it is after midnight I made sure Matt would come on live-streaming with us I know it's past your bedtime Matt but sometimes these are the only times we could do speaker talk so I wanted to kind of keep you up for a little bit and I wanted to talk about narrow verse wide dispersion speakers now the correct term really is to talk about the directivity of the speakers but that's a boring term that most people don't know what that means so I'm kind of keeping it a little more layman in the title I guess we could go over the directivity stuff we did a prior live stream about loud speaker directivity perhaps you could give like a two minute overview of that for anyone that that did not see that one I'll also link up our prior live stream about this topic in the description down below and I'll put them on a playlist so you guys can watch these back and forth and so let me switch over to the PowerPoint presentation Matt while you kind of give that definition of loud speaker directivity yeah I mean very briefly directivity refers to the idea of where speaker sprays it sound so does the speaker spray it sound in only one direction largely or does it spray it everywhere that's kind of a concept of directivity and so when you see a speaker that's essentially spraying it sound very evenly over a very very wide range we would typically call that having wide directivity or wide dispersion and when it seems to actually fall off to the sides gets quieter as you move off to the sides then we would call that narrower directivity in theory you could have a speaker that sprays sound in a particular direction over a particular set of angles very loud and then immediately falls off past a certain angle but that's not the reality we live in that would require some pretty sophisticated DSP and just just to be clear we're not always talking about like a dome tweeter virzal horn speaker because you could have a domes speaker that has narrower directivity by having a waveguide in and right you couldn't you don't necessarily need to use wave guides to control directivity so there's a variety of ways to narrow or control the directivity of a speaker you can also use an array of drivers near each other so you can take a cluster of tweeters for instance and you can process the sound that goes to each of those tweeters in such a way that it also would have a similar effect waveguides so you don't have to do this through a wave god that just happens to be one of the convenient ways to control your activity probably a more easier way to I would imagine yes it's cheaper yeah for sure see my slides right we're see yeah we're ready to go okay okay so the first thing I wanted to get into with some of the misconceptions about narrow and wide directivity so it's really a commonly held belief that a wide dispersion speaker has a wider sweet spot and I'm going to talk about this a lot more in the next presentation but I will get into it here that's not necessarily true why dispersion and narrow dispersion did not necessarily mean that the sweet spot changes what that means is that if you have two speakers and both of them have a perfectly flat response on access and the wide dispersion speaker also has a perfectly flat response all the way out to ninety degrees to the side going both ways so the full hundred and eighty degree frontal arc of the speaker has the same response anywhere you go and a narrow dispersion speaker let's say does that but only over we'll say plus or minus 30 degrees so over a 60 degree arc the reality is within that arc the sweet spot is the same and if you actually look at when you when you point a speaker and you kind of follow that 30 or 45 degrees plus or minus out so let's say 60 to 90 degrees out you'll find then in a normal 9 to 12-foot listening distance that will cover a couple of seats at least if not more and so that narrow dispersion speaker and that wide dispersion speaker would have the same frequency response in any of those seats and then there's another aspect to sweet spot which we're going to talk about when we talk about time intensity training that can actually allow a narrow dispersion speaker to have a wider sweet spot than a wide dispersion speaker was because it can actually maintain the center image in the center of the room or the screen better than that wide dispersion can I know does this have anything to do with the fact that if you have a narrow dispersion speaker let's say a horn speaker people tend to tow those in and publicly separate them out further apart from each other than you would for a speaker that's a wide dispersion speaker where you might listen to it more straight ahead and maybe closer together can be how far apart they are isn't necessarily that important it's where they're aimed so the way that you can take advantage of this concept of time intensity train trading is that you aim them such that they actually cross each other the the listening access if you will crosses in front of you and that makes it so that as you move towards the the side for instance the speaker you're getting closer to is getting quieter so the reason why this time intensity trading works is that when you aim them correctly the farther speaker gets louder because you're actually moving more on access and the closer speaker is getting quieter because you're moving farther off access if you have them aim correctly then the two are essentially changing in level in lock sync such that the center image stays centered so that's the concept behind it and it can work but it only would work with properly designed what we're calling narrow dispersion speakers so I know if that answers your question yeah well we're also talking about higher frequencies too because bate obviously this doesn't apply to bass this applies more to the mid and upper a prefer yeah and we got into