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Re: [AUDITORY] loudspeaker recommendations




Hi Maria,

i think you received a lot of valuable information, especially from Pawel.
Adding one important aspect everyone "nowadays" should consider when investing in active monitors for uses in listening tests: Make sure they are "ready to go" afte turning power on! My personal experience form both Adam F5 and KRK Rokit5 is that both need a few seconds to "awake" from standby and work only once a certain threshold is exceeded (respective of 45dBSPL or so!!) otherwise there is no sound. The KRK´s even turn off during listening to quiet music unless i turn them up (and down again) every 20 mins or so, which is not only unconvenient but can be really problematic for uses during (calibrated) listening tests especially at low levels. I feel that this is a relatively new albeit unnecessary feature for whatever reason (saving energy?) manufacturers hopefully will remove in future products.

Stefan

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Stefan Schreitmueller, Dipl.-Ing. (FH)
Jean-Uhrmacher-Institut für klinische HNO-Forschung
Universität zu Köln
Geibelstr. 29-31
50931 Köln
Germany
Tel.: 0221 478 97 015
Fax: 0221 478 97 010

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan_Schreitmueller2
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Von: Paweł Kuśmierek [pawel.kusmierek@xxxxxxxxx]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 8. März 2017 14:40
Betreff: Re: 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