soundstage/image: lateral/height...

SlowcarIX

my setup does an superb job at reproducing lateral soundstage, voice/instruments are located at pinpoint location between the main speakers...BUT there no height to them. Maybe my CDs just does not have height info in them?

height: ie vocalist is standing and violinist is sitting...

whats a good CD with both lateral and height imaging?

Early B.

It may be your room, not the CDs.

SlowcarIX

its square...20' x 20'...bad for bass....now bad for soundstage too?

ben62670

When I built my speakers I placed the tweeters a little above ear level. How high are your tweeters?
Ben

SlowcarIX

tweeters are at ear level...

they are LSi9s on 28" stands

ben62670

Solid floor?

SlowcarIX

carpet over cement slab

speaker stand is spiked w/ 50lbs lead shots ea...

analog97

I used to have the Paradigm Studio Reference 100's. They are a decent speaker. I now have the 1.2TL's.....talk about a HUGE DIFFERENCE in "soundstage height"......wow. My experience with speakers tells me that each and every soundstage dimension improved with the big Polks. Stand up, sit down, lay on the floor, hide in a corner....the 1.2's throw it in spades in all dimensions. I think most speakers other than these are generally limited in this ability. Again, room size matters, but in a big room, these speakers are dandy. I think the Lsi9's are like my Paradigms in this regard. But the Lsi9's are damn fine speakers.:D

SlowcarIX

will something like this with a elongated drivers help with height presentation?

Early B.

SlowcarIX wrote: »

will something like this with a elongated drivers help with height presentation?

Not necessarily. Again, it depends a lot on the room's acoustics.

Face

Let's see a current picture of your setup(I know you change it daily).

I found moving the speakers forward so my TV was a few feet behind them made the biggest difference in width and height.

VR3

I have almost to much height with my speakers...

My speakers present a floor to ceiling experience...

Any size speaker can do this. As long as its good, backed with good electronics and placed well it is possible.

Hawkeye

If your stands allow it, can you tilt them back a bit? My ML's are tilted back from the factory but my set up requires them to be tilted forward a tad bit to bring the voices down to an accurate height.

steveinaz

There's a million variables here; source, quality of the recording, components in your system, cabling, the list goes on and on....

madmax

Speaker height doesn't seem to matter much here, at least with some speakers. I had a pair with the mids and tweeter less than 2 feet from the floor and the whole image was easily 3-4 feet higher.
madmax

DarqueKnight

In addition to room acoustics, the dispersion characteristics of a speaker's drivers and tweeters matters a lot too.

Another factor is the way the music was recorded and mixed.

I find myself frequently "looking up" to my 1.2TL's.:)

MillerLiteScott

I find that my system imaging/soundstaging height is dependent on the recording. Sometimes the vocals are up @ 6 feet and sometimes they are just a little above the tweeter level. Lotsa variables.

Scott

steveinaz

I think it's easier for a mic to pick up side-to-side information, than it is the vertical plane, just by nature of their design. Then again, I might be full of ****.

SlowcarIX

steveinaz wrote: »

I think it's easier for a mic to pick up side-to-side information, than it is the vertical plane, just by nature of their design. Then again, I might be full of ****.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone_practice

SlowcarIX

Face wrote: »

Let's see a current picture of your setup(I know you change it daily).

I found moving the speakers forward so my TV was a few feet behind them made the biggest difference in width and height.

i have not done anything since the last rearrangement...:p

i will move the LSi9 away from the tv and towards me when i replace the LSiC with a LSi9 when it comes in.

For HT...does the center channel have to be in the same plane as the front main speakers?

Face

I remember reading in the "Loudspeaker Cookbook" that the center should be the same height as the mains, I forgot the reasoning though.

I run a phantom center though, in my setup it sounds more natural.

SlowcarIX

whats a phantom center?

Face

Program your AVR's center to "NONE" or "Phantom", and the data that would have been sent to your center is sent to the L and R channels instead.

SlowcarIX

Face wrote: »

Program your AVR's center to "NONE" or "Phantom", and the data that would have been sent to your center is sent to the L and R channels instead.

the sweet spot will be limited to a small area with phantom center?

