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#1
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
In article ,
ScottW wrote: On Apr 26, 4:27 am, "Gary Eickmeier" wrote: ScottW wrote: On Apr 24, 7:17 pm, Audio_Empire wrote: Now with cardioids , they have a directional attribute in their pick-up pattern. How does one differentiate in a cardiod output from a quiet sound coming into the front (sensitive area) and a loud sound coming = from the side? Amplitude itself is not sufficient to provide a realistic 3D. You missed the point of AE's post. He wasn't saying that the = cardioid pattern has anything to do with the stereo. Just talking in general = about directivity in microphones. =20 So it was a nice informative obfuscation? I'd still appreciate an answer to the question. Trying to explain to someone how two cardioid mikes pick-up stereo is = obfuscation? Well, pardon me for living! I think this question has been = answered satisfactorily for most people. I'll leave the claim that all close mic'd, studio recordings, etc. = are not in fact stereo recordings....as an opinion based upon ancient greek language. Another misunderstanding. It's a long story. The common modern use of the word as a noun to name a recording or = a playback system....stereo means two channels. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...british/stereo I don't care what somebody's dictionary says. =20 Then you decline to accept the meaning of the word in current society. =20 Words can..and do change meaning. =20 The word means a field-type auditory perspective system. Width, height, and depth in the reproduction of a multi-channel = recording. The Bell Labs had three channels to do the same job. We now have 5. = You could have one channel per instrument and arrange them on your own soundstage and it would still be "stereophonic." You could compose a = piece for ten loudspeakers, a piece that was never performed in any other = space, and it would still be stereophonic if it could be portrayed with = more than one channel and present a width, depth, and height to the = presentation of the sounds. Live music is stereophonic, unless you are listening from the next = room. Technically the "stereo" part means solid, all three axes. The = "phonic" part means on loudspeakers. On the other system, binaural, the "bi" part means two. The "aural" = part means ears. We have binaural and monaural, or one eared. Monophonic = would be one loudspeaker. But it would still be mono if it was played on two loudspeakers, if the music came from just one channel. Mono sound = presented on headphone would be idiotic. All of these terms were defined by = the pioneers from Bell Labs, and then later forgotten. =20 Some people think words are defined by some forgotten use...others think they are defined by their current use in society as recorded by dictionaries...like cambridge. First of all, there's nothing "forgotten" about real stereo. Many record = companies still record that way, but usually, mostly for classical = music. Scott have you ever even heard a real stereo recording played = back on a decent system? It sure doesn't seem so.=20 =20 |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
ScottW wrote:
On Apr 26, 12:16 pm, George Graves wrote: First of all, there's nothing "forgotten" about real stereo. Many record companies still record that way, but usually, mostly for classical music. Scott have you ever even heard a real stereo recording played back on a decent system? It sure doesn't seem so. I guess my Linkwitz Orions or my Maggie 1.7s or my recently deceased Quad 63s or my Legacy Focus based surround system must not be up to the task. I'll have to just enjoy "unreal" stereo which fortunately for me...still seems to have depth and a 3D quality for my music pleasure. Your system has depth and a 3D quality? Then why were you fighting everybody tooth and nail about all this? I think I need to re-clarify a few things to tie up this thread and get back to the main point about stereo. Some have asked the musical question, how can stereo record height, width, and depth if the microphones can't know anything about direction, or how can all of this spatial information be contained in any recording? There is no HRTF or head shadowing in a recording. It just can't work. But it does. I have tried to put across the major, major concept that stereophonic is not a head-related system, the recording of ear signals in any way. There is no HRTF or head shadowing because those concepts have nothing to do with stereo, just binaural. We do not need to "encode" all of the sounds arriving at the microphones to be able to tell direction of anything, because it doesn't work that way. Harry Olson defined stereophonic as follows: "A stereophonic sound reproducing system is a field type sound reproducing system in which two or more microphones, used to pick up the original sound, are each coupled to a corresponding number of independent transducing channels which in turn are each coupled to a corresponding number of loudspeakers arranged in substantial geometrical correspondence to that of the microphones." William Snow comments that "it has been aptly said that the binaural system transports the listener to the original scene, whereas the stereophonic system transports the sound source to the listener's room." I hope all that comes as a shock to some readers. The Cliff Notes version of stereo theory is this: We record a set of sounds. We play those sounds back on speakers that we PLACE in our listening room where those sounds belong. There may be three speakers up front. They will have a certain height, such as the ear height of the listener sitting down. They may be pulled out from the walls and encompass a certain lateral spread. This is where the width and depth come from. In addition to the physical depth we perceive by simply pulling the speakers out from the walls into 3D space, there is a psychoacoustic depth contained in the recording due to loudness attenuation and sinking into the reverberance of the recorded venue. Finally, and the hardest to understand, we can bounce some of the output of the speakers from the surfaces of our room in order to use the acoustics of the room to help build a real space around the recorded sound. In a properly set up system this effect can actually decode, or paint, the recorded reverberance onto the appropriate walls of your listening room. Even shorter version: How does stereo know where the sound came from? Because we PUT it there, in front of us, where it belongs. The sounds that we hear in the reproduction are real, physical sounds that exist in real space in front of you, you hear them with your natural hearing, your own HRTF and head shadowing, a summing localization permits auditory events anywhere along a line between the speakers, and the recorded space gives the presentation the "flavor" of the original space if such is contained in the recording. All of this was well known by the pioneers at the Bell Labs who were doing the experiments, but of late it has become confused with binaural with some thinking that what is wrong with stereo is we need crosstalk cancellation, or we need to record the HRTF, or head shadowing, or anything else that has to do with binaural such as Sonic Holography, Holophonics, Ambiophonics, Transaural - there are a number of these that keep popping up about every 5 years, some new genius (usually a rocket scientist who is here to straighten us all out) comes up with a new form of loudspeaker binaural. Gary Eickmeier ScottW |
#3
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
On 4/26/2013 7:06 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
