THIS IS A CUSTOM PRODUCT MANUFACTURED IN SHORT RUNS
Initially conceived of as an ambience alignment tool for the front end and rear walls of high performance high power audio playback rooms, the Bastoni product line has expanded to include less expensive, small Bastoni panels and even smaller ones, sized to drop into acoustic tile ceiling T-bar grids or be flush mounted to walls.
The name Bastoni means a staff or hiking stick, a slender piece of wood that supports one’s interest to travel. It is also the wooden spoke of a wheel. We felt that our Bastoni panel product line is just that: A slim piece of wood that supports those who adventure into the sonic landscape.
It is particularly suited for large venue spaces with hard floors because of it’s ability to quickly quiet down the vertical reverberation in the front part of the room. The human listener, omni mics and ribbon mics are sensitive to the presence of vertical circulation of sound. With vertical sound, the wave front reaches both ears at the same time. With horizontal sound, the head shadows the ear giving a powerful sense of directionality to the wave fronts.
The best sound-masking signal is something that sounds just like the desired signal, except disorganized. Since vertical and horizontal ambience sound the same, except for the directionality factor, the lack of directionality of vertical sound masks or obscures the listener’s ability to hear the highly directional lateral sound, the sound of spaciousness and ambience. It is the lateral ambience that we are most interested in introducing into the listening room. It is why concert halls sound so good.
The single best location for the Bastoni is to the sides of the speakers, in the plane of the speakers. The bass trap part of the Bastoni softens the extra and undesirable reinforcement of the speakers bass voice caused by “wall loading” the bass. Comb filtering is also imposed on the speaker by the nearby wall bounce. The reflected wavefront washes back over the speaker, changing the impedance of the air in front of the speaker for different frequencies being played, resulting is self-cancelation and reinforcement and the tonality of the speaker changes.
In addition, absorbed bass wavefronts to the sides of each speaker give to the voice of the speaker and damp out the lateral buildup of side to side reverberation in the front of the room.
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