Romy the Cat wrote:

From the above-linked 6moons’ site:  Publisher's comment: Layered Sound as demonstrated at Marja & Henk's during my short visit consisted of running their Avantgarde Duos and the Model Ones simultaneously, the former inside at dominant volume, the latter outside as fill-in ambience providers. Varying the relative volumes of course shifted the percentages of point-source and omni-polar, direct and reflected sound. Muting the panels completely collapsed the sound by comparison to having them fill it in. The sound was unquestionably superior with the added panels. It made traditional two-speaker stereo obsolete by comparison. I would agree with this sentiments – from what I know now and from what I experimented I would hardly found straight two-speaker stereo as interesting enough. From where I am staying Injection is not debatable. What dubious is - the methods of Injections. The large panels of Layered Sound has own advantaged and own disadvantages. I was considering in past to use another Red injection channel (driven form the same amp) and located at floor to contra-balance vertical image shift in my case. In case is listening is done not in extreme nearfield it would not be necessary. From surface it looks like an Injection is just a forced substitute for our disability to have regular channels/drivers with right TTH characteristics (Tone, Transient, and Harmonics) where all necessary Injection benefits are included. However, recently I began to look at the things differently as I feel a need to moderate BETWEEN the elements of TTH as there are numerous external condition. Sure it would be great to have that ability to do it in the SAME driver but I do not know how it might be done properly. I can envision a Black Box through which a driver is connected with 3 knobs: Tone, Transient, and Harmonics. All that is necessary to figure out is how that Black Box will be working… :-) The caT

Romy the Cat wrote:

From where I am staying Injection is not debatable. What dubious is - the methods of Injections. The large panels of Layered Sound has own advantaged and own disadvantages. I was considering in past to use another Red injection channel (driven form the same amp) and located at floor to contra-balance vertical image shift in my case. In case is listening is done not in extreme nearfield it would not be necessary ... From surface it looks like an Injection is just a forced substitute for our disability to have regular channels/drivers with right TTH characteristics (Tone, Transient, and Harmonics) where all necessary Injection benefits are included.

Winnie wrote:

For me the key is not in adding measured amounts of distortion …. but in the blending of point source and omni directional sound.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Winnie wrote: For me the key is not in adding measured amounts of distortion …. but in the blending of point source and omni directional sound. I personally see it as meaningless objective. The point-source, line-source, omni-source, dipoles… etc… they are not the objectives but juts means. If they all done properly then they all might sound corrects. Still, I feel that “correct” objectives have sonic nature not the “language of sound” nature… Anyhow, I also feel that you will have a LOT of difficulty to mix horn with large panes as you will have a LOT of problems with time-aligning them.

drdna wrote:

While I think it has a lot of potential, I worry that the added complexity may lead to new problems that may outweigh the benefits derived, even if it is done very carefully, one of which is time alignment as pointed out.

Steve,

I hardly know what the NXT panels are and I hardly undusted them even after reading the 6moon article. I kind of understand what you are trying to accomplish, though I perhaps not exactly agree with the methods and means. Still, when we talk about Injection Channels it is very difficult to judge about anything “over the phone” and it is necessary to be in the room and to see/hear what is actually going on. The Injection Channels are in most cases providing their benefits do impact mains channels negatively and that trade off should be properly evaluated and balanced. So, after you play with your NXT panels please post your thoughts about the result, even preliminary results. In particularly I would be interested to learn what techniques you used to found that equilibrium between main channels and Injection channels. BTW, migh I ask you what main channels speakers you use?

stevie7V wrote:

… they can be used effectively in parallel with the main speakers and running about 5 or 6 dB quieter.  I use them with a separate amplifier and adjust the volume until I 'just can or can't hear them'.  At this level, I can tell that they're on by listening to the sound from the back of the room.

Sorry, Winnie, stevie7V, Podium Sound and NXT.

You are new people to me and new speakers to me and I did not “get” right the way who is who.

It is apparent that we in one way or another use the same “Injection” ideas, this I am religiously for time aliment or at least attempts to do so. Since you both from UK you should know the specific of Tannoy Red coloration, so you should have an idea what I am trying to “Inject”.

The success of injection might derive from 3 elements:

1)     Coloration of the Injection channels
2)     Negative Impact it has on main channels
3)     Adjustability of Injection (crossover, volume, TTH similarity…. etc), that is included in #2

Still, instead of subjecting to people to search “interesting colorful” drivers I would propose, in addition, to look in another direction. We could inject colors (as I do) or… texture. Here is a very interesting fact - a proper amount if texture does expedite colors. If it is not enough then I perfectly can see two Injection Channels – one for Color Injection another for Texture Injection. Pretend a TV where you set with your main speakers brightness and contracts, set with your Color Injection the saturation level and set with your Texture Injection the sharpness of your TV of the ability of your super-duper high resolution TV to display the walk into fog during the Casablanca’s last episode.

I very recently began to think about Texture Injection as any former know to me way to “increase sharpness” were accosted in my experience with harmonic fuckunization and deformation of  acoustic-like TTH characteristic – a big taboo to me. So, the big question would be: what I might propose to deal with Texture Injection but do not screw up nether with tone, not with harmonics nor with transients?

