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Gary Eickmeier Gary Eickmeier is offline
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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

In the previous thread about models for how stereo works, why it doesn't
sound more realistic, whether the recorded signal contains enough
information to reconstruct the performance in another room, and so on, the
discussion gets confused with personalities, experience with different
systems, taste vs something more scientific, theories vs hypotheses, and on
and on until the whole discussion skids to a halt and nothing is transmitted
or received. Well, I am here now to change all that.

A tautology is a statement whose truth is so obvious and undeniable that it
requires no proof. In logic, it means a statement that cannot be denied
without inconsistency. I have a simple example that might explain some
things about realism in sound reproduction.

Suppose that you just love Oscar Peterson's jazz piano playing. While he was
still with us, he made some recordings on a player piano like the Yamaha. It
records every keystroke, every pressure on the keys, perfectly, so that on
playback it is the same as when it was recorded. So imagine that you had one
of these pianos and invited him over to play and record same. He sits down
and plays. He leaves, later dies.

It is a tautology that if you play the recording of his keystrokes on the
same piano in the same room it will be a perfect reproduction. I think this
one will survive even Dick Pierce.

But why exactly will it sound the same? I mean beside that it IS the same.
It will sound the same because the sound that is played back will have the
same frequency response, radiation pattern, loudness, and position in the
room as the "real thing" did when Mr. Peterson actually was playing it.

So what? Is there a lesson here somewhere that can be applied to audio? Er,
well, yes of course. Let's try to do this thing with speakers instead of a
player piano. I am going to close-mike the piano while he plays, with some
high quality microphones and even do it with some separation between the low
and high keys so that I can delineate their spread. Sometimes even that is
not necessary, because we don't really hear that in a live situation, we
just hear the sound board coming out of the top and reflected from the
raised lid, but never mind for now, just suppose that we have recorded the
piano on digital, OK?

OMG, this recording contains NO information about where the piano is, or the
multiplicity of reverberant effects from all directions that it made in the
room, NONE of it. What's a body to do?

We plow ahead, undeterred. What the hell do we do with this recording, now
that we have it? Play it back "accurately" as is current engineering
thought, or go for "realism" so that it sounds like the piano is right there
in the room with you?

The "accuracy" team puts a speaker where the piano was when it was recorded
and aims it toward the listener. This speaker is perfect - flat frequency
response, no distortion, time aligned, the works. But somehow, it just
doesn't sound the same. What is the difference? What more can we do than
play the sound back with perfect accuracy?

Well, if Jens Blauert, Mark Davis, Amar Bose, Art Benade, Gary Eickmeier and
many others are right, it is because the playback does not have the same
radiation pattern as the original piano. So the theory is, if we could
figure out how the piano makes sound into the room - what frequency
response, radiation pattern, direct to reflected ratio, and so on, the
original had, and we could approximate that in the speaker or speakers, then
it would HAVE to sound the same. There is no more that we can do with this
signal that is audible, than play it back with the same response, rad pat,
etc etc.

Is there something in this allegory that can be applied to the general
situation, and maybe show a path to some improvement in our playback
systems? We saw that if we could model the playback spatial qualities after
the real acoustic event, it would sound more real, and that if we paid no
attention to those characteristics or didn't know about them or beleive
them, then it would emphatically sound different from the original.

Yes, I think there are some very valid and very important lessons there. It
has to do with theories of reproduction, models, what is audible about sound
in rooms - whether there is anything more scientific we can do than have
preferences for this or that.

If only someone would come along and put it all together for us...

Gary Eickmeier

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KH KH is offline
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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

On 4/21/2013 7:04 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
In the previous thread about models for how stereo works, why it doesn't
sound more realistic, whether the recorded signal contains enough
information to reconstruct the performance in another room, and so on, the
discussion gets confused with personalities, experience with different
systems, taste vs something more scientific, theories vs hypotheses, and on
and on until the whole discussion skids to a halt and nothing is transmitted
or received. Well, I am here now to change all that.


OoooKay...

snip

Suppose that you just love Oscar Peterson's jazz piano playing. While he was
still with us, he made some recordings on a player piano like the Yamaha. It
records every keystroke, every pressure on the keys, perfectly, so that on
playback it is the same as when it was recorded. So imagine that you had one
of these pianos and invited him over to play and record same. He sits down
and plays. He leaves, later dies.

It is a tautology that if you play the recording of his keystrokes on the
same piano in the same room it will be a perfect reproduction. I think this
one will survive even Dick Pierce.


One could niggle about the effect of Oscar sitting there as an absorber,
environmental parameters being held constant, etc. but ok...

But why exactly will it sound the same? I mean beside that it IS the same.


Ah, but there *is* no "beside". It is the same. There is no need for
further deconstruction to identify what makes it what it is. It's an
identity, not a tautology, logically.

It will sound the same because the sound that is played back will have the
same frequency response, radiation pattern, loudness, and position in the
room as the "real thing" did when Mr. Peterson actually was playing it.


AND, and it's real big AND, the performance being "replayed" is exactly
the same. No transformations, no transductions, no approximations, just
the identical performance.


So what? Is there a lesson here somewhere that can be applied to audio? Er,
well, yes of course. Let's try to do this thing with speakers instead of a
player piano.


And here is where you enter the realm of approximations and errors. And
the *performance* you provide will be very different than the original.

I am going to close-mike the piano while he plays, with some
high quality microphones and even do it with some separation between the low
and high keys so that I can delineate their spread. Sometimes even that is
not necessary, because we don't really hear that in a live situation, we
just hear the sound board coming out of the top and reflected from the
raised lid, but never mind for now, just suppose that we have recorded the
piano on digital, OK?


OK, we have close mike'd the soundboard, with FR and radiation pattern
associated with whatever mikes we used, and we ignored the reflected
sound from the lid. Ok.


OMG, this recording contains NO information about where the piano is, or the
multiplicity of reverberant effects from all directions that it made in the
room, NONE of it. What's a body to do?


Plod along flippantly?

We plow ahead, undeterred. What the hell do we do with this recording, now
that we have it? Play it back "accurately" as is current engineering
thought, or go for "realism" so that it sounds like the piano is right there
in the room with you?

The "accuracy" team puts a speaker where the piano was when it was recorded
and aims it toward the listener. This speaker is perfect - flat frequency
response, no distortion, time aligned, the works. But somehow, it just
doesn't sound the same. What is the difference? What more can we do than
play the sound back with perfect accuracy?


You are playing back a "performance" that is missing a lot of the
original data for starters, so it MUST sound different. So why does an
acoustical performance that has been electromechanically transduced,
frequency limited, digitized, D/A converted, amplified and
electromechanically transduced sound different on playback? Because
irrespective the playback model, the *performance* will be significantly
different.


Well, if Jens Blauert, Mark Davis, Amar Bose, Art Benade, Gary Eickmeier and
many others are right, it is because the playback does not have the same
radiation pattern as the original piano.


That's ONE of the problems, yes. An integral part of which is the lack
of ability to *record* "radiation pattern". This is the essential
predicate to re-establishing the same radiation pattern on playback
(were we physically/mechanically able to do so). And, we don't.

3-D pattern, 2-D signal.

So the theory is, if we could
figure out how the piano makes sound into the room - what frequency
response, radiation pattern, direct to reflected ratio, and so on, the
original had, and we could approximate that in the speaker or speakers,


If we could RECORD using techniques that would capture all of the
information needed to reconstruct the identical frequency response,
radiation pattern, locations, and sound pressure, AND you could create a
speaker system with the identical radiation pattern as the piano, THEN:

then
it would HAVE to sound the same.


It would sound very similar, not the same. You could likely make it
sound identical within the limits of listener perception. The
prerequisites, however, are daunting to say the least.

There is no more that we can do with this
signal that is audible, than play it back with the same response, rad pat,
etc etc.


But, of course, you can't actually do this.

Is there something in this allegory that can be applied to the general
situation, and maybe show a path to some improvement in our playback
systems?


Yes, we saw that a new paradigm in recording technology would be needed
as a prerequisite.

We saw that if we could model the playback spatial qualities after
the real acoustic event,


Constrained to the *original* venue, with a single instrument. If that
player piano was in my living room, it absolutely would sound like a
completely different performance than the original. This is a very real
constraint that is highly variable, and outside the control of recording
engineers and speaker manufacturers.

it would sound more real, and that if we paid no
attention to those characteristics or didn't know about them or beleive
them, then it would emphatically sound different from the original.


No, you asserted this to be true, without constraints. Yes, with a
perfect recording (e.g. the player piano recording) and a perfectly
accurate transducer (i.e. the player piano), and perfect placement of
that transducer, you can exactly recreate the performance. There is no
argument, from anyone I'm aware of, that this is very true. We all get
that. We all get it that this is what you're trying to accomplish; that
this is what your Model is all about.

But outside of the severely constrained example you provide, there is no
perfect recording - nothing even remotely close - and there is no
perfect transducer.

You said above "...if we could figure out how the piano makes sound into
the room - what frequency response, radiation pattern, direct to
reflected ratio, and so on,...", but that's not even a fraction of the
problems in implementing your model. How do you record the radiation
pattern? How do you design *A* speaker system with the same radiation
pattern of each recorded instrument (or orchestra)? How do you control
for vastly different listening rooms?

And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording stage.

There are major compromises necessary at every stage of the recording
and reproduction process that preclude, with current technology and
methods, doing what your model suggests. These compromises affect all
of us. We choose to focus our attention on the areas of reproduction
that are most important for our enjoyment, and our sense of realism.
You clearly think "spaciousness" is paramount, and you forgive many less
realistic attributes (faults in my model) of systems designed to
synthesize that spaciousness.

Your blind spot in this argument reminds me of something one of my
family members (a Jazz saxophonist) told me "People who don't like Jazz,
just don't understand it". Like her, you can't accept that anyone who
understands your "theory" could possibly disagree with you. Sorry, but
that just isn't the case. And no, I don't like Jazz.

What you presented as Logical Tautology was actually a grammatical
tautology.

Keith
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Audio_Empire Audio_Empire is offline
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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

In the previous thread about models for how stereo works, why it doesn't
sound more realistic, whether the recorded signal contains enough
information to reconstruct the performance in another room, and so on, the
discussion gets confused with personalities, experience with different
systems, taste vs something more scientific, theories vs hypotheses, and on
and on until the whole discussion skids to a halt and nothing is transmitted
or received. Well, I am here now to change all that.

A tautology is a statement whose truth is so obvious and undeniable that it
requires no proof. In logic, it means a statement that cannot be denied
without inconsistency. I have a simple example that might explain some
things about realism in sound reproduction.

Suppose that you just love Oscar Peterson's jazz piano playing. While he was
still with us, he made some recordings on a player piano like the Yamaha. It
records every keystroke, every pressure on the keys, perfectly, so that on
playback it is the same as when it was recorded. So imagine that you had one
of these pianos and invited him over to play and record same. He sits down
and plays. He leaves, later dies.

It is a tautology that if you play the recording of his keystrokes on the
same piano in the same room it will be a perfect reproduction. I think this
one will survive even Dick Pierce.


It might survive Dick Pierce, but it doesn't survive Audio_Empire.
Presently, the very best way of doing what you postulate, above is via
a system devised by a North Carolina computer company called Zenph.
They take a (commercial) recording of an artist and run it through a
computer program which registers each piano note played, analyzes it
for pitch, amplitude duration, and probably a number of other
parameters. The computer then turns that information into piano
keystrokes that mimic the information gleaned from the original
performance. They have then built a device that can exactly replicate
those keystrokes when placed in front of a piano (sort of like the old
vorsetzer from the late 19th, early 20th Century). They took this
player replicator to Toronto Canada to the very studio where the
recording they used was made by Gould in 1955. Not only was the studio
exactly the same, but the piano they used was the same piano as well.
They then had the piano tuned to exactly the same state of tune as
Gould's was on the recording dates. Then they invited people from the
Gould fan club to come and hear the "re-performance" of their hero's
most famous recording, the 'Goldberg Variations' by Bach. After the
performance (which was hailed by the assembled acolytes) they recorded
the performance using modern mikes for Sony SACD. I have that SACD and
I also have the original 1955 mono recording of that performance and
I have to say that, ignoring the sonic attributes of either, I'd have
to say while the performances are very close, they are not exactly the
same.


But why exactly will it sound the same? I mean beside that it IS the same.
It will sound the same because the sound that is played back will have the
same frequency response, radiation pattern, loudness, and position in the
room as the "real thing" did when Mr. Peterson actually was playing it.


To a certain extent yes, if we ignore the difference in accuracy
between Peterson's original playing and your Yamaha Disklavier's
registration of that playing. It's not all that accurate, believe me.
Like It's 19th century forebearer, the Vorsetzer, The Disklavier makes
keystroke "recordings" that are close enough to give lifelike and even
thrilling piano concerts right in one's own home. In fact, had I the
room in my home, I would have bought a grand piano and had a
Disklavier installed in it years ago! But that doesn't say that I
believe the system to make perfect registrations of a player's
performance.

