[KH]

On 4/19/2013 6:54 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote:
On 4/19/2013 4:47 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:

I never said or intend to implied that you were a nutcase. Merely
that you have consistently, and persistently, dismissed all
dissenters of your theory as idiots, or "poor dumb *******s". You
will find few people who are interested in discussions with such a
person. One mans "mysterious and combative" is another mans
"arrogant and condescending".

I guess I'm not going to outlive that one, so let me 'splain. Have you ever
seen "Patton" the movie? In it, George C. Scott makes a pep talk to the
troops before going into battle. He says something like "the goal is not to
die for your country - it is to make the other poor dumb ******* die for HIS
country." I always thought that was funny, and my statement is nothing more
than that - a joke.

Were this an isolated incident, your explanation would be far more
believable.


Perhaps you've heard the aphorism "If the pupil hasn't learned, the
teacher hasn't taught"?

I am an Air Force instructor, and I know how to teach. I hope I have made up
for past losses.

IMO, no. I'm quite sure I have, and have had, a pretty clear picture of
what you've done, how you see your 'model', and why you believe it
works. Your evidence is clear - it works for you. It's your
understanding of the mechanism behind what you're doing, and the
applicability of that method outside your own preference, that I question.

snip

I have been told that it is more of a hypothesis, but I disagree. I am
doing it in my home and listening to the result every day.

Which means nothing about your model other than it creates what you like.


I would say that the main theoretical basis of the whole concept is
to get the SPATIAL characteristic correct within your room by means
of physically reconstructing the important aspects of the whole
acoustical situation.

I would agree with you. Unfortunately, reconstruction of the "whole
acoustical situation" is not possible, for reasons provided many, many
times. That you can create a soundfield in your room that sounds real
*to you* doesn't make it a theory. Realism is a matter of preference.
Pure and simple.


And yet, you cannot, or will not, accept that you do not have, within
the recorded signal, the information required to do that accurately. So
you construct, not reconstruct, a reflected field that sounds to
you like what you feel are the "important aspects" of the venue.

OK I think this is the place where I can go into my next speech (lesson).

As a means of, yet again, failing to answer simple questions, or address
observations directly.

You say there is a problem that the recording doesn't contain enough
information to determine all of the spatial aspects of the recorded venue.

I say that it contains NO directional information. Obviously it
contains spatial clues in the form of delayed and attenuated information
from the reverberant field. These effects clearly can be interpreted as
a sense of spaciousness. Spaciousness is an attribute unrelated to
direction, and directional information is what you need for your model
to work the way you seem to think that it works.

So therefore we cannot reconstruct it at home. So my question to you would
be, what are you doing about it? Do you just give up on the concept of
stereo?

I'm quite happy with my 'concept' and implementation of stereo. Given
the limits of commercially available recorded music, my stereo is not
"broken", and is not in need of some novel replay concept to "fix" it.
You are alone, as far as I can tell, in your perception that some
"stereo crisis" exists.


No, you don't. You handle the problem in much the same say as I do. You
place two (at least two) speakers in front of you in a room, so that the
lateral localization might be brought out on playback. You decide where the
speakers will go and now to treat the room and where to sit. This is an
attempt to reconstruct the spatial characteristic contained in the
recording.

So far, so good.

You cannot, for example, put one speaker on top of the other, or
even on opposite sides of you, you must construct a soundstage in front of
you with a reasonable resemblance to the geometry of the original, which is
almost always a presentation in front of you with a certain lateral spread
that we - and the Acoustical Society of America, and most band leaders and
producers, have come to know and love.

OK.

The main difference between us is that you don't take it as far as I do.

No, you go in an altogether different direction; not further along the
same continuum.

Remember The Big Three that Linkwitz asked about? We both need to decide on
those factors in our reproduction, and to do that we need some sort of
paradigm, or model, of what it is that we are doing with the system in order
for it to work.

Throughout history most things have had models or theories generated to
explain how things worked, not the other way around.

That said, are you really implying that no one designs speakers against
physical models of how acoustics and reproduction work?

If you study the live model, you can see all of the spatial,
spectral, and temporal aspects of it. No matter who you are or what your
paradigm or ideas are, you must somehow account for a translation of those
characteristics from the live model to the reproduction. If you don't, it
will sound DIFFERENT. You simply cannot put this immense, complex sound
field through two points in space in front of you and expect it to sound the
same.

No matter WHAT you do, it will sound different. That is a simple fact
of physics.

OK, pause for now.

