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It's an expression of Sean Olive's preferences for listening to stereo recordings.

carcass93
"It's not really important who actually said that - suffice it to say that's somebody who made a career of trying to discredit "audiophile beliefs":"

That is flatly untrue. Sean Olive is a scientist who has devoted his career to studying what characteristics people prefer in speakers. It just happens that the results may overthrow some beliefs about audio, but that is normal with any good research.

Here's is the text quoted without attribution (against the rules but the mods so far show no sign of caring) from a post on Hydrogen Audio by Sean Olive, without providing a link (I have provided the link below) so that one could easily check the context:

"I still listen to 2-channel stereo music, but it's seldom listened to through 2 speakers: it's listened through 5 to 7 channels via an up-mixer like Logic 7. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. The up-mixing gives me a center channel (missing in stereo), a much wider sweet spot (also missing), and a sense of envelopment and spaciousness that is entirely devoid in 2 channel reproduction. I'd rather be in the concert hall listening to Bach that looking through a window into the concert hall."

This is clearly a statement of preference for listening to stereo recordings in multichannel, and the he notes three things he likes about it.

1) He gets a center channel. There's no center channel with only two speakers.

2) He gets a wider sweet spot that way.

3) He gets "a sense of envelopment and spaciousness" which is missing in stereo. On this last, please note there may be many senses of envelopment and spaciousness, different with each system, and in his multichannel system, Sean gets one he prefers to what happens in stereo (taken universally). I have many times on this forum noted that many sometimes confuse universal and particular. Some confuse them in this thread.

Here's some things Sean said in the next post at HA, no. 75:

"I agree that the discussion on 2 channel versus multichannel is off topic and I am happy to abandon it.

"I only brought it up because we seem to have people in this forum willing to sit in a tiny sweet spot while listening to overpriced, directional speakers with terrible off-axis response that we are told are both highly room-dependent and loudspeaker/listener position dependent -- all for the purpose of what? To listen to stereo, which Bell Lab scientists said back in the early 1930s was completely inadequate to convey the realism of a live music performance to an audience.

"For me, that is a terribly misguided use of effort and money because there too many inherent compromises in sound quality, given what is possible today with music recording and reproduction science and technology. We can do so much better, and we should.

"As an industry we have failed to learn and acknowledge the Bell Lab science that is almost 80 years old! And we are now repeating ourselves by ignoring the loudspeaker science that has been known since the mid-1980s from Floyd Tooles' work at the National Research Council."


-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser

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