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In Reply to: RE: Is that a new experience for you? posted by Todd Krieger on July 20, 2014 at 00:45:30
So you basically require a recording made in a real acoustic space that has the proper spatial cues and a belief that, somehow, the listening room's reverberations will be subdued enough merely by placement of the speaker pair and the listener's ears in relation to it to have the direct wave swamp out the delayed ones.
Two speakers simply are not enough to make a room disappear, unless that is there is magic involved.
Follow Ups:
What good stereo reproduction does is to open an acoustic 'window' into the recording venue between your speakers.
All the acoustic cues needed are already present in the recording either because the way it was recorded by careful mic placement or by judicious adding of artificial reverb during the mix process. (Obviously not all recordings are the same in this respect.)Unfortunately this effect is counteracted by visual cues in our rooms. When ears and eyes disagree the brain will practically always side with the eyes, this was determined by the evolutionary pathway humans took ie trusting our eyes over our ears leads to an increased survival rate.
Which presumably is why many believe that free-standing speakers have more spacious soundstaging than wall-mounted speakers. They don't, you just have to close your eyes to remove their input from your brain to give both types of speakers a level playing field.
Edits: 07/20/14
I fully agree with your last paragraph.
Where I disagree though is that there are more terribly dry recordings out there than you can shake a stick at.
Also, every real room that music is played in has an acoustic signature, real concert halls always have pros working overtime to get the acoustics just right and it is a simple fact of life that the acoustics of the room recorded music is played in will be added to whatever ambiant cues are on the record.
I understand full well what good speakers in a good room can do and the fact that when the sound appears really detached from the boxes you get a most pleasing effect, one that I have called for a good while now the "spook factor". What I think is that this can only work when the listener sees the speakers. Hide any kind of good speakers behind a curtain that is acoustically transparent and the sound remains the same but the spook factor is not as, well, spooky.
It's too bad multi-channel systems have never been implemented properly as my long gone one could do things that actually made one beleive he/she had been transported to different size venues.
Generally audiophiles are like believers in homeopathy in that they think a tiny dose of whatever is better than actually taking real medicine.
Near filed listening falls into that category as far as I am concerned, but whatever lifts your dirigeable I guess...
"Two speakers simply are not enough to make a room disappear, unless that is there is magic involved."
You nailed it! There IS magic involved and it's all in your head. The stereo just creates a sound-field that emulates an actual event sufficiently that your ears and brain can accept it as valid input and interpret it correctly.
Every used a view-master or seen a well done 3D movie? Same deal.
Using even more channels can improve the experience, because then your pinnas interference patterns add to the data, but two channels are definitely adequate to mostly make the room go away...
Rick
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