So what? Is there a lesson here somewhere that can be applied to audio? Er,
well, yes of course. Let's try to do this thing with speakers instead of a
player piano. I am going to close-mike the piano while he plays, with some
high quality microphones and even do it with some separation between the low
and high keys so that I can delineate their spread. Sometimes even that is
not necessary, because we don't really hear that in a live situation, we
just hear the sound board coming out of the top and reflected from the
raised lid, but never mind for now, just suppose that we have recorded the
piano on digital, OK?


Not OK. Why not mike the SPACE that the piano occupies rather than the
piano. And that idea of "some separation between low and high keys" is
wrong in every way, Gary, and you should know this. The type of miking
that you seem to be advocating here will result in a piano 12 ft wide
with none of the venue ambience that gives a piano its fulsome sound.

OMG, this recording contains NO information about where the piano is, or the
multiplicity of reverberant effects from all directions that it made in the
room, NONE of it. What's a body to do?


That's better. You were setting up bad example on purpose for
illustrative purposes. Good boy!

We plow ahead, undeterred. What the hell do we do with this recording, now
that we have it? Play it back "accurately" as is current engineering
thought, or go for "realism" so that it sounds like the piano is right there
in the room with you?

The "accuracy" team puts a speaker where the piano was when it was recorded
and aims it toward the listener. This speaker is perfect - flat frequency
response, no distortion, time aligned, the works. But somehow, it just
doesn't sound the same. What is the difference? What more can we do than
play the sound back with perfect accuracy?

Well, if Jens Blauert, Mark Davis, Amar Bose, Art Benade, Gary Eickmeier and
many others are right, it is because the playback does not have the same
radiation pattern as the original piano. So the theory is, if we could
figure out how the piano makes sound into the room - what frequency
response, radiation pattern, direct to reflected ratio, and so on, the
original had, and we could approximate that in the speaker or speakers, then
it would HAVE to sound the same. There is no more that we can do with this
signal that is audible, than play it back with the same response, rad pat,
etc etc.


I don't agree with Amar Bose and others here (I have always thought
Dr. Bose was a bit of a quack and snake-oil salesman, and his products
have always been a triumph of marketing over substance). Bose might
have a point if recordings were designed to bring a performance into
one's listening room. They're not. At best, they are designed to
transport us, the listeners, to the venue where the performance took
place, and at worse they are designed just to allow the listener to
merely hear all the instruments without any thought of a soundstage or
any venue ambience. The microphone, correctly used, captures the space
that the instrument or ensemble occupies. If all you want is the
instrument sound. you might as well Frap (use contact mikes) all the
instruments and be done with it. I've heard that done... I don't want
to hear it again!

Is there something in this allegory that can be applied to the general
situation, and maybe show a path to some improvement in our playback
systems? We saw that if we could model the playback spatial qualities after
the real acoustic event, it would sound more real, and that if we paid no
attention to those characteristics or didn't know about them or beleive
them, then it would emphatically sound different from the original.


Your conclusion is faulty because it's based on facts not in evidence.
We do not see any evidence that proves to us that if we could model
the playback spatial qualities of the instruments after the real
acoustic event that it would result in more realistic sound from our
stereo systems. It's quite a leap in logic to go from an example of
someone like Oscar Peterson playing on a Disklavier and then playing
that Disklavier on the same piano in the same space and sounding
identical to the real performance, and then somehow transferring that
(mostly) truism to a performance in a living room playing a commercial
recording. IOW, your Oscar Peterson example proves only that Oscar
Peterson sounds like Oscar Peterson when playing the same piano that
he played before, Whether he plays in person or via an accurate player
piano device. It does not prove or even infer that this experience is
transferrable to your ideas about sound reproduction.

Even if we could prove that what you postulate is true, it's simply
not doable. Every recording is different and each brings it's own set
of acoustic parameters to the table. Short of using some technology
that embeds digital information about the acoustic signature of the
recording being played in that recording. And having done that,
playing said recording and data back through some system that can,
somehow, physically rearrange the room and speakers to conform to
those embedded parameters, I don't see how it could even be
implemented.

Yes, I think there are some very valid and very important lessons there. It
has to do with theories of reproduction, models, what is audible about sound
in rooms - whether there is anything more scientific we can do than have
preferences for this or that.

If only someone would come along and put it all together for us...


Gary, all of that research has been done. In the 1930's Bell Labs did
experiments with up to THIRTY channels of sound (they couldn't record
30 channels in those days, so they had musicians in a soundproof room
with 30 microphones feeding 30 speakers in another room). They'd move
speakers and change the room around a thousand different ways trying
to get what we would call a holographic sonic image of the musicians
playing in that other room. Out of these experiments came the final
realization (after continuing to remove mikes and speakers one at a
time) that two channels and two microphones and two speakers were
actually ideal for stereo.

Gary, don't you think that If the Bose's concept of "direct-reflecting
Sound" had any real merit beyond its marketing appeal, that it would
have gained some traction in the industry? By that I mean don't you
think that some others company would have, in the ensuing years,
copied Bose's principle to make similar, competing products? Yet in
the almost 45 years since the 901's first broke cover, no one has ever
tried to replicate Dr. Bose's product or use any of his concepts in
other products.

BTW have you ever heard the MBL Radialstahler 101 or the X-Treme?
These speakers (as closely as possible with current technology) mimic
the physics ideal of the perfect loudspeaker being a pulsating sphere.
The MBLs are (mostly) omnidirectional and yet they throw pinpoint
images. They are among the best loudspeakers I''ve ever heard. But
then so are the latest Wilson Alexandrias as well and they are just a
set of cones in boxes. And the M-L CLX is the most transparent
loudspeaker I've ever heard. There are lots of paths to audio nirvana
it seems. All of them out of my reach...... 8^)

Audio_Empire

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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

KH wrote:

Keith -

Thanks for an interesting discussion - once again - I know that we both care
very much about this subject, so I hope you will stay with me for a few
excruciatiing further comments


That's ONE of the problems, yes. An integral part of which is the
lack of ability to *record* "radiation pattern". This is the essential
predicate to re-establishing the same radiation pattern on playback
(were we physically/mechanically able to do so). And, we don't.


OK, but, as you saw previously, we can synthesize, or approximate it on
playback

3-D pattern, 2-D signal.


Back into the D's for a minute: We don't usually record height, because that
is not real important in most music. It is just the width and depth that I
am concerned with. The width part is obvious, but the depth, as AE has
mentioned, is more of a learned response based on the loudness and sinking
back into the reverberance of the recorded room. However, we also
"synthesize" the depth part by placing the speakers in our 3D space of our
room, well away from all walls, and then - in my concept - by reflecting a
large part of the output from the front wall of the room. This has to do
with how sound in rooms differs from sound outdoors or anechoically. When a
source is played in a room we get a lot more information about its
localization than if we had only the direct sound from that source. The
reflection patterns set up a sort of XYZ coordinate on the sound event that
gives an auditory event more information to go on, especially if we can move
around, turn the head, etc. Short version - we can tell if the speakers are
out into the room in OUR 3D space or up against the wall.



If we could RECORD using techniques that would capture all of the
information needed to reconstruct the identical frequency response,
radiation pattern, locations, and sound pressure, AND you could
create a speaker system with the identical radiation pattern as the
piano, THEN:


It would sound very similar, not the same. You could likely make it
sound identical within the limits of listener perception. The
prerequisites, however, are daunting to say the least.






Constrained to the *original* venue, with a single instrument. If
that player piano was in my living room, it absolutely would sound
like a completely different performance than the original. This is a
very real constraint that is highly variable, and outside the control
of recording engineers and speaker manufacturers.


You said above "...if we could figure out how the piano makes sound
into the room - what frequency response, radiation pattern, direct to
reflected ratio, and so on,...", but that's not even a fraction of the
problems in implementing your model. How do you record the radiation
pattern? How do you design *A* speaker system with the same radiation
pattern of each recorded instrument (or orchestra)? How do you
control for vastly different listening rooms?


OK, true enough, but should that stop us from pursuing an improvement, an
enhancement to the playback that could make the limited info in a commercial
recording sound more real, more like live music?

All I was trying to establish with the tautology was that the spatial nature
of the original is an important, AUDIBLE part of the reproduction problem.
One that perhaps has been ignored in conventional stereo theory - you know,
the diagram of how stereo works that shows just two speakers and a head, in
an equilateral triangle.

In the model of reproduction that I want to mimic the live model more
closely, we are simply making an estimate, an educated guess, on the most
important parts of what a typical live sound field's spatial nature is like,
and trying to get closer to that in the reproduction. The answer to AE's
questions about recordings is that only the best recordings contain in
addition to the direct sound from the orchestra the early reflected and a
touch of the reverberant sound of the venue, just enough to give your
playback the "sound" of the original if you can somehow array those recorded
sounds spatially in your own room in a similar way as in the original. If
the engineer had recorded only the direct sounds by close-miking everything
then there would be no real space in the recording. He might get away with
synthesizing it electronically, but we would probably be onto him with the
best playback systems.

In my big theory about how exactly to build the playback model, the
positioning of the speakers is very important so that the stronger reflected
output will be more of a neutral canvas on which the recorded reflected
sound can be arrayed, or painted, if the recording contains these delayed
signals. If it does not contain them, the model does NOT make fake ones as
you seem to be suspicious of. That part is very hard to explain to people
the first time around, but believe me, I do not like synthesized electronic
enhancement of any sort to "fake" a night club, rock arena, concert hall, or
anything else. EVERYTHING in my playback model comes from the recorded
signals, the attempt being to just present this more realistically according
to what we know about sound in rooms.

And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording
stage.
There are major compromises necessary at every stage of the recording
and reproduction process that preclude, with current technology and
methods, doing what your model suggests. These compromises affect all
of us. We choose to focus our attention on the areas of reproduction
that are most important for our enjoyment, and our sense of realism.
You clearly think "spaciousness" is paramount, and you forgive many
less realistic attributes (faults in my model) of systems designed to
synthesize that spaciousness.


I hear you! And I hope everyone realizes that my ideas are of interest only
to those of us who are after this ultimate reproduction experience, and that
our wives and children may not care or even perceive any of it.

Your blind spot in this argument reminds me of something one of my
family members (a Jazz saxophonist) told me "People who don't like
Jazz, just don't understand it". Like her, you can't accept that
anyone who understands your "theory" could possibly disagree with
you. Sorry, but that just isn't the case. And no, I don't like Jazz.

What you presented as Logical Tautology was actually a grammatical
tautology.

Keith


Well, if you could give me just a teensy bit of credit that I do not
actually have a blind spot to any part of it, because I have been studying
it for some 30 years, doing it in my own system, and trying to find fault
with it, but it holds up to everything I have read and heard. I know full
well that it is hard to explain. I had to read the original Bose research
paper a couple dozen times before I understood it, but I finally "got" the
point about the difference between the spatial and the temporal and was able
to separate those out in my mind and use them in my tale. The readers of my
paper at the AES could not understand that, and like many others were
confused by the difference in size between a home listening room and the
real concert hall, saying that the model couldn't work because of that
difference. That is the hardest part to get through, they not seeing that
they have the same problem, but that they can still do something about the
spatial part to make it sound better, then address the physical size part by
simply building a bigger listening room!

As I asked Arny Krueger to do, it is possible to analyze all of the parts of
the listening experience - the audible parts - and examine just what is
happening to them as we translate this experience from the redording to the
reproduction. If we could get all of the spatial, spectral, and temporal
aspects of the experience to be identical, then we would "be there." And you
are correct, we cannot do that in the field-type system, but it is for
acoustical reasons and not so much about not being able to record full
periphony or all of the directional effects with sufficient channels.

Gary Eickmeier

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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:


Oh boy. A lot here to respond to. Is it OK if I edit a little and cut to the
chase?

It might survive Dick Pierce, but it doesn't survive Audio_Empire.
Presently, the very best way of doing what you postulate, above is via
a system devised by a North Carolina computer company called Zenph.
They take a (commercial) recording of an artist and run it through a
computer program which registers each piano note played, analyzes it
for pitch, amplitude duration, and probably a number of other
parameters. The computer then turns that information into piano
keystrokes that mimic the information gleaned from the original
performance. They have then built a device that can exactly replicate
those keystrokes when placed in front of a piano (sort of like the old
vorsetzer from the late 19th, early 20th Century). They took this
player replicator to Toronto Canada to the very studio where the
recording they used was made by Gould in 1955. Not only was the studio
exactly the same, but the piano they used was the same piano as well.
They then had the piano tuned to exactly the same state of tune as
Gould's was on the recording dates. Then they invited people from the
Gould fan club to come and hear the "re-performance" of their hero's
most famous recording, the 'Goldberg Variations' by Bach. After the
performance (which was hailed by the assembled acolytes) they recorded
the performance using modern mikes for Sony SACD. I have that SACD and
I also have the original 1955 mono recording of that performance and
I have to say that, ignoring the sonic attributes of either, I'd have
to say while the performances are very close, they are not exactly the
same.


Yes, that is what I was talking about. I have the Oscar Peterson CD of the
recording of his performance.






