It took for us, for the people with brains and ears, a few years to explain to the foolish audiophiles the artificiality of their soundstage objectives. Six years ago when I was tiring explaining to the audio-zombies that soundstage is juts a surrogate of audio reproduction and not a property of performing event they were laughing.  The audio doodleists screamed about “wide soundstage” in each their audio publication and the subscribers of audio-zombinism were buying into this like puppets. Since then ”we the people with brains and ears” educated a little bit the cretins who run this industry and nowadays the “kinkiest” of them are not afraid to bash soundstage, persuading the buyers that “there are other more important things”.  The funny part that we “people with brains” did not tell the to those “intelligent” reviewers and editors with “40 years of experience in audio” the whole truth. The whole truth is that Soundstage still might be very powerful expressive tool if some other things are taken care. Those “other things” are the keys and without possessing them the industry freaks speeding wisdom about soundstage sound more like chicken noise....

Still, continuing my educational “Audio for Dummies” section and to observing the subject of speaker organization there is one subject upon which I would like to shade light.

Most of audio people in one way or other use “imaging” or a certain subset of the “real soundstage”. Imaging is ease achievable, easy manageable and easy detectable. However, not a lot of people know that listening room compress dynamic. The compression is less visible and not as much “in your face” as the imaging. The irony is that the settings for best imaging most frequency (in context of conventional box loudspeakers) directly contradict the best settings for the least dynamic compression. Still, the problem is not with the compression itself but with total lock of understanding by the audiophiles that the position of minimum dynamic compression should be the target of installation… NOT the position of maximum imaging.

Practically all audio people position speakers by “imaging” and it is wrong. The “imaging positioning”. NEVER leads to the DPoLS positioning (Look further at the article about the “Dead Points of Live Sounnd":

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=994)

and the DpoLS is the ONLY one setting where there is no conflict between the dynamic and imaging.

Interesting that the search for the least dynamic compression eventually do leads to the DPoLS, and whan the loudspeakers are in the DPoLS position then all aspect of “imaging” get resolved at orders of magnitude more interesting level then the people practicing the “imaging positioning” even could imagine.

So, do use your ear and brain to recognize and to manage the “least dynamic compression” position without initial paying attention to imaging…

One more tip. The “least dynamic compression positioning” mostly managed by upper bass and bass channels while in the “imaging positioning” the MF and HF channels play more dominating roles. Therefore, if you use a typical single box loudspeaker then you most likely have quite few tools to manage the situation as the different channels would most likely demand the different optimum positions in your room (unless you are incredibly lucky!!!). Still, even is you do have a separation of the enclosures between the channels then it might be quite complex to take care of the  LF’s “dynamic compression” the MF’s “imaging”, the phase consistency and many other this… at the same time and within the very same installation….

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Jan, I disagree.

Obviously the ultimate intention is to listing music not the "imaging" or the “compression” but…. in order to listen music there is no needs for a good playback at all.

Audio and music are very different subjects of human experiences and they are no necessarily related.  Still, if we make the assumptions that “better audio” could enrich music listening experiences then let find out what actual do enriching and what does not.

I did not “shift between listening to the system and losing yourself in the music”. I presume that it is self-evident that the “listening to the system” and the “losing yourself in the music” are very different animals that certainly might be related. However, currently under discussion is not the result of the listening but the process of obtaining the result.

Would a properly, DPoLS-based, playback installation enrich a listener ability “to be lost in music”? Unquestionably would. How a listener without knowing the expressive methods of audio might bring up his/her system up to the DpoLS level? To do it requires a ceremony of connected sensations, actions and motivations… and this I try to make someone to think about. All that I was saying was that by perusing the "imaging minded” ceremony it is hardly possible to produce decisions leading to the actions that might produces any DPoLS-fruitful results.  Contrary to this the training to recognize the dynamic compression of listening rooms take the DpoLS searching skills through the roof.

Before one plays a violin concerto…. it would be nice to figure out the basis principles of noted producing by this violin … :-)

Rgs,
Romy the caT

Romy the Cat wrote:

<P><BR>Jan, I disagree. <BR><BR>Obviously …. in order to listen music there is no needs for a good playback at all.</P>

<P>Rgs,<BR>Romy the caT</P>

hifitodd wrote:

Frankly, from my perspective your stance on DPoLS mirrors that of the typical audio-moron voodooism.  Here is some essentially non-obtainable state that when realized will make the listener "hypotized" by thew newfound musical "significance".  DPoLS one day, intelligent chips that work their "quantum voodoo" the next day.

