[Gary Eickmeier]

Oh boy. A treasure trove of binaural vs stereo confusion.

Listen fellers, I know you probably have engineering degrees to hold over my
head, and you know calculus, and I freely admit that Audio Empire has a lot
more experience with professional recording than I do, but... well, what I
am offering as an industrial designer (those who study whole systems for
understanding before putting pencil to paper to design a particular product)
is more conceptual than all of the objections that you have stated. We all
have preconceptions about how something is, or how something should be done,
and it is hard to shake off those preconceptions, especially if you have
based a lot of your life and your career and expertise on them. Galileo and
Copernicus didn't have it easy... they all laughed at Christopher Columbus
when he said the world was round... they all laughed when Edison recorded
sound...

To try and understand the magnitude of what I perceive I am up against,
imagine duking it out with a Chistian fundamentalist over atonement
theology. He will fight you tooth and nail using the bible as his reference
and "proof."

Allow me to just re-type one small section of my paper in which I propose an
analogy that uses the "window to another acoustic" that is one of the
primary conceptions you have both used to illustrate how stereo works.

(I discuss the difference between binaural and stereophonic, the lack of a
single stereo theory or explanation of how it works, what we are doing with
the process, the Bell labs experiments, the Blumlein patent.). I continue:



The trend to note with both of these versions is that stereo is thought to
operate as a sort of windowing or portaling process wherein the sound that
was recorded is simply being relayed to the listener by the reproduction
chain. Stereophonic sound is thought to be a "trick" that attempts to fool
the ears into hearing all audible spatial properties of live sound strictly
by means of lateralization - like looking through a portal into another
acoustic space. The degree of success of the illusion is thought to depend
on the "accuracy" of the system, and the status of stereo theory as we know
it today can be thought of as a search for greater and greater accuracy.

Notice also that the above descriptions are strictly two-dimensional
processes. The theories are based only on the direct sound radiatied from a
pair or a line of speakers. They are "blind" to the effects of loudspeaker
radiation pattern, positioning, and room acoustics. We started with the
system definition as a field type system, reproduced in a real acoustic
space by loudspeakers, but as far as the explanation of how it works goes,
the playback room might as well not even exist, and nowhere do we find
reflected sound incorporated as part of stereo theory.

AN ANALOGY

The best way to illustrate this highly conceptual problem is with an
analogy.

Many people have used the "brick wall" analogy - that stereo is something
like punching out two holes in a brick wall separating you from the
performance. Some writers widen the two holes and join them together, some
claim that their systems knock down the entire wall, but we are always
witnessing teh sound through a large portal, standing on the outside looking
in.

That's a good starting point, and a nice, simple analogy to make the desired
point, but let's take it one step further. Imagine your listening room
plunked down in the middle of Symphony Hall with you in it. We're going to
punch out first two holes (or a portal) in front of us, to "let the music
in." Then, the surround sound devotees will puch out some more holes in the
rear and perhaps side walls, to let all the ambience in. Under the
"accuracy" banner, we say that when the reproduction chain gets good enough,
the sound will be indistinguishable from this punched-out shell of a room,
with nothing between you and the music but air.

The caution at this point is that this would all be very fine thinking
except that, no matter how many channels we have, we will never quite make
it all the way because, in this analogy, we must remember that the sound can
get into the imaginary room but it can't get out, and so the sound still
bounces around the listening room with the time between reflections of the
smaller space.

The main point of this section, however, is that this is NOT a good analogy
at all.

Many people, especially audiophiles, have the impression that the recording
contains a perfect image of the performance as witnessed from the best seat
in the house. This may be true with binaural, but stereophonic is a very
much different process. The problem with the above analogy is that it
pictures the sound as having been "witnessed," or recorded, from the vantage
point of the listener in the room suspended in the middle of the concert
hall. This is not the case. What we have done is dispatched the microphones
up to the orchestra, recorded the musicians and the soundstage surrounding
them, and brought back the sound to be played again from entirely within our
room, not from outside with holes punched in the walls so we can hear it.
This is quite a different thing, and it forces us for the first time to
think of the listening room not as a nuisance variable but as the performing
space itself. For better or for worse, the room must be thought of as an
integral part of the sound, to be used to construct the same sort of spatial
patterns that existed in the real concert hall, rather than fought with
sound killing materials. I believe that this is for the better, because once
we reconstruct the sound fields in the playhback room, all of the
characteristics of live sound can be present, making the sound real and not
a trick. The stereophonic recording can be thought of as a concentrate, to
be mixed with the playback acoustic in a way that models the reproduction
after the real thing. Although we must inevitably hear some of the
listeining room along with the "flavor" of the recorded acoustic, the
realism can be stunning.

Gary Eickmeier