I don't agree with Amar Bose and others here (I have always thought
Dr. Bose was a bit of a quack and snake-oil salesman, and his products
have always been a triumph of marketing over substance). Bose might
have a point if recordings were designed to bring a performance into
one's listening room. They're not. At best, they are designed to
transport us, the listeners, to the venue where the performance took
place, and at worse they are designed just to allow the listener to
merely hear all the instruments without any thought of a soundstage or
any venue ambience. The microphone, correctly used, captures the space
that the instrument or ensemble occupies. If all you want is the
instrument sound. you might as well Frap (use contact mikes) all the
instruments and be done with it. I've heard that done... I don't want
to hear it again!


This is a gross misread of the Bose research and everything I have said
about the philosophy of what it is we are doing with the process. It was
William Snow, one of those Bell Labs researchers, who said that the object
of the binaural system is to transport the listener to the original space,
and of the stereophonic system to transport the sound to the listener's
room. You asked in your original post in the previous thread, why doesn't it
sound like they are right there in your room? My statement is that it is
indeed possible for it to sound like they are right there in front of you,
while at the same time getting your room to sound more like the recorded
space to give it more of the "flavor" of the recorded acoustic. That is a
big pill to swallow, but I'm afraid it is the best we can do, because of the
central recording problem, and because we simply cannot make a room sound
larger by playing a recording of a larger room within it.

Is there something in this allegory that can be applied to the
general situation, and maybe show a path to some improvement in our
playback systems? We saw that if we could model the playback spatial
qualities after the real acoustic event, it would sound more real,
and that if we paid no attention to those characteristics or didn't
know about them or beleive them, then it would emphatically sound
different from the original.


Your conclusion is faulty because it's based on facts not in evidence.
We do not see any evidence that proves to us that if we could model
the playback spatial qualities of the instruments after the real
acoustic event that it would result in more realistic sound from our
stereo systems. It's quite a leap in logic to go from an example of
someone like Oscar Peterson playing on a Disklavier and then playing
that Disklavier on the same piano in the same space and sounding
identical to the real performance, and then somehow transferring that
(mostly) truism to a performance in a living room playing a commercial
recording. IOW, your Oscar Peterson example proves only that Oscar
Peterson sounds like Oscar Peterson when playing the same piano that
he played before, Whether he plays in person or via an accurate player
piano device. It does not prove or even infer that this experience is
transferrable to your ideas about sound reproduction.


If you do not agree that spatial characteristics of sound are audible, then
I am at a loss how to proceed.

Even if we could prove that what you postulate is true, it's simply
not doable. Every recording is different and each brings it's own set
of acoustic parameters to the table. Short of using some technology
that embeds digital information about the acoustic signature of the
recording being played in that recording. And having done that,
playing said recording and data back through some system that can,
somehow, physically rearrange the room and speakers to conform to
those embedded parameters, I don't see how it could even be
implemented.


So what is your solution to all that? You have the same problem I do, but
have not any answer. You certainly can't reproduce those qualities by
ignoring the problem and playing everything with a direct field.


Gary, all of that research has been done. In the 1930's Bell Labs did
experiments with up to THIRTY channels of sound (they couldn't record
30 channels in those days, so they had musicians in a soundproof room
with 30 microphones feeding 30 speakers in another room). They'd move
speakers and change the room around a thousand different ways trying
to get what we would call a holographic sonic image of the musicians
playing in that other room. Out of these experiments came the final
realization (after continuing to remove mikes and speakers one at a
time) that two channels and two microphones and two speakers were
actually ideal for stereo.


No, not "ideal," just the most practical approximation for commercial use.
And yes, as I have mentioned, the pioneers knew some things about stereo
that we have since forgotten.

Gary, don't you think that If the Bose's concept of "direct-reflecting
Sound" had any real merit beyond its marketing appeal, that it would
have gained some traction in the industry? By that I mean don't you
think that some others company would have, in the ensuing years,
copied Bose's principle to make similar, competing products? Yet in
the almost 45 years since the 901's first broke cover, no one has ever
tried to replicate Dr. Bose's product or use any of his concepts in
other products.

BTW have you ever heard the MBL Radialstahler 101 or the X-Treme?
These speakers (as closely as possible with current technology) mimic
the physics ideal of the perfect loudspeaker being a pulsating sphere.
The MBLs are (mostly) omnidirectional and yet they throw pinpoint
images. They are among the best loudspeakers I''ve ever heard. But
then so are the latest Wilson Alexandrias as well and they are just a
set of cones in boxes. And the M-L CLX is the most transparent
loudspeaker I've ever heard. There are lots of paths to audio nirvana
it seems. All of them out of my reach...... 8^)

Audio_Empire


OK, first you poo poo the Bose concept of a combination of direct and
reflected sound, then you point out the best reproduction you have heard,
from the omnidirectional MBL! Why do you think the MBL sounds the way it
does? And no, it has nothing to do with "perfect pulsating spheres." The
Bose research project disproved that one, and I don't even know where that
concept came from, but it is bunk with no research behind it.

I do not understand your saying that you think Wilson speakers sound like
MBLs. The Martin Logans are, again, dipolar multidirectional speakers that
"splash sound all around" much like 901s and MBLs and have an equal
radiation to the rear as to the front. Those factors are what makes speakers
sound the way they do, so I propose that in essence you are agreeing with
me!

Gary Eickmeier



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Audio_Empire Audio_Empire is offline
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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

In article , KH
wrote:


And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording stage.


I'm afraid that you have hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head
with that statement, Keith. I suspect that High-End audio will largely
die with us baby-boomers and older folks. Apparently, except for a very
few, the younger generations don't view music the way our generation
views it. They might say that they love music, but what they actually do
love are the songs that belong to their generation. W'se all do that to
a certain extent, But I have friends in their 40's, 30's 20 and I know
some of their teen offspring. They don't understand my love of music.
"How come you spend tens-of thousands of dollars on playback equipment
when all you need is an iPod and a pair of ear-buds?" They don't get the
idea of playback quality at all. One friend, in his 40's, once told me
that while he could appreciate the sound from my system, he felt that he
didn't need that because he could hear what he was *interested* in with
his little pre-packaged video surround system. Depressing.

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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:


Oh boy. A lot here to respond to. Is it OK if I edit a little and cut to the
chase?

It might survive Dick Pierce, but it doesn't survive Audio_Empire.
Presently, the very best way of doing what you postulate, above is via
a system devised by a North Carolina computer company called Zenph.
They take a (commercial) recording of an artist and run it through a
computer program which registers each piano note played, analyzes it
for pitch, amplitude duration, and probably a number of other
parameters. The computer then turns that information into piano
keystrokes that mimic the information gleaned from the original
performance. They have then built a device that can exactly replicate
those keystrokes when placed in front of a piano (sort of like the old
vorsetzer from the late 19th, early 20th Century). They took this
player replicator to Toronto Canada to the very studio where the
recording they used was made by Gould in 1955. Not only was the studio
exactly the same, but the piano they used was the same piano as well.
They then had the piano tuned to exactly the same state of tune as
Gould's was on the recording dates. Then they invited people from the
Gould fan club to come and hear the "re-performance" of their hero's
most famous recording, the 'Goldberg Variations' by Bach. After the
performance (which was hailed by the assembled acolytes) they recorded
the performance using modern mikes for Sony SACD. I have that SACD and
I also have the original 1955 mono recording of that performance and
I have to say that, ignoring the sonic attributes of either, I'd have
to say while the performances are very close, they are not exactly the
same.


Yes, that is what I was talking about. I have the Oscar Peterson CD of the
recording of his performance.






I don't agree with Amar Bose and others here (I have always thought
Dr. Bose was a bit of a quack and snake-oil salesman, and his products
have always been a triumph of marketing over substance). Bose might
have a point if recordings were designed to bring a performance into
one's listening room. They're not. At best, they are designed to
transport us, the listeners, to the venue where the performance took
place, and at worse they are designed just to allow the listener to
merely hear all the instruments without any thought of a soundstage or
any venue ambience. The microphone, correctly used, captures the space
that the instrument or ensemble occupies. If all you want is the
instrument sound. you might as well Frap (use contact mikes) all the
instruments and be done with it. I've heard that done... I don't want
to hear it again!


This is a gross misread of the Bose research and everything I have said
about the philosophy of what it is we are doing with the process. It was
William Snow, one of those Bell Labs researchers, who said that the object
of the binaural system is to transport the listener to the original space,
and of the stereophonic system to transport the sound to the listener's
room.


I use the terms interchangeably, I guess, and I shouldn't do that. To me
a stereo system is supposed to open a window onto a live performance.


You asked in your original post in the previous thread, why doesn't it
sound like they are right there in your room? My statement is that it is
indeed possible for it to sound like they are right there in front of you,
while at the same time getting your room to sound more like the recorded
space to give it more of the "flavor" of the recorded acoustic. That is a
big pill to swallow, but I'm afraid it is the best we can do, because of the
central recording problem, and because we simply cannot make a room sound
larger by playing a recording of a larger room within it.


First of all the system has to sound like music. With Bose 901s, you
have one strike against you right there. 901s sound terrible (to me)
they have no highs, the bass is muddy and slow (with the equalizer.
Without the equalizer they have NO bass) and that reflected sound off
the wall is, to me incredibly annoying and unrealistic.

Is there something in this allegory that can be applied to the
general situation, and maybe show a path to some improvement in our
playback systems? We saw that if we could model the playback spatial
qualities after the real acoustic event, it would sound more real,
and that if we paid no attention to those characteristics or didn't
know about them or beleive them, then it would emphatically sound
different from the original.


Your conclusion is faulty because it's based on facts not in evidence.
We do not see any evidence that proves to us that if we could model
the playback spatial qualities of the instruments after the real
acoustic event that it would result in more realistic sound from our
stereo systems. It's quite a leap in logic to go from an example of
someone like Oscar Peterson playing on a Disklavier and then playing
that Disklavier on the same piano in the same space and sounding
identical to the real performance, and then somehow transferring that
(mostly) truism to a performance in a living room playing a commercial
recording. IOW, your Oscar Peterson example proves only that Oscar
Peterson sounds like Oscar Peterson when playing the same piano that
he played before, Whether he plays in person or via an accurate player
piano device. It does not prove or even infer that this experience is
transferrable to your ideas about sound reproduction.


If you do not agree that spatial characteristics of sound are audible, then
I am at a loss how to proceed.


I'm not saying that they aren't audible. I'm saying that recreating them
artificially is not possible.

Even if we could prove that what you postulate is true, it's simply
not doable. Every recording is different and each brings it's own set
of acoustic parameters to the table. Short of using some technology
that embeds digital information about the acoustic signature of the
recording being played in that recording. And having done that,
playing said recording and data back through some system that can,
somehow, physically rearrange the room and speakers to conform to
those embedded parameters, I don't see how it could even be
implemented.


So what is your solution to all that? You have the same problem I do, but
have not any answer. You certainly can't reproduce those qualities by
ignoring the problem and playing everything with a direct field.


You listen to the stereo system that you like and be happy that you can
come THAT close. Frankly, I'm pretty happy with what we CAN do. I wish
the industry would catch-up with me, but they have gone in another
direction entirely! Properly recorded stereo sounds magical to me, I
can turn out the lights (with a proper recording) and point to each and
every instrument in the ensemble with pin-point accuracy. I can hear the
highest highs (that my old ears can respond to) and the lowest lows. The
midrange is very realistic and distortion-free. I'm content with that
because I know what's possible and what's impossible.


Gary, all of that research has been done. In the 1930's Bell Labs did
experiments with up to THIRTY channels of sound (they couldn't record
30 channels in those days, so they had musicians in a soundproof room
with 30 microphones feeding 30 speakers in another room). They'd move
speakers and change the room around a thousand different ways trying
to get what we would call a holographic sonic image of the musicians
playing in that other room. Out of these experiments came the final
realization (after continuing to remove mikes and speakers one at a
time) that two channels and two microphones and two speakers were
actually ideal for stereo.


No, not "ideal," just the most practical approximation for commercial use.
And yes, as I have mentioned, the pioneers knew some things about stereo
that we have since forgotten.

Gary, don't you think that If the Bose's concept of "direct-reflecting
Sound" had any real merit beyond its marketing appeal, that it would
have gained some traction in the industry? By that I mean don't you
think that some others company would have, in the ensuing years,
copied Bose's principle to make similar, competing products? Yet in
the almost 45 years since the 901's first broke cover, no one has ever
tried to replicate Dr. Bose's product or use any of his concepts in
other products.

BTW have you ever heard the MBL Radialstahler 101 or the X-Treme?
These speakers (as closely as possible with current technology) mimic
the physics ideal of the perfect loudspeaker being a pulsating sphere.
The MBLs are (mostly) omnidirectional and yet they throw pinpoint
images. They are among the best loudspeakers I''ve ever heard. But
then so are the latest Wilson Alexandrias as well and they are just a
set of cones in boxes. And the M-L CLX is the most transparent
loudspeaker I've ever heard. There are lots of paths to audio nirvana
it seems. All of them out of my reach...... 8^)

Audio_Empire


OK, first you poo poo the Bose concept of a combination of direct and
reflected sound, then you point out the best reproduction you have heard,
from the omnidirectional MBL! Why do you think the MBL sounds the way it
does? And no, it has nothing to do with "perfect pulsating spheres." The
Bose research project disproved that one, and I don't even know where that
concept came from, but it is bunk with no research behind it.


