Reddit mentions of Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms (Audio Engineering Society Presents)

To my knowledge, no one else explains it better:


https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511848230&sr=1-6&keywords=audio+engineering

1. Really? Because you better check all applicable insurance agreements to see if they cover fire on that property when it's a commercial entity. He already posed photos of employees/friends working in this space. And the idea that no one has to follow any safety regulations if all they do is say "i'm self employed" is ridiculous.
   
   
2. That's patently false and shows a complete lack of understanding of acoustics. You're just making stuff up to placate the reddit crowd. Post false BS and get upvotes lol. Post science and get DVs. Welcome to reddit..:)
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=floyd+toole&qid=1572283051&sr=8-1
   
   You can start there. There's decades, DECADES of science explaining the worst and best speaker qualities. And among the worst is a cabinet that adds any audible distortion to the input signal.

1. Get centered along one wall so the room is as symmetrical as possible. Preferably with the long way to your back. Put your speakers close to the wall as possible to raise your front wall low end modal frequency as high as possible.
   
2. Build your own acoustic panels using a wool or recycled denim based insulation. The deeper the better.
   
3. Install those panels at your early reflection points on your walls and ceiling...and behind your speakers.
   
4. Get one subwoofer, preferably two.
   
5. Put isolation under your speakers.
   
6. Get some monitors that don’t suck.
   
7. Use an RTA with a transfer function to identify problem frequencies and locations.
   
8. Build your own helmholtz resonators to address low frequency problems.
   
9. Use more acoustic panels to address any high end frequency problems.
   
10. Diffusion on your back wall can make your room sound a lot bigger.
    
    Read a book. There are many, but Sound Reproduction by Floyd E. Toole is a must read for every audio “Engineer”.

It is, there's sections dedicated to metrics in speaker design that have shaped how Harman designs their speakers, theory on room acoustics, etc. He has both a 3rd edition and a 1st/2nd (1st and 2nd are identical, 3rd is restructured and changed a bit while addding some).

Link to 3rd edition here [no referral]

>Also tell how you hear a “resonance”

Lol. You need help bud. Best to just start here.I have the 2nd edition on PDF. Worth every penny.


Acoustic Resonances

You have justified your logic, but, with all due respect, it is flawed. It reminds me of a joke about a scientist that taught a fly to fly on demand, and observed that when he removed it's wings, it went deaf, because it didn't fly on demand anymore!

The human brain is tricked very, very easily. In 1910, Muzak was invented: phycological based music systems! If you have any doubt on how easily the brain can be tricked, PLEASE search for audio myths on reddit and watch and listen to the videos. It will blow your mind, if you believe what you wrote. They demonstrate just how easily the brain is tricked. In fact, you can be talked into hearing things! Fact. The softwares we are speaking of, such as Sonnarworks, measures reflections on a spectral analytic basis, as well as time differences, as well as phase and inversions, natural comb filtering and much, much, much more.

It does, indeed negate the effects of the room, actually better than room treatment, in most cases, so your speakers are indeed sounding as if they are in an anechoic chamber.

>On top of that there is a frequency curve and we perceive different frequencies at different volumes.

It does take into effect the fact that human ears are most sensitive at 1000 hz and the rollouts of the human ear. For headphones, they go as far asking for you to send in your cans, as they measuring each side of YOUR headphones, for they differ, it is that accurate. Andrew Shepps ( if you into audio engineering, you know his pedigree - If you don't, you should) swears by it, as more and more engineers are, and they are in fact using it to mix now - grammy winning mixers using it and swearing by it - I'm not second guessing Schepps and his golden ears. I'm not going to challenge the incredible work Sonnarworks engineers either.

>Throw a digital room correction into the mix and you are now lying to your brain and it can no longer tell fact from fiction.

This is baseless, my friend. High end home theater has been doing this for well over decades with wondrous results, in high end home theater, I'm talking the custom stuff, a point source mic is put at every listening point in the room to correct the room. The before and after is stunning - jaw dropping. The consumer's brain doesn't 'fix it'. Even regular consumer home theater, best buy stuff, has Audyssey MultEQ XT32, LFC, Sub EQ HT, Dynamic Volume and Dynamic EQ. Sonnarworks has taken it to pro level.

>our brain can perceive this room correction and correct for it in the mixing process, because at least your brain is hearing the truth

Our brains lie to us, our brains lie to us every day, for it tries to quickly piece together bits of sounds, and sights, for that matter, and quickly try to come up with something that makes sense. i.e. the man on the moon syndrome: our brains try to do it's best to create a whole picture out of pieces. It does the same to audio. I'm sure you've seen optical illusions. They work extraordinarily well! Sonic illusions do too!

>Your brain can perceive this room correction and correct for it in the mixing process, because at least your brain is hearing the truth.

Now we're getting ridiculous. If this were true, than why do all, as in every one, without exception, of the best mixing and mastering engineers treat their rooms? Because their brains cannot decode the complex array of waves bouncing all over a room.

>Throw a digital room correction into the mix and you are now lying to your brain and it can no longer tell fact from fiction.

Where are you getting this from? You just pulled the wings off the fly! I'm not sure if you can tell fact from fiction, as you are writing baseless fiction, posting it as fact. Are you Trump???

>Digitally correcting a room is imperfect and leads to worse results than the original uncorrected signal.

This is America, you are certainly entitled to your own opinions, but nobody is entitled to their own facts.

I mean no disrespect, but you are misguiding the OP with baseless nonsense. If I understand you right, your point is, the more you do to correct for ones room's imperfections, the worse sound you are going to get. by extension of that theorem, no room should be treated in any way, physically or electronically.