I disagree with you.  First of all I have nothing to do with the "quantum voodoo" and as far as I remember I always was very vocal critic of it. The DpoLS is not a “newfound musical significance" but the only existing ways to get the “real audio sound”. Some people use it for years and years and some people consider it as “newfound”.  The reasons why I made it available is because someone who does not know yet might learn about the DpoLS….

hifitodd wrote:

The only difference between your DPoLS and many other "mystical" audio tweaks is that yours is non-feasible to reproduce.  I can place the chip on top of my CD player and tell you in within a short matter of time that the significance of the event has not changed, but a personal experment to prove/disprove DPoLS would take months of endless tweaking/refining.

Actually it is not really correct because if you approach the DPoLS from the position of  “tweaking” then you NEVER discover it and never learn how the Points work. The DpoLS hardly might be discovered by accident or by tweaking but rather by the intentional and premeditated pursuit.

hifitodd wrote:

In my current state of audio/music/listener interaction knowledge acquisition I am of course cautious, and I believe in science-backed evidence as opposed to religion.

I do not think that you use the “science-backing” is this case appropriately. If you did not experience (mostly audio people never did) a playback installation in the DpoLS then you certainly might accept is as a religion. However, if you have very personal and very tangible witnessing what happen with playback when it hits the DpoLS then you do not need any “voices from the burring bushes” and you become not just a “believer” but a person who use the DpoLS as a regular expressive tool.

hifitodd wrote:

So my question is this: Just what exactly IS DPoLS, as described by the physics that it operates on.  Your thread describes what happens when DPoLS is obtained, but I am not able to find any data around why it exists, and what it is in actuality.

You will not find any data about it anywhere because what was proposed in the article above is  way much more advanced that the understanding of the people who create “data” in audio.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

I had no idea that DPOLS was such a controversial topic!  While I do know a local stereo dealer that believes in setting up speakers based on where they look good (and he sells AvantGardes BTW), I think he does so many other things right to tweak a system that his customers are happy. 

I never thought of DPOLS as special.  This is the way I have always set up my speakers.  There is one definite very exact configuration that gives the best sound as if simulating the emanation of sound from a single very distant point.  It is truly a matter of a fraction of an inch to get it right. 

But why argue about it?  Just TRY it and see what happens!

Cheers!
Adrian

Actually there are many hidden aspects of DPOLS, the aspects that, many audio people who never experienced DPOLS but wiling to argue about it, do not even understand. Interesting that by observing some of this aspects is it very easy to detect where a person stay in his/her understanding of audio.

For instance one of the hidden DPOLS aspects is a fact that a loudspeaker do not has any default sound and the loudspeakers sound is a result of the loudspeakers complicity multiplied by the efforts that the loudspeaker’s owned is capable to vest in order to make the loudspeaker to perform in it’s best. The people who do not want to know anything about DPOLS and who do not want have DPOLS as the objective juts are not familiar with loudspeaker or with any more or less civilized sound in listening rooms.

Hifitodd, I do not knock in your door with this reply, I juts would like to remind that desires to get ANY science evidences are juts the desires of convince own mental applicability. However, a creative sensibility of and a person ability to recognize the realty and react to realty accordingly is a real high ends of human actions.  The DPOLS is an art of the speakers setting. The “science-backed evidences” have no relation to loudspeaker but juts the conventual morals that was invented by the Audio Asylum’s Idiots in order to prove why their sound worst then sound in the rooms of their neighbors…

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

hifitodd wrote:

I am interested in how you personally discovered dpols for your own personal reference.  You Say:  If this is the case, then how did you first come about dpols?  Given that DPoLS cannot be "stumbled upon".

The DPoLS not be "stumbled upon" but it should be cognitively recognized. The point is that a listener consciousness should be DpoLS-ready (I know it sound ironic but it’s what it is). Without have own awareness to be DpoLS-ready the fact of stumbling upon the DpoLS might be completely acknowledged. You do not fine anything if you do not search for it.

hifitodd wrote:

Do you feel that way about everything audio related?  You obviously have very firm-rooted opinions of rights/wrongs in audio, and you must feel as though there are physics-related reasons why you feel the way you do.

