[KH]

On 4/26/2013 7:06 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
ScottW wrote:
On Apr 26, 12:16 pm, George Graves wrote:


snip

I guess my Linkwitz Orions or my Maggie 1.7s or my recently deceased
Quad 63s or my Legacy Focus based surround system must not be up to
the task. I'll have to just enjoy "unreal" stereo which fortunately
for me...still seems to have depth and a 3D quality for my music
pleasure.

Your system has depth and a 3D quality? Then why were you fighting everybody
tooth and nail about all this?

I don't see him fighting "about all this". I see him saying, basically,
what I've been saying. Naturally, I agree to a large extent :-)

I think I need to re-clarify a few things to tie up this thread and get back
to the main point about stereo. Some have asked the musical question, how
can stereo record height, width, and depth if the microphones can't know
anything about direction, or how can all of this spatial information be
contained in any recording?

Yes. If you want to clarify, however, you could actually answer that
question.

There is no HRTF or head shadowing in a
recording. It just can't work.

There is in binaural, which you never cease to conflate with stereo in
these discussions. But yes, you're correct; there isn't any HRTF in
stereo recording - and no one has ever even suggested such.

But it does.

I assume you mean "spatial reproduction" here. Unless are you just
contradicting your previous sentence?

I have tried to put across the major, major concept that
stereophonic is not a head-related system,

And you are clearly incorrect in that concept as presented. There is no
HRTF in the recording, true. But the listener, wherever he may be, or
whatever type of system he is listening to, will perceive the sound as
filtered through his HRTF, as you later state clearly yourself.

the recording of ear signals in
any way.

Can you just drop the "ear signals" nonsense? No one has ever suggested
anything about this, but you perpetually erect this strawman.

There is no HRTF or head shadowing because those concepts have
nothing to do with stereo, just binaural.

On the playback end, they certainly *do* play a primary role. Please
tell us how they do not? Do they play a role in the construction of
*your* reproduction model? No. That's the major deficiency, and the
part you seem not to grasp. Whatever "field" you construct, it will be
transformed by the listeners HRTF, and will be interpreted for spatial
clues based on that transformation. Your "model" provides erroneous
spatial clues by redirecting what spacial information is on the
recording in all directions.


We do not need to "encode" all of
the sounds arriving at the microphones to be able to tell direction of
anything, because it doesn't work that way.

You do if you want to "decode" it on playback. Anything else is purely
synthesis, not reproduction or decoding.

snip

Finally, and the
hardest to understand,

Simply because it is factually inaccurate, and physically impossible.

we can bounce some of the output of the speakers from
the surfaces of our room in order to use the acoustics of the room to help
build a real space around the recorded sound. In a properly set up system
this effect can actually decode,

You already stipulated that it is not "encoded", therefore you cannot
"decode" it.

or paint, the recorded reverberance onto
the appropriate walls of your listening room.

And yet you have no theory for how this is actually performed. You
continually use words like "decode" and terms like "appropriate walls"
in a definition-free manner and expect the readers to somehow "grok"
what you feel they mean to you.

Tell us how you define "appropriate", and tell us how you *direct* the
appropriate sound to the appropriate wall.

Even shorter version: How does stereo know where the sound came from?
Because we PUT it there, in front of us, where it belongs. The sounds that
we hear in the reproduction are real, physical sounds that exist in real
space in front of you, you hear them with your natural hearing, your own
HRTF and head shadowing, a summing localization permits auditory events
anywhere along a line between the speakers, and the recorded space gives the
presentation the "flavor" of the original space if such is contained in the
recording.

Whoa there partner, this "shorter version", scrubbed of undefined terms
and physical impossibilities, is pretty much accurate. And yes, it works
surprisingly well. But once you add in all the reflections of sounds
that should be "there, in front of us, where it belongs", thinking that
somehow that decodes information not present on the recording, that's
where you run off the tracks.

Obviously you *like* the way that sounds, great, but it simply is not
doing *what* you claim it is, and you've provided no plausible mechanism
for *how* it could.


All of this was well known by the pioneers at the Bell Labs who were doing
the experiments, but of late it has become confused with binaural

Maybe you have been confused about it; I see no evidence that anyone
else is so afflicted.

with some
thinking that what is wrong with stereo is we need crosstalk cancellation,
or we need to record the HRTF, or head shadowing,

Again, who? I've not seen any evidence of that here.

Keith