From: Lang Elliott <>
>
> My only practical experience was at the Nature Sounds Society workshop wh=
ere
> we set up a simple quad speaker arrangement in a small cabin. We did util=
ize
> blankets to reduce reflections, but the setup was very crude indeed. And =
it
> worked really well, or seemed to. At least the results were encouraging. =
My
> conclusion was that it would be fairly simple to put together a home quad
> setup that would work. One could certainly do it nearfield, by placing th=
e
> speakers around a swivel chair, maybe six to eight feet away. The swivel
> chair would keep the listener in the sweet spot.
>
> Again, this is not for your average listener. This is for our pleasure. T=
he
> only way a group could experience such immersive sound is to do it in a
> large room, with maximum speaker distance from the listener. This would
> enlarge the sweet spot considerably. A nearfield setup would have a small
> sweet spot, but it would certainly be large enough for an individual in a
> swivel chair.
>
> The sweet spot in our cabin setup seemed pretty large, meaning it was eas=
y
> to find and easy to stay in it while turning in different directions. And
> this was a rather small cabin, maybe 12' wide by 16' long or thereabouts.
>
> The best listening situation no doubt would be a relatively dead room
> without reflections. That way the sense of perceived spaciousness is
> provided completely by the signals from the speakers, which I think shoul=
d
> be rich in binaural cues (that's why I would choose a quad-binaural type =
of
> mike array design). Then the sense of landscape and geography will be
> imparted by the sound itself. You will hear what you would have heard in
> nature, or nearly so. Room reflections would degrade the experience to on=
e
> degree or the other. Nonetheless, things sounded pretty darned good in th=
e
> little cabin at the workshop.
My thinking is that this would be a good place to use magnaplan
speakers. I've heard a 5.1 surround magnaplan system, and it certainly
helped that. My own use of my pair of magnaplans for stereo similarly
agrees. They, in fact, can fill the house with a dimensional soundfield.
Has to be heard, makes no sense, but it's there. I don't normally play
them loud enough for that, though it does not take very loud in the room
for them to reach the rest of the house too.
One advantage of magnaplans is that in being large sound producing
surfaces rather than point sources like regular speakers is that they
might imitate the multipath sound that's found in outdoors better.
Not sure on how dead the room needs to be. Magnaplans have to be "tuned"
by careful placement to handle room reflections, or so it's said. I used
the route of suspending the speakers over the listeners with regular
speakers front for stereo. That gives a very wide sweet spot on the
order of 8' or more wide. Even outside of that big area there is
considerable spaciousness. I've no sound deadening in the room. The
front of the magnaplans has a shorter reflection path off the ceiling
and walls than the rear, which seems to be enough to keep down phase
problems. For those that don't know, magnaplans radiate sound both front
and back off their entire large surface. The back sound is radiated 180
degrees out of phase with the front, which is where all the tricky part
starts. The setup I have comes close to imitating the 5.1 surround
systems even though it's only the front channels.
Of course magnaplans in a completely sound deadened room give another
alternative. Place them on the original axis of each mic and
perpendicular to it. With sound deadening they could be placed quite
close to the walls. That might make your sweet spot the entire room. I'm
not sure without trying it.
Note, because of the cost of the big magnaplans that I think would be
best this would not be a cheap room. Worth checking out if you get the
chance. There are a fair number of 5.1 magnaplan setups around.
Walt
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