GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Omni-directional 'horny' speaker from RAAL

Post Subject: 360 sound makes no sensePosted by drdna on: 10/14/2008

So-called omnidirectional sound (of course here we are talking only about 360 degrees within a two-dimesional plane) is framed in the concept of emulating the microphone. This makes no sense to me, since it, firstly , fails to emulate the microphone. Secondly, why emulate the microphone? The idea, I would think, is to emulate the sound path of the original musical event and replicate that.

The argument can be made that since we do not know the directionality of the original event (the information is lost due to the omnidirectional nature of the microphone), we can make a good approximation by reproducing omnidirectional sound.

This argument fails because:
1) not all microphones are omnidirectional.
2) the source feeding the microphone is never omnidirectional. The vast majority of the time it is unidirectional (e.g., microphones set up in front of the band, etc. -- when was the last time you saw someone in the recording studio setting up the microphones behind the singer?)

And, yes, I have heard the MBL's etc. (but not the Morrison speakers). However, I have heard the effect of the omnidirectional dispersion pattern of the MBL's etc. and I was surprised how little difference it made. Of course, MBL is a pretty intolerable speaker for a number of reasons. Still, not because of the omnidirectional pattern. This just makes it sound unnatural.

Why? Only the linear beam from the speaker gets directly to your ear. The rest of the 360 dispersion bounces off the walls etc making vibrations, reflections and creating ambience and room information of your listening room. Only it is room information about a very unnatural event, namely 360 degree planar dispersion from two distinct sources, hardly a natural event. Really, I found it only tolerable in a heavily dead room, which largely was able to negate the effect of this type of speaker, but then you are left with the bad sounding speakers, which have many compromises already which they have sacrificed to create the special 360 degree dispersion.

Oh well.

Adrian

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