[Gary Eickmeier]

wrote:
Gary E:

I consider two-channel stereo the "mp3" of stereo! lol

It's an approximation of the spatiality of the original recording
environment, or, a manufactured image(pan-pot mono).

Be very quiet as you read this. Listen to whatever sounds you are
hearing, whatever they are coming from and which ever direction....

That is stereo! Where ever you are - in your house, on a commercial
flight, hanging upside down from a set of parallel bars, rowing a
canoe across a rapid, etc. - is stereo.

No, that is natural hearing. Reproducing those sounds is an entirely
separate question.

To practically reproduce the above environments with any number of
speakers is theoretically impossible. Well, binaural done properly
comes close, but still, the sound field is limited to and affected by
the type(closed or open-back) and quality of headphones you are
lisening via.

Stereo is everything - the source, proximity to or distance from, the
radiation pattern, reflectivity sources, vibration transmission - all
of that, and more, localize you in that specific environment at that
given time.

Your wild-eyed description of stereo is not helpful. The terms
"stereophonic" and "binaural" have been defined by Snow and Olson for over
60 years now. The basic idea is that there are fundamentally two ways of
reproducing a sensory experience: reproduce the sensory inputs, as with
binaural recording and reproducing the ear signals that a listener on site
would experience, or reproduce the object itself, the sound of the orchestra
in front of you, as with the stereophonic system, and let your natural
hearing experience that.

There are problems with both ideas that prevent a perfect reproduction of
the live experience. With binaural, on headphones you cannot move your head
without the orchestra moving with it, and you get in In Head Localization
(IHL) problem that prevents the externalization of the live experience. With
loudspeaker binaural, you must still listen in a real room for the
externalization to happen, in which case you once again mix the room
acoustics in with the recorded acoustic. You are also stuck in a fairly
small sweet spot, limiting the technique for large audiences.

With stereophonic, which is not limited to two channels but can be done with
any number of channels and speakers, you are reproducing the object itself
in front of you, the sound of the orchestra and the soundstage surrounding
them, in another acoustic space - your listening room. This is potentially
the more realistic of the two techniques, because you can move around and
get different perspectives on the performance, as in the live situation, and
it can be used for large audiences. But it has the "central recording
problem," that you must run the sound through two acoustic spaces before you
hear it. This is solved mostly by recording much closer to the orchestra
than you would with the binaural system so that the result will not be too
"swimmy," or "wet" with reverberance.

The one aspect of the stereophonic system that is missed by most writers and
theoreticians is that once you recreate all of the spatial, spectral, and
(the combined) temporal characteristics of the performance within your
listening room, and if you do that right, you then are regenerating all of
the spatial cues you need for your natural hearing to be able to just listen
to the actual (real) sounds right there in your room in front of you and the
realism can be stunning because it IS real within your recreation.

The above was demonstrated by the AR company and Edgar Vilchur in the 50s
and 60s in their Live vs Recorded shows, and is alluded to in my OP, in
which loudspeakers are substituted for a player piano to recreate realism
that is indistinguishable from the real piano, if you get the radiation
pattern the same as the piano would have.

Gary Eickmeier