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In Reply to: RE: New side and rear surrounds - Magnepan, BG, Sunfire? posted by Norman M on January 19, 2015 at 09:34:58
What did you hear?
Follow Ups:
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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