On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 16:48:43 -0700, Scott wrote
(in article ):
On Sep 6, 8:40=A0am, wrote:
With excellent amps etc. having become commodity items and inexpensive fo=
r
some time, little new or better can be expected for sound experience
quality from the hardware end of things. =A0That battle has been won.
The next big step it seems to me is in the area this article discusses. =
=A0
It reminds me of a project I have been watching evolve for some years:
http://www.ambiophonics.org/
With similar goals, here in part is another effort that is worth reading
in its entirety:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/sc...?ref=3Dscience
The author of the article really steps in it here.
"But stereo had no real psychoacoustics. It created an artificial
sense of space with a second track, but did so by dealing with only
one variable =97 loudness =97 and enhanced human perception simply by
suggesting that listeners separate their speakers."
Seriously? Stereo had no real psychoacoustics? Credibility goes right
out the door then and there.
Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century,
but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of
music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what
Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" -- to replicate the original in
every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can
be delivered."
removing the room (the listening room) is IMO a good idea. Of course
one does not do that by bouncing the sound off the walls.
Yeah, it looks good on paper. Remove the listening venue from the equation
and replace it with the performance venue's acoustic signature - along with
the performance. Easier said than done, unfortunately. Even DSP-based room
correction schemes are only partially successful because EQ-ing a system to
alter it's frequency domain in order to overcome peaks and valleys in
response caused by room interaction seems to me to only be addressing
first-order effects - amplitude anomalies. I don't believe that any of these
schemes address time-related anomalies at all and I don't see how any such
system can address room size (with regard to wavelength, anyway).
Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and
chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based
audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters
and digital microprocessors.
But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of
psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory
system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and
understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said.
Sloppy article. No surprise there. Wonder if his research has taken
into account the vast array of stereo recordings and stereo recording
techniques out there. Trying to mimic a specific concert hall using
their one recording made in that concert hall strikes me as a pretty
narrow approach. But who knows? The article seems to be full of
questionable reporting.
Seems to me that in order for this approach to work, the world would have to
come to a consensus about what constitutes a proper stereo recording. And,
that, my friends, will never happen. I can tell you from long experience,
that there are about as many opinions on THAT subject as there are recording
engineers and producers (and in my not-so-humble-opinion, any stereo
recording scheme that starts with more than two microphones for the
performers is suspect 8^).