There as differences in perception of Music but there are no differences in perception of sound. I do not have any opinions about rights/wrongs in audio but I do know what relates to sound and what relates to nothing. DpoLS is very directly and very dominatingly affects Sound. However, the conversations about the “DpoLS exaggeration” without having any familiarity with the DpoLS benefits relates to nothing…

hifitodd wrote:

Actually, I may be starting to see your point now that I am starting at your thoughts in isolation.  You mean that physics clearly coincides with reality, but that's not the point.  The point is what is real/not real, regardless of data, and a person's ability and motivation to work with reality using live music as a frame of reference is all that matters.

In a simple trims yes, but there is more to it. Physics and sciences are the wrappers that support out perception of raw Reality. If a person could operate by the native languages of Reality then the “languages of the wrappers” because much less expressive, or at least have totally different inflection..

Rgs,
The cat

I think that I've never experienced a pair of speakers placed to achieve the DPoLS, but once I had mine quite close since the "sound" was something special, which trascended the features of individual sounds and helped to make music an experience quite closer to what live music is, not exactly in absolute terms of dynamic range, "tone", air or whatever you may use to describe sounds, but in the way one could get the meaning  of the contents of the music... well, it's quite hard to explain, but it's related to the way some works can ellicit an emotional response which oneself produces just if things are fine. And that "feeling" was present wherever you were in the room, not just sitting in the "sweet spot" and also you might lay on the floor or standing up on your feet, that "thing" was there. I changed the speakers and I lost it :-( but I'm still looking for it.

The point is that that sensation is something quite comparable to when you meet the right VTA whilst setting up the cart on the turntable. If you try to set up VTA trying to balance "frequencies", you'll probably go mad fiddling with it every single record you play, but there's a position, which you can spend months to find, that simply makes music a "whole" and it really doesn't matter very much if you play a thick record or a thin one (which goes against the very principle of VTA), that everything is balanced in tone, dynamics and space on most records.

Regards,

A

drdna wrote:

Maybe I don't know what DPOLS is, as suggested by others in this forum.  All I know is that I can spend a lot of time fiddling with the exact location of the speakers, the sepcific 3 dimensional alignment of the two sets of drivers, and there is just one very specific position for the speakers in the room that makes a gigantic difference in the perception of the sound being like live music.  I can spend literally weeks or months trying to adjust the speakers when they are put in a new room.  Quickly ( after a few days), often there is a small area around this where the sound is pretty good and I can live with this quite happily, but there seems to be one very sepcific arrangement where the music comes alive.  It is a matter of moving the speakers very small amounts by 1/16 of an inch toe in, toe out, forward, back, sideways, etc.  to get it just right.  But when it is there, you know it.  Maybe this is not DPOLS, perhaps I had misunderstood the original posting.  If this is the case, perhaps someone can enlighten me to waht DPOLS really is?

Hugh wrote:

The rewards of ideal speaker placement is something I've experienced as well and perhaps is related to DPLOS or possbily audio-moronism.  While not easy to find or predictable between speaker brands the result is consistant.  As it turns out my first experience with this result was actually a complete fluke.  After a night of positioning my speakers I, through a measurement mistake, returned my speakers to what I thought was their original position but to my suprise was something far better.  Not long after finding this position the speakers were boxed up to make way for some renovations and I subsequently lost the paper I wrote the speaker locations on and it took me about 1.5 years of diligent trial and error to locate this position(s) again.

Hugh wrote:

The best advice I can give to those willing to seek out the location is to put away your calculators and measuring tapes.  Also, I'm convinced this ideal location tends to float around a little over time requiring slight speaker re-positioning from time to time.

