Unipolar vs Dipolar response

Part of upgrading the bedroom system would have to include before and after measurements.  The Before measurements would provide an objective target to set the levels and such.

However the current bedroom system hasn't been much of a focus for many years now, despite having "descended" (or ascended) from my very first audio system, with replacements.  There is nothing in that descent predating 2005 at this point.  That was when I got the Revel M20's.

A few years ago, the living room Tact RCS 2.0 died, so I replaced it with the bedroom one, leaving the bedroom short of the "digital preamp" (source plus level control if nothing more, I never seriously tried the RCS and what little I did I didn't like it, found it frustrating, etc) I had relied on since 2009 or so.  But since at least 2016, if not 2009, the bedroom system was a distant second in getting my constant attentions as the living room.  In fact, it didn't really need the Tact anymore, since I had basically only one "source" I ever used...the TV.  Or, possibly, the turntable/tape/digital recording hub on the side of the room, which has been used in recent years mostly for cassette to digital transcriptions, though at one time was my primary vinyl transcription also.  When doing those operations, I need to be listening to what I'm doing on the bedroom system.  That happens through Sonos, I put the analog inputs to Sonos in (for the Tape node) and listen using the Sonos on the other side of the room.  Any other kind of interconnection would invariably lead to ground loop.  The network cabling the Sonos uses has ground breaks, usually a final length of unshielded cable from the wall panels (all shielded prior to that point).

So, the two essential things by that point were just Sonos and TV.  Which was all handled by the Sonos Zoneplayers themselves, nothing more needed.

Except for the EQ and crossover, and here's where the rub is.  All the historic EQ programming ever since I got my first DCX 2496 and DEQ 2496 wasn't all that great anyway, but work was done, but then lost when those units died, and has now gone through a succession of same units.  I was never good at recording what EQ settings were being used, and once those units died, that information was lost, and I had less time and interest in doing it very well anymore (though, I might have easily done better than before with improved equipment and methods, etc).

So, the system settings had already pretty much devolved to whatever sounded good in the first 30 minutes of setup.  Possibly making the pink noise look good.  But little beyond that.

But, anyway, this time I'm trying to honor past judgements by recording the "before" condition before losing it.  Not merely the settings (the bass crossover set in the DEQ was 71 Hz, which was easily dialed into its replacement miniDSP), but the actual system response.

This turned out more interesting than I had anticipated, because it's now clear that the target response of a unipolar system (as the Revel M20 speakers) and dipolar needs be different.

Here's the M20 with SVS cylinder sub, as measured now but set up pretty quickly a few years ago:

Bedroom Response near Headboard

Wow this is flat and deeply extended.  You might even say it's far better looking than the living room response.  Why shouldn't I equalize/crank the Acoustat High Frequency Control up to get a response more like this?  (The deep bass gets weaker and the midbass stronger as move away from headboard (measuring above it, so this is the best looking response.)

Here's the living room response measurement (I'm back to the long "evolved" upper frequency EQ, because the scratch built version was slightly worse, but further experiments were going to be sufficiently complex that I needed a digital device like DEQ 2496, to be "liberated" from bedroom by the ongoing upgrade the )

Living Room, "Evolved" HF EQ

Utterly different, though generally I think I like the living room system better, and they don't sound as different in HF balance as the measurements suggest.  They sound utterly different as in the Acoustats sounding like there is a life sized concert hall behind them, no fake source of anything anywhere, whereas the bedroom system sounds like everything is being viewed on a 72 inch TV, precise and perhaps even more in focus than real life, but still miniaturized.

I think the drooping response of the electrostats may be required because they light up the room uniformly with high frequencies, while unipoles radiate from a "point source" dome tweeter usually.  The ear is far more sensitive to high frequencies on the side axis that enters the ear canal.  Therefore perhaps what needs to be matched is the ambient measurement.  One way to do this is from the measurement behind the Revel M20's, which looks curiously like the listening position measurement of the Acoustats:

Bedroom behind M20's