Thanks for the information Matthew! I didn't intend to get you riled up or to be critical towards the Perlistens. :). They just seemed to have significantly different vertical dispersion pattern than the Ascendos, for example. Thanks for sharing all this great information, keep it up.
I knew you didn’t. What riled me up is the fact that you were given that impression in the first place. They don’t really have narrower directivity than the Ascendos. Different yes because it remains controlled over a wider region. The Ascendos behave like most traditional speakers in the vertical. They widen as the response gets lower. This means the response shape changes as you move your and down. The Perlistens control their response over a very wide bandwidth and so the response shape doesn’t change as you go up and down. It simply gets quieter. Eventually all speakers tend to get ugly. So yes if you are far enough off axis the Perlisten response does change in such a way that is quite colored. But so does the Kef and Ascendo (and every other speaker in the market). The key is that this angle is so far outside the listening window of any theater as to be of no consequence. Ascendos Blacks Swans have very narrow directivity. I mentioned its value to Geoffrey once who immediately got defensive (understandable). The moment I explained what I meant he concurred. It’s a lot narrower than a normal speaker in that it gets quieter quicker. But it’s an excellent speaker and its response shape and timbre doesn’t change with angle until you get way way off axis. This isn’t a bad thing. You can actually take advantage of it to get more high performing seats. A trick that a wide dispersion speaker can’t do. The issue that narrow directivity brings is that it also decreases reflected energy. This can cause speakers to be more localizable. You have to change how you approach the acoustics and listening distance.
@@PoesAcoustics Thanks so much for this incredibly thorough answer. I'm eyeing a high channel count upgrade in a year or two. The only way I could fit the Perlistens within budget would be the R series. In particular the R4S (surround) seems to have a narrower vertical dispersion than its S counterpart the S4S. Any concerns with the R versus S series?
@@nevohraalnavnoj I got to hear Perlistens, Ascendo, and even Grimani Systems at MWAVE. Perlistens were great, but are out of my price range. The Ascendos sounded really good and were much cheaper. I'm thinking to go with Ascendo as my next setup unless I can find speakers in a similar size and price with better dispersion.
@@andrewskaterrrprice no object would you choose the Perlistens? Was it the R series or S series? I still don't know what's superior, a controlled vertical dispersion like the Perlistens or a wide vertical dispersion like the Ascendos.
Well, svs made a new floor standing speaker with only 10 degrees of good vertical dispersion. And then Placed the tweeter lower than most towers which means that some people depending on seat height and the height of the person, will be greater than 10 degrees above the tweeter. Blows my mind.
10 degrees vertical may sound very limited, but I think it's important to calculate it out to understand the window. For this example assuming +/-10° vertical dispersion, at a listening distance of 8 feet (which I think is pretty close for a large tower speaker), this measures out to be 8ft. x tan(10°) = +/-1.41 feet. So that's nearly a 3 foot vertical window of flat response at only 8 feet away, and grows linearly as a function of distance. I think a 3 foot window at 8 feet is sufficient for 90%+ of real life situations, as seated ear height doesn't vary all that much between people. This also has a real tangible benefit of basically killing vertical first reflections before they ever have a chance to become an issue. Frankly I think there is a lot of merit to a design with narrow vertical dispersion, provided they still can maintain a wide horizontal dispersion.
I'm used to hearing of how to use directivity with stereo only; this way of using it to even a surround system response is kind of enlightening. Thanks!
Hi Matt! Just wanted to thank you for these videos! Very informative. I do have a question regarding the "non-dedicated theater room" room and quality sound. I know I am in the minority but would love to know how often you're asked to incorporate end-game speakers into a "normal" living room. I spent a lot on furnishings and am looking at some S7ts to pair with my LG OLED and NAD M33. Am I nuts going for broke with the S7t? Or would I benefit from maybe some R7t and in-walls for a 5.2.2? (Giant TVs require giant floor standers IMHO.) I spend about 50% of my time listening to music on my comfy sofa, 25% watching RUclips, and 25% on movies/tv equally. Thanks!
I found with concentric designs (Elac & Kef), there's significant smearing in comparison to conventional designs. isoacoustics doesn't clean it up, so it's not resonances causing the smearing. Dirac on the other hand did a 180 on them for the smearing. My conventionally designed speakers (Focal and Martin Logan) don't have issues with smearing.
