Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: Ever notice

There are funny effects with speakers that involve room interaction, especially tweeters bouncing off room surfaces. However, once these have been cleaned up (through positioning and room treatment) then one can hear effects associated with the surfaces of the recording venue (on a real stereo recording only, of course). If the musical instrumentation is similar to what one is familiar with in live concerts then it becomes possible to understand certain sonic patterns in terms of reflections off of various surfaces. This appears in the time domain as reflections and in the frequency domain as comb filtering. Both of these can provide clues as the microphone patterns, the acoustic venue, etc., and any competent recording engineer would be familiar with these effects and the best ones would be able to place the microphones appropriately to make a nice recording. There is little "height" information directly on most musical instruments at a live concert since the musicians are all on a stage. Sometimes there are risers to elevate those in the back but this amounts to a "tilt" effect and in effect the musicians are still pretty much on a plane. The main acoustic effect in the vertical dimension is bounces off the floor and ceiling. Here the live concert gets a two fold benefit of height information, first from the HRTF in the vertical dimension (asymmetric ear lobes) and second from comb filter effects. There is certainly the possibility for a Pavlovian connection between these two methods of vertical information to be learned, and if so then the comb filtering reflections could get decoded as height rather than just confusing aberrations in frequency response.

Whenever I've listened to headphones, I've been bothered by the "sound in the head" situation, so I don't have much experience using them. In any event, the sound is substantially different from what one would hear in a live environment, so I would have no basis for learned effects (particular sound matched to particular physical location). Perhaps if I were to spend more time listening with phones I might learn to hear more. Of course there are also binaural recordings and these can definitely have height effects, due to HRTF effects.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  VH Audio  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • RE: Ever notice - Tony Lauck 15:01:28 11/13/12 (0)

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.