Actually it is true the perfect loudspeaker would be a pulsating (truly
omnidirectional) sphere and it would also (here's the difficult part) be
infinitely small. This is a mathematical model, and it can't be
researched as such except on a theoretical level.

I do not understand your saying that you think Wilson speakers sound like
MBLs.


Well, I can understand your confusion since I never said that. I said
that both the MBLs and the Wilson Alexandria XLF were AMONG the best
speakers I've ever heard (obviously, for different reasons). I also said
that the Martin-Logan CLXs are the most transparent speakers I've ever
heard and those are the one's I'd choose if money were no object. No
speaker does everything well, so this speaker might impress me in one
way, and that speaker might impress me another way.

BTW, MBL 101s only work in giant rooms. In the average 14 X 18 living
room they don't work at all.



The Martin Logans are, again, dipolar multidirectional speakers that
"splash sound all around" much like 901s and MBLs and have an equal
radiation to the rear as to the front. Those factors are what makes speakers
sound the way they do, so I propose that in essence you are agreeing with
me!

Gary Eickmeier


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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article , KH
wrote:


And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording
stage.


I'm afraid that you have hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial
head with that statement, Keith. I suspect that High-End audio will
largely die with us baby-boomers and older folks. Apparently, except
for a very few, the younger generations don't view music the way our
generation views it. They might say that they love music, but what
they actually do love are the songs that belong to their generation.
W'se all do that to a certain extent, But I have friends in their
40's, 30's 20 and I know some of their teen offspring. They don't
understand my love of music. "How come you spend tens-of thousands of
dollars on playback equipment when all you need is an iPod and a pair
of ear-buds?" They don't get the idea of playback quality at all. One
friend, in his 40's, once told me that while he could appreciate the
sound from my system, he felt that he didn't need that because he
could hear what he was *interested* in with his little pre-packaged
video surround system. Depressing.


When I was a kid I got my first tape recorder, a stereo one, I was maybe 15.
We messed around with playing our voices backwards, doing skits, recording
some of our 45s Then I found out about stereo tapes and wanted to try that.
My uncle willed me his "hi fi" console, which had an RCA jack input, so I
used that as one channel and the speakers in the recorder as the other. All
I knew was that there were some sounds over there, and some over here, and
that was stereo. Maybe the louder you played it the more real it sounded.

Later when I was in High School, one fine lunch period a couple of musicians
came into the gym and started playing some examples of some jazz pieces. I
don't remember but I think it was a bass and some drums. I just remember
that I was transfixed. Couldn't move, couldn't go on to lunch or class. I
guess our family didn't go to good, live music much, or didn't take us kids.
Later yet, I remember going up to the record department of J.L. Hudson's and
listening to Ahmad Jamal for as long as they would let me. Everyone else was
listening to Elvis and the new Rock 'n Roll, and I was discovering Ella
Fitzgerald on the radio. Didn't know who she was, didn't even know she was a
black woman, just recognized her voice every time and sat transfixed. I
thought "who is that?" and had to seek her out and find some tapes. Made a
fool of myself trying to give a speech about her in speech class. But one of
my friends was taken with my enthusiasm and went with me to a concert in the
Ford Auditorium in Detroit, on the evening of our graduation. We sat in the
front row. All she had for accompaniment was a piano trio. She had the
audience in the palm of her hand for an hour and a half. When it was over,
we exited around the back of the stage after the curtain came down, and as
we walked out there she was coming off the stage. Her eyesight was not the
best and of course she didn't need to wear her glasses to sing, so she
thought we were just some backstage people, and we heard her gushing "They
were so kind, so kind." We were so kind! She sang some of the Gershwin
songbook for us! It was at the peak of her career, 1962! I saw it, I heard
her live right in front of me! OMG!

Later in my many musical episodes I met and got autographs from Ella, Oscar
Peterson, Ray Brown, Count Basie, McCoy Tyner, Nat Adderly at his home here
in Lakeland - he helped me find a trio to play at my wedding 16 years ago.
He bemoaned the state of jazz appreciation in this country. So do I.

Gary Eickmeier

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Default Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology

On 4/22/2013 7:34 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote:

Keith -

Thanks for an interesting discussion - once again - I know that we both care
very much about this subject, so I hope you will stay with me for a few
excruciatiing further comments


That's ONE of the problems, yes. An integral part of which is the
lack of ability to *record* "radiation pattern". This is the essential
predicate to re-establishing the same radiation pattern on playback
(were we physically/mechanically able to do so). And, we don't.


OK, but, as you saw previously, we can synthesize, or approximate it on
playback

3-D pattern, 2-D signal.


While I have read this news group for some time and Keith can surely
answer for himself, I don't think the 3-Ds he is referring to are
spacial dimensions. The three are time, amplitude and direction. Of
these the microphone captures only time and amplitude which are are the
contents of the 2-D signal.

Don


Back into the D's for a minute: We don't usually record height, because that
is not real important in most music. It is just the width and depth that I
am concerned with. The width part is obvious, but the depth, as AE has
mentioned, is more of a learned response based on the loudness and sinking
back into the reverberance of the recorded room. However, we also
"synthesize" the depth part by placing the speakers in our 3D space of our
room, well away from all walls, and then - in my concept - by reflecting a
large part of the output from the front wall of the room. This has to do
with how sound in rooms differs from sound outdoors or anechoically. When a
source is played in a room we get a lot more information about its
localization than if we had only the direct sound from that source. The
reflection patterns set up a sort of XYZ coordinate on the sound event that
gives an auditory event more information to go on, especially if we can move
around, turn the head, etc. Short version - we can tell if the speakers are
out into the room in OUR 3D space or up against the wall.



If we could RECORD using techniques that would capture all of the
information needed to reconstruct the identical frequency response,
radiation pattern, locations, and sound pressure, AND you could
create a speaker system with the identical radiation pattern as the
piano, THEN:


It would sound very similar, not the same. You could likely make it
sound identical within the limits of listener perception. The
prerequisites, however, are daunting to say the least.






Constrained to the *original* venue, with a single instrument. If
that player piano was in my living room, it absolutely would sound
like a completely different performance than the original. This is a
very real constraint that is highly variable, and outside the control
of recording engineers and speaker manufacturers.


You said above "...if we could figure out how the piano makes sound
into the room - what frequency response, radiation pattern, direct to
reflected ratio, and so on,...", but that's not even a fraction of the
problems in implementing your model. How do you record the radiation
pattern? How do you design *A* speaker system with the same radiation
pattern of each recorded instrument (or orchestra)? How do you
control for vastly different listening rooms?


OK, true enough, but should that stop us from pursuing an improvement, an
enhancement to the playback that could make the limited info in a commercial
recording sound more real, more like live music?

All I was trying to establish with the tautology was that the spatial nature
of the original is an important, AUDIBLE part of the reproduction problem.
One that perhaps has been ignored in conventional stereo theory - you know,
the diagram of how stereo works that shows just two speakers and a head, in
an equilateral triangle.

In the model of reproduction that I want to mimic the live model more
closely, we are simply making an estimate, an educated guess, on the most
important parts of what a typical live sound field's spatial nature is like,
and trying to get closer to that in the reproduction. The answer to AE's
questions about recordings is that only the best recordings contain in
addition to the direct sound from the orchestra the early reflected and a
touch of the reverberant sound of the venue, just enough to give your
playback the "sound" of the original if you can somehow array those recorded
sounds spatially in your own room in a similar way as in the original. If
the engineer had recorded only the direct sounds by close-miking everything
then there would be no real space in the recording. He might get away with
synthesizing it electronically, but we would probably be onto him with the
best playback systems.

In my big theory about how exactly to build the playback model, the
positioning of the speakers is very important so that the stronger reflected
output will be more of a neutral canvas on which the recorded reflected
sound can be arrayed, or painted, if the recording contains these delayed
signals. If it does not contain them, the model does NOT make fake ones as
you seem to be suspicious of. That part is very hard to explain to people
the first time around, but believe me, I do not like synthesized electronic
enhancement of any sort to "fake" a night club, rock arena, concert hall, or
anything else. EVERYTHING in my playback model comes from the recorded
signals, the attempt being to just present this more realistically according
to what we know about sound in rooms.

And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording
stage.
There are major compromises necessary at every stage of the recording
and reproduction process that preclude, with current technology and
methods, doing what your model suggests. These compromises affect all
of us. We choose to focus our attention on the areas of reproduction
that are most important for our enjoyment, and our sense of realism.
You clearly think "spaciousness" is paramount, and you forgive many
less realistic attributes (faults in my model) of systems designed to
synthesize that spaciousness.


I hear you! And I hope everyone realizes that my ideas are of interest only
to those of us who are after this ultimate reproduction experience, and that
our wives and children may not care or even perceive any of it.

Your blind spot in this argument reminds me of something one of my
family members (a Jazz saxophonist) told me "People who don't like
Jazz, just don't understand it". Like her, you can't accept that
anyone who understands your "theory" could possibly disagree with
you. Sorry, but that just isn't the case. And no, I don't like Jazz.

What you presented as Logical Tautology was actually a grammatical
tautology.

Keith


Well, if you could give me just a teensy bit of credit that I do not
actually have a blind spot to any part of it, because I have been studying
it for some 30 years, doing it in my own system, and trying to find fault
with it, but it holds up to everything I have read and heard. I know full
well that it is hard to explain. I had to read the original Bose research
paper a couple dozen times before I understood it, but I finally "got" the
point about the difference between the spatial and the temporal and was able
to separate those out in my mind and use them in my tale. The readers of my
paper at the AES could not understand that, and like many others were
confused by the difference in size between a home listening room and the
real concert hall, saying that the model couldn't work because of that
difference. That is the hardest part to get through, they not seeing that
they have the same problem, but that they can still do something about the
spatial part to make it sound better, then address the physical size part by
simply building a bigger listening room!

As I asked Arny Krueger to do, it is possible to analyze all of the parts of
the listening experience - the audible parts - and examine just what is
happening to them as we translate this experience from the redording to the
reproduction. If we could get all of the spatial, spectral, and temporal
aspects of the experience to be identical, then we would "be there." And you
are correct, we cannot do that in the field-type system, but it is for
acoustical reasons and not so much about not being able to record full
periphony or all of the directional effects with sufficient channels.

Gary Eickmeier

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Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:


First of all the system has to sound like music. With Bose 901s, you
have one strike against you right there. 901s sound terrible (to me)
they have no highs, the bass is muddy and slow (with the equalizer.
Without the equalizer they have NO bass) and that reflected sound off
the wall is, to me incredibly annoying and unrealistic.


This is, of course, the biggest and most frustrating stumbling block in
trying to relate my story. As soon as they get wind of my using 901s in my
system, "nanner nanner, he can't be right, he likes Bose 901s - ha ha, Bose,
no highs no lows, must be Bose." And I can sympathize with all who say that,
because they have not been demonstrated properly in about 40 years.

I opened my tale with how I discovered a tragic fault with the Bose owners
manual. It had us placing the 901s from a foot to a foot and a half from the
front and side walls. That is not just wrong, it is disaster in the making.
The only reason I can think of for them to be doing that is to make "the
public" think that they can be placed almost anywhere and give that great,
Bose spacious sound. Well, they can't, and no company can change the laws of
acoustics with an owners manual.

Long story short, I have mine 5 ft from front and side walls, and I am
incorporating a Velodyne F1800 subwoofer. My system images like a
striped-assed ape, puts out sound power like the Second Coming, and has a
power response that has no limits with any recording I have of my thousands.

Believe it or leave it, you have not heard 901s yet.

You listen to the stereo system that you like and be happy that you
can come THAT close. Frankly, I'm pretty happy with what we CAN do. I
wish the industry would catch-up with me, but they have gone in
another direction entirely! Properly recorded stereo sounds magical
to me, I can turn out the lights (with a proper recording) and point
to each and every instrument in the ensemble with pin-point accuracy.
I can hear the highest highs (that my old ears can respond to) and
the lowest lows. The midrange is very realistic and distortion-free.
I'm content with that because I know what's possible and what's
impossible.


What are you listening to again? I forgot.


BTW, MBL 101s only work in giant rooms. In the average 14 X 18 living
room they don't work at all.


That is because an omni is still a little too hot in the direct sound. You
need to back off from them a certain distance for the direct sound to go
down to something more Bose like, and live sound like.


Gary Eickmeier



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Donald White wrote:
On 4/22/2013 7:34 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote:


3-D pattern, 2-D signal.


While I have read this news group for some time and Keith can surely
answer for himself, I don't think the 3-Ds he is referring to are
spacial dimensions. The three are time, amplitude and direction. Of
these the microphone captures only time and amplitude which are are
the contents of the 2-D signal.

