I invented a new twist to solve a room interaction problem, built a pair of loudspeakers to demonstrate the results and showed it to a very famous magazine publisher of many years ago. His reaction was: "yes it helps but it's not right so I can't endorse it". I was crushed at the time and abandoned the idea for fear of further ridicule.
That was years ago and I have since learned to ignore the naysayers. I'll tell you the story.
The problem with most rooms is they confine the soundstage to the room boundaries and this sounds unnatural as the volume levels increase when you're playing your hi fi. So, for example, when you are listening to a live concert and an orchestra gets really loud, the soundstage seems to expand in almost exponential fashion - it just keeps getting bigger without seeming limitation - something that doesn't happen on a loudspeaker system in a room. When a certain level is reached on loud passages, the soundstage sounds like it's starting to compress into the limited space of the room.
So I invented the idea of a pair of loudspeaker drivers placed on the outside of each loudspeaker cabinet pointing at the left and right walls of the room. I then cobbled together a threshold circuit that fed the music to these drivers only when the sound reached a certain overall level. In other words, when the music got loud enough to start producing this compressed soundstage I was hearing, these outer drivers kicked in and widened the soundstage. It worked! The louder the music got the wider the stage and I could adjust it such that it sounded completely natural.
Artificial solution? Yes.
Did it work and solve a big problem that still, to this day, no one has addressed? Absolutely.
Now that I am beyond worrying about what people think of my ideas, I put hot sauce on my eggs in the morning - despite the looks of horror from others - and I am sharing a whacky idea without fear of ridicule.
It's good to get beyond some things.
