[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [AUDITORY] loudspeaker recommendations

Hi Maria,

I would look into professional and semi-professional studio "monitors", i.e, small-ish powered loudspeakers designed for very faithful reproduction from small distances. Usually the recommended listening distance is about 1 m, but I am pretty sure that smaller models should work very well at smaller distances too ("well" in terms of perceptual "fusion" of the tweeter and woofer sound). Most models are two-way, but as I said, they should work fine at small listening distances. One-way (single-cone) speakers will usually have problems with good quality over wide range of frequencies.

As for the manufacturers: someone suggested Genelec and these have very good reputation.
Adam-Audio are excellent monitors, (I actually have an older model from the A series at home) in terms of faithful and transparent reproduction, possibly due to unique tweeter construction.
Tannoy (British!) also makes fine monitors. Other (cheaper?) options include Yamaha, KRK. Alesis, PreSonus, JPL (professional). Behringer and M-Audio are the cheapest end and I have had some problems with M-Audio gear (though not speakers).

One way to achieve high sound quality and wide frequency range while avoiding separation of woofer and tweeter sound at small listening distances is to look for concentric speakers, i.e., with tweeter placed in the center of the woofer. These are rare though, I think, except for car audio (which I would not recommend for several reasons). Tannoy used to make concentric drivers and used them in some higher-end monitors, but I am not sure if they do it anymore.

Hope this helps,

Pawel
 

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Chait, Maria <m.chait@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

So far we have been conducting our behavioural experiments using high quality headphones, but for various reasons will need to shift to using free field sound presentation for some of our work.  I was hoping you might be able to recommend a high quality loud speaker to use for this purpose; Ideally, one that we can purchase easily from the UK.

 

Our requirements:  Experiments are conducted in a small-ish sound-proof booth, and we plan to position a single loudspeaker about 50-70 cm in front of the listener (space constraints prevents this from being any further away). Stimuli are spectrally rich ‘soundscapes’.  

My understanding is that we should prefer single cone speakers?

 

Many thanks,

Maria

 

 

Maria Chait PhD

m.chait@xxxxxxxxx

Reader in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience

Lab site: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ear/research/chaitlab/

UCL Ear Institute

332 Gray's Inn Road

London WC1X 8EE