Change of vantage
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsMusic Room Two, with its magnificent Infinity IRS V, BHK monoblocks, multiple P20 Power Plants, BHK preamp, DirectStream DAC, and Stellar Phono is one of the most revealing systems I know of. It’s our reference that allows us to hear deep into the music. It’s an invaluable tool for the design and voicing of PS Audio products.
Yet, Music Room Two is forever changing, something you might think a reference should never do.
As we change cables, improve DACs, find new music, or tweak speaker positions, our vantage point changes and it sounds different. Often, we’ve enough improvement that previously unnoticed details in familiar music come to the forefront, requiring us to readjust our expectations.
I think of this change in vantage point very much like changing one’s seat in a favorite concert hall. The few times I’ve been lucky enough to attend New York’s Carnegie Hall or the Met, it’s been in different seats. And each of those positions gave me a very different perspective of the whole.
Even in Music Room Two I’ll often take the right-hand seat instead of the center sweet spot just to change vantage points and listen from a different perspective.
We can get inured to the point of ignoring the obvious if we’re not careful.
A change in vantage point is often the best way to refresh and renew the music.
‘Aston Martin’
(sorry; it is the silly season)
So, who here can adjust the bass just by leaning forwards or backwards whilst sitting in their ‘sweet-spot’?
Fat Rat,
Strangely enough I noticed that the other day. Leaning forward altered the sound. Couldn’t lean back, the chair was in the way! Have yet to decide if there was any advantage. 😉
Richtea,
Two hours to go on the Eastern seaboard of ‘straya ’till 2020.
Best to you & yours for the new year 🙂
Fat Rat,
Thanks. Twelve hours to go here in U.K. Happy New Year to you and yours.
Don’t spend it all looking for that new H.S. album….in 4D 😉
Thanks for the hearty laugh Rich 🙂
The listening position is important!
Isn’t this standard?
When I lean forward, deeper bass gets sucked out and imaging looses center, when I lean backward, bass gets boomy in certain areas and imaging looses focus.
If you have a measuring option for frequency response in the room, you easily see how much changes when you move the mic for several inches.
In case one hardly angles the speaker towards the sweet spot, he certainly has less dramatic effects aside of the sweet spot, but he then also doesn’t have the focus and soundstage experience he could have at the sweet spot.
jazznut,
It must be pretty standard I guess.
I find it helpful sometimes if the next track on an album is a touch too ‘bassy’; I can just lean forward to tone it down.
Yes, that happens for me.
Hey Frank,
It’s already January 01 where I live so Happy New Year & all the best to you & yours for 2020 🙂
Thanks…same to you!
Sometimes I seem to wait for the wrong punchline. This time: what the heck is seriously changing in MR 2?
But probably I’m impatient and what I thought is today’s topic is in fact tomorrow’s.
Jazznut,
‘Toyota’…oh no we did that one many post’s ago.
Sydney, Australia is less than two hours away from 2020, so best wishes to you & yours for this next 365 days 🙂
I’m sober (yet) but didn’t get the Toyota one ;-(
jazznut,
Toyota made an ‘MR2’ model car a couple of decades ago 🙂
Like 😉 Too good for me today
Isn’t 2020 a 366 day year? 🙂
I hope you didn’t short change Jazznut.
Mike,
Shortchange jazznut?
Never!!
No, Feb’s got 29days in 2020; that’s 365days sir.
Htf do you get 366??
Math? (Old school – not new age) 🙂
Plus you said it yourself… leap year.
🙂
Mike,
I f#@ked up, please read my reply to Larry…it says it all.
Seems I did short change jazznut.
I would’ve sworn on The Bible that a ‘normal’ year has 364 days in it.
I’m in disbelief…
Apologies sir 😉
In all the years of ‘playing hard’ , to have only lost one brain cell is pretty damn good. Besides what’s a day here or there. Maybe the Southern Hemisphere spins just a little slower. 🙂
Happy New Year to you and yours.
Mike,
That’s very kind of you, but I lost a whole day; not just one brain cell…maybe I can blame three decades of smoking the devil’s tobacco 😉
Anyway, I figured it out!
It’s just lazy math.
For at least the last three decades I’ve been calculating 52 weeks x 7 days = 364 days in a year…I’ve been short changing EVERYONE.
