Good Sound, part 1
Shawn Woolman
Business Development – Brand Management – Sales Strategy – Leadership – Operational Efficiency
We quite often run into people who tell us that can’t tell the difference between a good sounding system and a bad sounding system. We have to respectfully disagree with these folks…if you can hear, you can tell the difference.
What’s missing is a little bit of training on how to listen in order to differentiate between good and bad sound reproduction. In just a few minutes we can demonstrate what to listen for and how to evaluate what is being heard.
Good sound has six metrics, or categories: Clarity, Focus, Envelopment, Dynamics, Response and Consistency. I’ll cover the first three in this post and the second three in a subsequent post.
Clarity is the primary acoustical goal because its perfection is dependent on the successful attainment of the other five metric goals. Dialogue intelligibility in movies is paramount, but musical lyrics must also be readily understood. Quiet background details should be easily detected, and there must be a sense of realism for acoustical sounds.
Several elements affect this goal, among them are the quality of the equipment, room reverberation levels, ambient noise levels, and listener position.
Focus is the ability to precisely locate each reproduced sound or image in a three-dimensional space. A system is said to have pinpoint focus if, from the perspective of the listener, each of these images is properly sized, precisely located and not wandering. Good focus also provides for individual images being easily distinguishable from amongst the others within the limits of the recording’s quality.
Envelopment is the reproduction of virtual images of each recorded sound in three-dimensional space around the listener. Proper envelopment requires that the soundstage be seamless for 360 degrees around the listener without interruption by holes or hot spots caused by speaker level imbalance or poor speaker placement. While envelopment requires three-dimensional images of all sonic cues, of pivotal importance is the realistic recreation of the ambient sound field of the recorded venue.
(Thanks to Gerry Lemay at the Home Acoustics Alliance for creating and articulating these metrics)