Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jens Eklund
Thanks for joining in Jens-
Hmmm, I interpret all of Floyd Tooles work and what he shares with the public at large to be that "flat and smooth" is having the least amount of deviation from whatever curve it is...The "Harman Target Curve" is from Toole and company no?
In my personal direct experience, the main issue here is the bass lift, not the treble tapering. Lots of experimenting here with a bunch of engineers actively working and we always come up with +6 to +8 @20hz tapering down to flat around 100hz, each full range speaker measured separately.
In terms of tapering the treble a little bit, I can agree that's a little more dicey. But at the same time many commercial mixes are bright for my taste, and especially are bright to listen to for full work days. I find ~ -2dB to take the edge off, especially for long days in the studio, but I can concede there is more risk here of overbright mixes and agree that -4 ala B&K is too much. I should have been more clear to say that B&K is, to me, a good place to start the experimenting.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the real 'standard' has been set by hundreds of thousands of records that have been released and listened to by the masses and adopted as a sort of de facto benchmark after each person's lifetime of listening. It is certainly a vague target, but musicians, artists and engineers do have a fairly well established concept of it in their minds.
Regarding speaker design- (you know all this better than me, but for the sake of the OP to understand), designing a speaker in an anechoic environment to be flat on-axis obviously doesn't translate to trying to achieve a flat response in an non-anechoic environment. We
should see some degree of boundary loading- which is to say every anechoic-ly flat speaker is completely expected to exhibit a rise in bass response in a real room (which as you know can be quite significant). Also it's much less likely that people are seated on the tweeter axis at home or in a car...
Add in a bunch of bass traps, and as you create a quasi anechoic environment it's reasonable to me for end that users to find a good balance there that suits their work.