[Sonnova]

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:09:12 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

wrote in message ...
On Apr 22, 10:45 am, wrote:

If one had a way, electronics and speakers etc. to fill a hall with
sound, and the played any stereo recording of any orchestral work, it
still wouldn't in any significant way sound like the original
performance, so how and why would it do so in any listening room using
any speaker system (under the sun)?

This is another misunderstanding of the system. We aren't always and only
trying to transport the listener to the concert hall. With binaural we are,
yes, but not with field-type systems. It's a sort of continuum in which we
might try for that effect (like with classical sometimes) and we might just
sometimes want to transport the performance to our listening room.

That is exactly what Edgar Vilchur was doing with his live vs recorded demos
at A.R. If you close-mike an instrument and play it back next to the real
instrument, you can fool the listener quite easily, because both sounds take
on the acoustics of the playback space. If you do that with several
instruments, then arrange the speakers in similar geometric positions, you
can have a little "player orchestra," something like a player piano -
perhaps the ultimate in electronic realism!

I had an opportunity - twice, actually, to hear the live vs. recorded demos
at A.R.'s downtown Manhattan showrooms in the early 'sixties. I was not
convinced either time. I never thought the recorded sections (which were on
analog (naturally) tape and were given away to my 17/18-year-old ears by the
hiss) sounded very much like the live playing. Older patrons couldn't tell
which was which, I guess, because they couldn't hear the hiss like I could,
And even though the live music sounded different from the recorded, if one
didn't know which of those one was hearing, one would be unable to tell which
was which - that's what made the demos successful, not that the live and
recorded performances sounded alike, the way A.R.'s advertising led readers
to believe. If they had conducted the tests by letting everyone hear the
string quartet play live first, so that the audience could get a handle on
what the real thing sounded like in that venue, I doubt if the demo would
have fooled anybody. As you might recall, both the speakers (AR3ax when I
heard the demo) and the musicians were behind a gauze scrim so that you
couldn't really see anything but shadows and thus couldn't tell when the
musicians were actually playing or faking it.