@@FOH3663 smearing is also known as instrument bleeding. It's when the image is smeared. There's beeding of one instruments sound into another's that neighboring on the soundstage. They should be tightly focused and constrained to their own area on the stage. It's something I have noticed with concentric designs that they are not the greatest at. And maybe that's because of having too much vertical dispersion? Hard to say what the cause was, but I found it weird that Dirac did a 180 on them in that department, but it wasn't an issue with the conventional designs that have controlled vertical dispersion.
@dicmccoy sounds more like a horizontal dispersion issue than vertical. Erin talks about his preference for wide horizontal dispersion speakers because of their wider soundstage, but acknowledges that this comes at the cost of less image precision...what I think you are referring to as smearing. Wider horizontal dispersion results in more side wall reflections and less precise imaging.
@@markpocock183 Tradition designs have more horizontal dispersion vs concentric 80° vs 50° give or take. So I'm not sure you have them understood properly? The concentric driver because of their limited horizontal dispersion, keeps their soundstage narrower and more between the speakers. The wider horizontal dispersion also has the advantage of a wider sweet spot and more even seat to seat dispersion.
@@markpocock183 sorry, had to re-read this. So as you are saying, yes wide dispersion could mess that up. But on the flip side, so could wide vertical dispersion. Especially since most ceilings and floors are untreated. So maybe it is the vertical dispersion that's the culprit?
I realize my anecdotal data is just about worthless, but I auditioned Perlisten R series towers when I was shopping for speakers, and I went into it crazily biased in favor of Perlisten. I had no idea that vertical dispersion might be limited, etc. But I absolutely, definitely noticed that sitting up vs slouching down the sound changed a lot. That was one of the main reasons I didn't end up buying them. I'm talking about a difference in ear level of plus or minus 6 inches or so, nothing significant. And the speakers were set up totally normally at an authorized dealer. Nothing screwy. I have the utmost respect for you Matt and for Perlisten, but I went in expecting these speakers to blow away all others and this one specific issue turned me off. Sorry if I'm being rile-worthy. Not my intent.
I’ve heard this idea before. But nothing in the actual anechoic data supports that experience. Nor does it match my experience or those of my colleagues. Within a 6” change in height you have a degree of shift. The response is exactly the same. I am sure you believe you heard what you heard. But there is nothing to support that this experience is possible.
@@MW-ii5nb but they don’t have narrow vertical directivity. There is absolutely no way the spectral balance could shift in a 1 foot window. It’s impossible. This was in your head. You read it, you were biased, and you confirmed your bias. That’s the reality.
If your ears went below the back of the chair I'm sure you may have experienced a significant change in tone/sound. Also, any treatments in the room may affect things differently even with a 6" shift. Nothing to do with the speakers
@@pconyc this is true and much more likely to be any cause of a claimed shift in timbre. The vast majority of speakers, including the Perlistens, would have only maybe a 1-2dB shift in that range. We are talking +/- .5 to 1dB. That is certainly all the perlisten has out to a 20+ degree window. So it’s just not possible to have such a shift.
I think one of the things that trips people up is that you really don't need that much vertical dispersion from a speaker compare to horizontal in order to be acceptable in the room. Based on Erin's measurements, let's just call the vertical dispersion of Perlisten's DPC array to be ±25 degrees. Assuming you're sitting 12ft away from the speaker, that means you would need to be less than 5.6ft above or below the tweeter line in order to fall within that region. That is a massive range. Unless you are messing up your speaker placement to an almost intensional degree, I can't imagine a scenario where you would be above/below the speaker by more than that amount. Obviously, that range narrows up a bit the closer you get. But say you are sitting 5ft away from your surrounds. You still just need to be less than 2.3ft above/below the tweeter. That's really not that hard to pull off with proper room design.
Yes but remember that the speakers response doesn’t go away or fall apart outside 25 degrees. It simply gets quieter. So in a properly designed system, you can use that to your advantage.
Matt, what do you think about using mtm center channels as surrounds? You dont necessarily need good horiztonal directivity for surrounds and there shouldnt be alot of lobing as you get into extreme angles on the verticle. They are often a bit slimmer and may have advantages in aesthetic designs in a media room.
I think you also missed the fact that the perlisten are not time coherent where the variance in dispersion and timing would create problems in seat to seat imaging. This is why when you listen to perlisten systems you hear more of the individual speakers and with something like kef or ascendo you get a nice bubble. In addition perlisten does not have controlled dispersion you can see this via the dispersion graph it's not exactly smooth by any stretch of the imagination. I think this is a case of you having to justify your purchase.