Make an experiment. Buy, borrow or steal somewhere an amplifier with switching power supply, or class-D amplifier not any of them but the cheapest possible, the one that operated at lowers possible switching frequency. You might buy such an amp for $50 or even less. Some of the crappies of them call subwoofer amps, they have 200hz low pass filter and their pulses are switching juts above 50kHz. (It calls carrier-frequency). Get rid of any speaker level 200hz low pass filter and out EMI filer from this amp; connect your low-passed at 7khz Texture Injection channel to this amp. How you will have an amp that will pump into your mid- and sub-mid frequency loudspeaker a HUGE amount of HF noise all the way from 10K-20K (they uselessly have internal second order) to 1/2GHz.  BTW, so not feel that UHF will be too much attenuated with amp filers as ay high frequency the ESR of the flirting cap is too high and in these cheap amps no one will use good coils to filter. Surely, with your low-passed Texture Injection channel you will not be able to hear the UHF sweating nose but the fun part that it will be there and it will be auditable as none-random wide bandwidth forth that will stress and massage your  Injection channel adding to it a feeling of texture and sharpness.  From here you might use LC chins to mitigate the depth of the Texture Injection, along with the volume of the Texture Injection Channel relative to the main speakers. If you have a dedicated upper bass channel driven from own amp then you can use this principle of Texture Injection right combined with your main speaker’s upper bass channel. I tried it (using APS PurePower regenerator with 20kHz carrier-frequency) and it works wonderfully.

Now the biggest question is: can the Texture Injection + Color Injection substitute a spontaneous “Resonating Oops”? Why the hell knows. The advantage of deliberate injection is that it is managed and predicable, of course if a system designer has sensibility and sensitivity. I am sure we all when over the situations when we bought some 50-70 years old junk, brought it home, got hypnotized how interesting the “Resonating Oops” was working on that loudspeaker? Then the speaker was sitting in your room on pedestal and you were for years afraid to fart toward to it. Was that speaker able to do anything else good beside the “Resonating Oops”? I do not think so. Using the moderate and deliberate Injection is it perfectly possible to write into sound of properly performing playback the tone and texture that the 50-70 years old grandfather-speaker could not even dream off….

Winnie wrote:

The transducers are equally spaced, in a straight line along the length of the spine, and as such are outside of the NXT patent.

Winnie wrote:

In talking with Shelly Katz a few days ago, I brought up the topic of how sound is perceived in the context of layered sound or indeed oops. He is a very busy man and we did not have long to develop the conversation, but this is the thrust of what he said. With Layered Sound there is no need to time align drivers, the 'signals' being delivered from the panels are not compromised by being out of time alignment by a few milliseconds. Apparently the sense of hearing behaves very similar to the sense of sight. If you look across a road to a car then the eye will bring the car into perfect focus, All around ,there will be objects that are closer and further away. They will contribute hugely to the overall picture even though they are not in perfect focus. If you have (say) a horn speaker that is in perfect focus acoustically then it does not matter if the oops effect or indeed the panel speaker is some way 'out of focus'. The brain will acclimatise rapidly and will primarily hear the horn, but with 'enhanced' acoustics supplementing its performance. The danger might be if you have the 'distortion/effect' at the same point source as the main speaker. In this case the brain can't discriminate and may only perceive that the main speaker is distorting. I hope this is not all rubbish!

Romy the Cat wrote:

Winnie wrote: In talking with Shelly Katz a few days ago ... he said [that] with Layered Sound there is no need to time align drivers, the 'signals' being delivered from the panels are not compromised by being out of time alignment by a few milliseconds ... They will contribute hugely to the overall picture even though they are not in perfect focus ... If you have (say) a horn speaker that is in perfect focus acoustically then it does not matter if the oops effect or indeed the panel speaker is some way 'out of focus'. What Shelly Katz is saying might be valid ONLY in case is his loudspeakers are being use as ONLY source of sound. ...if the Layered Sound speakers is being used as an Injection Channel complimentary with other (presumably time coherent) acoustic system then what Shelly Katz stated is completely false. Furthermore the analogy with the car and the sense of sight is absolutely not applicable and frankly speaking I am surprise that he even brought such a bogus illustration.

After thinking about this for a while, I have had a thought that should be relatively easy for anyone motivated to explore and I would be interested to see what others on this forum observe from such experiments.

Fundamentally I think the injection channel and layered sound are different things.  The injection channel is designed simply to compensate for the timbral shortcomings of a particular driver.  However, because of lobing effects, etc. it is never this simple.  There will be overlap into the realm of the Layered Sound effect, which is intended to mix directional sound with omnidirectional sound.

In most recordings, even simple two microphone recordings, there will be source input from several directions hitting the microphone diaphragm.  When we reproduce this unidirectionally with horn speakers it is a compromise.  BUT we cannot reproduce the exact directions of the original input, since this vector information is not recorded, only simply LEFT or RIGHT channel.  We therefore rely on small cues of secondary reflections etc. to clarify the data.  AND we cannot even begin to assess the vast majority of original musical source vibrations that occured at the many areas the microphones were not placed.

Layered Sound attempts to create semi-unidirectional sound to accomodate this.  But without time alignment, etc., really it is just an approximation of infinite reflections in a theoretical acoustic space with infinitely variable surfaces.

Most hall reflection sounds will be lower frequencies of variable localizability.  To approximate this simply, we might try to hook up a mid-woofer speaker in an out-of-phase configuration.  The exact cutoff frequency and loudness amplitude will remain to be determined.  For most of us using high efficiency horns, hooking up a low efficiency dynamic woofer speaker may be sufficient as it will be many dB down.  This also helps to explain why many designs with side or back firing woofers have reasonable sound.  Simply because it creates a simulation of hall ambience we associate with live music.

People using a multi-speaker woofer array may simply consider switching one driver on one side out of phase.

So, I wonder if hooking up a second set of woofers at very low amplitude out of phase in conjunction with the existing directional system may add an element of simulated hall ambience that makes the overall experience more like live music.

I would be very interested to see what other people think if they give it a try.