Don


Well, that's different! I'm sure Keith can answer for himself on this one,
but I would say that the 3D means the same as the Greek derivation of
"stereophonic," or "solid," three dimensional as opposed to flat, two
dimensional, width only.

Gary Eickmeier

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"Audio_Empire" wrote in message
...

I suspect that High-End audio will largely
die with us baby-boomers and older folks.


As you seem to define high end audio, yes. As it morphs, not so much.

Apparently, except for a very
few, the younger generations don't view music the way our generation
views it.


Just sitting down and listening to just recorded music and doing nothing
else as a preferred activity will largely die with our generation.

Listening to music has become an "and" process instead of an "or" process.
People now listen to music as they do something else, and that something
else may be the main activity that is getting their primary attention. So,
the experience is music and, and not so much music or.

They might say that they love music, but what they actually do
love are the songs that belong to their generation.


No difference there! ;-)

W'se all do that to
a certain extent, But I have friends in their 40's, 30's 20 and I know
some of their teen offspring. They don't understand my love of music.


Read what follows. What they don't follow is how you express your love of
music.

"How come you spend tens-of thousands of dollars on playback equipment
when all you need is an iPod and a pair of ear-buds?" They don't get the
idea of playback quality at all.


The error here is the lack of affirmation of the true knowledge that a good
digital player and a fine pair of headphones or earphones can be as accurate
and enveloping or even more so than the dedicated room and jillions of
dollars worth of racks and boxes of equipment.

One friend, in his 40's, once told me
that while he could appreciate the sound from my system, he felt that he
didn't need that because he could hear what he was *interested* in with
his little pre-packaged video surround system. Depressing.


The physical size and cost that equipment has to have in order to be
enveloping and accurate has decreased significantly. A Sansa Clip and a
pair of Sony XBA-2 earphones (for example) should not be pooh-poohed in the
way that many seem prone to do.


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In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Donald White wrote:
On 4/22/2013 7:34 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote:


3-D pattern, 2-D signal.


While I have read this news group for some time and Keith can surely
answer for himself, I don't think the 3-Ds he is referring to are
spacial dimensions. The three are time, amplitude and direction. Of
these the microphone captures only time and amplitude which are are
the contents of the 2-D signal.

Don


Well, that's different! I'm sure Keith can answer for himself on this one,
but I would say that the 3D means the same as the Greek derivation of
"stereophonic," or "solid," three dimensional as opposed to flat, two
dimensional, width only.

Gary Eickmeier


That's correct. Three dimensional sound has width, depth and height.
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In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article , KH
wrote:


And the biggest problem? It's "who cares?". We are a dying breed if
you hadn't noticed, and IMO high-end music reproduction likely won't
outlive us. There is simply no market for "better stereo" that would
have to be re-imagined, and would have to start at the recording
stage.


I'm afraid that you have hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial
head with that statement, Keith. I suspect that High-End audio will
largely die with us baby-boomers and older folks. Apparently, except
for a very few, the younger generations don't view music the way our
generation views it. They might say that they love music, but what
they actually do love are the songs that belong to their generation.
W'se all do that to a certain extent, But I have friends in their
40's, 30's 20 and I know some of their teen offspring. They don't
understand my love of music. "How come you spend tens-of thousands of
dollars on playback equipment when all you need is an iPod and a pair
of ear-buds?" They don't get the idea of playback quality at all. One
friend, in his 40's, once told me that while he could appreciate the
sound from my system, he felt that he didn't need that because he
could hear what he was *interested* in with his little pre-packaged
video surround system. Depressing.


When I was a kid I got my first tape recorder, a stereo one, I was maybe 15.
We messed around with playing our voices backwards, doing skits, recording
some of our 45s Then I found out about stereo tapes and wanted to try that.
My uncle willed me his "hi fi" console, which had an RCA jack input, so I
used that as one channel and the speakers in the recorder as the other. All
I knew was that there were some sounds over there, and some over here, and
that was stereo. Maybe the louder you played it the more real it sounded.

Later when I was in High School, one fine lunch period a couple of musicians
came into the gym and started playing some examples of some jazz pieces. I
don't remember but I think it was a bass and some drums. I just remember
that I was transfixed. Couldn't move, couldn't go on to lunch or class. I
guess our family didn't go to good, live music much, or didn't take us kids.
Later yet, I remember going up to the record department of J.L. Hudson's and
listening to Ahmad Jamal for as long as they would let me. Everyone else was
listening to Elvis and the new Rock 'n Roll, and I was discovering Ella
Fitzgerald on the radio. Didn't know who she was, didn't even know she was a
black woman, just recognized her voice every time and sat transfixed. I
thought "who is that?" and had to seek her out and find some tapes. Made a
fool of myself trying to give a speech about her in speech class. But one of
my friends was taken with my enthusiasm and went with me to a concert in the
Ford Auditorium in Detroit, on the evening of our graduation. We sat in the
front row. All she had for accompaniment was a piano trio. She had the
audience in the palm of her hand for an hour and a half. When it was over,
we exited around the back of the stage after the curtain came down, and as
we walked out there she was coming off the stage. Her eyesight was not the
best and of course she didn't need to wear her glasses to sing, so she
thought we were just some backstage people, and we heard her gushing "They
were so kind, so kind." We were so kind! She sang some of the Gershwin
songbook for us! It was at the peak of her career, 1962! I saw it, I heard
her live right in front of me! OMG!

Later in my many musical episodes I met and got autographs from Ella, Oscar
Peterson, Ray Brown, Count Basie, McCoy Tyner, Nat Adderly at his home here
in Lakeland - he helped me find a trio to play at my wedding 16 years ago.
He bemoaned the state of jazz appreciation in this country. So do I.

Gary Eickmeier


My story is similar. As a teen, I found a fairly new Roberts
"Crossfield" 770 (really an Akai) at an estate sale auction and
purchased it for 5 bucks (there were no other bids). I bought a
couple of cheap mikes from Layfayette Radio, mail order and went around
recording everything, especially our high-school band. I also made the
first recording ever done of Emmy Lou Harris, the country singer. She
was a high-school friend and was into aping Joan Baez in those days (boy
do I wish I'd have kept THAT tape!) I also started recording off of FM
and had a number of tapes of the famous Washington DC "Watergate
Concerts" I wish I still had them as well. FM was uncompressed and
un-limited in those days, and the radio station carrying the broadcasts
had just recently gone stereo. I had added a Knight-Kit stereo multiplex
adapter to my Eico HTF-90 FM tuner and could receive the broadcasts is
stereo.

For listening I had a two Knight-Kit 18-Watt mono integrated amplifiers
and two 12 " bass reflex speakers (EV "Wolverine" 12"") in cabinets my
dad built for me (he was an amateur cabinet maker, and a talented one).

I think I enjoyed that old system much more than I enjoyed any system
I've had since then. FM radio was filled with great music, and it
SOUNDED good too. There were lots of live concerts in DC as well. If it
wasn't the National Symphony live from the rotunda of the Natural
History museum, it was one of the President's bands (Army, Navy, Marine
Corps, Air Force) giving concerts almost any night (if they weren't
playing at a State Occasion they had little else to do).

Yeah, it's called Nostalgia.

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In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:


First of all the system has to sound like music. With Bose 901s, you
have one strike against you right there. 901s sound terrible (to me)
they have no highs, the bass is muddy and slow (with the equalizer.
Without the equalizer they have NO bass) and that reflected sound off
the wall is, to me incredibly annoying and unrealistic.


This is, of course, the biggest and most frustrating stumbling block in
trying to relate my story. As soon as they get wind of my using 901s in my
system, "nanner nanner, he can't be right, he likes Bose 901s - ha ha, Bose,
no highs no lows, must be Bose." And I can sympathize with all who say that,
because they have not been demonstrated properly in about 40 years.

I opened my tale with how I discovered a tragic fault with the Bose owners
manual. It had us placing the 901s from a foot to a foot and a half from the
front and side walls. That is not just wrong, it is disaster in the making.
The only reason I can think of for them to be doing that is to make "the
public" think that they can be placed almost anywhere and give that great,
Bose spacious sound. Well, they can't, and no company can change the laws of
acoustics with an owners manual.

Long story short, I have mine 5 ft from front and side walls, and I am
incorporating a Velodyne F1800 subwoofer. My system images like a
striped-assed ape, puts out sound power like the Second Coming, and has a
power response that has no limits with any recording I have of my thousands.

Believe it or leave it, you have not heard 901s yet.


The pair I had I tried in every configuration imaginable including
around 5 ft (and 6ft and 7 fit. At the time I lived in a loft-like place
with huge open spaces) out from any reflective surface. I never liked
them and didn't keep them long. I didn't even think that they made
decent surround speakers.

You listen to the stereo system that you like and be happy that you
can come THAT close. Frankly, I'm pretty happy with what we CAN do. I
wish the industry would catch-up with me, but they have gone in
another direction entirely! Properly recorded stereo sounds magical
to me, I can turn out the lights (with a proper recording) and point
to each and every instrument in the ensemble with pin-point accuracy.
I can hear the highest highs (that my old ears can respond to) and
the lowest lows. The midrange is very realistic and distortion-free.
I'm content with that because I know what's possible and what's
impossible.


What are you listening to again? I forgot.


Martin-Logan Vistas. And while flat-panel electrostatics can be
considered bi-polar, M-Ls are not. The curved screen focuses the back
wave in on itself so the bi-polar effect is largely lost. Even so, I was
a Magnaplanar enthusiasts for many years (still am, actually, but I
think electrostatics are just better) and though they are true bipolar
speakers they do not do what Bose 901s do (thankfully).


BTW, MBL 101s only work in giant rooms. In the average 14 X 18 living
room they don't work at all.


That is because an omni is still a little too hot in the direct sound. You
need to back off from them a certain distance for the direct sound to go
down to something more Bose like, and live sound like.


Believe me, if Bose 901s sounded ANYTHING like MBLs, I would still be
listening to them.

Everybody has different tastes. I'm not trying to impugn yours, just
demonstrate how mine differs.

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On 4/23/2013 3:18 PM, Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Donald White wrote:
On 4/22/2013 7:34 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote:


3-D pattern, 2-D signal.

While I have read this news group for some time and Keith can surely
answer for himself, I don't think the 3-Ds he is referring to are
spacial dimensions. The three are time, amplitude and direction. Of
these the microphone captures only time and amplitude which are are
the contents of the 2-D signal.

Don


Well, that's different! I'm sure Keith can answer for himself on this one,
but I would say that the 3D means the same as the Greek derivation of
"stereophonic," or "solid," three dimensional as opposed to flat, two
dimensional, width only.

Gary Eickmeier


That's correct. Three dimensional sound has width, depth and height.


Actually no, I wasn't referring to solid geometry. As Donald states,
I'm talking about time, amplitude, and direction. Hence all the
discussion surrounding vector information. A 2-D signal does not
contain directional information that is not just required, but is an
intrinsic property of a vector. Acoustic signals comprise multitudinous
vectors. It's the vector summation, filtered and transformed via the
HRTF that allows identification, aurally, of three dimensions. It's the
angular component that is excised during transduction.

Perhaps this is some of the confusion. I thought vectors would be well
understood in the discussion.

Keith

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In article ,
"Arny Krueger" wrote:

"Audio_Empire" wrote in message
...

I suspect that High-End audio will largely
die with us baby-boomers and older folks.


As you seem to define high end audio, yes. As it morphs, not so much.

Apparently, except for a very
few, the younger generations don't view music the way our generation
views it.


Just sitting down and listening to just recorded music and doing nothing
else as a preferred activity will largely die with our generation.
Listening to music has become an "and" process instead of an "or" process.
People now listen to music as they do something else, and that something
else may be the main activity that is getting their primary attention. So,
the experience is music and, and not so much music or.


And that's sad really, because listening to serious music is an
intellectual exercise. Not giving it all the attention it warrants is
like reading Spinoza or Marcel Proust while having sex. Your attention
just isn't 100% on your reading! 8^)

They might say that they love music, but what they actually do
love are the songs that belong to their generation.


No difference there! ;-)


Uh, yes there is. Pop music is (and has been for many years) mostly
about the lyrics, I.E. "poetry" with a beat. Largely speaking the melody
has been irrelevant. That's why pop music has morphed into rap and
hip-hop finally eliminating everything EXCEPT the lyrics and the beat.

W'se all do that to
a certain extent, But I have friends in their 40's, 30's 20 and I know
some of their teen offspring. They don't understand my love of music.


Read what follows. What they don't follow is how you express your love of
music.

"How come you spend tens-of thousands of dollars on playback equipment
when all you need is an iPod and a pair of ear-buds?" They don't get the
idea of playback quality at all.


The error here is the lack of affirmation of the true knowledge that a good
digital player and a fine pair of headphones or earphones can be as accurate
and enveloping or even more so than the dedicated room and jillions of
dollars worth of racks and boxes of equipment.


While that MIGHT be so, It's not their criticism at all. They don't
listen with a "good digital player" and a fine pair of headphones. They
listen with an iPod and cheap pair of earbuds.