Beam forming requires very precise time alignment of the drivers. What you said isn’t true. And the dispersion is extremely well controlled. Not sure what you are talking about. It’s extremely smooth. In fact it’s much smoother than others you mentioned. As evidenced by rhetorical smoothness of the DI. I think you are misinterpreting what you are looking at in looking for flaws that aren’t there.
Actually another point I should have made. Neither Ascendo nor Kef is time coherent either. Simply being a concentric design doesn’t make a speaker time coherent. That would require the use of a first order crossover for passive designs. 2nd through ## order crossovers all have too much delay. DSP based designs could be time coherent. But neither company makes a time coherent DSP based design. And you can still achieve time coherence from a non-concentric design. An expanding array can still be time coherent.
@@PoesAcoustics I think you will find ascendo do active speakers and kef also have DSP based speakers in addition there are other companies like genelec. For a home theater the narrow vertical dispersion will be a problem especially for surrounds and also if you use them for atmos. E.g. a side surround needs to cover vertically the person closest to the speaker all the way to the furthest along that row of seats, where this is a large angle of dispersion. Commonly the side surround is placed higher then ear level so that it has line of sight to each person so that one person is not blocking the sound to everyone.
I don’t think he intended to gaslight at all. I think this idea has floated on the forums caused by misunderstanding of how the speakers dispersion works. And how this plays out in a room. Horizontal is usually of much greater concern because it dominates the perception far more. However there is nothing unusual about the horizontal directivity. Perlistens horizontal directivity is dominated by the drivers own natural directivity and waveguide. It’s fairly wide. The vertical is driven by the beamforming design and this does make it unusually well controlled. It’s narrower than some. But it’s also far smoother in that range. Most have a lot more issues.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks for the information Matthew! I didn't intend to get you riled up or to be critical towards the Perlistens. :). They just seemed to have significantly different vertical dispersion pattern than the Ascendos, for example. Thanks for sharing all this great information, keep it up.
You got a long/full explanation; $10 well spent I'd say.
I knew you didn’t. What riled me up is the fact that you were given that impression in the first place.
They don’t really have narrower directivity than the Ascendos. Different yes because it remains controlled over a wider region. The Ascendos behave like most traditional speakers in the vertical. They widen as the response gets lower. This means the response shape changes as you move your and down. The Perlistens control their response over a very wide bandwidth and so the response shape doesn’t change as you go up and down. It simply gets quieter. Eventually all speakers tend to get ugly. So yes if you are far enough off axis the Perlisten response does change in such a way that is quite colored. But so does the Kef and Ascendo (and every other speaker in the market). The key is that this angle is so far outside the listening window of any theater as to be of no consequence.
Ascendos Blacks Swans have very narrow directivity. I mentioned its value to Geoffrey once who immediately got defensive (understandable). The moment I explained what I meant he concurred. It’s a lot narrower than a normal speaker in that it gets quieter quicker. But it’s an excellent speaker and its response shape and timbre doesn’t change with angle until you get way way off axis. This isn’t a bad thing. You can actually take advantage of it to get more high performing seats. A trick that a wide dispersion speaker can’t do.
The issue that narrow directivity brings is that it also decreases reflected energy. This can cause speakers to be more localizable. You have to change how you approach the acoustics and listening distance.
@@PoesAcoustics Thanks so much for this incredibly thorough answer. I'm eyeing a high channel count upgrade in a year or two. The only way I could fit the Perlistens within budget would be the R series. In particular the R4S (surround) seems to have a narrower vertical dispersion than its S counterpart the S4S. Any concerns with the R versus S series?
@@nevohraalnavnoj I got to hear Perlistens, Ascendo, and even Grimani Systems at MWAVE. Perlistens were great, but are out of my price range. The Ascendos sounded really good and were much cheaper. I'm thinking to go with Ascendo as my next setup unless I can find speakers in a similar size and price with better dispersion.
@@andrewskaterrrprice no object would you choose the Perlistens? Was it the R series or S series? I still don't know what's superior, a controlled vertical dispersion like the Perlistens or a wide vertical dispersion like the Ascendos.
Well, svs made a new floor standing speaker with only 10 degrees of good vertical dispersion. And then Placed the tweeter lower than most towers which means that some people depending on seat height and the height of the person, will be greater than 10 degrees above the tweeter. Blows my mind.
They made "audiophile" speakers unfortunately.
