Next 20 Years - What Audio Advancements Would You Most Like To See?

Sound system to room interfaces

Sound system to room interfaces

Over the past 20 years, we have seen huge strides in spectral management, the introduction of usable temporal solutions (e.g Audyssey), and these will continue to evolve.

In the future, we will see amplitude-variant adjustments to both temporal and spectral profiles.

Like an engines RPM based fuel-map that reacts to many input variables and adaptively selects appropriate profiles to determine what parameters to adjust given the conditions.

Therefore, when you play your system at an average level of 70dB, a certain profile will be in place to handle the slight imbalance between woofer and panel (let’s say woofer is louder), then you crank it up to get into that song you love, and at 90dB avg, the panel is imbalanced relative to the woofer, and it’s getting shrill in the room. An amplitude-variant map would have appropriate frequency (spectral) adjustment to bring those two back in-line, as well as a unique temporal adjustment to minimize a high-frequency resonance node that forms at high-volumes.

To deliver this, Power-envelopes of the system will be tested and modeled to achieve as accurate a reproduction as possible at any volume. Including limiters to maintain a target max THD.

An increase in vertical integration of speaker systems

An increase in vertical integration of speaker systems

I foresee that more and more speaker houses will go to tighter and tighter integration of drivers, cabinet systems, active crossovers and amplification. All reasonable designs will have similar topologies to a Meridian DSP speaker (Meridian has always been ahead of the curve).

We will see most respected solutions have:

•Digital delivery of content and command data (vol, room correction, steering, etc.)

• Highly customized DSP with driver-specific correction curves (or dynamically adaptable algorithms)

•A dedicated, optimal-match amplifier able to meet all SPL and THD goals for the ‘system’

•Implementing and integrating with high-function room correction solutions.

The more advanced designs will be implementing ‘steerable’ imaging, where users can select optimizations for movies vs music. This feature will also be leveraged by vector encoded positional audio.

Speaker tech

Speaker tech

Imaging arrays will be implemented using Hypersonic Sound Systems emitters to provide pinpoint sound sources with minimal room effects.

The steerable array of many small drivers designs pioneered by Yamaha in their “Digital Sound Projector” series, will see greater adoption by vendors and wider deployment as individual speakers that collaborate under a regime illustrated above in ‘Vertical integration’.

Air velocity based infra-woofers (0 – 35hz) will be perfected and mass-marketed. The current representative, the Thigpen Rotary woofer, will evolve and become a standard high-performance installation ‘must-have’ at a ‘reasonable’ sub $5K price-point.

But new implementations, leveraging smart materials and ever increasing computational and DSP power will deliver more conventional solutions that don’t require an Infinite Baffle sized rear-wave room. They might not get into the single digits, but could do 10Hz pretty clean and loud.

On ESL’s I have a ton of ideas, but some are patent worthy, so sorry, the crystal ball has a ‘non-disclosure’ cloud over it there

Radical doesn’t even begin to describe some of them.

But here’s an obvious direction for MartinLogan and other ESL vendors, as outlined in vertical integration, and evidenced by speakers like the Source and the powered centers, we will see active crossovers with DSP speaker corrections, fully dedicated and matched amplification, with DSP implemented amplitude management (SPL limiters, etc.). Basically, crank it as much as you want and it will always sound good, and won’t go out in a puff of smoke either

Room tuning

Room tuning

The science of room tuning will evolve with the introduction of highly automated spatial measurement systems (based on analysis from pictures, it can create a 3D model of the space). Using a combination of actual room-correction measurement data pus the 3D model, it will run full acoustical modeling and analysis, resulting in recommendations for equipment location, treatment quantity, type and location.

Used iteratively, it will allow the advanced user to tune their systems with the precision only the top people in the field can now barely achieve.

With the rise of highly integrated speaker array solutions along with the sophisticated room-correction system outlined below, we will see the introduction of integrated active room correction solutions.

Specifically aiming at the low-frequencies, we could see panels and other smart-material based devices implement a combination of sound re-enforcement and room mode mitigation in one active element.

The process of measuring room acoustics will become vastly simpler and fool-proof. A fixed-dimension multi-mic array on a mechanized stand is placed at the ‘prime’ position. Then a fully automated measurement process physically moves the array while issuing the measurement tones through the actual speaker system.

Instead of having a big dedicated acoustic measurement computer, or needing to co-opt your PC or laptop, this measurement system will be a basic (reasonable cost) box connected to the network, relaying all its captured data to a cloud-based compute array implementing sophisticated modeling software that can crunch through hundreds of individual measurements and model the acoustic space with incredible precision in all three axis mentioned previously (spectral, temporal and dynamic). Using a cool graphical UI’s presented by a web browser, the user can then see exactly what the models look like and optionally ‘tune’ the corrections and limits to taste.

The imaging would look like the fluid-dynamics modeling of automotive wind-tunnel testing along with stress analysis visualizations applied in materials sciences.

Once the correction maps are computed, they are now accessible to the preamp or speaker processors involved in the users system. Users will be able to store and recall many profiles to align with various scenarios (curtains closed, room full-of people, just me, etc.)

