Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Triggered pulled - Active LFR-1100's are on order!

I remember when I first listened to my M80v2. I was coming from Bose 601 series II. The M80s were a revelation. What I heard was clarity and definition. That is all I could describe at the time. As time marched on, I realized there was more to the M80s compared to the Boses. I could hear distinct images at the centre, and speaker extremes and areas in between. I ended up listening to many different speakers at many different locations. As I listened more and more, I found I could locate sounds better. I think without knowing it, I trained my brain to discriminate between sound source locations.

I got to the point where I realized my M80v2 were the limiting factor in my soundstage enjoyment. This was right around v3 time when Axiom started to make a big deal of their spinorama. I started to read up on the spinorama and realized this wasn't much different than some of the work I was involved with over the years on combustible gas sensors. I also realized that running curves was one thing, running them accurately and with sufficient resolution was another. Interpretation was a whole different matter as was implementation in the form of drivers, cabinets, cross-overs. As I've said in the past, I decided to observe for many years by watching posts and reading what Ian and Andrew were writing. Frankly I was not surprised when the vast majority of those who upgraded to v4 made simple obsrvations like "there's more bass" and "it's clearer". There were very few others however who piqued my interest by describing the difference in soundstage. Those were folks who, whether they knew it or not, had trained brains.

What convinced me to give v4 fronts a try, more than 4 years after they were brought to market, was a post by I think a fellow named davenote, and emails with Craig. When I first listened to the M5s, I confirmed it was the M80v2 that was the culprit and not my brain. I saw images with the M5 that were impossible to pick out with the M80v2 and those images were not just across the stage but into it. Then I heard the M3v4 and realized that Axiom must have really had done a hell of a lot of work in the chamber because now I was seeing the same images from two different speakers. The images from the M5 were of course clearer.

Which brings me to now. I've trained myself with the v4 so well, they are now the barrier to greater resolution in the perception of holographic imaging. No doubt chucking out passive filters and replacing them with actives will make a difference, but will the difference rival my brain's location discrimination capability? I don't know what that limit is but my feeling is that actives and LFRs won't be good enough for me just yet. I think the same with Craig and others who are trained. Better, yes. Rivaling our sensory capabilities, no.

I think that limit is found in higher resolution in the Family of Curves. What that resolution is, I don't have enough theoretical grounding in psychoacoustics to know. Is it one degree, half a degree, a quarter? It likely depends on what your MLP is. The closer you are, the more you can resolve up to the limit of near-field effects.

Having high resolution curves is one thing and interpreting them to figure out what variations are low Q/high Q and how to best flatten them is another. Thankfully a DSP can do things that no analog filter, not even active analog filters, can do. Even an inexperienced signal analysis engineer has simulation tools available to, for all intents and purposes, design a perfect frequency domain filter. The real challenge is in noise rejection because that really blurs imaging when all other parameters have been optimized.

I wonder at what point perfection, which I define as the limits of human perception, will be reached and what will have to be done to get there.