that a little bit in the last video and we will probably get into it here as well I can't remember now exactly all the content that I threw in here but yeah basically in a room at low frequencies especially below that transition frequency of the Schroder frequency of the room all speakers tend to be omnidirectional and even if the speaker isn't omnidirectional the reflections are so dominant that it doesn't really matter so below will say a hundred Hertz for sure basically all you're hearing is room anyway above that point up to let's say 500 Hertz you're actually in this kind of transition zone where you're largely hearing the room anyway so I make the argument and I've heard this from others including dr. Geddes or Geddes was pretty into this topic actually the one who taught me quite a bit about it that really 500 Hertz and above is the point at which you really care about directivity that's the point at which the reflections are the most audible and where you would be most taking advantage of these effects so so in this slide what we're talking about is the concept of wide dispersion this happens to be one of the better wide dispersion speakers that we had measured in the past which is why it looks like it's almost all red so typically why dispersion means a speaker spray sound in a wide range of angles with a fairly constant volume in other words the volume doesn't change as you get towards the sides ideally the frequencies frequency response is the same at all angles but that is difficult to achieve and it's rarely true so one of the things I want to kind of separate here is the concept of dispersion and evenness of the off-axis response we always want the response to be the same at every angle out across the frontal hemisphere we just wanted to get quieter and actually as you get into the rear of the speaker what you typically would want to see is it gets a lot quieter in the in the mid and treble range the bass usually is most speakers even mono poles are someone on directional in the bass so typically you still see the bass pretty loud in the rear so why dispersion speakers have a narrow imaging sweet spot potentially this is an argument that I was making relative to that notion of time and density training so the issue is with typical wide dispersion speakers at least when you point them at you in the correct way you tell them the way they're supposed to be the center position between those two speakers will provide the best imaging because the center image will be the center between them but if you move to the left the center image will shift with you and if you move to the right the center image will also shift with you to the right now with music that can be problematic but you may not care with movies I would argue that in the absence of a center channel that would be very problematic because the center image is shifting but the actual center image the person in the video screen that you're seeing is not now that's of course one of the great benefits of having a look for instance 5.1 or or whatever surround system is that you have a center channel and that separate center channel anchors the center image so it doesn't move we often consider a speaker to be wide dispersion if the response is no more than 6 DBS down at 90 degrees to either side of center so 90 degrees to either side is all the way to the side of the speaker and so when speakers are capable of actually only being about 60 bees down that far we definitely would call that a wide dispersion speaker and then I would call speakers that kind of fall let's say their choir than that but they're not a lot quieter than that kind of image art and fast this is why dispersion this is narrow there's kind of a transition if you will between the two and and so certainly there's some speakers that are probably wide dispersion a good example actually would be Ravel so I would generally call those fairly wide dispersion but they're still narrower for instance and dispersion than the speaker here which is that BMR speaker from Philharmonic so I mean I would think that based on this dispersion pattern it would really dictate to what you're gonna do what your sidewalls as well because if you if you go by Harmons science they basically say that early reflections are beneficial and you want to kind of preserve them so it seems to me that the way you preserve them and I don't want to get too far off topic but this kind of speak of this BMR versus a horn speaker what you do the sidewalls is going to be drastically different very possibly and we're going to talk about that actually in future slides okay so let's look at a narrow dispersion speaker so I mentioned earlier that transitioning from that narrow dispersion out to more omnidirectional by 500 Hertz is pretty okay because the room starts to take over and you don't hear the reflections discretely anymore so this is actually a really good example of a speaker like that so the dispersion of a speaker can be controlled such that the sound gets quieter as you move off access narrow dispersion doesn't mean that the sound gets bad as you move off axis it just means it gets quieter as you move off axis and this reduces the strength of sidewall reflections and ceiling reflections so you were talking about that a second ago Jean about how maybe these narrow dispersion speakers would have less strong sidewall reflections that's exactly a benefit of them and this has some interesting sonic attributes so one of the things I mentioned earlier was the concept of time intensity training trading keep saying training and the time intensity trading is that notion that as you move to the side one speaker is getting quieter the other one is getting louder and it helps to anchor the Center image with just two channels as benefits with multi-channel too I don't want to mislead