Dave Rat's bizarre speaker experiment

Interesting, if totally impractical. And using an acoustic guitar (no low end) and 4" speakers with limited frequency range (even that Infinity speaker he used only had a 4" driver) doesn't prove much. What is going to use to do the bass - some 18" sewer pipe?
 
Interesting watch. This brushes up against the Bose Wave tunnel/tube technology, but these speakers are at the end points. I get what he's talking about.
 
Ah yes! Acoustic guitars: famous for their dead zones directly in front.

The quest for "realism" is pretty silly and quixotic. (How does this idea scale? If you're listening to a full band, do you need one of these arrays for every single member? What about the fact that recorded music is rarely meant to be "realistic"?)

But in terms of a niche speaker that does interesting things to a signal, it's kind of cool. A clever engineer could get some fun lo-fi effects out of it. Or it would be interesting to see in an art exhibit where the idea of multiple copies emulating multiple performers would make sense.
 
I find Dave quite difficult to watch - but he's a clever man and knows his live sound stuff. In some videos he has the idea of taking two consoles - feeding identical signals into them and then nulling the outputs, revealing what each one is actually introducing. He put the Midas and behringer desks against each other and came to the observable conclusion that the processing and electronics was not the same - he also did a great cable experiment - taking every long cable in his stock, and end to ending them, and then putting a 58 or something on the end with a huge amount of cable - like a mile, or close. I think he likes debunking traditional thinking and doing real tests in the real world, rather than on paper. He also does mic stuff - where he pulls expensive mics apart to fix them, having bins of faulty ones to use. Things that I have never touched - like diaphragms on dynamics and condensers he routinely prods to check the surrrounds and see how they work. His sub experiments are interesting too. He's trying to move people in live sound away from putting subs onto the main L+R and sending only sources that would benefit via an aux or matrix send. Something I've never done. That way, the subs are only doing low frequencies, and not trying to make rumbles from mic stands and resonances from hardware make a sound. He does seem a strange fella to listen to, but he makes sense.
 
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