The Absolute Sound (DIGITAL)

The Absolute Sound is the world’s preeminent source of expert reviews, features, and commentary on high-performance audio and music. The subscription has 11 issue releases annually.

The Absolute Sound (DIGITAL)

From the Editor

Letters

FUTURE TAS

SPATIAL AUDIO • An important contributor to musical realism is the sense that your listening room has been replaced by the spatial characteristics of the recording. When you close your eyes, you are no longer in your listening room but in a large concert hall, a jazz club, or a small venue suitable for chamber music. Instruments appear in space as separate objects, surrounded by tangible air between them. We hear the strings in the front row, the brass and woodwinds behind them, and the percussion way in the back, with all the instruments surrounded by the hall’s rich reverberant acoustic. Each instrument appears as a separate entity with its own distinctive timbre and dynamics rather than sounding like part of a homogenized whole. The soundstage is wide, deep, clearly defined, and rich in detail. These are the elements that combine to create a believable sense of space.

The Role of DSP • Eelco Grimm, Co-Founder and Designer, Grimm Audio

Creating Immersive Recordings • Morten Lindberg, Founder, Producer/Engineer 2L Recordings

High-Resolution Immersive Streaming at Last • Stefan Bock, Pure Audio Streaming Service

Acoustic Techniques for Spatial Realsim • Jordan Goulette, Acoustic Sciences Corporation

Acoustics • Dave Shevyn, Chief Products Officer, GIK Acoustics

BASS IN LISTENING ROOMS • One of the most challenging aspects of believability in music reproduction is realizing smooth, natural, and articulate bass response in our listening rooms. Loudspeaker designers can and do create products with nearly perfect measured bass response in an anechoic chamber, but that performance goes out the window as soon as the speaker is put in a real room. The room dramatically modifies the speaker’s sound in the bass, introducing peaks and dips, bloat, thickness, overhang, loss of pitch definition, and reduced dynamic expression. We can minimize these problems through optimized loudspeaker placement, as well as choosing a listening room with good dimensional ratios that help to smooth the response. The latter solution isn’t practical for most of us, but not to worry; today’s designers have been working on a wide variety of techniques for realizing smooth, articulate, and uncolored bass in the real rooms in which we listen.

Dipolar Planar Bass • Daniele Coen, Founder and Designer, AlsyVox

The Case for Multiple Subwoofers

Active Loudspeakers with Bass Adjustability • Damon Von Schweikert, President and CEO Von Schweikert Inc.

Equalization in Preamplifiers • Richard Vandersteen, Founder, Vandersteen Audio

DSP Room Correction • Blake Alty, Director of Product Development, Paradigm and Anthem

MUSICAL DYNAMICS & NOISE REDUCTION • So much of music’s meaning, expression, and sense of realism is contained in dynamic contrasts. For starters, there’s the physical nature of the sound of instruments that create transient sounds—drums, percussion, acoustic guitar, piano. When these instruments are reproduced with muted impact, slower transient speed, or overhang, the sense of believability is diminished. Those instruments are examples of macro-dynamics—high-level transients that convey a sense of life and immediacy as well as convey rhythmic flow.

Loudspeaker Enclosures • Andrew Payor, Founder, Rockport Technologies

Musical Dynamics and Noise Reduction • Caelin Gabriel, Founder, CEO, and Chief Designer, Shunyata Research

Musical Dynamics and Noise Reduction • Garth Powell, Senior Director of Engineering, AudioQuest

Driver Technology • Alon...