One friend, in his 40's, once told me
that while he could appreciate the sound from my system, he felt that he
didn't need that because he could hear what he was *interested* in with
his little pre-packaged video surround system. Depressing.


The physical size and cost that equipment has to have in order to be
enveloping and accurate has decreased significantly. A Sansa Clip and a
pair of Sony XBA-2 earphones (for example) should not be pooh-poohed in the
way that many seem prone to do.


Who is pooh-poohing anything? I use an iPod occasionally to listen to
music casually, Lossless compression and Sony MDR-6s of course. But you
seem to be singularly intent on using my anecdote to reinforce your
opinion: I.E. that all high-end audio is bunk. Now I have no comment on
your opinion, because we've been there countless times, but I will say
that your interpretation wasn't the point of my post or of my friend's
comments at all. Their personal point, and my larger point was just what
you said above, before your soapbox got the better of you. I.E. that the
idea of sitting down and listening to great music (and great music comes
in all genres, classical, jazz, folk, even rock and so-called "easy
listening" (Sinatra, Bing, Steve and Eddie, etc., all doing their
interpretations of the "Great American Songbook") is passé and
therefore spending any money on equipment that would get one closer and
MORE INVOLVED in the music isn't a part of their lifestyle nor has it
any priority in their lives.

This is what is tragic. That society seems to be on it's way to the
human race becoming more Eloi-like with each successive generation.
'"Books? Yes, we have books." As they crumbled to dust in his hand.'

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On 4/23/2013 6:18 AM, Arny Krueger wrote:
"Audio_Empire" wrote in message
...

I suspect that High-End audio will largely
die with us baby-boomers and older folks.


As you seem to define high end audio, yes.


Well, yes, that goes without saying. But my definition is not
mega-buck, it's more related to need for high quality reproduction of
music - as an activity, not a background operation - in order to be
satisfied.

As it morphs, not so much.


Sorry, can't agree with you there based on my experience. I wish it
were so.

Apparently, except for a very
few, the younger generations don't view music the way our generation
views it.


Just sitting down and listening to just recorded music and doing nothing
else as a preferred activity will largely die with our generation.

Listening to music has become an "and" process instead of an "or" process.
People now listen to music as they do something else, and that something
else may be the main activity that is getting their primary attention. So,
the experience is music and, and not so much music or.


And I do the same as well - on airplanes for hours on end, and while
reviewing reams of data, etc. - but that *I* don't consider to be part
of "high-end" listening. YMMV

snip

The physical size and cost that equipment has to have in order to be
enveloping and accurate has decreased significantly. A Sansa Clip and a
pair of Sony XBA-2 earphones (for example) should not be pooh-poohed in the
way that many seem prone to do.


This is absolutely true IME, yet it hardly compares to a real full-range
system. I'm not saying that "kids" can't appreciate...yadda,
yadda,...it's just that, as you relate, the video generation never
really had the audio-only immersion that we (old guys) did (chemically
enhanced or not), and as a result just don't relate to it in the same
manner as we do.

Keith
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KH wrote:

Actually no, I wasn't referring to solid geometry. As Donald states,
I'm talking about time, amplitude, and direction. Hence all the
discussion surrounding vector information. A 2-D signal does not
contain directional information that is not just required, but is an
intrinsic property of a vector. Acoustic signals comprise
multitudinous vectors. It's the vector summation, filtered and
transformed via the HRTF that allows identification, aurally, of
three dimensions. It's the angular component that is excised during
transduction.
Perhaps this is some of the confusion. I thought vectors would be
well understood in the discussion.

Keith


So Keith Howard says there is no directional information in a stereo
recording? Just time and amplitude? Then what, pray tell, is the difference
from mono?

Gary Eickmeier

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Arny Krueger wrote:
"Audio_Empire" wrote in message
...



The error here is the lack of affirmation of the true knowledge that
a good digital player and a fine pair of headphones or earphones can
be as accurate and enveloping or even more so than the dedicated room
and jillions of dollars worth of racks and boxes of equipment.

One friend, in his 40's, once told me
that while he could appreciate the sound from my system, he felt
that he didn't need that because he could hear what he was
*interested* in with his little pre-packaged video surround system.
Depressing.


The physical size and cost that equipment has to have in order to be
enveloping and accurate has decreased significantly. A Sansa Clip
and a pair of Sony XBA-2 earphones (for example) should not be
pooh-poohed in the way that many seem prone to do.


In my fanciful Mars article, in which an imaginary trip to Mars by the AES
introduces the Martians to loudspeaker stereo rather than the only system
they had ever known, headphones, the team remarks on their success:

"The demonstration went extremely well. It is so refreshing to see beings
who had never been exposed to this type of reproduction jumping up and down,
screaming, and at times weeping over the beauty and realism of the music.
They had never been able to move around, dance, and interact with each other
before during a hi fi experience, unencumbered with headphones. They had
never felt the chest-thumping bass or been able to turn toward the soloists
and practically 'see' them playing. They enjoyed this pure audio experience
even more than a complete AV bit, feeling that they were in the living
presence of the performers even without the visuals."

Gary Eickmeier



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Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,


Martin-Logan Vistas. And while flat-panel electrostatics can be
considered bi-polar, M-Ls are not. The curved screen focuses the back
wave in on itself so the bi-polar effect is largely lost. Even so, I
was a Magnaplanar enthusiasts for many years (still am, actually, but
I think electrostatics are just better) and though they are true
bipolar speakers they do not do what Bose 901s do (thankfully).
Everybody has different tastes. I'm not trying to impugn yours, just
demonstrate how mine differs.


I'm sure you meant dipolar, not bipolar. And as a matter of fact, I do NOT
believe that our tastes differ, just that you have not heard my system yet.
I know it is pointless to say that without the pudding of proof, but if you
ever get to Florida....

It's funny how susceptible they are to the room acoustics and speaker
positioning, which is one of the ways I was able to discover some of the
principles in my IMT - because slight changes in these factors can make huge
differences in the sound, and when it locks in the rewards are worth it and
very illustrative.

Gary Eickmeier

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In article ,
ScottW wrote:

On Apr 24, 5:07*am, "Gary Eickmeier" wrote:
KH wrote:
Actually no, I wasn't referring to solid geometry. *As Donald states,
I'm talking about time, amplitude, and direction. *Hence all the
discussion surrounding vector information. *A 2-D signal does not
contain directional information that is not just required, but is an
intrinsic property of a vector. *Acoustic signals comprise
multitudinous vectors. *It's the vector summation, filtered and
transformed via the HRTF that allows identification, aurally, of
three dimensions. *It's the angular component that is excised during
transduction.
Perhaps this is some of the confusion. *I thought vectors would be
well understood in the discussion.


Keith


So Keith Howard says there is no directional information in a stereo
recording? Just time and amplitude? Then what, pray tell, is the difference
from mono?


I think directional information is not captured by a single
microphone or a single channel but it can be captured (or at least
estimated) from multiple mics and recreated from two or more channels
in playback.

ScottW


As has been pointed out previously, the only directional information
that can be captured by a microphone is intensity for omnidirectional
mikes and on-axis and off-axis response for cardioids and time delay for
both. I.E. If put two omni microphones in front of an orchestra about 15
ft apart. Each mike pick-up its half of the orchestra with greater
intensity than it will pick up the other half because it's closer to
it's half of the ensemble. Each mike will also pick up its off-side
delayed slight from the other mike which is closer to its side of the
ensemble. There will also be phase differences between the soundfields
picked up by each respective mike. It's really not down to any actual
directionality at all. Now with cardioids , they have a directional
attribute in their pick-up pattern. They are designed to be the most
sensitive to sounds directly on axis with the microphone's front . I.E
they are designed to be pointed, like a flashlight, at whatever one is
trying to capture. Just as a light beam from a flashlight is tight at
the source but is cone shaped as it leaves the flashlight and the
further one points the beam away from the source, the circle of
illumination gets larger. That's sort of (in a very crude way) how
cardioid mikes work. Imagine, if you will, being able to mount two
flashlights on a foot-long bar, and suspending that bar (from a tripod,
perhaps) so that both flashlights shine on a wall, say, 30 feet away.
The beams will each be a large, but pretty dim, circle of light and if
the flashlights are aimed straight ahead, the two circles of light will
intersect. Now, move the two flashlights at an angle to one another and
stop when the two pools of light overlap just enough to form the largest
common area of illumination before the two pools separate into two
distinct circles. You can now see how cardioid mikes work in a closely
spaced, coincident pair. The left mike "illuminates" the left side of
the ensemble and the right mike "illuminates" the right side, with some
overlap in the middle. Where the flashlight analogy breaks down is that
a pool of light thrown by a flashlight is pretty even from edge to edge
and goes dark altogether outside of the cone of illumination. A cardioid
mike, OTOH, would be brightest in the center, with illumination falling
off as you get further from the center. So flashlights and cardioid
mikes are really the crudest of analogies but the conceptual view of
both is pretty valid.

Stereo takes TWO microphones. If you are using widely spaced ominis,
then it might be useful to use a third in the center and blend that
third mike equally into both right and left channels. This is called a
center-fill mike. If you use more than two (or three spaced omnis)
mikes, then you are pan-potting the mikes into whatever position
laterally across the stage you want them to be. This is NOT stereo.
Multiple mikes create two channels that have a group of instruments
artificially blended in a right-to-left ratio that allows each
instrument to be placed along a lateral line, from right-to-left. If you
mike each instrument separately, you can produce two or three groups of
instruments which sound as if they are located on the right, with
another group on the left, and perhaps a third group in the center
(called a phantom center channel. This "channel" is monaural). This is
the way most jazz ensembles have been recorded for decades. Rock is
similarly produced. It is two channel sound, but it is NOT stereo
because it registers only left and right information. No depth is
captured, no height. It is merely two dimensional, not three.

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ScottW wrote:
On Apr 24, 7:17 pm, Audio_Empire wrote:
Now with cardioids , they have a directional
attribute in their pick-up pattern.


How does one differentiate in a cardiod output from a quiet sound
coming into the front (sensitive area) and a loud sound coming from
the side?

Amplitude itself is not sufficient to provide a realistic 3D.


You missed the point of AE's post. He wasn't saying that the cardioid
pattern has anything to do with the stereo. Just talking in general about
directivity in microphones.

I'll leave the claim that all close mic'd, studio recordings, etc. are
not in fact stereo recordings....as an opinion based upon ancient
greek language.


Another misunderstanding. It's a long story.


The common modern use of the word as a noun to name a recording or a
playback system....stereo means two channels.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...british/stereo


I don't care what somebody's dictionary says. The word means a field-type
auditory perspective system.
Width, height, and depth in the reproduction of a multi-channel recording.
The Bell Labs had three channels to do the same job. We now have 5. You
could have one channel per instrument and arrange them on your own
soundstage and it would still be "stereophonic." You could compose a piece
for ten loudspeakers, a piece that was never performed in any other space,
and it would still be stereophonic if it could be portrayed with more than
one channel and present a width, depth, and height to the presentation of
the sounds.

Live music is stereophonic, unless you are listening from the next room.

Technically the "stereo" part means solid, all three axes. The "phonic" part
means on loudspeakers.

On the other system, binaural, the "bi" part means two. The "aural" part
means ears. We have binaural and monaural, or one eared. Monophonic would be
one loudspeaker. But it would still be mono if it was played on two
loudspeakers, if the music came from just one channel. Mono sound presented
on headphone would be diotic. All of these terms were defined by the
pioneers from Bell Labs, and then later forgotten.

Gary Eickmeier

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On 4/26/2013 4:27 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
ScottW wrote:
On Apr 24, 7:17 pm, Audio_Empire wrote:
Now with cardioids , they have a directional
attribute in their pick-up pattern.


snip

The common modern use of the word as a noun to name a recording or a
playback system....stereo means two channels.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...british/stereo


I don't care what somebody's dictionary says.


Not the road to effective communication.

Technically the "stereo" part means solid, all three axes. The "phonic" part
means on loudspeakers.


No, the "phonic" part doesn't mean "loudspeakers" technically, it means
an acoustic wave. Etymologically, it comes from "phone", the Greek word
for "voice". "Hooked on speakers" would be a totally different product...

Keith
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KH wrote:
On 4/26/2013 4:27 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:


Technically the "stereo" part means solid, all three axes. The
"phonic" part means on loudspeakers.


No, the "phonic" part doesn't mean "loudspeakers" technically, it
means an acoustic wave. Etymologically, it comes from "phone", the
Greek word for "voice". "Hooked on speakers" would be a totally
different product...
Keith


We are not talking about Greek literature, we are talking about Harry
Olson's system definitions. The "phonic" suffix of "stereophonic."

Gary Eickmeier



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Gary E:

I consider two-channel stereo the "mp3" of stereo! lol

It's an approximation of the spatiality of the original recording environme=
nt, or, a manufactured image(pan-pot mono).

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are hearing,=
whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial flight=
, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a canoe across a =
rapid, etc. - is stereo.

To practically reproduce the above environments with any number of speakers=
is theoretically impossible. Well, binaural done properly comes close, bu=
t still, the sound field is limited to and affected by the type(closed or o=
pen-back) and quality of headphones you are lisening via.

