Musical
harmony has a full impact on us when we can hear the “natural” environment. Try
to play a trumpet in your closet or a violin in an anechoic chamber, and you
will hardly understand what instrument is playing and, most importantly, what
the instruments are trying to express with sound. With the listening systems we
experience in our 500-600 hundred square feet listening rooms, we clearly have
a clear message that it is a boutique sound reproduction effort. In my view, there
is no way to talk about proper sound until we exceed 1.5 seconds of
reverberation time at 60Hz. The sound in the 500-600 hundred square feet room
with 0.3 -0.5 seconds at 60hz cannot produce a sound that has a fully intended esthetical
and ethical payload to the listener. This is why I greatly support reverberation
injection in truly high-end audio. I very much do not support having playback
in vast listening spaces. It has its complications, but with the proper LF infusion,
our typical 500-600 hundred square feet of listening rooms can take our brain
to a very comfortable listening mode.
It is interesting how high-end audio has hugely progressed into
the realm of sound reproduction but altogether avoided the subject of space
reproduction. From my current standing, I feel if a person spends more than,
let's say, $20,000 for playback, then instead of buying new speakers, new
amplifiers, or new cable elevators, the best investment would be to deal with room
acoustics. There is a trick in it. Contemporary “high-end audio knowledge” does
not offer a person any understanding or benefits of longer reverberation time;
it just insists that a person must kill reverberation time in high frequencies
instead of extending it at low frequencies. Very unfortunate. To me, most of
the acoustic efforts in the typically high-end audio listening rooms look like
an attempt by a castrated person to produce a child. Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site