here actually the same concept applies to the surround speakers and can be taken advantage of and it also would apply to the left there's still a phantom image that's created between the left speaker and the center and the center and the right so that's how you get those pans and that phantom image would shift if you move around with speakers that are wider dispersion the narrower dispersion aimed correctly has the potential to do a little bit better job with that there isn't a hard and fast rule here so I'm just gonna say that we probably would define a speaker as being fairly narrow dispersion if it's minus 6 DBS by 45 degrees so earlier I was saying why dispersion is 90 this is now 45 we're quite a bit in and you can get a sense of what I mean by there's a range there so we're really kind of talking about a continuum not really a hard and fast common tools to narrow dispersion are things like wave guides horns multiple drivers etc and I do want to note that the the widening I already said this earlier but the widening of the dispersion below 500 Hertz is generally considered okay because a room takes over so a speaker that has this narrow dispersion like this as opposed to the one we showed before I would think that the far field on the speaker would be longer like you in other words it does sound doesn't disperse as quickly as a wide dispersion speaker so if you're in a very long or large room that's why a speaker like this may make more sense you get more that direct sound towards a listening area you've mentioned that before so I mean there's a finite amount of energy that comes out of the driver and when you use a waveguide you're you're focusing that finite amount of energy in a narrower range which is where you get the efficiency boost from but the other side of this is that you're not listening is loud so I would say this from that standpoint yes you're aiming the sound over a narrower angle but it's still going to be getting quieter and in the same fashion if you will as it would have otherwise you know compared to any other kind of direct radiator speaker that doesn't use wave guides you would have to get into line arrays to really get to a point where you start to see the sound getting quieter over longer distances so I would say that's probably not true of typical waveguide speakers in a home you know I in Pro Audio it's used I think primarily because that directivity control is important to make sure that you're focusing the sound where you want it and getting the maximum amount of efficiency boost that you need because of course they have to hit very high levels I do want to mention so somebody had had asked what is the clips are f73 how would I classify them so those are narrow dispersion speakers for sure those are using a waveguide to control dispersion and they would not be as narrow as this speaker they would be probably closer to that minus 6 DBS at 45 degrees okay all right so this is a really good example so that you guys can see so what I did was I took two speakers that I had measured and I the listening window and then the early reflection response and compared them here so you can see the top one is the narrow dispersion speaker and the bottom one is the wide dispersion so the point I'm really trying to make here is you can see that the frequency response is pretty much exactly the same between these two it's only the level that's changed so this is why I was saying narrow dispersion doesn't mean the sound gets worse off to the sides I think that's a misconception these are both really good speakers they're very good examples of their reflective type or prospective type I should say so that VMR speaker on the bottom is a really good wide dispersion speaker in fact I've not really seen many other speakers especially anywhere near that price point that has as good wide dispersion response as that one does even on that one the tweeter doesn't beam until well past 20 kilohertz which is like unheard of and then the top one which is a jtr speaker it's the noesis 212 R T that one is a good example of a speaker that has a nice pretty flat response and it remains flat as you move off access so you can see that the benefit of the narrow dispersion speaker is that you're reducing the volume of those early reflections and the reason why this is so neat is that a lot of people like to treat their first reflections with absorbers and this actually does the same thing you know all in those orbit does not remove all of the reflection it only reduces its volume and it actually does a really bad job of it because it doesn't have a flat response when when sound is hitting it from one angle you know the incident will basically that one angle it hits that and then goes back to your ears is different than when it's tested where they're testing it over all of the different angles that can hear and they're kind of looking at the average of all of those different incident angles and you get the random incident response which makes it look like it has this nice flat absorption curve but actually when you look at it in a room based on that one angle that it's hitting between you you know your ears and the speaker basically it does not have a flat absorption curve flow tool actually shows this I believe in his book and so one of the advantages is that you can avoid using those side wall absorbers and just use a narrower dispersion speaker which is going to do a much better job preserving the tonal balance of those reflections which is pretty important yeah look because I see some people when they treat their rooms they they'll side wall they'll treat the side walls with some absorption but then maybe only use like one or two inches thick absorption and then basically you're just sucking up the very high frequencies yeah and then actually one of the other