Spacious Sounding Listening Room
A method was developed for using certain flat reflecting surfaces of listening room to illuminate side wall cylinder reflectors. A segment of the sound from the speaker is allowed to reflect off a segment of rear wall that is about 3’ wide and located about 2’ in from the rear corner. The width of the speaker setup is typically 4 to 6’ off the side wall. A segment of sound beam from the speaker travels down the length of the room, hits the dedicated wall position and reflects back up the room, but in an outward angle.
This outward angled sound beam impacts a set of sound reflecting cylinders lined up along the side wall to create a pattern of time delayed lateral reflections and the associated wrap of the sound stage, plus that spacious sense of a listening space. With TubeTraps, only the front half of the cylinder is treble diffusive, and the other half is treble absorbing. Imaging and spaciousness are treble range sound effects.
The TubeTraps are set up along the side wall. The front half is set facing the rear wall and the back side, the dead side is facing the speakers. The wall reflections to the side of the listener are absorbed. The time delayed rear wall reflections are scattered off the front sides of the TubeTraps along the side wall. This creates a set of time delayed low level lateral reflections.
And notice that the right speaker is illuminating the right ear with delayed scattered reflection from the right side while the left speaker, playing different sounds, is illuminating the left ear with delayed scattered reflections off the left wall. The listener’s two ears are getting different time delayed lateral signals which meets another criteria for spaciousness, which is that the left and right ears hear different spaciousness signals.
Ambience Plus Spaciousness
Ambience frames in the images on the sound stage, not literally as in a picture frame but sound framing within the sense of time. The quiet chaos of ambience is the overall fluctuating glow of the room as it is filled and drained with the slowly changing color of tonality, dynamics and tempo of the direct signal. The comings and goings of sound, as newer sound is filling the room while the older fades away.
The spaciousness aspect is the presence of a field of sparkles to each side of the listener that reflects a distant glimmer of the music in the direct signal, as if the color of the image action on the sound stage is picked up and reflected, flickered back into the audience by the distant columns to the side of the listening area. |
