Joe Kesselman wrote:
For what it's worth, I've recently heard some pretty believable
phase-panning software demoed.

Even Q-Sound worked pretty well in the original demos. But when it
came out, people figured out that they could do all kinds of radical
things with it, placing sounds outside of the speakers and making
exaggerated depth effects. So they did, and then they wound up with
albums that had poor mono compatibility and couldn't be played on
and radio. And one of them was Madonna, and that was pretty much the
end of Q-Sound.

One downside is that once you introduce that axis, the image size is
much more noticable; distance "behind" the speakers is also affected by
their separation, so closely-spaced speakers (eg a desktop pair) scale
down the whole "soundstage" and you wind up with a band of deep-voiced
rabbits or something about that size. Admittedly that should be no
weirder than the fact that a TV image is smaller than life-size, but
we're less used to hearing it and it may take a bit of getting used to.

I dunno, this is exactly what I am used to hearing, but then I mostly
listen to classical music.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."