problems which is what tool had noted is that many of the absorbers that are used especially as you get closer and closer to glancing angles the covering on it actually is reflective at high frequencies so you've got something that doesn't need them to absorb that much down low and actually isn't really absorbing at high frequencies either so you get this basically is just causing a dip in the response through the mid-range lower trouble and that's about it so yeah that's I mean I'm not against absorbers there's good places to use them and reason to use them but you've got to be very careful because if you use them at those first reflection points and you've got wide dispersion speakers you may actually be making the sound worse not better so the bottom line guys if you are considering hiring an acoustic consultant for your theater room and they don't ask you the kind of speakers you're using and they just automatically want to sell your absorption panels you kind of need to run away because I you know that if they're not considering your listening habits and the kind of speakers you're using and the room dynamics they're not giving you a complete picture they're just trying to sell you a phone basically yeah so actually here now we get into this idea of the problem with absorber so here is the measurement that tool has I have a measurement that I did very similar to this using a pretty similar method mine's messier than his because I'm assuming he did this in an anechoic chamber I'm not sure I did it in a room and I actually hope maybe this summer to redo it outside but it's really hard to measure the reflection off of an absorber all to say for those of you who have ever been curious how you do that basically you get the mic and the speaker at the angles that you want relative to each other and then you capture the reflection off of a hard surface and then you capture it with the absorber in place you remove the original measurement you got of the pure reflection and what's left is the reflection through the absorber if you do that in a room it's a little bit messy which is what I did but what you can see here the bigger point is that it absolutely is not providing a nice flat absorption it's actually becoming more and more reflective so and it's very messy it's I mean it's obviously gonna mess up the shape of the response and here's a picture of my room I this was set up like I don't actually listen like this necessarily it depends on the speakers but there's some first reflection absorbers and then there's some farther back ones that are used just to sort of remove that some of the reverb in the room and so you know I'm kind of I'm using my room to show you what not to do but what I've done in my room is actually made it so I can remove those panels and that way I can move them around and play around depending on what I'm listening to and why and the speakers that happen to be set up there they happen to the tweeters being really bad on those but otherwise they're a wide dispersion speaker and I happen to prefer the sound of them with the absorbers in place those I think those are more in Logans you liken everything right they are yeah yeah they are so what are those white panels are those absorbers too on the side yeah they are those are curved absorbers and one of the advantages because of the problem that you're seeing here I've using a curved front on the absorber is that at the points at which it's being reflective it becomes like a curved diffuser and it helps to kind of flatten out the actual energy if you will that's coming at your ears at that particular point so I you know it's I'm not gonna say everybody should run out and get curved absorbers it's not it's the problem is it's it's true conceptually but whether it's true in practice is another matter mmm that's another topic for a different video oh it yes yeah so I think a lot of you are probably saying okay narrow wide absorb first reflections don't absorb first reflections really like what does this mean so the first thing I got to say is as far as I understand the research on this is pretty poor so we know that why dispersion speakers have stronger room reflections in other words the ratio of direct to reflected energy is going to be lower there's gonna be more reflections with a wider dispersion speaker and so conversely a narrow dispersion speaker is gonna have weaker room reflections and a higher director reflected ratio that doesn't tell us a lot about what people prefer what it sounds like it would just say that that's true it's gonna depend on the room I mean there's lots of things going on here so the other thing we know is that room reflections play a key role in our perception of spaciousness so from there we can start to draw some conclusions about how these two would sound different and everybody I've talked to has basically given the same conclusion so even though I can't point to a paper that specifically says this all the experts I've talked to have had the same reaction which is that speakers would narrow dispersion will have a tighter and more focused image with less spacious and less apparent source with so essentially the width between instruments is less the overall spaciousness of it is less but the image itself is tighter and more focused more laser-like if you will why dispersion speakers on the other hand tend to have a larger wider soundstage with more apparent space between the instruments but the image placement will be less distinct now I wrote let's see it will be more distinct that's not correct the image placement will be less distinct sorry and it's here's there's kind of a music angle to this so with studio recordings which typically are recorded in rooms that are very dry have very few reflection than the speaker's themselves often are narrower and dispersion I find