Smarter source to rendering management

Smarter source to rendering management

Content will start to include much more meta-data around the options contained in the content delivery. Therefore, a BluRay disc could contain info on which soundtrack is the highest resolution / best fidelity. It would contain specific information about aspect ratio (this already there, just needs to be propagated and used further downstream), and many more things about the content.

Propagating this formation through the rendering chain will allow all system components along the way to orchestrate their configurations for an optimal viewing/listening experience.

This means preamps, source playback systems and video rendering systems all have to communicate bi-directionally (using HDMI CEC and other protocols to-be-developed) and self-configure.

The user interfaces of all this will move away from being NASA control centers understood only be the indoctrinated geek-hood, to truly end-user result oriented interactions (I want to watch a movie, but it’s late at night).

The visibility of actual in-home data and constructive feedback loops

The visibility of actual in-home data and constructive feedback loops

In this highly connected era, and with all the data-gathering and compute horsepower in modern A/V systems, we will see a dramatic increase in solutions that implement bi-directional information exchange between the A/V systems deployed in homes and manufacturers or service companies that pop-up to help users get the most out of their investments.

With all the aggregated data from the installed base, manufacturers or service organizations will be able to refine future product offerings to minimize confusion, address acoustical, placement or configuration needs with great certainty of outcome based on the depth and breadth of the data set.

Solutions that allow vendors to perform remote diagnostics and config changes will continue to propagate (BTW- My Denon AVP preamp already has this).

So there you have a few of my thoughts one where this is going over the next couple of decades, and if you think any of this too radical, believe me, I held back

Im not 100% sure I understand all of what jonathan was expressing he is a bit above my knowledge level so if he included this in his posts I apologize

I would like to see some type of electronic spacial expander or player that gives more than one person a sweet spot from just two speakers.

it would be nice to be able to sit on the couch side by side with my wife and we both feel like we are in the middle

repman said:

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I would like to see some type of electronic spacial expander or player that gives more than one person a sweet spot from just two speakers.

it would be nice to be able to sit on the couch side by side with my wife and we both feel like we are in the middle

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Both the room treatment and room correction aspects will address that issue.

As you noted in my theater, the sweet-spot here is a good bit wider than many other ESL-based systems.

Some of the modes, such as Dolby Music and DTS:Neo will fix that since they use the center speaker.
However, none do it as well as TriField (implemented in Meridian preamps).

And it could be made a lot better, but more tech is required ...

Jonathan I was to disoriented from the ultra clean 200 decibel bass whacks I took to the head and chest from the opening ten minutes of BOLT at your place to remember

repman said:

Jonathan I was to disoriented from the ultra clean 200 decibel bass whacks I took to the head and chest from the opening ten minutes of BOLT at your place to remember

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Heh, heh, it is a lot to 'absorb' as it were

Sounds like you need another 'treatment'

Come on by ...

That is one hell of a post, Jon! I read it briefly, then read it again not so briefly. Very interesting, and some great points made.

The vector encoding sounds pretty interesting - must do some reading up on it sometime.

It seems that most of the possible "advances" outlined exist within the digital domain, and I have to concede that this is where future progress will lie. I just hope that the subjective results of digital sound processing become much more aurally convincing than a lot of what I have encountered thus far.

However, things will only get better in the regard - at least, that is what one would hope.

I must admit that whilst I have thought about the topic of this thread a bit, I haven't really decided what points I'd really like to make in it. Maybe I'll do that later in the week.

User211 said:

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It seems that most of the possible "advances" outlined exist within the digital domain, and I have to concede that this is where future progress will lie. I just hope that the subjective results of digital sound processing become much more aurally convincing than a lot of what I have encountered thus far.

However, things will only get better in the regard - at least, that is what one would hope.
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Yep, it's a digital world now, and manipulating sound data is becoming pretty well understood.

I've personally experienced ever increasing accuracy and pleasure from my system over the past 8 years as digital tech, in the forms of speaker management, room correction and improved soundfield processing all combine with the latest High-rez sources to deliver an amazing experience.

This on top of a room size, speaker and amp package that has remained unchanged (except for the tweaks applied via the digital bits just mentioned) during that same period. So I know what to attribute the improvement to.

Downgrading to an analog stereo preamp, amp and passive crossover speakers is unthinkable to me at this point. Not because that aren’t any good ones, it’s that they can’t possibly deliver the benefits in spectral, temporal and dynamic domains that I now enjoy.

Past prediction review

All this past and forward looking discussion made me go dig out a paper I wrote 21 years ago (1988) addressing the opportunities I saw at the time around modular, extensible audio systems I called AudioBus.

This page on my website is the review of that document and contains a link to it.

My crystal ball has an extended time-horizon, as some of the 1988 concepts have yet to be fully realized, as I outline in the review.

sleepysurf said:

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-JonFo relocates to Tampa, FL

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Heh, just saw this one

Maybe I'll visit next winter, it's cold up here in the mountains

JonFo said:

it's cold up here in the mountains

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Georgia.....cold ??????????? :ROFL: Hell I've seen colder July 4th's in Buffalo !!

twich54 said:

Georgia.....cold ??????????? :ROFL: Hell I've seen colder July 4th's in Buffalo !!

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Dave, sure, but not in January

Note I said Winter, not next week