Sore About Baffle Step?

Sore About Baffle Step? Never heard of it? Not many people have...

Do the press have a duty to educate? News after all is about learning something: "I just learned from the news that ... " is something we often hear in conversation.

Therefore should not the hifi press tell everybody who buys speakers about baffle step? Or don't they understand it?

It is one of the most important factors in determining a speaker's performance, and in the good old days didn't matter much, but since we were told to bring our speakers out away from the walls and corners of our rooms it became very important indeed.

Important because if not understood by 1. the manufacturer of the speaker; and 2. the user, it leads us to think that hifi is all about bright and thin sound.

When speakers were put on bookshelfs or pushed back to the wall the bass and low mids were reinforced so much that what baffle step does was never noticed.

But as soon as the hifi press told us we needed to bring them out into the room, and put bookshelf speakers on stands instead of the bookshelf, it made our listening a whole lot different - it made it bright and thin - perhaps that's what the press thought sounded hifi?

Baffle step makes speakers sound bright and thin on bass because the mids and highs are projected forward by the whole of the baffle - the speaker front - but the lower mids and bass is not!

The lower mids and bass makes the sound ripples much bigger than the width or height of a speaker front, and so they don't get the same reinforcement that the upper mids and highs get.

When positioned near to a back wall the wall does the reinforcement and makes the tonal balance right, but when pulled away from the wall, that is mostly lost, so the tonal balance goes bright.

So why pull them away from the wall in the first place? Because it improves the quality of bass, it improves the tempo, it takes away the dominant mode or characteristic sound of a particular wall (your wall and other people's walls can differ) - they sound less muddy.

But then the upper frequencies now dominate, they have the baffle to "bounce off" from.

Around the time we started pulling speakers further into the room, some speaker manufacturers realised all this and built into their crossovers baffle step compensation. That is a filter which reduces the output by a few decibels from the point the baffle takes over.

Such speakers when pushed back to the wall produce overblown muddy bass. The mini monitor versions might look like bookshelf speakers but use them on a bookshelf and you'll know about it.

However, I remember at the time that hobby crossover boards and kits didn't incorporate baffle step compensation, and if you built such as the RS Components speaker system, how bright it sounded, unless the speakers were pushed back to the wall.

So, there have been literally millions of hifi users who were never told about such effects by the hifi press. How unfortunate! And if you buy a hifi system and you can't get the sound right, and it doesn't do what all those reviews tell you, you give it all up and do something else.

Something as simple as explaining baffle step to readers would have made a profound difference to the hifi industry, because, as I know, and you should know, the hifi industry is shrinking, probably because quite often it doesn't do what it says on the can.

Would decoupling the speaker ( grommets and gaskets) help?kef decouple the bass units and the midrange unit ( on the 105.4)