What Goes Where With Sound?

[David Meek]

We spend a good bit of our time talking (and testing) our systems to get the most out of them. We want the cymbals to sound right, we want the brass, woodwinds, drums, guitars, vocals, keyboards, gun fire, jets, explosions, refrigerator doors closing - all - to sound right and to have the proper "presence" in our music and movies. We spend a good bit of time trying to balance/flatten our room response curves to help with this. We talk about treble, mid-range, mid-bass, bass, but I've never seen or heard anyone diagram where each of these fall on the frequency chart. For example: What frequency range does a saxophone play in? What frequency range does a kick-drum play in? What range does an M-16 firing play in? Where do the various type of vocals - soprano, tenor, bass, etc fall? Does anyone have something like this?

Some very minor worshiping/grovelling might be in order if you do. ;x(




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[ThomasW]

More info here

http://www.tnt-audio.com/topics/frequency_e.html

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/orchins.html

theAudioWorx
Klone-Audio

[Andrew Pratt]

thanks thomas I've wondered the same thing myself.

[George Bellefontaine]

Good answer , Thomas.




My Homepage!

[David Meek]

Thanks Thomas, this is exactly what I was looking for. However, this data raises some questions:

1) The first graph shows the human voice reaching 10kHz, the TNT page shows a top of 1.1kHz. Can a person reach 10 kHz?

2) The TNT page shows:

Interesting that a sound system will produce almost all the musical fundamentals of an orchestra without bothering the tweeter... thank Heaven for harmonics!

What does the tweeter reproduce? Is it just harmonics? 8O Or does the piano at 4.2kHz move into the tweeter realm?

3) What about cymbals?




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[ThomasW]

David

What the tweeter plays is dependant on the XO point. The lower the XO the more fundamentals the tweeter plays.

Yes 4.2Khz is certainly being played by a tweeter.

I'm not sure how high a female soprano can sing. It's certainly very high though....


Cymbals are completely played by the tweeters.

As the TNT page notes MOST of the fundamentals can be covered by a single speaker (think about the stock radio in a car). But its reproducing the lowest and highest notes as well that makes what we called Hi-Fi



Harmonics and Partials




theAudioWorx
Klone-Audio