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How to get good soundstaging for off-centerline listeners

"If I'm reading this correctly, it sounds too good to be true."

The setup I advocate uses speakers whose radiation pattern is about 90 degrees wide in the horizontal plane from about 1.5 kHz on up. Then the speakers are toed-in severely - like 45 degrees or so - such that their axes criss-cross in front of the normal "sweet spot" center listening position. Credit to Earl Geddes for teaching me this technique. And yes, it looks wierd.

The unusually good off-centerline imaging we get with this setup arises because the ear/brain system localizes sound by two mechanisms: Arrival time, and intensity. With a "conventional" setup (a few degrees of toe-in), for the off-centerline listener the near speaker "wins" both arrival time and intensity; the former because of the shorter path length, and the latter because the listener is now more on-axis of the near speaker and more off-axis of the far speaker. As a result, as the listener moves to one side of the centerline, the soundstage (in particular the center vocalist) shifts a disproportionately large amount towards the near speaker.

With the setup I propose (90-degree pattern speakers toed in at 45 degrees), for the off-centerline listener the near speaker inevitably "wins" arrival time but the far speaker "wins" intensity (over the imaging-critical portion of the spectrum) because he's now more on-axis of that far speaker but well off-axis of the near speaker. The key to this working well is a fairly strong falloff in intensity of the near speaker across the top half of the spectrum (where we get most of our imaging cues from). Some off-centerline locations in the room will have better soundstaging than others, but all of them will be better than with a conventional setup using conventional speakers. You can try this with conventional speakers, but it's unlikely to work very well because the off-axis falloff of the near speaker varies too much with frequency and is generally insufficiently rapid.

At the link below is a shot of a room with speakers that have this 45-degree toe-in built in. Notice that from the camera angle you're on-axis of the far speaker but well off-axis of the near speaker. The soundstaging and tonal balance both hold up well from the camera location.

Like I said it's a wierd-looking setup, and no doubt all kinds of things look questionable or outright wrong to most audiophiles. Feel free to grill me about 'em.

Duke

Me being a dealer makes you leery?? It gets worse... I'm a manufacturer too.

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