10 degrees vertical may sound very limited, but I think it's important to calculate it out to understand the window. For this example assuming +/-10° vertical dispersion, at a listening distance of 8 feet (which I think is pretty close for a large tower speaker), this measures out to be 8ft. x tan(10°) = +/-1.41 feet. So that's nearly a 3 foot vertical window of flat response at only 8 feet away, and grows linearly as a function of distance.
I think a 3 foot window at 8 feet is sufficient for 90%+ of real life situations, as seated ear height doesn't vary all that much between people. This also has a real tangible benefit of basically killing vertical first reflections before they ever have a chance to become an issue.
Frankly I think there is a lot of merit to a design with narrow vertical dispersion, provided they still can maintain a wide horizontal dispersion.
I'm used to hearing of how to use directivity with stereo only; this way of using it to even a surround system response is kind of enlightening.
Thanks!
Hi Matt! Just wanted to thank you for these videos! Very informative. I do have a question regarding the "non-dedicated theater room" room and quality sound. I know I am in the minority but would love to know how often you're asked to incorporate end-game speakers into a "normal" living room. I spent a lot on furnishings and am looking at some S7ts to pair with my LG OLED and NAD M33. Am I nuts going for broke with the S7t? Or would I benefit from maybe some R7t and in-walls for a 5.2.2? (Giant TVs require giant floor standers IMHO.) I spend about 50% of my time listening to music on my comfy sofa, 25% watching RUclips, and 25% on movies/tv equally. Thanks!
Thank you for your support of my Channel. I’ll shoot a video and answer your question after my trip to London
I found with concentric designs (Elac & Kef), there's significant smearing in comparison to conventional designs. isoacoustics doesn't clean it up, so it's not resonances causing the smearing. Dirac on the other hand did a 180 on them for the smearing. My conventionally designed speakers (Focal and Martin Logan) don't have issues with smearing.
Will you elaborate on what you're referring to as smearing?
@@FOH3663 smearing is also known as instrument bleeding. It's when the image is smeared. There's beeding of one instruments sound into another's that neighboring on the soundstage. They should be tightly focused and constrained to their own area on the stage. It's something I have noticed with concentric designs that they are not the greatest at. And maybe that's because of having too much vertical dispersion? Hard to say what the cause was, but I found it weird that Dirac did a 180 on them in that department, but it wasn't an issue with the conventional designs that have controlled vertical dispersion.
@dicmccoy sounds more like a horizontal dispersion issue than vertical. Erin talks about his preference for wide horizontal dispersion speakers because of their wider soundstage, but acknowledges that this comes at the cost of less image precision...what I think you are referring to as smearing. Wider horizontal dispersion results in more side wall reflections and less precise imaging.
@@markpocock183 Tradition designs have more horizontal dispersion vs concentric 80° vs 50° give or take. So I'm not sure you have them understood properly? The concentric driver because of their limited horizontal dispersion, keeps their soundstage narrower and more between the speakers. The wider horizontal dispersion also has the advantage of a wider sweet spot and more even seat to seat dispersion.
@@markpocock183 sorry, had to re-read this. So as you are saying, yes wide dispersion could mess that up. But on the flip side, so could wide vertical dispersion. Especially since most ceilings and floors are untreated. So maybe it is the vertical dispersion that's the culprit?
I realize my anecdotal data is just about worthless, but I auditioned Perlisten R series towers when I was shopping for speakers, and I went into it crazily biased in favor of Perlisten. I had no idea that vertical dispersion might be limited, etc. But I absolutely, definitely noticed that sitting up vs slouching down the sound changed a lot. That was one of the main reasons I didn't end up buying them. I'm talking about a difference in ear level of plus or minus 6 inches or so, nothing significant. And the speakers were set up totally normally at an authorized dealer. Nothing screwy. I have the utmost respect for you Matt and for Perlisten, but I went in expecting these speakers to blow away all others and this one specific issue turned me off. Sorry if I'm being rile-worthy. Not my intent.
I’ve heard this idea before. But nothing in the actual anechoic data supports that experience. Nor does it match my experience or those of my colleagues. Within a 6” change in height you have a degree of shift. The response is exactly the same. I am sure you believe you heard what you heard. But there is nothing to support that this experience is possible.
My experience was exactly the same where I had no pre conceived idea of the narrow vertical dispersion, so completely unbiased.
@@MW-ii5nb but they don’t have narrow vertical directivity. There is absolutely no way the spectral balance could shift in a 1 foot window. It’s impossible. This was in your head. You read it, you were biased, and you confirmed your bias. That’s the reality.