Stereo is everything - the source, proximity to or distance from, the radia=
tion pattern, reflectivity sources, vibration transmission - all of that, a=
nd more, localize you in that specific environment at that given time.
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wrote:
Gary E:

I consider two-channel stereo the "mp3" of stereo! lol

It's an approximation of the spatiality of the original recording
environment, or, a manufactured image(pan-pot mono).

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are
hearing, whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial
flight, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a
canoe across a rapid, etc. - is stereo.


No, that is natural hearing. Reproducing those sounds is an entirely
separate question.

To practically reproduce the above environments with any number of
speakers is theoretically impossible. Well, binaural done properly
comes close, but still, the sound field is limited to and affected by
the type(closed or open-back) and quality of headphones you are
lisening via.

Stereo is everything - the source, proximity to or distance from, the
radiation pattern, reflectivity sources, vibration transmission - all
of that, and more, localize you in that specific environment at that
given time.


Your wild-eyed description of stereo is not helpful. The terms
"stereophonic" and "binaural" have been defined by Snow and Olson for over
60 years now. The basic idea is that there are fundamentally two ways of
reproducing a sensory experience: reproduce the sensory inputs, as with
binaural recording and reproducing the ear signals that a listener on site
would experience, or reproduce the object itself, the sound of the orchestra
in front of you, as with the stereophonic system, and let your natural
hearing experience that.

There are problems with both ideas that prevent a perfect reproduction of
the live experience. With binaural, on headphones you cannot move your head
without the orchestra moving with it, and you get in In Head Localization
(IHL) problem that prevents the externalization of the live experience. With
loudspeaker binaural, you must still listen in a real room for the
externalization to happen, in which case you once again mix the room
acoustics in with the recorded acoustic. You are also stuck in a fairly
small sweet spot, limiting the technique for large audiences.

With stereophonic, which is not limited to two channels but can be done with
any number of channels and speakers, you are reproducing the object itself
in front of you, the sound of the orchestra and the soundstage surrounding
them, in another acoustic space - your listening room. This is potentially
the more realistic of the two techniques, because you can move around and
get different perspectives on the performance, as in the live situation, and
it can be used for large audiences. But it has the "central recording
problem," that you must run the sound through two acoustic spaces before you
hear it. This is solved mostly by recording much closer to the orchestra
than you would with the binaural system so that the result will not be too
"swimmy," or "wet" with reverberance.

The one aspect of the stereophonic system that is missed by most writers and
theoreticians is that once you recreate all of the spatial, spectral, and
(the combined) temporal characteristics of the performance within your
listening room, and if you do that right, you then are regenerating all of
the spatial cues you need for your natural hearing to be able to just listen
to the actual (real) sounds right there in your room in front of you and the
realism can be stunning because it IS real within your recreation.

The above was demonstrated by the AR company and Edgar Vilchur in the 50s
and 60s in their Live vs Recorded shows, and is alluded to in my OP, in
which loudspeakers are substituted for a player piano to recreate realism
that is indistinguishable from the real piano, if you get the radiation
pattern the same as the piano would have.

Gary Eickmeier

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In article ,
wrote:

Gary E:

I consider two-channel stereo the "mp3" of stereo! lol

It's an approximation of the spatiality of the original recording
environment, or, a manufactured image(pan-pot mono).

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are hearing,
whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial flight,
hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a canoe across a
rapid, etc. - is stereo.

To practically reproduce the above environments with any number of speakers
is theoretically impossible. Well, binaural done properly comes close, but
still, the sound field is limited to and affected by the type(closed or
open-back) and quality of headphones you are lisening via.

Stereo is everything - the source, proximity to or distance from, the
radiation pattern, reflectivity sources, vibration transmission - all of
that, and more, localize you in that specific environment at that given time.


While you are right, of course, as you say, to reproduce it with
speakers is essentially impossible (impractical, anyway). But two
channel stereo is what we've got (with occasional musical forays into
5.1 or 7.1 surround - but this experience often includes video and is
seldom done on its own.). Again, as you say, binaural is close, but
binaural recordings are thin on the ground. Even though high-end
headphones have become very popular of late, they are still used mostly
for private listening as most people would rather listen to speakers.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, even the most
expensive headphones are not all that comfortable for long-term
listening, and headphones lack the visceral involvement with the music
that you find when attending live musical events and that one gets
somewhat with speakers. Thirdly, while binaural sound does a very decent
approximation of the soundfield, the real thing doesn't move with you
when you move your head, but with binaural, through headphones, it does.
This is so unnatural, that for binaural to give a realistic illusion of
instruments playing in real space, one simply cannot move ones head, and
that requirement makes listening to binaural uncomfortable with even the
most comfortable headphones. The best way to make binaural work, (IMHO)
is with a chair, specifically designed for the purpose. Do you recall
the so-called "egg chair"? This was a hard plastic egg-shaped shell,
sitting on a pedestal, with a cutout for a person to sit in it. The
entire interior was upholstered, either with vinyl or leather and when
one set back in the chair, they were almost completely enveloped by it.
Some had speakers at ear level on each side of the head, but they
weren't very good. Now, if someone were to make such a chair and install
a pair of very good near-field monitors (self, powered, of course) and
supply a self powered sub-woofer to place in the room with the chair,
then binaural, would I believe, work quite well and be more than
adequately comfortable to listen to.

Audio_Empire

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On 5/26/2013 10:29 AM, Audio_Empire wrote:

While you are right, of course, as you say, to reproduce it with
speakers is essentially impossible (impractical, anyway). But two
channel stereo is what we've got (with occasional musical forays into
5.1 or 7.1 surround - but this experience often includes video and is
seldom done on its own.). Again, as you say, binaural is close, but
binaural recordings are thin on the ground. Even though high-end
headphones have become very popular of late, they are still used mostly
for private listening as most people would rather listen to speakers.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, even the most
expensive headphones are not all that comfortable for long-term
listening, and headphones lack the visceral involvement with the music
that you find when attending live musical events and that one gets
somewhat with speakers. Thirdly, while binaural sound does a very decent
approximation of the soundfield, the real thing doesn't move with you
when you move your head, but with binaural, through headphones, it does.
This is so unnatural, that for binaural to give a realistic illusion of
instruments playing in real space, one simply cannot move ones head, and
that requirement makes listening to binaural uncomfortable with even the
most comfortable headphones. The best way to make binaural work, (IMHO)
is with a chair, specifically designed for the purpose. Do you recall
the so-called "egg chair"? This was a hard plastic egg-shaped shell,
sitting on a pedestal, with a cutout for a person to sit in it. The
entire interior was upholstered, either with vinyl or leather and when
one set back in the chair, they were almost completely enveloped by it.
Some had speakers at ear level on each side of the head, but they
weren't very good. Now, if someone were to make such a chair and install
a pair of very good near-field monitors (self, powered, of course) and
supply a self powered sub-woofer to place in the room with the chair,
then binaural, would I believe, work quite well and be more than
adequately comfortable to listen to.


You are /enveloped/ in an egg-shaped chair... hmm; I think that could
be claustrophobic. Well, unless you like the idea of returning to the
womb.

Seems like the same effect would result without the chair. Just have
the speakers in similar positions while listening to a 'binaural'
recording. Eh?

bl
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Audio_Empire wrote:

Again, as you say, binaural is close, but
binaural recordings are thin on the ground. Even though high-end
headphones have become very popular of late, they are still used
mostly for private listening as most people would rather listen to
speakers. There are several reasons for this. First of all, even the
most expensive headphones are not all that comfortable for long-term
listening, and headphones lack the visceral involvement with the music
that you find when attending live musical events and that one gets
somewhat with speakers. Thirdly, while binaural sound does a very
decent approximation of the soundfield, the real thing doesn't move
with you when you move your head, but with binaural, through
headphones, it does. This is so unnatural, that for binaural to give
a realistic illusion of instruments playing in real space, one simply
cannot move ones head, and that requirement makes listening to
binaural uncomfortable with even the most comfortable headphones. The
best way to make binaural work, (IMHO) is with a chair, specifically
designed for the purpose. Do you recall the so-called "egg chair"?
This was a hard plastic egg-shaped shell, sitting on a pedestal,
with a cutout for a person to sit in it. The entire interior was
upholstered, either with vinyl or leather and when one set back in
the chair, they were almost completely enveloped by it. Some had
speakers at ear level on each side of the head, but they weren't very
good. Now, if someone were to make such a chair and install a pair of
very good near-field monitors (self, powered, of course) and supply a
self powered sub-woofer to place in the room with the chair, then
binaural, would I believe, work quite well and be more than
adequately comfortable to listen to.


I don't hold out that much hope for "the chair" (sounds like a sentence for
high end magazine reviewers) but I sure would like to experience Ralph
Glasgal's Ambiophonics system. He has about six large planars set up in his
large room with crosstalk cancellation on the front two and some surround
processing on the side and back pairs. This description may not be exact but
the idea is that it is loudspeaker binaural, in a real room, with surround
processing to help out. There is probably a sweet spot, but at least you
could turn your head and I believe the performers would stay put where they
belong. There would be a strong sense of being there and hearing the full
acoustic space of the original if it was a binarual recording.

http://www.ambiophonics.org/

With the chair it just seems to me that it would be more like the headphone
experience. I think that your ears might just go into and out of the best
listening position, and not externalize well.

Gary Eickmeier



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In article ,
Bob Lombard wrote:

You are /enveloped/ in an egg-shaped chair... hmm; I think that could
be claustrophobic. Well, unless you like the idea of returning to the
womb.

Seems like the same effect would result without the chair. Just have
the speakers in similar positions while listening to a 'binaural'
recording. Eh?


Al Kooper is said to have such a chair! I remember hearing "Riders on
the Storm" in one in a department store way back in the seventies.

Stephen
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Barkingspyder wrote:

One thing is certain, realistic audio reproduction, the kind you seem
to be crying out for is impossible. It is impossible with 2 speakers
or 7.1 speakers. It is even less possible with Bose
direct/reflecting speaker systems, especially using the inferior
drivers they choose. I have had the chance to listen to many
different speakers systems and some work better than others, but none
of them ever matched real life. Some, however managed to convey very
pleasant, worthwhile enjoyment, which given the limits of current
technology is fine by me. I don't really see the point of
continually claiming it's being done badly or incorrectly when the
fact is at it's best, stereo is done as well as it can be. You can't
continually complain about it being bad when the fact is it really
can't be much better because of the limits of technology. This has
all been done to to death and I have come to understand that unless
some new scientific breakthrough comes along, making it possible to
capture more realistic sound, this is what we have and it's pointless
to keep harping on it. You might want to find a place where you can
audition a Linkwitz speaker system and see how well 2 channel sound
can be done.


Dear Spyder,

Sounds like you are taking no prisoners, so I will keep it short.

First, I didn't say a word about Bose 901 speakers.

Second, I just gave you an example of undeniably perfect reproduction, which
you pressed on to tell me could not be done, without addressing my example.

Third, I do have a new "scientific breakthrough" that I call Image Model
Theory. It is a different way of looking at the reproduction problem that
leads to different ways of designing radiation pattern and positioning
speakers and doing room acoustics.

Fourth and finally, using that theory I built some very cheap box speakers
with Radio Shack components that I entered in Siegfried Linkwitz's Challenge
experiment, and I beat the Orions in a head to head double blind listening
session with the criterion of realism of the reproduced sound. Please Email
me if interested.

Gary Eickmeier

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In article ,
Bob Lombard wrote:

On 5/26/2013 10:29 AM, Audio_Empire wrote:

While you are right, of course, as you say, to reproduce it with
speakers is essentially impossible (impractical, anyway). But two
channel stereo is what we've got (with occasional musical forays into
5.1 or 7.1 surround - but this experience often includes video and is
seldom done on its own.). Again, as you say, binaural is close, but
binaural recordings are thin on the ground. Even though high-end
headphones have become very popular of late, they are still used mostly
for private listening as most people would rather listen to speakers.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, even the most
expensive headphones are not all that comfortable for long-term
listening, and headphones lack the visceral involvement with the music
that you find when attending live musical events and that one gets
somewhat with speakers. Thirdly, while binaural sound does a very decent
approximation of the soundfield, the real thing doesn't move with you
when you move your head, but with binaural, through headphones, it does.
This is so unnatural, that for binaural to give a realistic illusion of
instruments playing in real space, one simply cannot move ones head, and
that requirement makes listening to binaural uncomfortable with even the
most comfortable headphones. The best way to make binaural work, (IMHO)
is with a chair, specifically designed for the purpose. Do you recall
the so-called "egg chair"? This was a hard plastic egg-shaped shell,
sitting on a pedestal, with a cutout for a person to sit in it. The
entire interior was upholstered, either with vinyl or leather and when
one set back in the chair, they were almost completely enveloped by it.
Some had speakers at ear level on each side of the head, but they
weren't very good. Now, if someone were to make such a chair and install
a pair of very good near-field monitors (self, powered, of course) and
supply a self powered sub-woofer to place in the room with the chair,
then binaural, would I believe, work quite well and be more than
adequately comfortable to listen to.