The
direct, early reflected, and reverberant sounds will be made to come
from the appropriate directions if the playback model mimics a
typical live model as closely as possible.

No, they will not, because the information required to do so is not in
the recorded signal.

snip

Yes, they can. I will only say this once, and hope that you latch onto it.

The Image Model is a spatially arrayed, temporally delayed, spectrally
shaped sound field synthesizer that attempts to decode the direct and early
reflected sound contained in the recording in much the same way as a Dolby
Pro Logic delay sytem can bring out the ambience contained in the recording
without destroying the soundstage that belongs in front of the room.

Thank you. You're finally dealing with the electrical and acoustic
reality. You are "synthesizing" something that YOU find to sound
"real". You are absolutely not "decoding" anything, simply because no
directional information was "encoded" in the signal to start with.


The recorded signal contains a stream, or train, of pulses from the first
arrival transients to the recorded reverberation from spatially separate
areas around the instruments. The Image Model features two real speakers
that just happen to be closest to you of the 8 in the model. THEREFORE,
first arrival transients will be heard from the actual speakers first, and
this precedence effect is a very strong one, psychoacoustically speaking,
and results in a separation between first arrival and later reverberation
contained in the recording. There can be only one first arrival, and it has
to come from the actual speakers and nowhere else.

So the mechanism that you ask for is the precedence effect,

Nope, no cigar on that one. I'm quite certain I understand your
"theory", and I'm also quite certain you don't understand my critique,
so let me see if I can make it clearer:

As discussed earlier, there clearly are spatial clues available in the
recording, in the form of the delayed and attenuated reverberant field.
OK so far?

Ok, so now suppose we each sit down in front of our systems. Let's also
suppose that you limit your system to the front two speakers, and
further, that you eliminate the rear-firing drivers. Now, assuming we
play the exact same (good) recording, we will be hearing basically the
same sounds (for discussion, let's stipulate similar forward radiation
patterns, and similar room interactions). Still with me?

Now, in my room, I hear the direct sound, and the room effects, and I
get a sense of spaciousness from the reverb in the recording, and the
stereo effect, and to a small degree from the room interactions. I have
a well defined soundstage, with a proper localization of instruments and
vocals.

Now, in *your* room, one of two situations obtain; you hear *basically*
what I hear, or you hear something significantly different. From how
you frequently describe box speakers, you'll apparently hear no
soundstage, no spaciousness, a "window into another room", or a "hole in
the middle", and/or a flat presentation that is lifeless.

Alright, let's look at these two possible scenarios. In the first, we
hear *basically* the same thing. We both hear the spacial cues in the
recording in the direct sound from the speakers. We are, at this point,
both hearing ALL of the spacial information available on the recording -
we're hearing the entire unprocessed signal, within the limits of our
equipment. Nothing is hiding, nothing awaiting "decoding", we have the
whole tamale. Now, you then take all of this information and direct it
rearward to create a second, wholly synthesized, delayed soundfield
comprising all of the information - including the spacial cues - of the
recording. Every reflection comprising this synthesized field will
contain the entire signal, delayed (to a much lesser degree, and in
different ratios, than in the venue), attenuated (including the already
delayed and attenuated information in the recording), and coming from
directions different than the original. To you, this creates realism.
To me, this creates a sense of smearing that is incompatible with my
sense of realism.

In the case of the second scenario, there's no use for discussion, and
any hypothesis, model, or theory you come up with won't work for me; we
simply don't interpret audio signals in the same manner.

snip

That is one of the most fascinating aspects of this hobby. Seems like you
can't sit two of us down and have us agree on which is the best system.

Uhmm, yes. That is the point.

Seems like we should have all gravitated to a system with certain common
characteristics by this late stage, but it may never happen.

While you really seem to believe this, I am baffled as to why. This
seems the genesis of your mistaken belief that there is A paradigm, or
some fundamental TRVTH that would be universally applicable. There is
no realm of human perception, that I'm aware of, where such coalescing
has taken place. Not in food, art, music, literature, sport, or even in
the evaluation of human beauty. I fail to understand why you believe
interpretation of sound should buck the evolutionary tide where no other
class of perception has.

Perceptual
abilities and experience vary.

Why not just admit that perceptions and preferences vary, instead of
insinuating that dissenters are perceptually challenged, and thus *wrong*?

I think that very few people pay that much
attention to these spatial factors in listening to music.

You're free to think that, but don't expect anyone here to agree that
they are in that "group" however small or large it may be.

Keith