Face

Works fine from all seating positions here, but every setup will vary.

jon s

A square room is bad for standing soundwaves. if I remember correctly, an ideal room should have the dimensions of 3:4:5... i.e. 5 units long, 4 units wide and 3 units high... sure makes a room ugly tho...

scottnbnj

SlowcarIX wrote: »

my setup does an superb job at reproducing lateral soundstage, voice/instruments are located at pinpoint location between the main speakers...BUT there no height to them. Maybe my CDs just does not have height info in them?

height: ie vocalist is standing and violinist is sitting...

whats a good CD with both lateral and height imaging?

i'm just a hacker, but i think the short answer is that to perceive it, it has to be perceptible. listening room reflections can throw up too much chaff to hear what is buried on some recordings.

i think in some ways vertical height works like the width and depth outside of the band of sound directly between the speakers. if there are side walls or other reflective objects close to the speakers, image and soundstage width and depth can be unstable or collapse. with walls further away or with treatments the image and soundstage can become more stable and open up. if you control reflections from the floor and ceiling, you can get some of the same results because you're further limiting delay, peaks and cancellation scattered throughout the frequency range.

as others mentioned, it's obviously different in that there isn't stereo to tell you what sounds belong on the top or bottom, or how far from the top and bottom. But, some recordings do include, say, reflections from the floor and ceiling of the venue (even if subtle). i think that by removing reflections from the listening room that compete with and muddle venue reflections, it can make it easier to hear and distinguish between the source of the original sound and reflections, which help place height on the stage and where the venue boundaries are supposed to be and even what sort of materials they might be made of. i think our brain might fill this a bit like how the blind spots near the center of our field of vision is filled and how we perceive low frequency sounds from a sub to give us a sense of size of the venue and to come from the instruments they belong to. if we're not paying close attention to it, we get a pretty good sense of what it's supposed to be, but the more accutely we focus on it the weaker the perception becomes.

for recordings that might get you there, listen to what you have and listen at trailing edges of sounds for echoes or reverb. for music in your collection, look for live recordings or heavily processed music that you've seen mentioned often for quality. once you find that music, kill reflections, do the equadistant listening position thing, relax and listen to what happens.

to get started, you might try obviously processed stuff like, say, pink floyd that will throw lots of stuff at you that isn't at all subtle. then tune your room with that so that every beat of sound comes from the right place. i mean for rooms i've set up in, i'll get to a point where things are mostly right and the stage extends to the listening position with some music, but then something like one or two oddball footsteps or rotor turns come at me from a totally wrong direction. i'll look at that then, and try to figure out what sort of listening room reflection would make that happen and try to cover it (wouldn't it be nice if that oddball footstep pointed right to the spot that needed to be covered?). getting it right on obvious stuff like that might make it easier to get into the ballpark with more subtle cues.

anyway, this is what I THINK i've heard and tried to make sense of, but don't trust that i'm not totally full of **** too. cause, as much as i'd love to, i've never had a dedicated listening room or bought anything marketed as an acoustic treatment.

)

maximillian

I only have RTi6's, but for 2 channel music listening I seem to have decent height imaging although it may be a false image. I have RTi6's stacked on R50's driven A/B with the same signal. I have a CD of Kathleen Battle and Itzhak Perlman playing violin and soprano arias by Bach and I was able to detect the height difference. The soprano is about 5 feet tall and centered, whereas the violinist is only 3 feet tall and just to the left. I can also detect some front-to-back imaging because the organ seems to come from behind.

If you do not have any such music then I could probably be convinced to send you a 1 track mp3. PM me. This music is very baroque so probably not to most people's listening taste.

scottnbnj

madmax wrote: »

Speaker height doesn't seem to matter much here, at least with some speakers. I had a pair with the mids and tweeter less than 2 feet from the floor and the whole image was easily 3-4 feet higher.
madmax

i've heard this in my rooms when speakers have to be placed very close to side walls too. i think what might happen in your case is a combination of being so close to the floor and far from the ceiling.

i think maybe the timing of reflections from a very close boundary might come closer to reinforcing direct sound rather than compete with it. for the ceiling, maybe the increased distance makes reflections from there weaker and arrive so much later than direct sound that they are subconsciously discarded, sort of like the difference between how a speaker performs that is placed 3 feet from a side wall as opposed to 6 feet from a side wall.

)

SlowcarIX

Face wrote: »

Let's see a current picture of your setup(I know you change it daily).

I found moving the speakers forward so my TV was a few feet behind them made the biggest difference in width and height.

ok, moved it - its 4' away from the backwall

the speaker completely dissapears in most recordings but height is still not apparent - just have to live with it i guess :mad:

Face

Glad to hear it. Now it's time to try some room treatments such as heavy drapes covering the windows, acoustic panels, etc...

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=68641&highlight=panel

It never ends.