ScottW wrote: On Apr 26, 12:16 pm, George Graves wrote: snip I guess my Linkwitz Orions or my Maggie 1.7s or my recently deceased Quad 63s or my Legacy Focus based surround system must not be up to the task. I'll have to just enjoy "unreal" stereo which fortunately for me...still seems to have depth and a 3D quality for my music pleasure. Your system has depth and a 3D quality? Then why were you fighting everybody tooth and nail about all this? I don't see him fighting "about all this". I see him saying, basically, what I've been saying. Naturally, I agree to a large extent :-) I think I need to re-clarify a few things to tie up this thread and get back to the main point about stereo. Some have asked the musical question, how can stereo record height, width, and depth if the microphones can't know anything about direction, or how can all of this spatial information be contained in any recording? Yes. If you want to clarify, however, you could actually answer that question. There is no HRTF or head shadowing in a recording. It just can't work. There is in binaural, which you never cease to conflate with stereo in these discussions. But yes, you're correct; there isn't any HRTF in stereo recording - and no one has ever even suggested such. But it does. I assume you mean "spatial reproduction" here. Unless are you just contradicting your previous sentence? I have tried to put across the major, major concept that stereophonic is not a head-related system, And you are clearly incorrect in that concept as presented. There is no HRTF in the recording, true. But the listener, wherever he may be, or whatever type of system he is listening to, will perceive the sound as filtered through his HRTF, as you later state clearly yourself. the recording of ear signals in any way. Can you just drop the "ear signals" nonsense? No one has ever suggested anything about this, but you perpetually erect this strawman. There is no HRTF or head shadowing because those concepts have nothing to do with stereo, just binaural. On the playback end, they certainly *do* play a primary role. Please tell us how they do not? Do they play a role in the construction of *your* reproduction model? No. That's the major deficiency, and the part you seem not to grasp. Whatever "field" you construct, it will be transformed by the listeners HRTF, and will be interpreted for spatial clues based on that transformation. Your "model" provides erroneous spatial clues by redirecting what spacial information is on the recording in all directions. We do not need to "encode" all of the sounds arriving at the microphones to be able to tell direction of anything, because it doesn't work that way. You do if you want to "decode" it on playback. Anything else is purely synthesis, not reproduction or decoding. snip Finally, and the hardest to understand, Simply because it is factually inaccurate, and physically impossible. we can bounce some of the output of the speakers from the surfaces of our room in order to use the acoustics of the room to help build a real space around the recorded sound. In a properly set up system this effect can actually decode, You already stipulated that it is not "encoded", therefore you cannot "decode" it. or paint, the recorded reverberance onto the appropriate walls of your listening room. And yet you have no theory for how this is actually performed. You continually use words like "decode" and terms like "appropriate walls" in a definition-free manner and expect the readers to somehow "grok" what you feel they mean to you. Tell us how you define "appropriate", and tell us how you *direct* the appropriate sound to the appropriate wall. Even shorter version: How does stereo know where the sound came from? Because we PUT it there, in front of us, where it belongs. The sounds that we hear in the reproduction are real, physical sounds that exist in real space in front of you, you hear them with your natural hearing, your own HRTF and head shadowing, a summing localization permits auditory events anywhere along a line between the speakers, and the recorded space gives the presentation the "flavor" of the original space if such is contained in the recording. Whoa there partner, this "shorter version", scrubbed of undefined terms and physical impossibilities, is pretty much accurate. And yes, it works surprisingly well. But once you add in all the reflections of sounds that should be "there, in front of us, where it belongs", thinking that somehow that decodes information not present on the recording, that's where you run off the tracks. Obviously you *like* the way that sounds, great, but it simply is not doing *what* you claim it is, and you've provided no plausible mechanism for *how* it could. All of this was well known by the pioneers at the Bell Labs who were doing the experiments, but of late it has become confused with binaural Maybe you have been confused about it; I see no evidence that anyone else is so afflicted. with some thinking that what is wrong with stereo is we need crosstalk cancellation, or we need to record the HRTF, or head shadowing, Again, who? I've not seen any evidence of that here. Keith |
#4
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
KH wrote:
On 4/26/2013 7:06 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote: There is no HRTF or head shadowing in a recording. It just can't work. There is in binaural, which you never cease to conflate with stereo in these discussions. But yes, you're correct; there isn't any HRTF in stereo recording - and no one has ever even suggested such. Dick Pierce said in his response on 4/4/2013 at 7:27PM to AE's previous thread: "The fact is that the HRTF of the original sound field is eliminate from the listening chain is precisely the problem." But it does. I assume you mean "spatial reproduction" here. Unless are you just contradicting your previous sentence? Yes, it means spatial reproduction, and yes, I am contradicting my previous sentence "It just can't work." I have tried to put across the major, major concept that stereophonic is not a head-related system, And you are clearly incorrect in that concept as presented. There is no HRTF in the recording, true. But the listener, wherever he may be, or whatever type of system he is listening to, will perceive the sound as filtered through his HRTF, as you later state clearly yourself. Good. You got that. But then why are you harrassing me about it right now? In a field-type system, which has nothing to do with the number of ears, head shadowing, HRTF, or anything about the human hearing mechanism, everyone who hears the music hears it the same way he hears live music. We are reproducing the object itself, not signals for any particular being's ears, so we do NOT have to worry about anything that has to do with how we hear. I have noted the summing localization which happily lets us get away with fewer channels, but that is heard in the same way by everyone as well, and does not need to be encoded into the signals in any way beyond normal stereo recording techniques. Mr. Pierce was also very confused about how we can possibly know from the recording where the instruments are. Hence, this thread relating how we place those recorded sounds within our rooms and how that settles the question about the difference between a field-type system and a head-related system. the recording of ear signals in any way. Can you just drop the "ear signals" nonsense? No one has ever suggested anything about this, but you perpetually erect this strawman. If some still think that all arriving sounds must be "encoded" as to direction from the microphones then they may not be able to conceive of a field-type system with the direction decided physically and acoustically. They may still think that the signals alone, going into the ears, should be able to tell you the directions of all sounds. This sounds silly, I know, but that is what I have gleaned from some of the remarks. There is no HRTF or head shadowing because those concepts have nothing to do with stereo, just binaural. On the playback end, they certainly do play a primary role. Please tell us how they do not? Do they play a role in the construction of your reproduction model? No. That's the major deficiency, and the part you seem not to grasp. Whatever "field" you construct, it will be transformed by the listeners HRTF, and will be interpreted for spatial clues based on that transformation. Your "model" provides erroneous spatial clues by redirecting what spacial