those types of recordings to sound better on narrower dispersion speakers or in rooms where the first reflections are being absorbed I tend to find live music classical music acoustic music things that are done in real rooms to sound better on wider dispersion speakers and in livelier rooms or in surround sound systems because those also reproduce those spatial cues and that's because I'm getting a more accurate representation of that spaciousness so I would actually I would actually I would actually think looking at what you're saying here is if you're doing a two channel system versus a multi-channel system that a two channel would probably be more beneficial to have a wide dispersion speaker whereas a multi-channel system where you do have side channels and Atmos and you have the center channel and everything it would almost seem that narrow dispersion speakers are more optimal yeah I mean that's what I think I don't know that there is an absolute right answer I think that this is an area that needs to be researched and I think it could be researched you know I think it'd actually be interesting to do another video maybe we could talk with some of the folks from Harmon that we know there's not that there's certainly others who have looked into this matter to kind of get their take but my take is this I think surround systems benefit from using narrower dispersion speakers there's just a lot of benefits to doing that which the next video will get into I think that why dispersion though makes a lot of sense in to channel systems and so I think there's good reason to use a wider dispersion speaker for a two-channel only system having said that if you're somebody who especially is more familiar with the way it sounds in the studio using those narrow dispersion speakers in a more reflective free zone you probably would prefer then a narrower dispersion speaker well you know one thing that kind of shocked me and I don't want to put words in anyone's mouths but I did have some conversations with Floyd and Sean all of about speakers in the past and I was wondering you know what their preference was whether it was a JBL m2 which is the giant waveguide horn with a 15 inch woofer or the revel salon - which is their flagship wide dispersion speaker and they seemed to indicate that they scored similarly good in blind listening tests and to me I'm like well I don't understand how how that would work if their dispersion is so different but then I was kind of thinking that most of their tests are done in mono with a single speaker you might not be able to reveal those kind of inner details by not being it by not setting up a stereo pair like this to test for image width or source with like you're talking about how could you capture that data using a single speaker in mono well so a mono speaker test like that isn't gonna tell you much about sound staging and imaging and probably can't do a lot for apparent source width I would think you would need at least two sources for that to be true that might not be exactly right them there might be a little bit of a parent source was coming through I guess there still would be some because you're gonna have sidewall reflections that would be contributing to that but I would say that spaciousness which is a function more of the reflections in general in the room is true of one or two speakers or or five or ten so in that sense I don't know that they're necessarily losing a lot of that but I would argue that the tests that Harman did and the way they set them up basically is not allowing you to really tell the differences that narrow versus wide dispersion speakers would have on our perceptions of soundstaging and imaging I I don't want to speak for them but my understanding was that maybe tools argument was that the vast majority of soundstaging and imaging is actually in the recording rather than the speaker's themselves but I would just counter that and say my experience is if you take a fixed recording so we're not talking it because certainly most of the differences we hear are in the recording but if we stick within a fixed recording there are distinct sonic differences between narrow and wide dispersion speakers so I guess I would argue that there still is a difference there that's important and that's an area that I think needs to be studied yeah I agree it would be a nice experiment to set up one of these days in fact that's kind of a hint to you Matt and I think you need to do that well you know to do that right one of the so I Harman interestingly enough through lexicon makes a speaker that would be the way to test that so the problem is you can't just take any old speakers you can't take like here is a good example of a narrow dispersion and a wide dispersion speaker so those vivid audio speakers are actually some of the best measuring wide dispersion speakers I've ever seen that speaker will sound different than that Dutch in Dutch 8c that double dutch 8c speaker there which is a narrow dispersion speaker for reasons other than the directivity so if I was to sit down listeners and I was to do something like a mooshri test and I said all right I want you to fill out the it's gonna be a bunch of questions about what you're hearing you know you're gonna flip through the two speakers you're not going to know which is which they're gonna go through the music's they're gonna do their thing they might like one versus the other more to do with the frequency response differences for instance than they would the directivity differences so you really need a speaker that's able to have the exact same sonic signature and just changes directivity and the only way to really do that I think reliably is to use something that has DSP based beam steering that allows multiple drivers to then change the dispersion over wide and narrow so there