thx.

• JBL 2397

Doesn't Mr Widget have a good thread on building a scaled size Smith horn there?

See you on LH

Ron

That they're diffraction devices intended to produce a diffuse sound field for mono-listening

That if you're the sort of person who worries about stereo "image" you'll be disappointed in them.

Anyhow, looking at the diagrams on audioheritage, it seems pretty easy and cheap to mock one of these horns up. The only difficulty is getting a set of throat adaptors. If I can get a pair of adaptors inexpensively, I'll give these horns a try.

Gar.

Play a recording of the same event through speakers that are often cited as imaging well and you have made a subtle transformation. No sound reproducer is perfect, but I find one thing is in common with many of those speakers touted as being good at imaging. They tend to have certain characteristics that make them sound good in one spot but move your head around and it gets phasey.

It's an interesting effect, and I think that's what a whole lot of people are listening for when they talk about imaging. Just a hunch that I've begun to consider as I listen to speakers that produce this effect.

You have touched on, but perhaps circled around the main issue. In a concert setting, be it a symphony orchestra or a piano bar, there is no real sense of imaging, only a sense of presence. There are so many reflections in the concert hall that imaging in the hi-fi sense isn't possible. So what is imaging? Exactly what the recording engineer wants it to be. Almost all modern recordings are multi-mic'ed, usually with a mic for each performer and another one for his guitar. So, in the mix-down, any performer can be placed anywhere on the sound stage. We are not reproducing the performance, we are reproducing the mix.

Any decent speaker can be made to image from well to excellent by proper room placement or room treatment. Eliminate the early reflections and the speaker images. One would have to actually try to make a speaker that has inherently poor imaging. Presence is another issue, and is generally the opposite of imaging. The music seems to come from everywhere. This is the Bose effect, and I use it to impress the unwashed when demoing my system. I take a recording with pretty good imaging, like AKUS, and set my HT receiver to Pro-Logic with a significant delay. Presto -- Presence. They love it!

I'm, sorry, but I feel that a quest for imaging falls into the category of listening to the equipment rather than listening to the music.

Bob

Once upon a time I made the very point you make on another forum down the dial - that sitting at any reasonable distance from the performers in any venue there's no ability to pinpoint sounds, to localize individual instruments.

What was rather hilarious was one rejoinder. The person wrote that *because* you can't see the performers when listening to a recording it becomes especially important to insist on "imaging" to assist in "imagining".

Me, I like fidelity better.

I guess some folk may actually prefer imaging for the "illusion" since that is all that reproduction is, right... creating an illusion?
Others might prefer "presence". I personally like imaging becuase it makes the vocalist or lead instruments appear more centered, and lends to the illusion that there is a real instrument playing... centered somewhere. Of course, you & Wayne are right: in a real performance, especially one that is electronically amplified, the singer's voice or lead instruments' notes will come from all over. However, in an unamplified performance, with a well damped room, the singers voice and the instruments should be localized, even in a live performance, no?

Based on the above discussion, perhaps imaging is good to create the illusion of a live umaplified performance, even if it were not really that way. That's probably one of the reasons why so many folk like single driverspeakers that image so much better (beaming etc) when listening to small arrangements (like one singer and 4-5 instruments).

Keeping the room treatment constant, it makes intuitivie sense that speakers with higher directivity will image better. What do you & Wayne think?

-akhilesh