JDCrae wrote:
I had seen the CBT kit on PE. Looks amazing, but there is no way I could get away with speakers like that in our tiny house. Would be amazing to hear them in person.
I don't recall the brand, it may have been McIntosh, but there was a set of speakers at Grammaphone, they had to be 7 feet tall, maybe 24 inches wide, and it had to be a line array of some kind. The thing that amazed me, was whether you were standing one foot in front of them, or 30 feet back, the volume of sound was exactly the same. Don't know how it was done, but I remember being blown away by it.
One of the reasons for what you heard with the McIntosh are with a tall line array you are in the near field for a greater distance from the speakers. The drop off with distance in the near field is half what occurs in the far field. Therefore the amplitude stays more constant with distance. Secondly the cylindrical wave launch of the sound in a line array minimizes the ceiling and wall reflections (assuming a vertical array) therefore minimizing reflections off those surfaces. As a result you get less contribution from reflections and more emphasis on the direct sound. Those are all good things. The tradeoff is that imaging is not as precise as with a point source. As the old saying goes, "youse pays your money and youse takes your choice".
Tom