Hugh wrote:

For testing I prefer to use a recording of a female singer, when speaker location is optimized sound just seems to come to life and float around the room.  The central singer seemingly reaches out envelopes me and at times I can sense "phantom" breath blow across my face or during the parting of lips feel I've been kissed.  This experience probably sounds a little strange for some but "phantom" sensations are real and to occur my brain has accepted the re-creation of voice and breath as natural and has interpreted the intimacy of the re-creation as a familiar real intimate experience and then bridges the gap and creates the "phantom" physical sensation, in essence turning the experience into something organic.  My speakers require to be postioned just so before I can experience this nature of reaction and also when in this location terms such as imaging, sounstaging, extension.....etc. become quite foreign and completely irrelevent to the music.

Hugh wrote:

The best advice I can give to those willing to seek out the location is to put away your calculators and measuring tapes.  Also, I'm convinced this ideal location tends to float around a little over time requiring slight speaker re-positioning from time to time.

Gregm wrote:

Coming back to the "multi-driver" spkrs -- especially unfamiliar ones. It has taken me a long time to "optimise" the positioning of a pair of 4-way spkrs (9 drive-units, of which two in the back, in phase) …. One difficulty in "correctly" positioning these two in the room came fm the number of frequency bands that have to be "coupled". Simply put, moving ONE spkr 1degree front tow-in with less than 1mm movement in the back will change the phase relation in 4 frequency ranges. For example, the tweets may snap into "focus" while the mid-bass recede (phase problem).

Gregm, what you describe is very accurate. Form my point of view your description suggests that you have very accurately and very smartly built loudspeakers, however the loudspeakers built upon the fundamentally faulty design objectives. With multi-channel speakers it might be quite complicated and in many instances it might be impossible to reach the DPLOS. Even if it is possible with a given loudspeaker then the DPLOS become very fragile and appears/appears too sudden, without a gradual improvement while approaching the DPLOS. The keys are phase coherency and … surprise, surprise a compliance of the individual drivers between each other. Also, in end of 90s I spent a lot of time learning how different topologies of crossovers affect Sound. Higher order crossovers produce less “maximum amplitude” at the level #3 (my post above) of the DPLOS proximity. Any deviation of crossover from 6db per octave severely minimized articulation and expressive capacity of a loudspeaker. The impedance normalization networks and any resonating chains completely kille it. Ironically 12dB per octave coming from a mechanical device (for instance cut off due to the size of a horn bell) instead of electrical resonating chain do not affect Sound so negatively.

Gregm wrote:

{BTW, by "focus" I mean the sound between them -- not the soundstaging & three-dimensional presentation, breathtaking rendition of detail, et alia nauseating mumbo-jumbo.}

Yes, defiantly it is mumbo-jumbos but if look at this “semantic” form a different angle than there is nothing wrong with this phraseology if this phraseology actually means something. I think that problem is that year over year the army of the industry idiots: reviewers, dealers and etc… completely compromised and devaluated this semantic and today, it does sound to us as the mumbo-jumbo. For instance the estimable imbecile Michael Fremer, the senior and extraordinary contributing editor to the Stereophile magazine, was so overwhelmed with his desire to make the Audio Morons to buy a 12” peace of cheap plastic for $400 that he have written that his turntable mat was so good that being 4mm of height it practically …did not affect FTA. Another, well know Moron-dealer, who also loves to run his brain-disconnected mouth and to mill empty words, was trying to convince me a week ago that there is a way to increase output power of Class A1 operating SET by changing power mains from 20A to 30A. According to him it will make 6C33C be able to output 100W… Surely, after listening the chorus of those cretins year after year any person who has IQ higher then 50 would begin to hate the beaten audio phraseology … In context of this BS that the “audio semantic providers” dump to audio public I perfectly appreciate what Bose did in 80s taking a reviewer who wrote meaningless phraseology in court and forcing the fool to admit that his comment were meaningless.
 

Gregm wrote:

{BTW, in order to guard against accidents, I have taped the contour of the spkrs (which are usefully floorstanding).

Sure, everyone dose it. The funny part is that when we return the speakers into the previously marked position we never put then in the exact spot but a few mm off. Very frequently the “off” location is closer  (luckily) to the DPLOS then the original was. I feel the only one way to map the exact location is to have loudspeakers to sit on the hard-coupled spikes and do not mark the location of the loudspeakers but rather make the holes made in wooden floor by the spikes. Of course it is not always possible and if you have some kind of Wilson Grand Slam of many hundreds kilograms then good luck to manage the loudspeakers to match the spike’s holes… :-)