I'm going to start with a seemingly bold statement - please hang in there with me - I promise I will support it and offer a solution:

Point-source loudspeakers don't work well in rooms

There - I said it. As with my title, you could call it the "100-year war against the room."  The point-source loudspeaker is the "industry standard" - it's what we've had to work with since the invention of the loudspeaker around a century ago. Point-source loudspeakers work and measure amazingly well in anechoic chambers, and to some extent, outdoors where the only major boundary is the ground. Bring them into a room, and the battle begins. For this past century, you could argue that the industry has not done a lot to solve the problem, but it has spent an incredible amount of time and energy creating methods to manage the symptoms.

The craft of building loudspeakers has come a very long way - and what is offered by the major brands today is truly amazing in many respects. However when you consider the in-room performance as the whole package, most of the progress has come from one of three areas:  1) Treating the room, 2) Pointing the beam, or 3) "Fixing it in post (DSP.)".

1. Treating The Room

This concept says that if the room ruins the point-source performance, kill the room. This involves treatments including diffusers, absorbers, bass traps, and a multitude of aesthetic compromises that were likely never in the architects original design concept. Then the audio pro enters the room only to say "nice room - but sound will never work well in here..." In other words, kill the well designed aesthetic, or live with a difficult room sonically. Fear the reverberant space in the room - thats where things get out of hand, so lets absorb and deaden it before it gets there,

2. Surgically Aim the Sound

If you can't kill the room, avoid it. Audio engineers have developed elaborate horns, and digitally-steered line array systems that can shoot the sound directly at a listeners ear, while attempting to avoid the room boundaries altogether. This can help to some degree, but it's not perfect - this requires a fair amount of processing horsepower that many will say has side effects, and inevitably after all that work, point-source sound still makes it to the room boundaries, and comb filtering rears it's ugly head. The onset is delayed somewhat, but ultimately, the reverberant field in the room still wins the battle, with the well correlated sound falling apart as soon as it starts to reflect.

3. Fix it with DSP

If the physics fail us, then let's fix it with math - an approach to managing symptoms becoming more popular as DSP power increases and cost decreases. Today, we use incredibly complex DSP, FIR filters, and digital room correction to affect some semblance of control over the sound before it gets out of hand. We tweak the audio signal in the digital domain to counteract the physical distortions that happen when a point-source hits a drywall boundary." The results can be impressive, but again there are sweet spots and not-so-sweet spots in the room - not to mention the digital artifacts, including potential collapse of the stereo field (Don't believe me? Study Pre Ring and it's effect on the Haas effect - something very few consider when using FIR filters.)

Stated in an extremely simplified manner, the goal with point-source in most cases is to get every set of ears in the direct field of the loudspeaker as much as possible. This is because with point-source, when that perfectly correlated wave hits a hard surface, it bounces off the surface perfectly intact. Because it's still coherent, when that reflection meets the next incoming wave from the loudspeaker, the interference destructive from a sound perspective, causing dead-zones and hot-spots, aka comb filtering.

Fear the Reverberant Field!

You could use the above title as a goal for successful point-source sound inside rooms - maximize direct sound to the listener, and avoid the reverberant field at all costs, as that's where all the beautiful coherence of the point-source falls apart and becomes destructive.

Imagine dropping a stone into a small square bucket of water. Once the stone hits the water, the ripples hit the sides, bound back collide, and turn the surface of the water into a chaotic, choppy mess.  Our amazing audio industry has spent 100 years trying to come up with gadgets to flatten those ripples.

Enter the DML

Let's go back to the bucket of water. The DML is not a single stone, but instead is a handful of sand. Letting the sand flow out of your hand into the water bucket allows thousands of tiny, independent ripples to be created simultaneously on the surface. They are uncorrelated - when they hit the walls of the bucket and bounce back - they don't fight each other, as there is no synchronized wavefront to destroy. You aren't trying to beam the sound past the room, and you aren't trying to deaden the room to hide the reflections. Instead you are changing the acoustic DNA of the sound wave, so that the room becomes an asset, rather than a liability. Yes with DMLs we can now USE the reverberant space as a safe place for sound to end up - the result is direct + reflected sound that can coexist in a non-destructive way.

So back to my original statement. Point-Source loudspeakers don't natively work well in rooms, without help from room treatments, or some level of DSP magic. Yet with Distributed Mode Loudspeakers, instead of fearing the reverberant field, we embrace it. DMLs work WITH the room, allowing clean, clear audio to be intelligible in both the direct field and the reflected space in the room. 

If you haven't experienced a DML loudspeaker in your space, and how sound can work with the room instead of against it, please reach out to us - we'd love to show you a new way to fill a room with clean, clean, consistent sound.