If your ears went below the back of the chair I'm sure you may have experienced a significant change in tone/sound. Also, any treatments in the room may affect things differently even with a 6" shift. Nothing to do with the speakers
@@pconyc this is true and much more likely to be any cause of a claimed shift in timbre.
The vast majority of speakers, including the Perlistens, would have only maybe a 1-2dB shift in that range. We are talking +/- .5 to 1dB. That is certainly all the perlisten has out to a 20+ degree window. So it’s just not possible to have such a shift.
I think one of the things that trips people up is that you really don't need that much vertical dispersion from a speaker compare to horizontal in order to be acceptable in the room. Based on Erin's measurements, let's just call the vertical dispersion of Perlisten's DPC array to be ±25 degrees. Assuming you're sitting 12ft away from the speaker, that means you would need to be less than 5.6ft above or below the tweeter line in order to fall within that region. That is a massive range. Unless you are messing up your speaker placement to an almost intensional degree, I can't imagine a scenario where you would be above/below the speaker by more than that amount. Obviously, that range narrows up a bit the closer you get. But say you are sitting 5ft away from your surrounds. You still just need to be less than 2.3ft above/below the tweeter. That's really not that hard to pull off with proper room design.
Yes but remember that the speakers response doesn’t go away or fall apart outside 25 degrees. It simply gets quieter. So in a properly designed system, you can use that to your advantage.
I misunderstood what you said before. This is helpful.
Matt, what do you think about using mtm center channels as surrounds? You dont necessarily need good horiztonal directivity for surrounds and there shouldnt be alot of lobing as you get into extreme angles on the verticle. They are often a bit slimmer and may have advantages in aesthetic designs in a media room.
JBL synthesis has much wider vertical dispersion. Weird companies are going away from the segment creator.
Can u give me link for angle calculator that u use ? Thanks
www.calculator.net/right-triangle-calculator.html
I think you also missed the fact that the perlisten are not time coherent where the variance in dispersion and timing would create problems in seat to seat imaging. This is why when you listen to perlisten systems you hear more of the individual speakers and with something like kef or ascendo you get a nice bubble. In addition perlisten does not have controlled dispersion you can see this via the dispersion graph it's not exactly smooth by any stretch of the imagination. I think this is a case of you having to justify your purchase.
Kef is the master of messing up timing. All their speakers that have a dedicated bass driver lag behind in time with their bass.
Beam forming requires very precise time alignment of the drivers. What you said isn’t true.
And the dispersion is extremely well controlled. Not sure what you are talking about. It’s extremely smooth. In fact it’s much smoother than others you mentioned. As evidenced by rhetorical smoothness of the DI. I think you are misinterpreting what you are looking at in looking for flaws that aren’t there.
Actually another point I should have made. Neither Ascendo nor Kef is time coherent either. Simply being a concentric design doesn’t make a speaker time coherent. That would require the use of a first order crossover for passive designs. 2nd through ## order crossovers all have too much delay.
DSP based designs could be time coherent. But neither company makes a time coherent DSP based design. And you can still achieve time coherence from a non-concentric design. An expanding array can still be time coherent.
@@PoesAcoustics I think you will find ascendo do active speakers and kef also have DSP based speakers in addition there are other companies like genelec. For a home theater the narrow vertical dispersion will be a problem especially for surrounds and also if you use them for atmos. E.g. a side surround needs to cover vertically the person closest to the speaker all the way to the furthest along that row of seats, where this is a large angle of dispersion. Commonly the side surround is placed higher then ear level so that it has line of sight to each person so that one person is not blocking the sound to everyone.
@@MW-ii5nbyou misunderstood me. Yes they have DSP speakers. But they are not time coherent speakers. They didn’t implant that ability in the DSP.
I would be more concerned with horizontal dispersion but yeah...the OP is definitely a master at gaslighting.
I don’t think he intended to gaslight at all. I think this idea has floated on the forums caused by misunderstanding of how the speakers dispersion works. And how this plays out in a room.
Horizontal is usually of much greater concern because it dominates the perception far more. However there is nothing unusual about the horizontal directivity. Perlistens horizontal directivity is dominated by the drivers own natural directivity and waveguide. It’s fairly wide. The vertical is driven by the beamforming design and this does make it unusually well controlled. It’s narrower than some. But it’s also far smoother in that range. Most have a lot more issues.