I am curious as to how many ears you used when making this
"observation" and how they were arranged in relation to your head.
Stereo pictures can create incredibly deep and realistic spatial
detail as can stereo recordings. I would completely agree in principal
with you that, equipment quality aside, technique is everything. We
have had guests at our home watching movies and on several occasions
have witnessed them look around the room for the other speakers and
even behind them towards the street to see if someone was approaching
from outside as the depth of the sound was so real as to be
enveloping. We have only two speakers in the room.
- Bill
www.uptownaudio.com
Roanoke VA
(540) 343-1250

"Bruce Abrams" wrote in message
...
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