is an Alexa con speaker that can do that and if I was gonna conduct the study that's what I would use man I don't know I mean right away just looking at that yellow speaker that kind of throws me off I could not I could not have you gotta get it to pretty bright yeah I think James is supposed to get the bookshelf version of those and I'll be curious if they measure as well but I know the very large towers the measurements I've seen on those have been pretty impressive okay so I you know I think a lot of people want us to say which is better and I think I've already kind of answered that to say I don't think there's an answer to which is better I the research needs to be done and it hasn't been done and even if it does get done I even if they it said like one is better than the other I'd probably still say I don't know probably depends on the music I mean I just really think it's a matter of taste I think it varies with music you know if we were all super rich probably we would all just have lots of different types of speakers in different rooms to listen to all the different music I would kind of argue though I know that maybe my perceptions wrong here but just as baseline experience if I'm in a near field environment like a like desktop or something I would almost choose the wide dispersion speaker because you're already close to that speaker you don't have to worry about controlling the side wall reflections as much because you're in the near field of the speaker maybe yeah I don't know I mean I I'm really kind of up in the air on this I I James Larson and I talk about this a lot both of us have had the same reaction like I prefer narrower dispersion speakers I think he tends to prefer maybe wider dispersion I think Jean you said you maybe prefer generally wider dispersion speakers and but like he's heard narrow dispersion he likes and I've heard wide dispersion that I like I really like those BM ours I've heard these vivid audios I really like them too I mean I'm not I love Ravel speaker there's the I mean if somebody says to me like what's your kind of go-to brand that you recommend that you feel confident and I've never heard a bad Ravel speaker mm-hmm but you know what what do I own I own deadly Abbie's they're absolutely a directivity control design it's my personal preference yeah yeah it really depends on the execution of the design I guess you know yeah this looks like the robot from Lawson space yeah those are those I don't even if I should have put the mean with him a little MLB or ambien and yeah yeah it's an NB l speaker I forget the exact name of it it's a German company so there there's lots of companies have made attempts at like very wide dispersion so this gets into the concept a typical monopole speaker whether it's wide or narrow dispersion is gonna have a downward slanted power response and the reason for that is what I said earlier if you look at the response across the frontal hemisphere a wide dispersion speaker like that BMR it's basically flat across the full hundred eighty degrees of the front but as soon as you get to the rear 180 degrees what you'll see is the high frequencies in the mid range is very quiet and the base remains just as loud as it was in the front or very close so it's essentially omnidirectional in the base but it's a monopole it's still got a forward firing if you will lo this is a different speaker this speaker has a equal lobe in all directions around the horizontal which means that the power response is essentially flat or very close to it and one of the things about this speaker is that in typical rooms especially large rooms that kind of speaker is going to have a very high ratio of reflected to direct sound you know there's gonna so kind of the reverse of why I said earlier that there's gonna be a lot more room if you will in the speaker now I've always been very skeptical of these speakers and I had never heard them but just had decided that I wouldn't like them given my preference and I actually got to hear them now a couple of times and and I had some real one-on-one time with not that model about the model below it at Oxbow know where I was able to get the room closed off and it was just me and one other person and we listened for quite a while on them and my perception at the end was essentially what I was describing earlier it's like an extreme case of that like the imaging is not as distinct but it's huge and so with big orchestra music they actually sounded really nice I mean it just presented this very lifelike realistic and scale presentation of the of the symphony but with rock music it was fun and interesting I could totally see why people would like it to me it didn't sound accurate though - you know at least what - what I perceive is accurate for those kinds of recordings they were playing some Steely Dan on it at one point I was recording I had heard many times before and it to me did not sound like how I you know typically had heard it it wasn't to my preference so I can get why people like these especially for classical music and jazz and stuff like that but this is not my particular flavor yeah you know I've heard the speaker over the fore over the last decade or so at the trade shows maybe not this model maybe the model below like you said I never got a good demo experience with the speaker at the trade shows I just they never resonated with me no pun intended yeah I probably wouldn't own them even if they were given to me for free well I look cool I mean they look they look cool yeah yeah so somebody asked a question that I think is relevant to this discussion they said is it true that acoustically dead rooms are better for home theater so I just want to say yes in general but there's this nice feature of our brains if you will which is that when presented with two rooms acoustically a