You know, have heard or have had the experience that where you place your speakers and favorite listening chair can make a big difference in the way your system sounds. Maybe you've moved things around a little, hoping to find a better spot but you can't quite seem to nail it. You are experiencing how the effects of a room can impact sound reproduction. Because of these effects the frequency response in the bass and mid-bass, at the listening position, can vary by as much as 15db depending on speaker and listener placement. There is no substitute for correct speaker placement and nothing, including an equalizer, can properly remove the problems of incorrect placement. Your desire is to find the best set up without having to drag your speakers all over the room.

Standing Waves Reflections between parallel room surfaces create "standing wave" patterns within the room. The standing waves will be obvious to you, in the extreme, if you play a recording with a sustained bass tone and walk about the room. Without having to resort to any room treatment, you can reduce the effects of these standing waves upon your listening pleasure by simply finding a listening location where the "frequency response of the standing waves" is the flattest. Reflections Also impacting upon the listener are multiple reflections from room surfaces which can greatly alter the perceived frequency response and clarity of the system. Your chosen listening position will determine the effects of these reflections.

Visual Ears, is an easy to use computer program that, through mathematical simulation, will help you find a "listening sweet spot" which minimizes the effects of standing waves (20-200Hz) and boundary reflections (20-500Hz). Visual Ears can handle rooms with sloped/cathedral ceilings and accomodates most speaker designs including sub/satellite systems. Visual Ears is not designed for use with electrostatics or L shaped rooms.

Referring to the main program screen in the next panel: 1. Click on this icon to describe your speaker. 2. Click on this icon to describe your room. 3. Move the 3 key elements: Left Speaker Right Speaker Listener . . until both the Standing Wave Performance and Boundary Reflection graphs present an acceptable picture as outlined in the manual. 4. Duplicate the set-up in the real room. 5. Listen. 6. If necessary, return to step 3. Make use of the remaining tools as you see fit. A complete printed manual is provided for easy reference.

The main screen show below is where you can move the speakers and listener around the room and view the resulting frequency response and standing wave information. All sub-functions are accessible from this screen as well.

Visual Ears produces a graph plotting Frequency vs SPL for all axial roomstanding wave modes up to 220Hz at the listeners position. There is adifferent color graph marker for each of the room dimensions. Adjust the speaker and listening position to get most of the markers inside the dotted area.

Visual Ears produces a Frequency response curve which is the combined output from the speaker plus all reflections ocurring within the first 25 milliseconds. 1/3octave averaging as well as the low frequency roll-off of the system may be applied to the curve. You will want to adjust the speaker and listeners position for a reasonably flat curve.

See the Review of Visual Ears in SoundStage! magazine. See the Review of Visual Ears in Audiophilia magazine. Visual Ears was well reviewed in the Winter 1997 issue of Audio Ideas Guide. Visual Ears is on the recommended component list of Stereophile Magazine. Visual Ears has been well reviewed in "Voice Coil", a newsletter for the loudspeaker industry and "Speaker Builder", a magazine for the speaker building DIYer. Visual Ears is recognized as an essential tools in listener and speaker positioning.

The requirements to run Visual Ears are almost any PC running Windows 3.1 or better. Currently Visual Ears does NOT run under Windows XP. OR a Mac using Virtual PC 2.0 from Connectix. If the demo will run under your operating system, the full program will do so as well. We urge you to download the demo to make sure. You have absolutely no reason not to Check it out! We have a fixed room size demo with an abbreviated on-line manual. It is a self extracting file. Just put it in an empty directory and execute the extraction. Then check out the readme.doc file for further instructions. To down load a demo copy of Visual Ears Mouse click on THIS LINK

Summer's just around the corner, folks are thinking about outdoor activities and our sales take a dip. So, we're running a spring special. Visual Ears is now $59.00 including shipping! That's $34 off the regular price. You can purchase Visual Ears with your credit card through PayPal. Just click on the PayPal buy image below. PayPal accepts overseas credit card orders. Sorry, we cannot accept COD or telephone orders. The program and manual are available only in the English language at this time.

Dealer, Press, Dist. and Rep inquiries are invited.

    

© 2001 KB Acoustics POBox 130 Veneta, OR 97487 541-935-5008