[KH]

On 5/26/2012 7:44 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
Hi Keith -

wrote in message
...
On 5/24/2012 5:46 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
snip

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.

Just that stereo is not a binaural type system, not a directly head-related
system

There's no HRTF involved in the *recording* of stereo.

in which the channels are piped to your ears and you are "fooled"
into hearing what the mikes heard and transported to another acoustic space.
That is a long story, a possible confusion for most all these years of
trying to figure out stereo and speakers and what causes imaging
characteristics.

Reproduction certainly *is* subject to HRTF effects unless you're using
earbuds. Hence your statement about once "both ears are free to hear
your entire room/speaker situation" still seems non-cogent in the
context of stereo.


With binaural, the channels are isolated from each other at the ears and you
are supposed to be able to hear the entire original recorded acoustic space,
with your real space eliminated on headphones, and diminished with
loudspeaker binaural. But with a field-type system like stereo, your ears
are free to hear both speakers, their spatial characteristics, and the
entire speaker/room situation. This entire speaker and room situation has
been studied mostly with respect to frequency response

And boundary reflections, room standing wave modes, comb filter effects,
etc...

and an attempt to
mistakenly diminish the room acoustics from the listening experience. They
seem to understand that you don't want to eliminate it all (see Floyd's book
and the LEDE idea) but it is still usually considered a nuisance variable
that subtracts from the "accuracy" of that pure, recorded signal that they
think they want to go straight, no chaser, to their ears.


*It* usually is a nuisance variable. Taking a quick side trip to the
reality of everyday use, what fraction of a fraction of a percent of
listeners have the luxury of a purpose designed/built dedicated
listening room? Even were we to stipulate that your "theory" is 100%
accurate, you cannot take a single speaker design, and through
placement, make it have the same response, relative to reverberant
field, across the myriad sizes, shapes, furnishings, and different/mixed
materials of construction used in typical listening rooms.


This is a fundamental error of a proportion great enough to call my
corrections a whole new stereo theory in order to break loose from the
binaural confusion.

With all due respect, you seem to be the one confused about everyone
else confusing stereo with binaural.


snip
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.

Slight misread. There are as many presentations of the recording as there
are rooms to play music in.

No, no misread on my part. You simply failed to understand my basic
point; no matter what you do with a stereo system, it will NOT sound
like a real live event. The information to do that is not in the
recorded signal. Thus every speaker design, and every room setup is a
compromise, and dependent on individual listener preferences. Your
optimal setup, one that to you is just a hairs' breath away from real
life, may sound contrived, or fake to me. That is simply a fact that you
need to come to grips with.

An analogy, since you're partial to them:

Take vinyl vs. CD for example. I'm fairly convinced that one reason
(whether anyone agrees with me or not) that many who continue to find
vinyl more realistic than CD - specifically among us old-timers - is
that listening to vinyl for decades creates a mental "image" of what
reproduced music should sound like. An image that contains all the
artifacts specific to vinyl playback, but which are lacking in CD
reproduction.

Now, if you're a vinyl nut, and I'm wedded to CD's, we can both listen
to the same record, and the same CD, and come to the opposite
conclusion. I'll hear the vinyl tics, some phasiness, and say you
cannot *possibly* think that's more realistic than the CD (for argument,
let's stipulate they're a GOOD CD and Record). Yet you'll never agree.
You'll insist that the vinyl is more realistic. Both of us are right,
because there is no standard of realism outside of the interpretation of
each individual listener.

In the same way, you are insisting that you had an epiphany about the
proper way to hear music in a listening room, and simply refuse to
accept that, for any given listener, you could be dead wrong. Perhaps,
after 4+ decades of listening to stereo through box speakers, excessive
reflected sound doesn't sound more real to me, it sounds contrived.

I am just pointing out that we need to pay
attention to the spatial nature of sound in a field-type system. If you know
nothing of this, you have no clue what you are doing to the sound in an
installation with wall speakers for example. Or you may design corner horns
or other speakers with no regard to the spatial results of such a scheme. If
it sounds "funny somehow" to you, you try to equalize it or something that
has nothing to do with the basic problem. Or, in my case, you may own a
highly omnidirectional speaker and have no clue how to place them in the
room for best imaging.

Perhaps the rest of us do pay attention, and have considerable
experience experimenting with speakers and placement?

OK, so, if Eickmeier comes along and points out this spatial nature of
speakers and rooms, and gives a way of looking at the problem in more visual
terms, with a concept that has been time honored as valid - then why is
everyone fighting me so hard about it? This is not rocket science -

OK, perhaps it's that Eichmeier misinterprets concepts that have been
around forever, and comes to some untenable conclusions:

1. You can hear the spatial nature of your speakers and room

2. It is wrong to force all of the sound that was recorded through just
those two points in space that are the speakers in front of you, because
that will change the spatial nature of the sound that was recorded

No, it's wrong to even think that there is "spatial" information on the
recording. Other than left/right, there isn't. There's temporal
information, and phase information, and level information. These cues
can be, and will be, to some extent perceived as spacial separations
when reproduced, but that is not the same thing at all.

3. The way to look at the problem is to notice the image model of the
(typical) live situation and the reproduction, and see how they differ, to
try and explain what it is that we are doing with a field-type system.

And the first thing that we notice is that all spacial information is
lost in recording. The recording does not discriminate relative to
incident angle. Thus whatever the live model is, the information to
recreate it, spacially, simply doesn't exist on the recording.

The paradigm is NOT just "shoot an exact replica of the recorded signal out
of the front of the speakers" or some similar nonsense. Do you get that
Keith? Anyone?

You know, Gary, I've found that when someone frequently resorts to
condescension, something you appear, from this thread, to have a
penchant for, A) people consider them uninterested in reasoned
discussion, and B) people choose to ignore them.



[ This is a good time for everyone in this thread to consider
taking a deep breath and relaxing before replying. Don't
send this into a flame war, please. -- dsr ]



You've alluded to finding many in "Group A" over your many years of
pushing your 'theory', and you reference the latest members of "Group B"
below. Perhaps you need to decide whether your desire is a reasonable
discussion or a pogrom against audio orthodoxy? My surmise is few will
be interested in the latter.



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.

No, it is ignoring nothing, and we are all establishing a "fixed" image
model with our speakers and rooms. Do you move your speakers around for each
recording?

No, but I'm not trying to create a comb filter or reflective soundfield
that doesn't exist on the recording either.


Footnote - I am not, and cannot, make a dead recording sound spacious. That
is another misread. I am using a single additonal reflection in a room that
has no apprecialble reverberant field. A single reflection does not an
acoustic make. Addressing the spatial, not the temporal. No reverb chamber.

You really need to take more care in assuming illiteracy on the part of
everyone else, while assuming clarity on yours. What I'm saying is that
you are taking temporal information that *is* on the recording, and
using it to create a, by necessity, inaccurate one-size fits all
illusion of spaciousness; information lacking from the actual recording.
To you, having sound come from a larger, though still primarily
forward 'pallette' of incident angles - none of which are accurate
relative to the actual recording space - sounds more realistic than
direct firing speakers. We all get that. We don't all agree.


OK, my little game is up. It was a great effort, and I am at an impasse with
you and AE for now, until you have had time to digest some of it.

Yes, we are notoriously slow of wit. Observant of you to notice, and
kind of you to point it out.


I realize I am getting no more responses from AE, and very few others even have an
opinion on any of it yet.

Gee, want to guess why?

Keith