Look, I'm usually a really nice, helpful guy on Reddit. I rarely will call someone out. But your uneducated statements are wrong, on many levels. They are baseless, incorrect, misguiding and it's not a very nice thing to do to the OP and others who might think what you are posting is fact. At least the first poster started his post with, "this is simply my observation.....".

Now I'll give you that the brain can 'learn' headphones or speakers, and even a room, (to a very small degree if at all). You can only to an extent on, all of them. The issue is, we are never finished learning them....ever. That's why we listen to our mixes on different transducers in the studio, headphones, the car, and as many different places, because we are never sure! We never ever fully learned a pair of speakers or even a room with room treatment!

Please read the following and get back to me:.

"Nonlinear-acoustics" this is a good primer, and a freebee

“Sound Reproduction: Loudspeakers and Rooms”,Floyd E. Toole, This is a Classic

“Acoustics and Psychoacoustics”, This is advanced

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Mr-Mud

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>most legit speakers designers go by ear rather than just letting the computer do the work.

Most legit speaker designers have a ton of measurement equipment and do the math.

Yes, there is a lot of art involved, but it's principally an engineering and physics endeavor.

If you're interested in what we do and don't know about loudspeaker design and what makes a good loudspeaker, this book is essential reading:

Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms

> After much contemplation, wonder and imbibing of beverages, I return to thank you.

You should save the contemplation and beverages for when you get the eargear - it's a common witticism among audiophiles that the best upgrade to your system is a higher BAC :P

>On the contrary, this is fascinating! I'm in science writing (nonfiction and fiction), so I get to appreciate this kind of nerdery. It kind of answers this hazy question I have about why does good audio equipment cost so much. We're still sciencing it out, which is cool. I mean, that goes for most technology, so it's not unique, but for me, it's a whole new world.

If you like that, Sean Olive, a fairly major person in most of the above links, [has an infrequently-updated but occasionally pretty neat blog] (http://seanolive.blogspot.com/), and on the heavier end of things his mentor Floyd Toole has a [wonderfully detailed and IMO shockingly readable text on sound from a music/listening standpoint] (https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/).

I will say, while there's definitely a component of development/progress being funded here - particularly in headphones, an area which has been seeing both a vast increase in prices and a substantial rise in quality over the past decade or so - I'd also point to two other factors driving high audio equipment prices:

The first is that, in many respects, audio tech develops exceptionally slowly - there were condenser microphones and electrostatic headphones made in the 1960s and 70s that are in many respects comparable to modern high-end equipment, and we haven't got that much more efficient at making them either. Unlike, say, integrated circuits, the core mechanisms of electroacoustic transducers haven't really become smaller, more efficient to make, or higher performance, at least to nearly the same extent, nor have we developed many alternative methodologies - we have better diaphragm materials, stronger magnets, and better assembly processes than in 1920 or 1970, but not to nearly the extent of, say, transistor or capacitor manufacturing, and almost all headphones, speakers, and prior to the smartphone revolution microphones are still the same style of moving coil design that existed at the start of WWI.

This, to some degree, keeps our buying power a bit low compared to what we're used to - I can get a 1980s supercomputer in my pocket for $100, but it's not that much cheaper to make a high-quality headphone now than it was then (and, indeed, some high-end headphones from that era that have persisted since then - Stax's Lambda series, for example, and Beyerdynamic's DT880 - have seen their prices track with inflation for the most part, or in some cases rise).

Of course, I'm neglecting the increasing use of modern technology in some bits of audio tech - digital signal processing, in particular, has immense potential, and has yielded exceptional results in many cases - but that's partially because the field of high-fidelity audio has been comparatively slow to adopt things like digitally controlled speakers and headphones, and where they do exist they tend to in fact be closer to the commodity end of the price range than the high end (and, sadly, they often underperform their potential as a result of this lack of attention).

The second is that the higher end of audio equipment primarily consists of [Veblen goods] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) - while there are many fine speakers, headphones, amplifiers, and so on available at higher price tags, for decades the highest end of the hobby has been defined at least as much by luxury and status as by actual technical performance. This isn't really that pertinent in the price ranges that sane people talk about - a $100-400 headphone or speaker definitely has some status signalling component for its buyer, but it also just plain costs money to make these things, and often as you climb past the "sold in gas stations" price bracket you see massively diminishing sales volumes, with the attendant loss of economies of scale. That said, outside of "lifestyle/consumer" products, a lot of the field is driven by the eccentricities of the higher end, and when that segment isn't looking for cost reduction (or, in fact, may be looking for the opposite), it has some weird impacts on how resources are allocated and what sorts of products are developed, even outside of the realm of $10k/meter cabling and $200k per pair speakers.

Erm, sorry to ramble at you, but I'm really into this stuff, and sometimes I get carried away.

>Makes sense. Would my unrefined taste buds really appreciate a $1,000 bottle of wine over a $30 one? Probably not.

Oenophiles are a [common comparison point with high-end audio] (http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-we-hear.html), as a matter of fact - although usually from the standpoint of "past a certain point, you aren't really getting more quality" rather than "your palate isn't refined enough" in my experience.

> I have no idea what this means but it got me searching how do brains process sound, good stuff.

It's a really fascinating topic, although I'm mostly hip to the parts that are pertinent to headphone design (my profession) more than the neurological (or physiological in general) side of things - in general, once you get to the eardrum, my job is pretty much done. A lot of weird stuff happens by that point, however - you can spend a fair while just getting your head around how the binaural hearing apparatus lets us locate sounds in three dimensions.

> I think I want a better sound experience, and it's worth it in my situation to invest better in both speakers and headphones. I've actually decided to downgrade to the 3700x build in order to grab better eargear.

I hope that it ends up being worth your while! I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the gear, if you have any.