information is on the recording in all directions. Do you see what I mean about your thinking that the information on the recording needs to be directed strictly toward your ears? No, that is NOT the way it works. Not recording and reproducing ear signals, recording and reproducing sound in rooms, not sound in ears or heads. OK here is a deeper explanation to illustrate the difference. There are basically two ways to reproduce a sensory experience.We can reproduce the sensory inputs or we can reproduce the object itself and let your own senses experience it. The first one would be like binaural, in which we record and reproduce ear signals by using a dummy head and then headphones. The sensory experience of when the head was there at the live event, reproduced by direct sensory input with headphones. The stereophonic system is like the second method - reproduce the object itself, a sound field in a room, and let everyone experience that sound with his own senses. The part about redirecting spatial information on the recording in all directions is simply a part of reconstructing sound fields that were recorded so that they can come from similar directions at home Finally, and the hardest to understand, Simply because it is factually inaccurate, and physically impossible. we can bounce some of the output of the speakers from the surfaces of our room in order to use the acoustics of the room to help build a real space around the recorded sound. In a properly set up system this effect can actually decode, You already stipulated that it is not "encoded", therefore you cannot "decode" it. I told you this isn't easy. No, the directions of all of the spatial content is not encoded as such, it is reconstructed int he playback room by means of time delay and positioning of extra speakers or just using reflected sound from the main speakers. or paint, the recorded reverberance onto the appropriate walls of your listening room. And yet you have no theory for how this is actually performed. You continually use words like "decode" and terms like "appropriate walls" in a definition-free manner and expect the readers to somehow "grok" what you feel they mean to you. Tell us how you define "appropriate", and tell us how you direct the appropriate sound to the appropriate wall. A recording is made of a saxphone on the left side of the orchestra. The recording contains reverberance from the sax bouncing some of its output off the left side wall. We play this back on a system with multidirectional speakers. The left speaker contains the vast majority of the sound of the saxophone and its reverberance from the left wall of the concert hall. The right channel has little or none of it. On playback both speakers direct part of their output toward their nearest side wall, but only the left speaker has the sound of the sax and its reverberance. Therefore, in the playback model the sax sound is bounced more from the left wall of the playback room than the right - which would be the appropriate wall. Even shorter version: How does stereo know where the sound came from? Because we PUT it there, in front of us, where it belongs. The sounds that we hear in the reproduction are real, physical sounds that exist in real space in front of you, you hear them with your natural hearing, your own HRTF and head shadowing, a summing localization permits auditory events anywhere along a line between the speakers, and the recorded space gives the presentation the "flavor" of the original space if such is contained in the recording. Whoa there partner, this "shorter version", scrubbed of undefined terms and physical impossibilities, is pretty much accurate. And yes, it works surprisingly well. But once you add in all the reflections of sounds that should be "there, in front of us, where it belongs", thinking that somehow that decodes information not present on the recording, that's where you run off the tracks. How is the reverberance not contained in the recording? Obviously you like the way that sounds, great, but it simply is not doing what you claim it is, and you've provided no plausible mechanism for how it could. You want me to keep saying it again and again until - never mind. All of this was well known by the pioneers at the Bell Labs who were doing the experiments, but of late it has become confused with binaural Maybe you have been confused about it; I see no evidence that anyone else is so afflicted. with some thinking that what is wrong with stereo is we need crosstalk cancellation, or we need to record the HRTF, or head shadowing, Again, who? I've not seen any evidence of that here. Pierce. And many of your statements, as above. Gary Eickmeier |
#5
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
Gary Eickmeier wrote:
KH wrote: On 4/26/2013 7:06 PM, Gary Eickmeier wrote: There is no HRTF or head shadowing in a recording. It just can't work. There is in binaural, which you never cease to conflate with stereo in these discussions. But yes, you're correct; there isn't any HRTF in stereo recording - and no one has ever even suggested such. Dick Pierce said in his response on 4/4/2013 at 7:27PM to AE's previous thread: "The fact is that the HRTF of the original sound field is eliminate from the listening chain is precisely the problem." Which, of course and as usual, you completely utterly misunderstood. I would please implore you once again to not assume that when you are confused, you immediately assume that it's because the other person is confused. The HRTF (do you even know what that means?) is eliminated for a variety of reasons. Most especially in the confused and inconsistent misrepresentations you've proferred, since the soundfields presented by the instrument and ANY recreation of the soundfields by ANY existing stereo recording and playback technique are VASTLY different (despite your unsupported claims about what your 901- based speaker system is capable of doing), the HRTF- processed result of that original soundfiels and that of the reproduced soundfield must, be necessitty, be vastly different. The fact that it work at all, as stated by Audio_Empire and many others, is far more a testimony to the flexibility and adaptability of the human auditory system in being able to synthesize the resultant emotive results, than it is to any alledged physical or technical properties. And you are clearly incorrect in that concept as presented. There is no HRTF in the recording, true. But the listener, wherever he may be, or whatever type of system he is listening to, will perceive the sound as filtered through his HRTF, as you later state clearly yourself. Good. You got that. But then why are you harrassing me about it right now? In a field-type system, which has nothing to do with the number of ears, head shadowing, HRTF, or anything about the human hearing mechanism, everyone who hears the music hears it the same way he hears live music. We are reproducing the object itself, not signals for any particular being's ears, so we do NOT have to worry about anything that has to do with how we hear. I have noted the summing localization which happily lets us get away with fewer channels, but that is heard in the same way by everyone as well, and does not need to be encoded into the signals in any way beyond normal stereo recording techniques. Mr. Pierce was also very confused No, once again, Mr. Eickmeier is confused about what Mr. Pierce said. Please stop blaming him for your confusion. with some thinking that what is wrong with stereo is we need crosstalk cancellation, or we need to record the HRTF, or head shadowing, Again, who? I've not seen any evidence of that here. Pierce. And many of your statements, as above. No. Mr. Eickmeier, Pierce did not say anything like the confused statements you have represented. -- +--------------------------------+ + Dick Pierce | + Professional Audio Development | +--------------------------------+ |
#6
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
Dick Pierce wrote:
Gary Eickmeier wrote: Dick Pierce said in his response on 4/4/2013 at 7:27PM to AE's previous thread: "The fact is that the HRTF of the original sound field is eliminate from the listening chain is precisely the problem." Which, of course and as usual, you completely utterly misunderstood. I would please implore you once again to not assume that when you are confused, you immediately assume that it's because the other person is confused. The HRTF (do you even know what that means?) is eliminated for a variety of reasons. Most especially in the confused and inconsistent misrepresentations you've proferred, since the soundfields presented by the instrument and ANY recreation of the soundfields by ANY existing stereo recording and playback technique are VASTLY different (despite your unsupported claims about what your 901- based speaker system is capable of doing), the HRTF- processed result of that original soundfiels and that of the reproduced soundfield must, be necessitty, be vastly different. The fact that it work at all, as stated by Audio_Empire and many others, is far more a testimony to the flexibility and adaptability of the human auditory system in being able to synthesize the resultant emotive results, than it is to any alledged physical or technical properties. Again I say, HRTF has nothing to do with the stereophonic system. Your problem with its being eliminated in the process, or the two HRTFs being VASTLY different, show a confusion between stereophonic and binaural. HRTF means Head Related Transfer Function. It has to do with a head-related system, not a field type system. snip No, once again, Mr. Eickmeier is confused about what Mr. Pierce said. Please stop blaming him for your confusion. Mr. Pierce, I started this whole new thread because of your astonishing statements in the previous thread, in the post already quoted, that: "ALL directional information iis lost in any single microphone. The output of the microphone is a simply two-dimensional record of instantaneous pressure or velocity amplitude vs time. That's it. There is no information in that electrical signal as to where the sound that caused it came from. None. "As I said, even in a directional microphone, that information is irretrievably lost. Say a directional microphone is down 20 db 120 degrees relative to the principle axis. There's nothing in the resulting electrical stream that unambiguously (or even vaguely) provides a clue as to whether that signal was due to an 80 dB SPL sound on the principal axis or a 100 dB SPL sound 120 degrees off axis. "And when you start to talk about recording in a complex sound field, the electrical output has NO indication AT ALL whether a direct sound came from there, while the reverberent sound came form over there. "Now, take a stereo pair. The situation is really not any better It is geometrically impossible to disambiguate, for example, by any property in the elctrical signals, whether a source of a sound is anywhere on a circle whose center is defined by the line between the two microphones and whose plane is at right angles to that circle. Two omnis some distance apart will generate the SAME electrical signals whether the source is 20 feet ahead, 20 feet above, 20 feet behind or anywhere else on the circle. The same is true of any other mike position. The only position that can be unambiguously recorded is somewhere EXACTLY in between the two, which is arguably not very useful." But anyway, I think that the main difference between the live and the playback is an acoustic one, not necessarily that some info gets lost during recording. "Uh, sorry, but it is the 3-dimensional aspect of the original acoustical field that is provably lost. "The fact is that the HRTF of the original sound field is eliminate from the listening chain is precisely the problem." And further down: "The reason carefully done (and VERY inconvenient) binaural works is because it works VERY hard to try to preserve as much of the utility of the listener's HRTF as possible." And so what we have here is a fuzzy confusion between stereophonic and binaural, once again thinking that the idea is to encode signals that when they enter the ears will decode all incident angles that were recorded and fool the listener into hearing the original space. What I have been hammering at is that the stereophonic system does not work by recording and reproducing ear signals, but rather by recording and reproducing sound fields in rooms. Pierce says that the reason that stereo doesn't work all that well is because almost all directional information is lost and can never be resurrected again. I point out that we are not playing the recorded channels into our ears, we are playing them on speakers arranged where we want the sound to come from, in our playback space. Big difference. Spot evaluation: Record a single instrument with a single microphone. Put a loudspeaker in your listening room in a position that is geometrically similar to where the source was in the original room. Now NAIL IT DOWN SO IT CAN'T MOVE. Now play the sound that you recorded. Can you tell where the instrument is? Did the recording contain any information about where it was originally? Did the recording have any HRTF in it? Head shadowing? Anything to do with the human hearing mechanism? Now make a stereo recording, maybe three instruments placed left, center, and right. Play the recording on speakers that you have arranged in front of you in positions that are geometrically similar to the original. Even in a two channel recording, can you tell where the instruments are? Left, center, and right? Is there any ambiguity about it, even though the stereo pair could not tell which of 360 possible planes those sounds came from? So how did you choose to make the sound come from right there and there? I will leave the spatial reverberance part for another post, but I just want to communicate with you for the first time the kind of difference I am talking about. Most of us grew up in audio thinking that stereo was a vague attempt to fool the ears into hearing another acoustic space, the one in which the microphones were placed, by putting two channels of information into our ears. And so if it didn't work quite like we expected, we figured that there must be some fault in the signal path and so the search was on for greater and greater accuracy in our microphones, electronics, recording media, and speakers, or, as you have expressed that sufficient information was never recorded in the first place, so it cannot work as expected. My contribution is that you are studying the elephant from the wrong end. The Holy Grail lies not in signals, paths, sufficient information, accuracy, none of that. The answer lies in studying the problem of reconstructing the recorded information as sound fields within your room - direct, early reflected, and reverberant. If you understand the structure of this "thing" that we are trying to rebuild within our space, you will have a much better chance at success. Gary Eickmeier |
#7
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote: Spot evaluation: Record a single instrument with a single microphone. Put a loudspeaker in your listening room in a position that is geometrically similar to where the source was in the original room. Now NAIL IT DOWN SO IT CAN'T MOVE. Now play the sound that you recorded. Can you tell where the instrument is? Did the recording contain any information about where it was originally? Did the recording have any HRTF in it? Head shadowing? Anything to do with the human hearing mechanism? Well said, Gary. Bravo! That is exactly right. In the case of the mono recording, you know where the instrument is, because you put it there! How could it be anywhere else. It's a single channel representation of a single instrument. Now make a stereo recording, maybe three instruments placed left, center, and right. Play the recording on speakers that you have arranged in front of you in positions that are geometrically similar to the original. Even in a two channel recording, can you tell where the instruments are? Left, center, and right? Is there any ambiguity about it, even though the stereo pair could not tell which of 360 possible planes those sounds came from? So how did you choose to make the sound come from right there and there? Right again! You know where each instrument is because you know from whence they are emanating. You have brought up one of the prime reasons why stereo works. And it works for 100 instruments as well as it does for two, or three. You know where the sound filed is because you know where the speakers are. You expect that stereo spread to come from the speakers because it does. Gary Eickmeier Audio_Empire --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: --- |
