[Gary Eickmeier]

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message ...
William Sommerwerck wrote:

And no... you _aren't_ stuck with whatever room you have. If you
want an accurate playback system, the room needs to be designed
with controlled acoustics and the speaker system needs to be
designed into the room.

I was thinking in terms of the sorts of things Gary wants to do.

Gary wants to _replace_ directional cues in the original recording with
dominant directional cues in playback, effectively swamping the acoustics
of the original recording.

That makes for a system that tends to make all recordings sound the same,
whether they are recorded in a dry or wet acoustic.

Some folks in the high end world like the "huge sound" and they want
everything to sound huge, even intimate solo classical and folk
recordings.

I suppose that's nice for them if they like that, but such systems are not
accurate, and it's not possible to make recordings for which they _are_
accurate because they can reproduce only one kind of space. Which also
makes such systems worthless for monitoring work.

But if people like the way that stuff sounds, I'm not going to tell them
not to like it. I'm just going to tell them that making claims of realism
and accuracy of imaging are foolish.

NO.

No Scott, and no William. Your fanciful descriptions of my system are not
what is happening at all.

William has agreed that delayed and spatially separated versions of the
sound can decode the ambience contained in the recording. Scott has agreed
that you always have and need the room on playback because our ears need to
anchor the sound and externalize it. Where you both go astray is when you
think that this process swamps the recorded acoustic and makes all
recordings sound the same. The answer is no, the reflected sound is still
within the fusion time and is still correlated with the direct sound. If I
play a very dry recording, it sounds that way. If I play a wet, or
reverberant recording, it widens out and deepens accordingly, something that
doesn't happen with direct firing speakers alone.

I could say the same thing about listening on Scott's LEDE system. The
spatial nature of his playback situation is just as constant as mine. As for
systems which intentionally do NOT encourage any reflected sounds, all
recordings are heard as the direct only, and so they all sound the same -
everything coming from those two **** holes in the snow - as it were.

My room is very carefully designed for image modeling. The front third or so
is specular reflective to keep the freq response of the image, or virtual
speakers, the same as the primary ones. Imagine listening to not just two
speakers, but a lattice of 8 speakers spread out some distance deeper and
wider than the actual room. Speaker positioning is such that all of these
real and virtual speakers are equidistant from each other. This makes for a
very even spread of the imaging all across the front of your room, not just
speaker to speaker.

As you go back in the room there is more and more absorption and diffusion,
in order to prevent all modes from coming back to the front. You need two
reflective surfaces for slap echo or excessive reverberation - of which
there is very little in a home sized room anyway.

Sound images form themselves in 3D space within the aforementioned lattice
of speaker images. This causes the speakers to disappear and the performers
to seem to be right there in the room in front of you. For live, reverberant
recordings the spread of these reflections is all important in making the
model - your room - take on the characteristics of the recorded space. This
is not speculation, I am doing it ahd have been for like 25 years in my 20 x
30 dedicated room.

William, for the record I don't believe in adding some phony "hall effect"
from a processor. I like to hear only what is contained in the recording,
for better or for worse. I have very few bad recordings, my system sounding
great on most - but not all. If you cannot say the same, you have some
problems in your system that need to be addressed. Some recordings are just
a blast, and I feel sorry for those iconoclasts that are just listening to a
pair of direct speakers with all room sound cloaked. You just don't know
what you are missing.

Gary