Need help with spectrum analyzer

[Paul S.]

Can anyone tell me if this a good reading? I took it using white noise. New to this so im willing to learn. 

[ctsooner]

Looks like this is covered under the longer thread. 

[Paul S.]

Yes i dont know why it made 2 posts. Would be nice if we could delete our own posts

[Holmz]

25 minutes ago, Paul S. said:

Yes i dont know why it made 2 posts. Would be nice if we could delete our own posts

I thought maybe it was one for each channel?

[ctsooner]

LOL.... If you guys ever need a thread deleted, I think I am able to do that for you.  Just PM me whenever that happens...

[Richard Vandersteen]

On 12/30/2021 at 8:08 PM, Paul S. said:

Can anyone tell me if this a good reading? I took it using white noise. New to this so im willing to learn. 

Don't know if that is a good measurement for your room but more importantly, how does it sound?  It has rising bass, flat midrange and a falling high frequency which usually indicates good sound but if these measurements are all it takes one could get an equalizer and a cheap pair of speakers.............  Guess if one toke enough time he might even surpass my Model SEVEN XTRM's.  LOL

 

RV

[Holmz]

6 hours ago, Richard Vandersteen said:

Don't know if that is a good measurement for your room but more importantly, how does it sound?  It has rising bass, flat midrange and a falling high frequency which usually indicates good sound but if these measurements are all it takes one could get an equalizer and a cheap pair of speakers.............  Guess if one toke enough time he might even surpass my Model SEVEN XTRM's.  LOL

 

RV

I like ^it^. 

With a DSP one cannot fix:

• Two speakers where the the cross over region is out of phase or shifted in time.
• Cabinet resonances
• Edge diffraction 
• Other stuff they do not even know to consider.

And then with the cheap speakers/drivers, there are the cone breakup modes, and motor non-linearities.
One could likely address making the motor more linear with  DSP,  but it would be hard to make papryus appear like carbon fibre. 
(It would be a journey to rival Thor Heyerdahl’s.)

[Paul S.]

Sorry to all for the duplicate post. RV to answer your question after much fiddling for hours with toe in everything now sounds great. I went from a strong center image (toed in alot) to a nice soundstage (toed out). Then i moved them just almost straight out with a slight toe out and everything just snapped into focus with a beautiful soundstage. Crazy thing is that i have a bay window next to my right speaker and i was trying to minimize side wall reflection but the heavy curtains i have for my window actually contributed to the excellent sound i am now getting. Im so appreciative of this site teaching me to ignore my gut instincts and just experiment. 

[Holmz]

15 hours ago, Paul S. said:

Sorry to all for the duplicate post. RV to answer your question after much fiddling for hours with toe in everything now sounds great. I went from a strong center image (toed in alot) to a nice soundstage (toed out). Then i moved them just almost straight out with a slight toe out and everything just snapped into focus with a beautiful soundstage. Crazy thing is that i have a bay window next to my right speaker and i was trying to minimize side wall reflection but the heavy curtains i have for my window actually contributed to the excellent sound i am now getting. Im so appreciative of this site teaching me to ignore my gut instincts and just experiment. 

There is so much happening, and lot of it counter intuitive.

But it could be interesting to see if there is any difference in the frequency response after this. But I suspect that the reflections would not show up well in FR, but would show up better in an autocorrelation… But then again it is hard to know what to do that sort of info… so we’re still back to experimenting with the placement and toe.

[Paul S.]

Id be happy to run another sample. Im not sure these analyzers show a good center image and proper tilt back that our ears hear. I am a complete newbie with analyzers hence asking for advice here. To me it sounds better than what I had before. That not to say i wont fiddle with it some more just to see what more i can squeeze out of it. All part of the fun right? 

[Paul S.]

If i remember the manual correctly on the 2 CE the way to measure side wall distance is from the wall to the center of the speaker not the edge of the cabinet. Maybe RV can confirm if this is correct 

[bkeske]

Center of speaker is correct IIRC.

[Paul S.]

So just for fun i took some more samples. Im interested in options on what you guys see. First 2 are samples at 4096 and 8192 for the way i have it setup for best sound. After testing i ran a white noise out of phase and adjusted speakers for wide and even dispersion. Then i ran in phase white noise to see if everything was centered correctly. Then i ran 2 more tests at 4096 and 8192. Honestly I think it sounds good both ways with maybe the second one a bit more center focus but without losing soundstage. 

[Holmz]

9 hours ago, Paul S. said:

Id be happy to run another sample. Im not sure these analyzers show a good center image and proper tilt back that our ears hear. I am a complete newbie with analyzers hence asking for advice here. To me it sounds better than what I had before. That not to say i wont fiddle with it some more just to see what more i can squeeze out of it. All part of the fun right? 

Totally agree with the first sentence.

I believe (don’t know), but I think we hear in the time domain… so time and phase can be important, and we (via the brain) get the direct path resolved.

However a lot of what the mic measures may well be the reflections.
(It is probably both though… imaging with direct path and timbre part with the direct+reflected sound.)
RV would know.

Ideally we would not care and we could (or might) be happy with speakers that were not time and phase correct?

It os good enough that your speakers snapped into a magic spot. I don;t know how it works, but almost everyone get the same observation.
(It is a WTF moment when it happens.)

[Paul S.]

Yep. Like I said just did the measurements for fun. My ears are happy 

[ctsooner]

I guess I never worried about measurements.  Even as a kid I glossed over them when reading Stereo Review I think it was. Same with the other pubs, I just don’t care. I’m in the minority and that’s cool. It’s all a fun hobby and we all have our own fun ways to enjoy it. I’m learning a bit though from this thread so thanks to all. 

[Paul S.]

I agree. I skip over the measurements too. Im sure they have some merit but as RV said if thats all it took we would be using the cheap $100 dacs that audio science review claims are superior to dacs costing twice as much. This excersize for me was just to learn. Not only did I learn about measurements but I also learned a few tricka to dial in my speaker setup. Thanks to all who helped me on this journey. 

[Holmz]

4 hours ago, ctsooner said:

I guess I never worried about measurements.  Even as a kid I glossed over them when reading Stereo Review I think it was. Same with the other pubs, I just don’t care. I’m in the minority and that’s cool. It’s all a fun hobby and we all have our own fun ways to enjoy it. I’m learning a bit though from this thread so thanks to all. 

Someone, somewhere, needs to worry about measurements.
I suspect that RV having the FFT machine early on, and later through the development of pistonic driver (etc.), were not born out of a lack of the engineering rigour including lots of measurements.

But then again, at our end of the chain, one needs to do some listening.

 

4 hours ago, ctsooner said:

…. I’m in the minority and that’s cool…. 

I think/believe that you are in the majority for 2 channel.
HT and car audio are more measurement driven.

[ctsooner]

Yes, as you said, OTHERS need to measure (designers).  I think it's great that many of you are engineers or can do the measurements and they mean something to you. Ignorance is bliss for me in this regard.  I have always listened and knew what I like.  Many dealers skip from cut to cut and ride the gain to show off systems.  I purposely take control of any remotes and now pads to listen how I want to listen.  JMHO.