[Audio Empire]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2011 07:56:56 -0700, bob wrote
(in article ):

Friday night, WQXR in New York broadcast a live concert by Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. On their Web site, it was possible
to get a binaural stream. I wasn't able to listen to it (my wife
wanted to hear the concert too, so no headphones!), but was wondering
if anyone else had.

I gather this is a fairly new feature, and I don't know if they're
going to do it on any upcoming live broadcasts.

bob

I certainly would have listened-in had I known about it. I used to do
binaural broadcasts for the now defunct KPEN Classical Station in Mountain
View, CA. and they were very well received. In those days I made my own
binaural set-up with a styrofoam wig stand, a pair of Neumann KM-83
"lipstick" condenser omnidirectional condenser mikes (alas, they weren't
mine, they belonged to the station), and a piece of wood with a 1/4-20
captive nut hammered into it.

I buried the KM-83s in each side of the styrofoam head after "painting" it
with a can of "flock" paint from an auto supply store. The microphones were
situated with the diaphragms flush with, and parallel to, the sides of the
"head" . The board was cut with a scroll saw to neck-size and glued to the
bottom of the head with the captive nut centered for mounting the head on a
camera tripod. When the recordings were played back through headphones, the
effect was almost spooky. The only thing that I could never get binaural to
do was to localize things in back of one's head. A test was to walk around
the head while it was being recorded jiggling a set of keys. Images were
solid and localization pin-point anywhere at the sides of the head, or in
front of the head, but images from behind seemed to move to the middle of
one's head, halfway between your two ears (the way regular stereo often
images on headphones). I could never figure out how to get binaural to place
images behind the listener. I suspected that it might be because the
recording head had no external ears but when I tried to fabricate a pair out
of a piece of leather, the rear imaging didn't improve, yet we all know that
we can always tell when sounds are behind us. 'Tis a puzzlement to this day.
But with music recordings where the instruments are arrayed in front of the
head, nobody ever seemed to notice.