You are /enveloped/ in an egg-shaped chair... hmm; I think that could
be claustrophobic. Well, unless you like the idea of returning to the
womb.


Hadn't considered that. I was just contemplating on the fact that the
egg-chair IS a real product that could easily be made to be a quality
binaural chair. I've sat in one. pretty comfy, just not conducive to
conversation.

Seems like the same effect would result without the chair. Just have
the speakers in similar positions while listening to a 'binaural'
recording. Eh?


Sure. Might look a little odd. That's why I suggested the "egg-chair".

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On Sunday, May 26, 2013 12:40:09 AM UTC-4, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
gmail.com wrote:

Gary E:

I consider two-channel stereo the "mp3" of stereo! lol

It's an approximation of the spatiality of the original recording
environment, or, a manufactured image(pan-pot mono).

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are
hearing, whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial
flight, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a
canoe across a rapid, etc. - is stereo.


No, that is natural hearing. Reproducing those sounds is an entirely
separate question.

To practically reproduce the above environments with any number of
speakers is theoretically impossible. Well, binaural done properly
comes close, but still, the sound field is limited to and affected by
the type(closed or open-back) and quality of headphones you are
lisening via.

Stereo is everything - the source, proximity to or distance from, the
radiation pattern, reflectivity sources, vibration transmission - all
of that, and more, localize you in that specific environment at that
given time.


Your wild-eyed description of stereo is not helpful. The terms
"stereophonic" and "binaural" have been defined by Snow and Olson for over
60 years now. The basic idea is that there are fundamentally two ways of
reproducing a sensory experience: reproduce the sensory inputs, as with
binaural recording and reproducing the ear signals that a listener on site
would experience, or reproduce the object itself, the sound of the orchestra
in front of you, as with the stereophonic system, and let your natural
hearing experience that.

There are problems with both ideas that prevent a perfect reproduction of
the live experience. With binaural, on headphones you cannot move your head
without the orchestra moving with it, and you get in In Head Localization
(IHL) problem that prevents the externalization of the live experience. With
loudspeaker binaural, you must still listen in a real room for the
externalization to happen, in which case you once again mix the room
acoustics in with the recorded acoustic. You are also stuck in a fairly
small sweet spot, limiting the technique for large audiences.

With stereophonic, which is not limited to two channels but can be done with
any number of channels and speakers, you are reproducing the object itself
in front of you, the sound of the orchestra and the soundstage surrounding
them, in another acoustic space - your listening room. This is potentially
the more realistic of the two techniques, because you can move around and
get different perspectives on the performance, as in the live situation, and
it can be used for large audiences. But it has the "central recording
problem," that you must run the sound through two acoustic spaces before you
hear it. This is solved mostly by recording much closer to the orchestra
than you would with the binaural system so that the result will not be too
"swimmy," or "wet" with reverberance.

The one aspect of the stereophonic system that is missed by most writers and
theoreticians is that once you recreate all of the spatial, spectral, and
(the combined) temporal characteristics of the performance within your
listening room, and if you do that right, you then are regenerating all of
the spatial cues you need for your natural hearing to be able to just listen
to the actual (real) sounds right there in your room in front of you and the
realism can be stunning because it IS real within your recreation.

The above was demonstrated by the AR company and Edgar Vilchur in the 50s
and 60s in their Live vs Recorded shows, and is alluded to in my OP, in
which loudspeakers are substituted for a player piano to recreate realism
that is indistinguishable from the real piano, if you get the radiation
pattern the same as the piano would have.

Gary Eickmeier

__________________

Stereo IS natural hearing! You need to step out of the box Gary. The
speaker-box that is.

My originaly reply was meant to imply just how difficult it is to
really capture and reproduce something as it was heard then-and-there.

The phrase "in stereo" does not mean two-channel, and it certainly
doesn't mean that something playing over a "stereo system" aka a
couple components feeding a pair of speakers.
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In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:

Again, as you say, binaural is close, but
binaural recordings are thin on the ground. Even though high-end
headphones have become very popular of late, they are still used
mostly for private listening as most people would rather listen to
speakers. There are several reasons for this. First of all, even the
most expensive headphones are not all that comfortable for long-term
listening, and headphones lack the visceral involvement with the music
that you find when attending live musical events and that one gets
somewhat with speakers. Thirdly, while binaural sound does a very
decent approximation of the soundfield, the real thing doesn't move
with you when you move your head, but with binaural, through
headphones, it does. This is so unnatural, that for binaural to give
a realistic illusion of instruments playing in real space, one simply
cannot move ones head, and that requirement makes listening to
binaural uncomfortable with even the most comfortable headphones. The
best way to make binaural work, (IMHO) is with a chair, specifically
designed for the purpose. Do you recall the so-called "egg chair"?
This was a hard plastic egg-shaped shell, sitting on a pedestal,
with a cutout for a person to sit in it. The entire interior was
upholstered, either with vinyl or leather and when one set back in
the chair, they were almost completely enveloped by it. Some had
speakers at ear level on each side of the head, but they weren't very
good. Now, if someone were to make such a chair and install a pair of
very good near-field monitors (self, powered, of course) and supply a
self powered sub-woofer to place in the room with the chair, then
binaural, would I believe, work quite well and be more than
adequately comfortable to listen to.


I don't hold out that much hope for "the chair" (sounds like a sentence for
high end magazine reviewers) but I sure would like to experience Ralph
Glasgal's Ambiophonics system. He has about six large planars set up in his
large room with crosstalk cancellation on the front two and some surround
processing on the side and back pairs. This description may not be exact but
the idea is that it is loudspeaker binaural, in a real room, with surround
processing to help out. There is probably a sweet spot, but at least you
could turn your head and I believe the performers would stay put where they
belong. There would be a strong sense of being there and hearing the full
acoustic space of the original if it was a binarual recording.

http://www.ambiophonics.org/

With the chair it just seems to me that it would be more like the headphone
experience. I think that your ears might just go into and out of the best
listening position, and not externalize well.

Gary Eickmeier


Well, you know Gary, Ambiophonics has been around almost as long as your
beloved Bose 901s have been for sale - IOW, more than 40 years! I heard
it at a CES show in Chicago in the early eighties in one of the hotel
suites down in the loop (I think it was the REALLY old one and not the
Conrad Hilton or the Palmer House) The Ambiophonics demo was very
impressive, even then. They even had a static display of the microphone
array (8 Coles condenser mikes in an octahedron arrangement with a
controller/power supply).

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Audio_Empire wrote:

Well, you know Gary, Ambiophonics has been around almost as long as
your beloved Bose 901s have been for sale - IOW, more than 40 years!
I heard it at a CES show in Chicago in the early eighties in one of
the hotel suites down in the loop (I think it was the REALLY old one
and not the Conrad Hilton or the Palmer House) The Ambiophonics demo
was very impressive, even then. They even had a static display of the
microphone array (8 Coles condenser mikes in an octahedron
arrangement with a controller/power supply).


Yes, I know. And every few years some new genius invents loudspeaker
binaural all over again and calls it some new pet name. It's novel at first,
but in the long run I prefer stereophonic in the classical sense, auditory
perspective on loudspeakers placed in your room in geometrically similar
positions to the orchestra and generating their sound anew within your
space. Come one, come all, suitable for large audiences, no mattress up to
your forehead or crosstalk cancellation circuits required. I think I have a
fairly ideal system on which I can play most any recording properly and get
all of the intended spatial effects out of them.

I just did an interesting experiment. My system incorporates surround sound,
of course, and the receiver has several modes that can manipulate the sound
field around you. I bought a recording of Dr. Chesky's Amazing Binaural
Sound Show, which consists of nothing but binaural recordings and sound
effects. I looked for the mode on my receiver that can display the stereo
channels the widest, and found "Game" and "Neo 6 Speaker" to be able to
image the L and R channels completely to the sides. I think it puts the L
and LR at equal loudness so that they combine to form an apparent S channel.
I wouldn't have thought that could be done, but with identical 901 speakers
to the front and the rear/sides, it works.

The result was not magical, but it did display the Amazing Chesky's sounds
as intended, just a little too distant. It worked great for music, such as a
live band spread 180 degrees in front of you, but when it came to the
"barber cutting your hair" material, or Chesky whispering into each ear, it
was too distant to fool me. I have heard it work amazingly on headphones,
but note that it is only these extremely close effects that work that way in
binaural. The farther away stuff just starts having problems. But in my
experiment, the farther stuff worked great.

One thing that never can be overcome is physical size. You just cannot make
a small room sound like a large room by playing a recording of a large room
within it. You and I are recording engineers - you for real, and me
learning - but perhaps you have experienced the same phenomenon after a
session. The finest recording played on the finest system simply does not
and cannot sound the same as the live group in the huge audition hall.

There is nothing that Ambiophonics can do about it, nothing that my system
can do about it, nothing that anyone can do about it, and going anechoic is
not the answer either. Play even a good surround recording in an anechoic
environment, and you get IHL, as described by Floyd Toole.

The most realistic reproduction I have heard, bar none, is in a large room,
almost performance size room, because the acoustics of that room take over
and are REAL and not trickery, and you can move around, and it IS real,
happening right up there on stage in front of you, and you are using your
natural hearing and every nuance of the live sound experience is present in
that recreation, or re-staging of the recorded sound, and all of Arny's and
Dick Pierce's "lost" spatial cues are there present and are REAL, happeining
all over again for the same reasons theay happened live.

Them's the facts of audio life, and maybe that says it better than I have
said it before, and I wonder if they are reading this and wish to comment.

Corollary to Image Model Theory is my EEFs, or Essential Elements of
Fidelity - the four factors of sound that are audible and must be accounted
for in comparing live to reproduced. They are Physical size, Power, Waveform
fidelity (freq response and freedom from noise and distortion), and Spatial
Characteristics. Image Model Theory, or IMT, is contained within the last
one.

Did you get that crazy set of recordings I sent you? What think ye?

Gary Eickmeier

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In article ,
Barkingspyder wrote:

On Monday, May 27, 2013 8:05:25 AM UTC-7, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
Audio_Empire wrote:


Loking at the descriptions of Ambiophonics and Sonic holography, it
seems they are working on the same concept, namely eliminating
crosstalk. Having heard SH on a demo disc I can say I was impressed
with some of the recordings and less so with others. Like any audio
experience it all depends on the quality of the recording. I have
heard some recordings that were so-called purist recording using just
2 microphones that sounded amazing and quite realistic. I think it
always comes down to the quality of the gear being used to do the
recording and the experience and taste of the recording engineer.
Then lastly but most important is the listener. What pleases the
listener is really all that counts.


True. Unfortunately, no single recording will please all listeners, and
the business of recording, like all businesses these days are so
cynical, that many really don't care what their product sounds like as
long as it sells to those who have no tastes to please, because they
don't care about sound at all. just the "tunes".

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On Sunday, 26 May 2013 04:51:42 UTC+8, wrote:
Gary E:
=20


=20
Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are hearin=

g, whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....
=20
=20
=20
That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial flig=

ht, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a canoe across =
a rapid, etc. - is stereo.
=20


How can that be? Sound which originates from a single source travels into y=
our left and right ears. A violin or a person singing cannot be consider st=
ereo. However, when we playback the recordings in stereo we are listening t=
wo identical violins or singers over the left and right speakers and it can=
not be correct but we accept that as natural.

There was two experiments conducted in 1957 and in the 70s to see if audien=
ces (3000 of them) could tell difference between live sound and recording. =
The experiment concluded they couldn't. How good can the gears and the reco=
rding be in the 50s?





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ST wrote:
On Sunday, 26 May 2013 04:51:42 UTC+8, wrote:
Gary E:

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are
hearing, whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a
commercial flight, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars,
rowing a canoe across a rapid, etc. - is stereo.


How can that be? Sound which originates from a single source travels
into your left and right ears. A violin or a person singing cannot
be consider stereo. However, when we playback the recordings in
stereo we are listening two identical violins or singers over the
left and right speakers and it cannot be correct but we accept that
as natural.


That never happens, unless you're sitting in an anechoic chamber.
Sound comes from all over.

Andrew.

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That never happens, unless you're sitting in an anechoic chamber.

So how does that make stereo accurate in anechoic chamber? We listen to mono sound with a lot of reflections. Stereo simply attempt to create the soundstage illusion. It is unnatural but for the last 50 years or so we are listening in stereo and accept that to be correct.

Imagine a small band with the piano to the left, double bass in the centre and the drums on the right. Each instruments emits from a single source. In order to recreate the exact recorded playback perhaps we should put one speaker each at the exact location of the instruments and play the mono recording of the each instrument. It should be more accurate than attempting to recreate the three instruments with a single stereo recording over a pair of speakers.

We prefer to listen to the sound coming directly to us by turning our head towards the sound. Unfortunately in stereo, we fix our head to an empty space between two speakers and listen to sound coming from outside of our point of focus. How can that be natural? Do you stare and look right in the centre of the stage irrespective where the sound coming from in a live recording?

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