AR-303 placement for best stereo imaging

[thiptoman]

Is anyone getting great imaging from their AR-303 speakers ? If so what is your space between each speaker in feet ? What's the ideal placement for the best inroom imaging . My room is sort of small for the speakers ( three feet between the speakers ) is definitely not doing the imaging thing .Room size is 11x13 feet and crowded . Will move system to a larger room soon (15x24 feet ). I've heard that these speakers need a larger room than the monitor type speakers . Any info will be appreciated . Thanks for posting !

[tysontom]

>Is anyone getting great imaging from their AR-303 speakers ?

>If so what is your space between each speaker in feet ? What's

>the ideal placement for the best inroom imaging . My room is

>sort of small for the speakers ( three feet between the

>speakers ) is definitely not doing the imaging thing .Room

>size is 11x13 feet and crowded . Will move system to a larger

>room soon (15x24 feet ). I've heard that these speakers need a

>larger room than the monitor type speakers . Any info will be

>appreciated . Thanks for posting !

When you move your AR-303s to the larger room you will see an improvement, especially on the low end, but probably not in "imaging." The AR-303 is the wrong tool for that requirement in that for a speaker to have good imaging, it generally must be relatively directional, at least throughout the critical mid-range frequencies. The 303 has wide off-axis response at all frequencies, and thus the speaker is arguably more natural and life-like than a lesser speaker that might actually have better imaging. Good imaging also requires that you listen up close (in the nearfield) positioned inside a magic "sweet spot," and the speaker must not reflect energy off surrounding surfaces such as walls, floors or objects in the room. It requires that you get first-arrival sound without disturbances, and a wide-dispersion speaker will simply not do this well. Speakers with good imaging sound good *only* in one specific spot, so that if you have friends over to show off your system, you must take turns sitting in one specific location -- a pain in the tail. The speakers are typically two or three feet or more from the back wall, and the speakers are toed-in precisely so that the midrange driver is aimed at the listener's ear. After awhile this takes the fun out of audio.

Yet for good imaging the speaker must be quite directional in the midrange, and it will thus have relatively poor integrated-power response, or the total energy put into a listening room. Therefore, a speaker that images above all else will sound very dull, lifeless and two-dimensional when heard well back into the reverberant soundfield (because the total reflected energy into the room is very restricted), compared to a speaker such as the AR-303, which will sound spacious and alive back in the sound field. So, it's either "imaging" or "spaciousness." Take your pick. But consider this: a good set of headphones will usually out-image any loudspeaker, so why not use headphones when you are trying to bring the instruments to you rather than transport yourself to the concert hall.

High-fidelity sound reproduction is always a series of trade-offs, yet one speaker that seems to defy this logic is the superb -- but now discontinued -- NHT 3.3. It is so good that it does a credible job of both "imaging" and providing spacious, natural sound back in the reverberant field, and seems to be one of the few speakers capable of doing both well. And only a limited number of speakers have ever rivaled the 3.3 in low-frequency extension and low distortion.

--Tom Tyson

[soundminded]

"The 303 has wide off-axis response at all frequencies, and thus the speaker is arguably more natural and life-like than a lesser speaker that might actually have better imaging."

As I posted elsewhere, the ability to precisely localize the spot of a musical instrument is not an element of music and is often not possible even at a live performance while the tone of a musical instrument is. The obsession by both audiophiles and the equpment industry with so called imaging at the expense of reproducing the exact or even credible timbre of acoustic instruments convinces me that the original concept of "high fidelity" in music reproduction no longer has much meaning or value, at least to the current market. While reproducing the sound of acoustic instruments as they would be heard in a concert hall is well beyond the current state of the art, reproducing them as they would be heard in your own home is also beyond the capabilites of commercially available audio equipment but is due to their deliberate design limitation of directionality. Examining the way most musical instruments propagate sound into space, it becomes clear that most or all of their sound is directed AWAY from the audience. It is also clear that whatever their directions of propagation, the higher harmonics are propagated in the same directions and with almost the same relative intensity to the lower harmonics and fundimentals in all directions. This is not the case with home high fidelity loudspeakers which direct most of their sound directly at the listener and increasingly so as frequency increases. This results in sound which is unnaturally shrill and not resembling the sound of those instruments they are presumed to reproduce. Speakers such as AR3, 3a, 10pi, 303 which beam their high frequencies to the least degree sound the most accurate. LST with its uniquely wide high frequency dispersion may have been the most accurate sounding of all commercially available models.

[kkantor]

Thanks, Tom!

"Imaging," in popular usage, can refer to many things... transient localization, steady-state localization, localization blur, soundstage width and depth, envelopment, IACC and lateral energy, etc. It might be interesting to see what different people here mean when they use the term.

-k

kkantor.spaces.live.com