As a choral singer, I regularly have the opportunity to hear what is
frequently referred to as the "absolute sound", namely unamplified music in
a concert hall. As regards this reference, we audiophiles frequently
question whether the purpose of a reproduction system is to recreate the
original musical experience in the listening room, or whether it is to
reproduce what the recording engineer heard in the control room.

Recently during a rehearsal at Weil Recital Hall at Carnegie while waiting
to get on stage, I was sitting in the third row of the mostly empty hall
listening to a sonata for piano and cello and trying to figure out
(seemingly for the zillionth time) what it was that allows the ear to so
clearly distinguish even the finest quality reproduced music from the real
thing. While the obvious factors such as tonal balance and dynamic range
certainly contribute, I began to reconsider (again, for the zillionth time)
the role that ambient sound plays. As I listened, it ocurred to me that the
percentage of reflected sound to direct was probably much greater than I had
previously thought (bearing in mind that while I was in row 3, the hall was
mostly empty) and that the quality and quantity of reflected sound probably
has as much to do with the subjective impression of "live or memorex" as
does the traditionally thought of factors of tonal balance and dynamic
range.

Back to the original question. I have always been of the opinion that an
accurate replay of the control room is all that could be hoped for, and that
assuming the engineer did his job properly, a reasonable facsimile of the
original event could be had. (The thinking was based in part on the concept
that no listening room could be made to acoustically duplicate a concert or
recording venue. This also happens to be the thinking that led to binaural
recording & playback techniques.) Which brings us to the possibility that
discreet multi-channel playback should be far more capable of reproducing
the original acoustic space than stereo ever could hope to. This is so
obvious and self-evident that I have difficulty understanding why the
audiophile community continues to disparage multi-channel systems as being
good for movies only. That stereo is physically incapable of placing sound
behind (and to the sides of, etc.) the listener is obvious. That to
accurately replicate an acoustic event requires sounds (a
potentiallysignificant portion of the total sound as previously discussed)
to be located behind the listener is equally obvious. The simple fact is
that a concert cannot be accurately reproduced with sounds emanating only
from in front of the listener. It's just not what we ever hear in the
original venue.

When viewed from this standpoint, even if DVD-A and SACD provide no more
"resolution" in two channels than standard red-book CDs, the potential for a
more accurate reproduction of the original musical event via a multi-channel
experience should have all audiophiles jumping at those formats. Rather
than quibbling over interconnects and speaker cables with all their limited
(if at all existing) possibilities for improvement, I suggest that a far
more meaningful upgrade would be the addition of 2 or 3 channels to existing
systems. Save for speaker upgrades, we really have maxed out the
capabilities of the stereo format. It is only through multi-channel
playback that we can hope to approach a true recreation of the "absolute
sound."

Bruce