large room in a small room we tend to ignore the small room in favor of the large room so in other words if you've got a surround system that's providing you with cues of a very large space and then your actual room is providing you with cues of a very small space you'll tend to ignore that so what that means is that a surround system really doesn't need that much treatment to sound good and to provide a convincing presentation it doesn't mean that getting rid of the small room is bad in other words doesn't mean that treating the room is a bad thing it just means that it's not as critical as you might think and I will I'll add this amount of info to that discussion I don't like a room that you can't that you walk into and you can't be comfortable just sitting there if you can't like just sit there and have background conversation and it doesn't feel like you're in an antic oh and it feels like you're in an anechoic chamber that's a problem to me the room should still feel spacious even when nothing's playing yep so audio holics recommended wide dispersion speakers so I wanted to provide I thought a lot of people are gonna look at this and say you know what what's out there what can I get well these are all speakers that we've heard and reviewed I'm recommending them I tried to cover the price points and I want to be clear these are not all equally good speakers they're just further dollar amount their speakers we've heard that I would call wide dispersion that I think are good so the salk sound BM ours which is the only way to get the BM ours now that Philharmonic's aren't available anymore at $2,400 a pair though I still consider them a good value and they are one of the better wide dispersion speakers I've ever heard they have their limitations they will not play as loud as a lot of other speakers but I still really like them and I've never seen a speaker that had as wide dispersion in the treble so another one of the outlaw audio the BLS and the LCR v2s that we had listened to the BLS is 699 I forget what the LCR is cost but either of them are good we like the way those sounded quite a bit there also a wide dispersion speakers so for that price point I would say good the Revell M 126 Bea's just one of my all-time favorite speakers I didn't want to give those back they are $4,000 so you know I get it but they're a really good speaker the SPS pinnacles prime tower is an ultra bookshelves where all speakers that we've heard before we've seen measurements on they're decent for the money you know I don't think that they're quite as good as the other ones that I've gone through in the list but I think they are very good and they're popular and certainly they're a widest portion dispersion speaker obviously the more you spend the better but you know these were three that we had at least heard before now the cheapest that I have in here is the Dayton Audio MK 402 X's the four for twos and the four for two T's which is the tower they start at $69 you know are these a great speaker no but there's $69 a pair on up or what they are they're very cheap and they're really not that bad but they know would argue I would argue get the mk44 to because of the MTM you have a more advantage and sensitivity and just a better overall speaker if you could do those vertically oriented for your front three LCR okay yeah it really wasn't a awful speaker it really wasn't bad a little bit of EQ for me made it into a very likeable speaker and definitely for the price I mean I just the aren't a lot of other speakers that cheap you know that are that are is good whatever you do don't use the Dayton audio m31 amplifier with any of these speakers as we found out as I did in that video and how would that amplify that little amplifier I can handle a forum load but that's a separate topic yeah I mean hopefully nobody's using little pocket-sized Class D amplifiers as for like high-end systems and expecting good sound all right so here's some narrower dispersion or narrow dispersion speakers the jtr noesis 212 are teas and other JT our speakers are certainly pretty decent for the money given what you're getting they have good measurements the clips are P 8000 asked I don't want to so there might be other good clip shows I just haven't heard a lot of them there are some I don't like I think gene you said - there's some you don't like that tend to sound a little bit bright and don't necessarily measure great this one didn't measure bad for the price and sounded did a really decent and what little flaws we saw in the measurements weren't particularly audible so I think that's a good speaker and it has narrow dispersion pretty high output for 1,400 bucks a pair that's really not bad the shoe CCB eights which that's an all right it is a coaxial and it measures pretty decent it's not perfect but for $750 a pair it's really a nice speaker the JBLM 2's are a really nice speaker I've heard them maybe three times now they are $23,000 with amps I have seen occasionally some discounts and actually can get them without the amps and and kind of do your own thing to get the price down a little bit but you know just for the sake of argument they are $23,000 it's just a lot so they make sure better sound good right well they're active to that have active crossovers yeah that's the reason why I said with apps it's an active design so the amps are kind of required they have DSP built into them some people have two gone their own route buying different arguably better amps and then using a different DSP solution and then loading their own DSP to the crossover so the JBL HDI 38 hundreds which I believe we're reviewing right now that hasn't yeah the review is done it should post this week so stay tuned for that on audio honks comm yeah so I haven't heard those yet but I trust James and he says they sound really good I