Rex
Dignified but Approachable
You're right. An IR cannot fully capture the sound of a speaker cab in a room. But it's not that the detail in an IR is too much information. Rather, it's incomplete information. All those different EQ curves and levels — the sound coming straight down the bore of a speaker, the sound radiating at different angles, the sound coming off the back of the cab — form a complex soup of different sounds that radiate out, and bounce off the walls, floor and ceiling in different amounts and at different times and phases. The way those sounds mix is different at every point in the room, and it changes as you move around. An IR can't capture all of that. It is, as you say, a single capture of some of the many things that the cab does.I guess my point is exactly what Rex said, that "there is no single inherent eq curve for a speaker" and when you listen to an actual speaker, you never here a single freq curve (except perhaps in the studio, where addition eq'ing is typical). However, present day irs do exactly that, they pick a single point. This makes me wonder if all the detail that an ir provides around a single eq axis is really necessary to represent the essential sound of a particular speaker. Maybe it does. But, to me, something seems limited by the way we are doing it.
Never stop thinking.I'm just thinking... and I have already been warned about that, ...many times.