[Audio Empire]

On Wed, 16 May 2012 03:57:25 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

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."

I don't think that's really an apt analogy. You have formulated, in a vacuum
of actual knowledge, and experience, it seems, a bunch of notions about how
you think this stuff works. People with knowledge (those engineering degrees
that you mention) and actual experience with the concepts that you blithely
throw around, try to explain to you why your notions are based on assumptions
not in evidence. It's not a "fight" between fundamentalism against atonement
theology, it's a fight between how you want things to be and how they
actually are. It's like someone with a deep background in physics and
electronics arguing with a layman who is convinced that he can hear the
difference between different expensive audio cables. The scientist KNOWS that
the cables can't sound any different, and can explain to the "true believer"
why this HAS to be so, but the true believer hasn't the background to follow
the argument and KNOWS what he thinks he hears.

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.

Well the window analogy is useful to explain the listener's relationship to
the sound source, it is overly simplistic. Too simplistic to explain the
signal that the speakers are reproducing. For instance, windows will never
give the listener inside the room, any image specificity, any front-to-back
layering, or any image height. That;s because speakers are attempting to
reproduce an audio signal picked up by microphones with certain
characteristics that are very unlike "two open windows".

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.

Only in the sense that it explains the listener's RELATIONSHIP with the sound
field as produced by the speakers. It is not, by any stretch of the
imagination, a "model" for stereophonic sound and it would be a mistake to
see it that way.