#8
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
On 4/29/2013 4:56 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
Dick Pierce wrote: Gary Eickmeier wrote: snip No, once again, Mr. Eickmeier is confused about what Mr. Pierce said. Please stop blaming him for your confusion. Mr. Pierce, I started this whole new thread because of your astonishing statements in the previous thread, in the post already quoted, that: Astonishing to you, apparently. More about that below: snip "The reason carefully done (and VERY inconvenient) binaural works is because it works VERY hard to try to preserve as much of the utility of the listener's HRTF as possible." And so what we have here is a fuzzy confusion between stereophonic and binaural, And, I submit, the confusion is yours. once again thinking that the idea is to encode signals that when they enter the ears will decode all incident angles that were recorded And once again, you miss the obvious - the *angles* were NOT recorded. and fool the listener into hearing the original space. What I have been hammering at is that the stereophonic system does not work by recording and reproducing ear signals, Whatever that means... but rather by recording and reproducing sound fields in rooms. Pierce says that the reason that stereo doesn't work all that well is because almost all directional information is lost and can never be resurrected again. Which is, again, demonstrably true if you substitute "all" for "almost all", which would be the accurate way to characterize Mr Pierce's statements. I point out that we are not playing the recorded channels into our ears, we are playing them on speakers arranged where we want the sound to come from, in our playback space. Big difference. Not nearly as big as you'd like to imply. According to this concept, headphones simply cannot produce any stereo sound right? Spot evaluation: Record a single instrument with a single microphone. Put a loudspeaker in your listening room in a position that is geometrically similar to where the source was in the original room. Now NAIL IT DOWN SO IT CAN'T MOVE. Now play the sound that you recorded. Can you tell where the instrument is? Of course you can. And *why* is that? What mechanism allows you to localize that sound? Yep, the old HRTF that "has nothing to do with stereo" in your world. Without it, and two (or more) ears, you could not localize it. Did the recording contain any information about where it was originally? Nope. Now you're getting close... Did the recording have any HRTF in it? Head shadowing? Anything to do with the human hearing mechanism? Nope. So you can tell where it *is*, but not where it *was*. If it's front left, that's where you hear it. Doesn't matter that it was far right in the recording. This is synthesis, not reproduction. You need to understand the difference. Now make a stereo recording, maybe three instruments placed left, center, and right. Play the recording on speakers that you have arranged in front of you in positions that are geometrically similar to the original. Even in a two channel recording, can you tell where the instruments are? Left, center, and right? Is there any ambiguity about it, even though the stereo pair could not tell which of 360 possible planes those sounds came from? So how did you choose to make the sound come from right there and there? Once again, you put it where you wanted to hear it *from*, and your ears and HRTF allow you to localize the sounds. You think this an epiphany? Seriously? That, of course has zero to do with where it was in the performance. I will leave the spatial reverberance part for another post, Well yes of course, because your model breaks down completely at this point. You can choose where the left channel is placed, but where do you *place* the reverberant information? You don't know where it was, it had no unique location such that you can place a speaker with 'geometric accuracy', and you can't separate the reverberant from the direct in the signals you bounce around. so you just bounce it all around everywhere - you have no other options. Keith |
#9
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
KH wrote:
On 4/29/2013 4:56 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote: Once again, you put it where you wanted to hear it *from*, and your ears and HRTF allow you to localize the sounds. You think this an epiphany? Seriously? That, of course has zero to do with where it was in the performance. I will leave the spatial reverberance part for another post, Well yes of course, because your model breaks down completely at this point. You can choose where the left channel is placed, but where do you *place* the reverberant information? You don't know where it was, it had no unique location such that you can place a speaker with 'geometric accuracy', and you can't separate the reverberant from the direct in the signals you bounce around. so you just bounce it all around everywhere - you have no other options. Keith Keith is getting close to some understanding here. He sees that we are reconstructing the stereo images within our room, synthesizing where left and right are, and using the recording to play onto that model the sounds that we want to take on this perspective. I haven't yet convinced him that this is legitimate, that it is "OKAY" to display the recorded sound in another room like this, or that the ambience can possibly be separated from the direct by means of time delay. But at least he is beginning to see the system as a reconstruction in his room rather than a head-related system.that is supposed to contain all directional information for your ears. And no, Keith, listening on headphones would not be stereophonic. Remember the system definitions. Stereophonic is the above described field-type system in front of you in your playback room. In fact, this is a great illustration of the "problem" that Dick Pierce and Keith are both talking about with stereo. They say that the two signals just don't have enough information in them to completely reconstruct where all of the sounds came from in the live situation, so stereo is a flawed system that may never have complete realism. Thinking that you can play it on headphones proves them correct in their complaint. All you get is this In Head Localization because your ears just cannot tell which of Pierce's many possible planes that set of left to right sounds could have come from. Right? So Eickmeier comes along and says right, but that is not how the system works, and explains the difference between regarding the recording as "ear signals" and realizing that it is a field-type system intended for playback on speakers in another room from that which was recorded. My big contribution is (if we can get over the first hurdle, the field-type system difference) that to do it right (or rather even righter) we must study the problem aa a total acoustical situation, rather than just sound coming from two direct speakers. The acoustical model of live sound can be studied for its spatial nature and those qualities incorporated in the playback model to a great extent, if you can see you way clear to looking at it from that perspective. And so the people of Eick land lived happily ever after recording and reproducing direct, early reflected, and reverberant sound and displaying it as such in their listening rooms, using their new speakers as Image Model Projectors rather than direct radiators. Gad I love the ending. If we can ever make our way through the first chapter. Gary Eickmeier |
