Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Podcast with Floyd Toole

Hi all:

Some of you may be aware that Scott Wilkinson with Ultimate AV has a podcast. The podcast is quite good and has interviews with some real interesting people like Tomlinson Holman, and Spears & Munsil. The latest podcast is with Floyd Toole.

The link is here:
Ultimate AV Podcast

Some of the interviews contain some information that is relatively old hat, but some of them have some neat behind the scenes info and some cool tech stuff as well. In case any of you are interested.

great stuff, just listened to Floyd's cast, onto Tomlinsons..

Cool idboy.

I thought I would add another link to this thread. It is a blog by Sean Olive called Audio Musings. He is the director of acoustic research at Harman international and has also worked with Dr. Floyd E. Toole among many other things.

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/

Interesting stuff. I'm responding mainly to set a bookmark, so to speak, in my list of posts.

Edit: THX = Tom Holman Crossover. Then later the Tom Holman Experiment.

Dr.House - thank you for the blog link for Dr. Olive - also very cool. I am really getting into understanding the science behind this hobby.

Thanks for the link. For some reason I always thought Dr. Floyd Toole would sound like Gandalf, but he sounds more normal.

Just finished listening to the hour and a half of the interview with Dr. Toole. Of course he goes into much more detail on the several topics touched upon(and others)in his book, but he summarized some findings that should be of interest to many of our members and make a worthwhile listen.

Subwoofer placement was a prominent item and the benefits of two subs at the center of opposite walls or diagonally opposite corners were discussed. One point made which should be of special interest to certain of our members with square rooms that suck(who shall remain nameless)was that even this could be largely overcome with proper multiple sub placement.

The benefits of surround sound were discussed and Dr. Toole stated that those who think that stereo is a superior listening mode are ignorant of the facts.

Placement and types of surrounds was discussed. Dipoles were criticized, while bipoles and monopoles(for a more limited listening area)were viewed favorably.

Yep, your right John, he said even a cube can be awesome with the appropriate setup. I was very interested in his comments about designing a room and how people make a mistake by using the "perfect" dimensions. Sounds like proper sub placement, and following the seating within the 25% rule is more ideal.

I still like to listen to my music in stereo mode from the prime seat, but will experiment with PLIIx Music asap.

At one point the direction was to talk about sub placment for rooms that were not rectangular or square, but the topic was changed. I was hoping they would discuss that a little more to give me more ideas to try in my huge room that leads into other areas of the basement and my 3 subs. It does sound like a larger room is subject to less issues versus mid or smaller sized rooms.

Can you tell me about the book John, I might be interested, as long as it is not to technical. I loved how he talked in laymens terms in this discussion.

They're making me think having the subs located in the corners is the way to go if I end up with four.

And they knocked phantom centers, too, which we have recommended to people who are on a budget and don't know which pieces to buy first.

Randy, as you may recall, I've quoted from the book several times over the past year or so. It's difficult to generalize, but the discussions are just slightly more technical than those which were in the interview. There's very little math involved and it isn't necessary to brush up on one's calculus. The graphs and diagrams in the book add a valuable element.

My judgment from your years here is that you would understand the book and find most of the material to be interesting and helpful.

Charles, at least one reason why some might prefer a phantom center to an actual speaker there(which Dr. Toole found to be curious)could be that their main speakers were simply better than the center speaker. The imaging benefits of the center speaker didn't overcome its general inferiority. Use of identical speakers across the front, as is most highly recommended, would remove this problem.

Yeah, I was surprised that point about center speakers wasn't made.

I love these podcasts ,but I find my mind wandering while listening to them and miss out on parts of them. Is there anyway to position within the data stream? I sure can't find one. The only option seems to be to start it all over again.

Since it gets asked about SOOOOO often, Sean Olive's blog on the sighted vs. blind listening tests and the bias of the human brain!

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/04/dishonesty-of-sighted-audio-product.html

One excerpt:

"The sighted tests produced a significant increase in preference ratings for the larger, more expensive loudspeakers G and D. (note: G and D were identical loudspeakers except with different cross-overs, voiced ostensibly for differences in German and Northern European tastes, respectively. The negligible perceptual differences between loudspeakers G and D found in this test resulted in the creation of a single loudspeaker SKU for all of Europe, and the demise of an engineer who specialized in the lost art of German speaker voicing)."

Thanks for this link very interesting read.

Brian, the Musicmatch Jukebox that I used has a slider to click on which moves back and forth in the program.

Oh. I thought I was stuck with what it defaulted to when it opened up, which was Yahoo media player. It never gave me any option to change it. Here at work, it gives me a choice, but I have windows XP here and Vista at home.

Musicmatch is still around? I remember answering phones to sell the product back in '98 or '99.

Looks like you did an awesome job!