Wall of speakers/sound?

NeilGabriel

This has been puzzling me for awhile and displays my continuing..... Is there any sonic benefit or detriment to playing an array of speakers in stereo mode (or as fronts in HT for that matter)? In other words, if the speakers are a sonic match, is there any benefit to running 2 left and 2 right, or 3 or 4? Assuming sufficient amp power.

MillerLiteScott

Imaging would go to ****.

ben62670

Line arrays work very well. It takes considerable design to get imaging correct. The higher the frequency the closer the drivers have to be together. As stated above just placing a bunch of speakers together would have a strong detrimental effect on imaging.

MacLeod

Your best sound will come when youre running as few speakers as possible. Way too many phase and time alingment issues going on with multiple drivers. The best SQ would come from a pair of single point source drivers but since those arent always available, a pair of bookshelf speakers and sub will be the next best thing.

Im going to start hanging out on this side of the forum more. Much more and better in depth discussion happening here! The old "which sub hits hardest" questions do get old.

ben62670

MacLeod wrote: »

Your best sound will come when youre running as few speakers as possible. Way too many phase and time alingment issues going on with multiple drivers. The best SQ would come from a pair of single point source drivers but since those arent always available, a pair of bookshelf speakers and sub will be the next best thing.

Im going to start hanging out on this side of the forum more. Much more and better in depth discussion happening here! The old "which sub hits hardest" questions do get old.

Some very nice Hi Fi speakers consist of a single full range driver. These are not popular in the USA, but get great praises in Europe when driving very efficient single driver speakers with tube amps. No crossover, or other electronics. Now saying that I am working on a 16 mid, 2 tweeter, 4 passive radiator behemoth, but in the future I would like to build a 2 driver cab with a real nice woofer, and tweeter. My x girlfriend says that my speakers are an indication of a penile insecurity problem. What the heck does jail have to do with speakers?:rolleyes:

NeilGabriel

I keep picturing this wall of marshalls from the guitar gods (I took my son), and wondered, would that work for home audio....seemed to me it would be a bunch of noise. But a solid wall of vintage polks did sound fun. I ran itno this vintage jbl the other day that was tweeter and mid in a little latticed box...looked very interesting and apparently had some value.

MacLeod

Thats great for sheer volume and output but not for SQ.

All those drivers can move a lot more air due to the much greater displacement but because of all the phasing and time alignment issues associated with multiple drivers all at different distances from your ears, it blurs the stage pretty bad, causes cancellation and just generally isnt good.

It works for subs, cause there arent any imaging cues in bass frequencies and theyre omnidirectional anyway.

TN_Polk_Lover

It's kindof like with a receiver that has "7-channel stereo" mode. You get left channel through the L front, L side surround, and L back surround. You get right channel through the R front, R Side Surrond, and R back surround.

It would be useful for a party where you have people just walking around and you just want music spread throughout the room. But as others have said, for serious listening, sitting still in one place, your imaging would not be good.

Yashu

People used to do this back in the day with Advents. Stacked Advents were popular. Some speakers today have their larger designs as basically two bookshelves stacked tweeter to tweeter.

I don't think you could just stack any speakers though, they have to be either designed for it, or have that accidental advantage like the Advents of old.

Before I cared so much about accuracy, back when I was young, I experimented with 4 speakers all the time. I ran two bookshelves fairly close to each other in the front, and larger towers off to the side almost perpendicular to each other. It was like wearing giant headphones, no imaging, but big sound, my friends and I loved it. I would never do that today though, now that I am "enlightened". It was not so bad for watching movies though, pre 5.1 days.