The same effect is responsible for an unavoidable flaw with stereo loudspeakers, where you have differing path lengths between your ears and each speaker. Try playing some mono pink noise on stereo speakers and moving your head, then compare with the same sound hard-panned to a single speaker. It's most obvious when you're close to the speakers and in an acoustically dry environment. If you add lots of additional reflections you'll generate many overlapping interference patterns that will average out to a smoother frequency response. This is one reason why adding a real physical center channel can improve clarity of dialogue in movies.
Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#22The same effect is responsible for an unavoidable flaw with stereo loudspeakers, where you have differing path lengths between your ears and each speaker. Try playing some mono pink noise on stereo speakers and moving your head, then compare with the same sound hard-panned to a single speaker. It's most obvious when you're close to the speakers and in an acoustically dry environment. If you add lots of additional ref…
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Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#23The same effect is responsible for an unavoidable flaw with stereo loudspeakers, where you have differing path lengths between your ears and each speaker. Try playing some mono pink noise on stereo speakers and moving your head, then compare with the same sound hard-panned to a single speaker. It's most obvious when you're close to the speakers and in an acoustically dry environment. If you add lots of additional ref…
Real hi-fi enthusiasts sit at the reference listening point of their system (the third corner of an equilateral triangle placed on the speakers). Everyone else won't notice the difference; they listen to 256kbps Spotify anyways.
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#24Tangentially related I once picked up my memory foam mattress and stood it up against one of the walls ... for cleaning the bed or whatever. As I walked past the mattress I instantly noticed that the mattress is such a good absorber of audio waves that I could immediately notice a dip in ambient sound in the ear facing the mattress. The room was already "silent" and this newly discovered lower limit of silence was pr…
Everyone should try a real anechoic chamber once. The silence there is deafening.
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#25The same effect is responsible for an unavoidable flaw with stereo loudspeakers, where you have differing path lengths between your ears and each speaker. Try playing some mono pink noise on stereo speakers and moving your head, then compare with the same sound hard-panned to a single speaker. It's most obvious when you're close to the speakers and in an acoustically dry environment. If you add lots of additional ref…
Real hi-fi enthusiasts sit at the reference listening point of their system (the third corner of an equilateral triangle placed on the speakers). Everyone else won't notice the difference; they listen to 256kbps Spotify anyways.
It doesn't take much head movement to cause audible flanging. The real hi-fi enthusiasts will have to use head clamps like in A Clockwork Orange (or just use headphones).
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#26Pretty sure this is also why, when you stand at the right spot in a techno concert, the music starts to sound like a jet engine. We also have this in game development, where if two sound effect emitters play the same effect at the same time with just a bit of offset, phase, whatever, they sound like that.
If the offset is fixed, the effect is called a comb filter. If the offset is changing, the effect is called flanging. The name stems from recording engineers rubbing their fingers against the flange of a reel-to-reel recorder's tape reel, to brake it slightly, which adds increasing delay to the sound.
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#27> it's like the pitch goes down at first, but when the plane has passed us, the pitch goes up again. That's not how Doppler works! Call me a dummy, but this was exactly how I thought Doppler works.
Let's say the mistake is understandable, because it happens to coincide with the observation of a passing jet. ;) I guess that's why Doppler explanations nearly always use an ambulance as their example.
The jet example will needlessly confuse people and create fodder for low effort "akshually" type commentary because the air getting sucked into the front and crammed out the back of the engine sound very different so you can get like most the same effect without the aircraft actually moving relative to the observer.
People explaining doppler don't want to have to explain this to a bunch of nit pickers, so they use an ambulance.
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#28Tangentially related I once picked up my memory foam mattress and stood it up against one of the walls ... for cleaning the bed or whatever. As I walked past the mattress I instantly noticed that the mattress is such a good absorber of audio waves that I could immediately notice a dip in ambient sound in the ear facing the mattress. The room was already "silent" and this newly discovered lower limit of silence was pr…
Everyone should try a real anechoic chamber once. The silence there is deafening .
I shudder to think what tinnitus would sound like in an anechoic chamber…
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#29Tangentially related I once picked up my memory foam mattress and stood it up against one of the walls ... for cleaning the bed or whatever. As I walked past the mattress I instantly noticed that the mattress is such a good absorber of audio waves that I could immediately notice a dip in ambient sound in the ear facing the mattress. The room was already "silent" and this newly discovered lower limit of silence was pr…
Everyone should try a real anechoic chamber once. The silence there is deafening .
Don‘t know if this is the same but I went to Death Valley on the Devil‘s Golf Course during summer. There was no wind no nothing. It was so damn silent. Wonder how that compares to an anechoic chamber now.
Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
#30So who is up for turning the last graph of the article into a synthesizer?