[KH]

On 5/24/2012 5:46 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
I yield. You guys have fed my papers to the junkyard dog until they are no
longer recognizable. I would just leave you with one final thought on audio.
My biggest point is that once both ears are free to hear your entire
room/speaker situation, then they can easily hear the spatial presentation
in front of them.

OK, under what normal listening situations are both ears *not* be "Free
to hear your entire room/speaker situation"? I'm afraid I don't know
what you're trying to say here.

If it is a boombox, you can tell the sound is coming from
that little box in front of you, no matter what was recorded. If it is a car
stereo, you usually hear some stereo image coming from, or forming itself
over, a certain portion of your dashboard or windshield. If it is a
sophisticated home system, you can hear those aspects that I described at
the beginning. In other words, the process changes the spatial
characteristics of the recorded original to those of the presentation in
front of you.

Absolutely. There's no argument there at all. What you seem to refuse
to allow is that *your* version of "realism" or "EEF's" or whatever term
you want to use, is not universal. To a very large degree it is a
matter of preference, and subject to the interpretation of the listener.
You seem to insist that there is *a* correct way, and other ways are
*wrong*. It is a simple fact that you could set up a system that to
your ears is a 10 out of 5 for EEF, and it could still sound totally
unnatural to me, or others.

So the idea is to study those characteristics and make them
closer to the live situation by manipulating The Big Three.

But again, this ignores the recording piece which, perforce, sets a
realism boundary that you simply cannot breach through speaker
design/placement. You are, in essence, applying a form of fixed
equalization which, being fixed, has to perform with varying degrees of
help or harm depending on the specific recording. If you make a dead,
flat recording sound spacious, then you'll overcompensate for a good
recording with 'proper' spatial clues.

Making an image
model drawing gives a more visual representation of what you are hearing,
and leads to more realistic reproduction if you model the room/speaker
situation after the original.

A visual image is often useful, and often misleading. A classic
example; you cannot form a visual image of 7-dimensional space. We have
no visual concept of more than three dimensions. But mathematically,
multiple additional dimensions are realizable, and often useful. If
there are no mathematical underpinnings for your "Image", and you have
no way of developing such supporting calculations, you have to accept
that your Image could simply be fallacious, irrespective of how obvious
its conclusions appear to you.

A PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALOGY

I love visual analogies.

Hadn't noticed ;-)

The analogy of sound to vision eventually breaks
down, but it is fun to try.

But this is the problem with reasoning by analogy; the analogy is only
useful when it is truly analogous in most, if not all, crucial aspects.
Since sound is room dependent, and video is not, the analogy breaks
down before it starts.


Keith