hope I got the price right but $5,000 for the pair I believe he said they measured pretty good he sent me the measurements they looked decent so it looks like a good speaker definitely falls into this category the Dutch and Dutch 8c I haven't heard these yet either but I really want to I'm really excited about this particular speaker they're expensive you look incredible I mean this state of the art stuff going on in that speaker you know exactly yeah we should do a review on those right we're hoping to review those they're 12,500 a pair I've occasionally seen some small discounting on those but you know basically that's the price but the nice thing about those is that they're an 8 inch bookshelf speaker with the directivity that you typically see from a 15 plus inch size speaker so like the directivity on that is actually arguably better than even the m2 in terms of its ability to control it down at low frequencies because it's using a mixture of passive and active directivity control mechanisms which is way cool I'm gonna put anything Genelec like I've heard a lot of their speakers before I've seen measurements on dozens of them pretty much anything they put out seems to be excellent and they all tend to be controlled direct ivities ein so I'm going to call them narrow directivity the one that I have pictured there I'm forgetting the model number on that but like anyone who knows what that is knows that's an excellent excellent speaker but they're big money there's no denying that and then it looks like it's covered up on my own but the Chi audio speaker there which is the one that's got the little arrows pointing around it that's another design Bruno Pudsey or price at his wrong name let's see boots I would say there we go so he was on our show previously but he designed that speaker it also uses a form of like beam steering to direct sound towards the front and control control drug to be better but it's a good speaker and I've actually heard those a number of times now and they really do sound nice yes so there's a lot of good choices my friends and there's no clear answer wide or narrow dispersion speakers are the best that really depends on your application your room dynamics how you're listening I've I've heard good examples and bad examples of both so it was this video topic was a bit click Beatty you know telling you we're gonna tell you the definitive answer cuz there really is none I think both designs can be really well done and give you good results I agree so I think we're gonna wrap this up well Matt you could go in and kind of answer questions you know after the fact when this post's we're gonna do another follow-up we have one more video that's gonna complete this series what's that third video gonna be about Matt well it's really gonna focus on that concept specifically of time intensity trading so we're gonna talk about it in two contexts so one of them is the way that it can provide a more stable frontal image but also the same idea that allows it to maintain that stable frontal image can be used to maintain a more stable surround image as well across different seats by taking advantage of directivity not in the horizontal but in the vertical so if you think about it's actually more in line with the pro audio approach if you look at how it's spraying sound across your your different seats that you have you can actually make it so that as you move to the left seat the middle seat or the right seat or whatever you have in your room the levels are not really changing relative to each other of the surround speakers and that helps to maintain the stability of that surround image so as you just gonna kind of talk about how directivity can be used in cool ways so I wanted to give a shout out to Optimus Vader he did a super chat for $20 thank you my friend and his question is in the case of the RF 7 3s how would you classify them I think we already discussed this it is a narrow dispersion speaker and you know I think the RF 8 thousands that we reviewed were based on this speaker so this is kind of their flagship right now so what we measured with the RF 8000 the RF 7 3 should be even better I don't remember to be honest they're different models so I'll take your word on that one you I believe that's their I mean I used I remember they had the palladiums years ago I don't think those are around anymore so I think as it stands right now they are up seven 3s are their flagship speaker so anyways guys we're gonna wrap this up don't forget about our patreon channel at patreon.com slash audio holics we post a lot of unique content there that you don't just get as a regular Youtube subscriber in fact I just put up all of our latest base a holic subwoofer data there including some JT our subs we just we just measured so there's great information for you there Matt thanks for staying up so late and being part of this discussion this was an awesome slide presentation I'm gonna put this up on our patreon as well for anyone that wants to reference it later and until next time my friends keep listening
Very interesting and comprehensive discussion on the import of speaker directivity.
I guess it’s personal preference and how they are being used. I’m 50/ 50 music and movies. I like a wide sound stage with large separation. Was watching Thor last night. When he dropped his coffee cup it sounded like the sound was coming from the floor.
One thing to be wary of with wide dispersion speakers is that they increase the ratio of reflected vs direct sound that you hear and that it may come with the downside of not as great directivity control. The higher the proportion of sound is reflected, the more the in-room response will resemble the sound power response. If you try to optimize the in room response with EQ, you might make the on axis or early reflection response worse.