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In Reply to: The most easily created sonic illusion posted by madisonears on April 1, 2007 at 14:29:12:
...transport the home listener to the recording space, not to bring the musicians into your home. In that sense, it is clearly possible to create a suitable experience of hearing both orchestras and chamber groups realistically at home. Isn't this the very reason why multichannel audio is moving forward? Multichannel done well will create the recording space more effectively than simple two-channel, bringing the listener there. I use a Hafler ambience arrangement to get this type of experience in my home. On the best recordings, I experience a credible illusion of being at the concert hall/recording space, whether it is an orchestra going full bore on Mahler or a Bach cello suite.If you are expecting the musicians to be in your home you will be sadly disappointed because it is simply not a realistic expectation.
Mark
Follow Ups:
I have had classical musicians in my living room. They are used to playing in concert halls. Even small halls are vastly bigger than my rather big living room. They were simply too loud. They preferred to play at near the volume they usually play, and their instruments are designed to fill a concert hall. They simply overwhelmed my room. Once I heard a very good professional opera singer sing some arias in the living room. The volume was amazing. I think I would have liked it better if I went several rooms away. I agree with you. My goal with my systems has been been to transport myself to the concert hall, and MCH sound can be an enormous asset for this. All this said, maybe this discussion is really about how words are being used, and there is no real disagreement.
HowdyI've got to wonder how much of this depends on how your system is set up. I like using absorption with no explicit diffusion for my system. The room is just about as dead as I can get it without giving that "full ear" feeling you get in an anechoic chamber. This way I essentially hear everything from the speakers on the first pass a get as little room interaction as possible. IMO this gives me a fighting chance of experiencing the venue where the music was recorded and with the better surround recordings I sure don't feel like I'm listening in my own room.
For decades I have sought to recreate the feeling I am at the venue where the music was recorded. Since I listen primarily to classical music, this is a real challenge. About 30 years ago I was thinking somewhat along the lines you describe. I had speakers with relatively low dispersion and a fairly dead room, so that the ambiance information on the recording could come straight to me without modification by the room reflections. However, 2-ch stereo just couldn't do it. I became very interested in time-delay units and bought an Advent 5000. This added a lot of the concert hall experience, but it wasn't right; it added ambiance to ambiance.I think the ideal system would be a fairly dead room, low-dispersion front speakers, side speakers, and rear speakers with recordings properly encoded to feed the right information to the right speakers. Thus the room would drop out of the equation, and all ambiance information would be carefully created and controlled. We're not there yet, but a well set-up MCH SACD system goes a long way in this direction.
HowdyEven tho for two channel I have to admit that vinyl can beat SACD, for MC in my experience it's just not a fair contest. SACD MC often transports me to other places... even contrived ones :)
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