#10
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
In article , KH
wrote: On 4/29/2013 4:56 AM, Gary Eickmeier wrote: Dick Pierce wrote: Gary Eickmeier wrote: snip No, once again, Mr. Eickmeier is confused about what Mr. Pierce said. Please stop blaming him for your confusion. Mr. Pierce, I started this whole new thread because of your astonishing statements in the previous thread, in the post already quoted, that: Astonishing to you, apparently. More about that below: snip "The reason carefully done (and VERY inconvenient) binaural works is because it works VERY hard to try to preserve as much of the utility of the listener's HRTF as possible." And so what we have here is a fuzzy confusion between stereophonic and binaural, And, I submit, the confusion is yours. once again thinking that the idea is to encode signals that when they enter the ears will decode all incident angles that were recorded And once again, you miss the obvious - the *angles* were NOT recorded. and fool the listener into hearing the original space. What I have been hammering at is that the stereophonic system does not work by recording and reproducing ear signals, Whatever that means... but rather by recording and reproducing sound fields in rooms. Pierce says that the reason that stereo doesn't work all that well is because almost all directional information is lost and can never be resurrected again. Which is, again, demonstrably true if you substitute "all" for "almost all", which would be the accurate way to characterize Mr Pierce's statements. I point out that we are not playing the recorded channels into our ears, we are playing them on speakers arranged where we want the sound to come from, in our playback space. Big difference. Not nearly as big as you'd like to imply. According to this concept, headphones simply cannot produce any stereo sound right? Headphones can produce binaural sound fairly realistically, Stereo? Not so much. Headphones will give you two channels, sure, but they won't produce a sound stage like speaker will, with the ensemble spread out before you from wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, or front-to-back. Center placed sounds like vocals, then to end up inside the listener's head instead of front-and-center, and that's not very stereo-like. So, I'd say no. headphones don't produce anything that I would call stereo. Spot evaluation: Record a single instrument with a single microphone. Put a loudspeaker in your listening room in a position that is geometrically similar to where the source was in the original room. Now NAIL IT DOWN SO IT CAN'T MOVE. Now play the sound that you recorded. Can you tell where the instrument is? Of course you can. And *why* is that? What mechanism allows you to localize that sound? Yep, the old HRTF that "has nothing to do with stereo" in your world. Without it, and two (or more) ears, you could not localize it. Did the recording contain any information about where it was originally? Nope. Now you're getting close... Did the recording have any HRTF in it? Head shadowing? Anything to do with the human hearing mechanism? Nope. So you can tell where it *is*, but not where it *was*. If it's front left, that's where you hear it. Doesn't matter that it was far right in the recording. This is synthesis, not reproduction. You need to understand the difference. I think Mr. Eickmeier understands that difference. He also understands that "where it was" is simply not important to the illusion that stereo seeks to produce. Do you understand that? Now make a stereo recording, maybe three instruments placed left, center, and right. Play the recording on speakers that you have arranged in front of you in positions that are geometrically similar to the original. Even in a two channel recording, can you tell where the instruments are? Left, center, and right? Is there any ambiguity about it, even though the stereo pair could not tell which of 360 possible planes those sounds came from? So how did you choose to make the sound come from right there and there? Once again, you put it where you wanted to hear it *from*, and your ears and HRTF allow you to localize the sounds. You think this an epiphany? Seriously? That, of course has zero to do with where it was in the performance. No. And from his context, I don't see how anyone could think that this explanation is any kind of epiphany. It is merely an attempt to explain the localization of a stereo image within a room to a number of people who seem duty bound to argue points about this subject that are abundantly clear to everyone except the highly contentious amongst us. I will leave the spatial reverberance part for another post, Well yes of course, because your model breaks down completely at this point. You can choose where the left channel is placed, but where do you *place* the reverberant information? You don't know where it was, it had no unique location such that you can place a speaker with 'geometric accuracy', and you can't separate the reverberant from the direct in the signals you bounce around. so you just bounce it all around everywhere - you have no other options. Actually, Mr. Eickmeier wasn't talking about his "theory" here. He was talking about first one and then two VERY generic speakers and how they form the locus of any directionality that a recording or live broadcast of an event can provide. --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: --- |
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
On 4/30/2013 9:54 AM, Audio_Empire wrote:
In article , KH wrote: Not nearly as big as you'd like to imply. According to this concept, headphones simply cannot produce any stereo sound right? Headphones can produce binaural sound fairly realistically, Stereo? Not so much. Headphones will give you two channels, sure, but they won't produce a sound stage like speaker will, with the ensemble spread out before you from wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, or front-to-back. Center placed sounds like vocals, then to end up inside the listener's head instead of front-and-center, and that's not very stereo-like. So, I'd say no. headphones don't produce anything that I would call stereo. Really? Interesting. I wouldn't say they produce Mr. Eckmeiers definition of stereo, which I don't believe is universally held, but given your rather spirited defense of "stereo" as simply producing a "solid image", I wouldn't have thought you'd disagree. I find they are clearly capable of providing a solid image, just not a recreation of a soundstage out in front of you. Nope. So you can tell where it *is*, but not where it *was*. If it's front left, that's where you hear it. Doesn't matter that it was far right in the recording. This is synthesis, not reproduction. You need to understand the difference. I think Mr. Eickmeier understands that difference. He also understands that "where it was" is simply not important to the illusion that stereo seeks to produce. Do you understand that? Apparently not. I'm of the opinion that an "accurate" reproduction would place the instruments in the proper position in the reproduced soundstage. You don't think that's important to the illusion? Is it necessary to build a solid image? No, only to build an accurate one. Keith |
#12
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
KH wrote:
Apparently not. I'm of the opinion that an "accurate" reproduction would place the instruments in the proper position in the reproduced soundstage. You don't think that's important to the illusion? Is it necessary to build a solid image? No, only to build an accurate one. Keith Keith - Remember the player piano from the OP of this thread? The only case where you can have "accuracy" of the kind you are thinking of is if you can close-mike the piano and play it back with a speaker of speakers that have the same loudness, freq response, and radiation pattern and room positioning as the real piano. This is because the sound of the piano depends upon the way it puts sound into the room. For too long now we have been misled by this "accuracy" red herring, trying to take the recorded sound and play it on speakers aimed at your face, trying to eliminate the room from messing up the pure recorded signal in this mistaken goal of accuracy. But obviously if you point the speakers at your face only, then they will not be putting sound into the room in the same way the piano did, so no accuracy, no realism. We are not "doing" accuracy in the stereo system, because we cannot have accuracy. The reason is that we must run the sound through two different acoustic spaces before it's all over with. Take the simple problem of placing the two stereo speakers. Lots of sage advice here, but eventually you mut place them somewhere and sit somewhere. So is there a "correct" angular spread? Distance to sit? No, and neither is there live. Are we trying to put the same sound as the microphones heard into your ears? That would be an ultimately silly concept, as if you wanted to be suspended 9 ft. above the conductor's head with your ears stretched 10 to 16 ft apart, or you have coincident ears angled 110 degrees twoard the orchestra, and an additional ear 1 ft in front of the soloist. You get the idea, this is not an "accuracy" process. So, if we can drop that false goal and study how live music puts sound into a room and mimic that with speakers then we could make some progress toward greater realism by studying it from the other end - sort of. OK, it is much too late now and I can't type any more without falling asleep and laying down a mile of "k"s that I have to backspace out of. Later, Gary Eickmeier |
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
KH wrote:
Apparently not. I'm of the opinion that an "accurate" reproduction would place the instruments in the proper position in the reproduced soundstage. You don't think that's important to the illusion? Is it necessary to build a solid image? No, only to build an accurate one. You guys have inspired me to write another paper. Not sure if I would submit it to the AES or just give up, but the idea has to do with those new fangled 3D copiers. Ya know? They take a bin of plastic media and scan an object and then reproduce another one complete with working parts etc, all in plastic. It can make anything, in various colors, just like the Replicator on Star Trek. So this 3D copier guy is giving a demo at the AES during one of their conventions, and someone asks him if he could reproduce audio in 3D. He says sure, how are you doing it now? They tell him all about "accurate" sound reproduction and he is astonished at their ignorance. He says that can't possibly sound like live sound, the three dimensiional sound fields that were recorded! What's the matter with you people? You have studied live sound in concert halls, you have been told by Leo Beranek what makes a good concert hall, you have read the Bose research into the difference between live sound and "hi fi." And you think you are going to reproduce this huge, complex 3 dimensional field with this two dimensional presentation from two speakers doing the direct field alone? After being lectured about "accuracy" and Blumlein and measurements and not wanting to hear the playback room, the guy gets really perturbed. He explains that even in stereo we still hear three dimensionally, whatever sound presentation is in front of us. What you experts have been doing is taking the original 3D object and presenting it as a 2D plane of direct field sound with no theory or paradigm or concept of any kind that can explain how the one is supposed to sound anything like the other. Please call me when you get serious about this subject. I might take it as far as the call back, when they ask him to tell how he would do it. He says just like anything else, I would study the compnent parts in 3D space and model the reproduction after that object. He would explain about the essential (audible) components of the live sound object they are trying to reproduce, the direct field, the early reflected, and the full reverberant, how important it is for all of those to be reproduced in your playback room, all of the component parts coming from the appropriate points in space. He says the direct sound part is fine - you are recording the direct field, playing it on speakers placed about right in front of you and getting the left to right separation duplicated pretty well. Now lets take a look at the early reflected sound. It must come from all around the instruments, from the front and left and right side walls - very important that it not come from the same place as the direct sound. In a good recording you are actually capturing that sound pretty well, if you are recording in stereo with well positioned microphones. Some engineers use a Mid/Side pattern that gets the full spread of sound in the front half of the concert hall. Some use outrigger mikes for this purpose, like John Eargle used to do. Some do spaced omnis placed far apart. All of these techniques pick up all of these sounds and their relationships to each other in 3D space. So how might we reproduce the early reflected part on playback so that it comes from the correct points in space - around the instruments, behind and beside the main direct sound? Well, we might want to have some extra speakers placed around the main stereo pair, on time delay to leave the main sound (first arrival) intact. Or we might use some extra speakers reflecting their output from the front and side walls in the same way the instruments did when making the recording, and in fact those sounds are contained in the recording and are just waiting to be played back from the proper incident angles. Reflecting the output of these extra speakers from the walls would automatically incorporate some delay in them and separate that sound from the direct field. So the smartest of the AES guys get a little agitated and bark back at him, sure, but there is no way to record those reflected sounds separately from the direct sounds so that we can present the direct from the speakers facing us, and the reflected from the extra speakers. You are bouncing ALL of it all around the room, not just the reflected from the recording. No way to separate the two. So the new guy comes back with "Yes, of course there is. They were separated in the recording by time delay and they will be separated on playback by the same mechanism. All of the recorded sounds must of necessity come first from the direct speakers, then later from the walls all around. There can be only one first arrival, and so those sounds take priority from the direct speakers. All of that plus remember, if your criticism is that all of the sounds will be bounced from the walls, not just the reflected part, you have the same problem, only worse! If you cause all of these sounds to come from only the direct speakers, it will also not be separated and the direct may even mask the reflected part. "So we need to design some special reflecting speakers and just aim their output toward the walls and set their gain and response to properly build these fields?" "Well," the man explains, "no, you do not. All you need to do is design the radiation pattern of the existing speakers to reflect a certain portion against the walls, in much the same manner as happens live, to fill out the frontal soundstage as recorded." They say that sounds familiar. Didn't Bose do that in 1968, and write a paper telling how it was developed? Yes, the man says, and a guy presented a paper in 1989 about modeling the playback sound fields after the live sound, but for some reason you guys never believe your own research, all in the name of this "accuracy" red herring. Many arguments ensued, until the smartest man in the room stood up and said hey - I think we could settle this whole thing by just trying it. Amen and The End. Gary Eickmeier |
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
On Tuesday, April 30, 2013 6:37:45 PM UTC-7, KH wrote:
On 4/30/2013 9:54 AM, Audio_Empire wrote: In article , KH wrote: Not nearly as big as you'd like to imply. According to this concept, headphones simply cannot produce any stereo sound right? Headphones can produce binaural sound fairly realistically, Stereo? Not so much. Headphones will give you two channels, sure, but they won't produce a sound stage like speaker will, with the ensemble spread out before you from wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, or front-to-back. Center placed sounds like vocals, then to end up inside the listener's head instead of front-and-center, and that's not very stereo-like. So, I'd say no. headphones don't produce anything that I would call stereo. Really? Interesting. I wouldn't say they produce Mr. Eckmeiers definition of stereo, which I don't believe is universally held, but given your rather spirited defense of "stereo" as simply producing a "solid image", I wouldn't have thought you'd disagree. I find they are clearly capable of providing a solid image, just not a recreation of a soundstage out in front of you. I've never heard a pair of phones do this and I've a number of pairs. Everything from Sony MDV-6 and AKG K-340's, to Hifiman HE-500s and Stax SR-007s (the original ones from the 1980's). Even when playing a REAL stereo recording, I get right, and left images and everything in between is in my head, I.E. it literally sounds like it's inside my head! Headphones are necessary sometimes, but I find that even the best of them or less than satisfactory (unless one is listening to binaural material, then they are OK. Nope. So you can tell where it *is*, but not where it *was*. If it's front left, that's where you hear it. Doesn't matter that it was far right in the recording. This is synthesis, not reproduction. You need to understand the difference. I think Mr. Eickmeier understands that difference. He also understands that "where it was" is simply not important to the illusion that stereo seeks to produce. Do you understand that? Apparently not. I'm of the opinion that an "accurate" reproduction would place the instruments in the proper position in the reproduced soundstage. We are talking at cross purposes here. The stereo image starts and ends in your (or my) listening room. The recording you play may be real stereo or some studio creation, and their locations in the sound field are going to be wherever the recording engineer (or the stereo mikes) place them. BUT, the sound field in your room is going to be wherever YOU place it and however you place it. Erect speakers that don't image well, put your speakers too far apart, or too close together and you wreck whatever stereo image there might be in the recording. In that context, the where is simply not important, as ultimately, the where is going to be whatever your listening room and your choice of speakers and their placement dictates. Under Ideal conditions, the "where" can be a fairly accurate record of the space in which the recording took place, but whether that space Symphony Hall, in Boston, Dinklespiel Auditorium at Stanford U,, or Abby Road Studios in London or Sun Studios in Memphis, it all starts at your speakers and your listening environment. For all practical purposes, THAT's the "where"! You don't think that's important to the illusion? Is it necessary to build a solid image? No, only to build an accurate one. Of course it is. See above. |
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
In article ,
ScottW wrote: On May 1, 11:00*am, Audio_Empire wrote: On Tuesday, April 30, 2013 6:37:45 PM UTC-7, KH wrote: On 4/30/2013 9:54 AM, Audio_Empire wrote: *I find they are clearly capable of providing a solid image, just not a recreation of a soundstage out in front of you. I've never heard a pair of phones do this and I've a number of pairs. Everything from Sony MDV-6 and AKG K-340's, to Hifiman HE-500s and Stax SR-007s (the original ones from the 1980's). Even when playing a REAL stereo recording, I get right, and left images and everything in between is in my head, I.E. it literally sounds like it's inside my head! Thats true....but given time I have found my perception adapts and a very large 3-D image resolves even with distance creating a sense of a large space inside your head. The perceived size of a space is just a matter of scale which human perception adapts to quite easily if you give it a chance. ScottW It's the "inside my head" part that bothers me. Not saying here that I don't or can't listen to headphones , obviously, I do. When recording, for instance, I have a pair of big, clumsy Koss Pro-4AAs clamped to my head because they are the most isolating phones I know of next to a pair of David Clark aviation phones, and they're (A) expensive, and (B) monaural. I listen to my HiFiMan HE-500s using my HiFiMan tubed headphone amp as part of my stereo all the time. When editing recordings using Audacity, I use my Stax with its tubed amp/polarizing driver (don't use them on my stereo because the cord isn't long enough and I can't get an extension from Stax any more) A_E --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: --- |
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
Audio_Empire wrote:
It's the "inside my head" part that bothers me. Not saying here that I don't or can't listen to headphones , obviously, I do. When recording, for instance, I have a pair of big, clumsy Koss Pro-4AAs clamped to my head because they are the most isolating phones I know of next to a pair of David Clark aviation phones, and they're (A) expensive, and (B) monaural. I listen to my HiFiMan HE-500s using my HiFiMan tubed headphone amp as part of my stereo all the time. When editing recordings using Audacity, I use my Stax with its tubed amp/polarizing driver (don't use them on my stereo because the cord isn't long enough and I can't get an extension from Stax any more) A_E I have often wondered how those noise cancelling headphones would work for a recording engineer wanting to isolate from the live sound and hear what is going into the recorder more clearly. I would be a little afraid that you might hear a mix of the two, rather than just the pure electrical signal. Anyone ever try it? Gary Eickmeier |
#17
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Stereophonic Realism - a Tautology
In article ,
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote: Audio_Empire wrote: It's the "inside my head" part that bothers me. Not saying here that I don't or can't listen to headphones , obviously, I do. When recording, for instance, I have a pair of big, clumsy Koss Pro-4AAs clamped to my head because they are the most isolating phones I know of next to a pair of David Clark aviation phones, and they're (A) expensive, and (B) monaural. I listen to my HiFiMan HE-500s using my HiFiMan tubed headphone amp as part of my stereo all the time. When editing recordings using Audacity, I use my Stax with its tubed amp/polarizing driver (don't use them on my stereo because the cord isn't long enough and I can't get an extension from Stax any more) A_E I have often wondered how those noise cancelling headphones would work for a recording engineer wanting to isolate from the live sound and hear what is going into the recorder more clearly. I would be a little afraid that you might hear a mix of the two, rather than just the pure electrical signal. Anyone ever try it? Gary Eickmeier Yes, I bought a pair from Bose when they first came out. Here's what I found. They would totally cancel out the sound of a fan or an air conditioner and heavily attenuate the sound of a jet plane cabin. But, with music playing in the same room, they did nothing. They are designed to attenuate more or less constant noise and to be comfortable, they were not ACOUSTICALLY isolatory themselves like the Koss Pro 4AAs. I also didn't like the way the Bose's sounded. They seemed distorted to me. Luckily, one of the earpiece attachment pieces broke at the headband and that was the end of those. I have a pair of light on-ear noise cancelers from JVC now and they work OK for airplanes, noisy cafes, etc. and sound acceptable. I still prefer my Sony MDV-6s for iPod listening, though. --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: --- |
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