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In Reply to: RE: New side and rear surrounds - Magnepan, BG, Sunfire? posted by methylmarty on January 09, 2015 at 08:01:39
Thought I'd post an update to my quest for surrounds.
I've picked up four KEF CiFDT in-wall motorized dipoles (now discontinued) to play around with, due to scoring a very attractive deal. In all of the internet I have found one mediocre half-review. But it's KEF, and they hide in the wall. Frequency response is 80hz to 20khz, and IIRC the planar crosses to the poly woofer at 150hz.
I am honestly not expecting much compared to my MMG surrounds, but worst case I can use it as a bedroom setup, as my wife is not fond of the prospect of giant monoliths in every room of the house. I dropped them off at my father's house so we can play around with them for a bit this weekend (his system is much more accessible and easy to change than mine, and we share the same love of planar speakers). I will report back with my assessment soon, hopefully.
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Back in the day when I attended (classical music) concerts, the only times during which I experienced anything like surround sound was after the music stopped and the audience started to applaud. (OTOH during non-classical events there was no telling what an enthused audience member might yell out.) In my 2-CH Tympani IV-A system, the speakers use my room to create the desired ambience sound effect.
Norman,
Totally agree. I spend most of my time with two channel, and the Tympani perform admirably, often producing cues that wrap around the room.
However, I also do the occasional movie, and I thoroughly enjoy what can be done with multichannel music. I sat through the entire new Pink Floyd album in bluray DTS-MA just awestruck by their use of multichannel. Their immersion sets are also very good for this. Realistic presentation? No way, but a damn fun time. I think while listening I decided that the MMGs are irreplaceable as surrounds in my system, at least until I have the cash for that all-20.7 room I'm dreaming about.
I highly recommend the new Pink Floyd album (The Endless River), by the way. It's like the Division Bell (I think the tracks were all from that time), but mostly instrumental with a hint of that psychedelic sound like their first few albums. I think most fans will appreciate it.
Well, you shouldn't hear the hall ambiance as distinct, like a hyped-up gimmick recording. You should hear a sense of acoustical space, a pleasing ambiance, and more natural, laid-back highs. In fact once you're sitting back of the first few rows of the orchestra, most of the sound that you're hearing is coming from reflections (what acousticians call the "far field"). Speakers always seem to me more like a window into the hall than being there!
Out of curiosity many times I've connected the output plugs from L/R rear channels from a MC SACD player to the L/R channels of my 2 CH system. I believe you will find they contain anything BUT what you have described. (It's not a defect of that one particular SACD player, because others give similar results.) This type music in the round certainly isn't what I ever heard during any live performances.
What did you hear?
I hear(d) the sound of music, both loud and clear as might be heard from 2CH stereo recordings. I've got nothing against surround sound per se, but as a gimmick rather than a representation of actual live sound heard sitting anywhere in any of the venues in my limited experience. When I pop a stereo CD into the (factory installed) player using the similarly supplied and installed audio system in my car, it also yields a full surround sound result, and ditto for a Sony receiver in my HT room. (In those latter two cases I've always thought it might come to be because Dolby Pro Logic 2 was in use. IAE, and IMO it's as pleasant, or even better, than listening to most MC SACDs.)
That sounds about right, though. The surround channels are basically the front channels put through a digital reverb. Maybe convolved with an actual hall acoustic if you want to get fancy. You're basically going after an initial delay, which corresponds to the distance of the walls, and then the reverberant tail. Some spectral shaping because high frequencies are attenuated but mostly time domain stuff. Anyway, listened to in isolation, I'd expect it to sound pretty similar to the front channel sound (which also includes natural or artificial reverberation). After all, it's most of what you hear from most seats in a concert hall.
Josh,
My collection is by no means definitive of what an SACD should be. However, in most of my classical and jazz SACDs, there is no multichannel at all, just increased bitrates and such. The reverb/delay effects you and Norman describe are in my experience almost always added by processing (e.g.: Dolby PLX2 Music). As far as I'm concerned, guys like us have the room ambiance covered by our wonderful planars, which when set up properly envelop us and take us acoustically to the venue, or the venue to us.
On the other hand, listen to a Pink Floyd SACD or BluRay audio, any one of them will do, and you will hear full-range instrumentation and sound effects from all channels. This is used to great effect, IMHO, but is not in any way accurately recreating music. Totally captures that psychedelic vibe of their early works though.
I still need to pick up the new Dream Theater album on SACD to hear what uses they have devised for multichannel.
Spectacular as it is, what I hear through planars reminds me of listening to a concert through a picture window. The sense of envelopment I get in a concert hall is missing. It can be added back in a multichannel setup with artificial reverb that emulates a concert hall's acoustical signature, but that's impractical to do at home, since you'd have to tune it by ear for each recording. And a matrix decoder like Dolby's, no matter how sophisticated, isn't going to provide optimal results.
You can try to do it passively with your listening room. You want to create a "reflection-free zone" (RFZ) at your listening seat -- it's not really reflection free but it's free of the early reflections that would mask the early reflections from a much larger concert hall. But that's hard to do at home. So we try to pull the speakers out and use diffusion to achieve some of the same effect.
Then you want to use lots of diffusion to create a nice reverberant tail from the other room surfaces. Again, that's hard to do if you don't have a dedicated theater or listening room, or a blind wife. And even if you do, it's going to be a one-size solution. The acoustics of a jazz club, a concert hall, and a cathedral are radically different, and in movies, you have the outdoors to deal with as well! So you really need some electronic assistance here.
Which in a nutshell is why I favor discrete multichannel recordings. But I think there's a chicken-and-egg problem: Few people have surround systems so surround recordings don't sell very well, and since there aren't many surround recordings, people don't buy surround systems. Also, I think the fact that most people buy pop recordings hurts the prospects of surround because (the occasional psychedelic effect notwithstanding) you really don't need or even particularly want surround for studio pop.
One solution would just be to include an acoustical model of the hall with the recording. Then the user's processor could handle the reverb for whatever speaker setup and acoustics he has. I'm not aware of any movement in that direction, but then, I haven't had time to keep up with it!
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