I hope that the Tax Office doesn’t audit me 😉
Glad I could help. I like your math especially still being a working stiff. One less day to work a year. No work – no income – no taxes. Seems like a good way to go.
I hadn’t thought about this but looked it up. Leap years have 366 days.
https://www.epochconverter.com/days/2020
Larry,
I had to add it all up manually to convince myself that a ‘normal’ year has 364 days in it… & it doesn’t!
Talk about a senior moment…OMG…& I’m only 59!!!
Hey man, thanks for the heads-up on that.
I am totally bewildered…
On a happier note; all the very best to you & yours for 2020 sir 🙂
I guess I have a different perspective of the term reference. To me the IRSV’s are your reference, period. Everything else is the supporting cast…., The room, the placement in the room, the electronics, the cables, and I guess to some degree even the choice of music.
The reference shows off (for better or worse) the supporting cast. If a cast member doesn’t cut it anymore then I’m fairly certain you move them on for a new gig. The one cast member that is the safest is probably the room.
I can agree that different vantages offer different perspectives and insight. But there’s still only one ‘kings chair’
Changing one’s vantage point changes one’s view of everything. If I change the toe-in of my speakers just a few degrees, the music changes. If I move from the sofa and sit on the floor in front of the coffee table – rarely used for coffee, but at least SWMBO is also a musician and a little bit of an audiophile thanks to me, and had the grace and sense to design the room around the speakers, bless her heart – the sound REALLY changes for the better, because the tweeters are right at my ear level and the whole setup becomes near field listening. With some pieces, I just have to change my perspective by putting what I am doing on hold for a few minutes while I go sit on the floor in the REALLY sweet spot, spinal stenosis and rheumatoid arthritis be damned. (Growing older has enhanced my ability to change perspectives in many ways, not the least of which is living with chronic pain, among other things. Youth is indeed wasted on the young… ) And yes, Leap Years have 366 days, not 365. They would always be Presidential election years so as to torture us all an extra day. And the room can also be changed through furniture type and placement, room treatments, etc.
jnani,
I’ve got one word for you sir:
Beanbag!
I like my tweeters about 8″ above my ears & my trusty beanbag, on the floor, means that my ageing glutes don’t start complain right in the middle of my favourite musical passages.
Best to you for 2020 🙂
I wonder how Paul can differentiate between “better” and “new and different” when making minute changes to the MR2 system. No matter how good the recipe, we all tire of sameness and start to play with ingredients.
After all, Paul is only human, even if he has the stamina of the Energizer Bunny 😛
May all your audio system and life tweaks or changes be for the better in 2020!
Aeroaudio,
Same to you sir 🙂
Here’s an explanation of what I discovered about acoustics. What you hear depends on approximately two dozen variables. Where you are located is one of them. Therefore trying to explain acoustics with numbers that describe a space globally such as RT is of limited value. It doesn’t take into account the fact that these variables change with location. Among these variables are the size, shape, and materials of the room you are in, including everything and everyone in it, even what clothing they are wearing. These are called boundary values. The temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure cause the way sound is propagated through air to change with them. These are called conditions of state. The location of the source of sound, how it launches sound into space directionally, and its orientation matters. If a trumpet player lifts his trumpet and aims it at the left side of the audience the people on that side will hear something different from the people on the right side of the audience where the sound is not aimed at them.
The sound arriving at your ears can be described by five variables, amplitude, time, and three dimensions of arrival. In this form the analysis can’t be solved. The reason is that reflections arriving after the first arriving sound arrive at the same time as subsequent first arriving sounds and other reflections. The solution is to separate the reflections out adding a sixth variable. In this method each reflection can be segregated in time and described by its time of arrival relative to the first arriving sound, loudness, spectral change from the first arriving sound, and direction of arrival. The method for measuring this is different from the way sound is usually measured. Once understood the analysis can be used to compare how sounds arrive differently with changes in variables at one location or the changes experienced for the same sound at different locations at the same time.
The analysis of live music shows that the sound arriving at your ears is very different in many ways from the sound arriving from recorded music played through loudspeakers. Understanding these differences both qualitatively and quantitatively and engineering systems to make recorded sound have similar properties of arriving sound to live sound is the key to getting higher fidelity from recordings.
On my system I find that the best sound occurs when I get a really good match of the frequency response from the left and right speakers. Moving seats does change the sound. This change might not sound “worse” just less realistic.
Spot on, Paul. Happy New Year !