Audio Blind Testing

[STC]

 

I am still reading the first one but I still cannot find reference for two loudspeakers  playing simulataneously. 

[STC]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

STC, I note that you say you can always hear "the hole in the middle" with a conventional stero setup

 

Did I? Could you please point me where? I may have said some who prefer separating the speakers beyond 60 degrees can experience recessed centre.

[fas42]

37 minutes ago, STC said:

 

Did I? Could you please point me where? I may have said some who prefer separating the speakers beyond 60 degrees can experience recessed centre.

 

I may have misunderstood your intent, here,

 

Quote

Since I was young, I perceived the hole in the middle with stereo over loudspeakers. It could be because I lacked exposure to artifice sound and most of my reference were unamplified live sound. also check out about Trimemsional sound addressing hole in the middle with stereo in 1959 magazine which I posted in the other thread.

 

[STC]

7 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

I may have misunderstood your intent, here,

 

 

 

Clearly, it was a reference to WIDE stereo vs stereo in the TV settings. 

[fas42]

My apologies - I should have read it as "I perceived the hole in the middle with (wide) stereo over loudspeakers."

[STC]

No worries. We all make mistakes.

 

Actually, in the second quote I did say I perceive a hole in the middle. But I was referring to the transition from one speakers to two speakers. Generally, with stereo with two speakers you sense the sound bit hollow in the centre compared to mono sound with one speaker. Sorry for the confusion.

[Ralf11]

3 hours ago, STC said:

 

To localize sound you need ILD and ITD. Your example applies to mono signal because when the head is held steady both signals arrive your ears at same level and at same time thus making localization impossible and you can  place the sound anywhere along the line. However, your visual clue also would play a role and it is possible for you to imagine a location,IMO.

 

except that human ears are usually offset - just a little tho; not like an owl's

 

IIRC, the ear canals also differ slightly and there is some phase detection going on perhaps based on arrival times

 

and... shading effects of the head also allow some localization

[STC]

My ears are not identical but I have no trouble with localization in real world and very good at it. I think it got to do with your early exposure where localization played a crucial role in my early days.

 

However, I have trouble in perceiving sound extending beyond my room walls despite most of the visitors claiming to hear so. Perhaps, my visual clue plays a bigger role.

 

Generally, we could compensate for hearing differences in our left and right ears. There was a recent publication of a research paper that vocal whispered through right ear is perceived differently from left.

[esldude]

45 minutes ago, STC said:

My ears are not identical but I have no trouble with localization in real world and very good at it. I think it got to do with your early exposure where localization played a crucial role in my early days.

 

However, I have trouble in perceiving sound extending beyond my room walls despite most of the visitors claiming to hear so. Perhaps, my visual clue plays a bigger role.

 

Generally, we could compensate for hearing differences in our left and right ears. There was a recent publication of a research paper that vocal whispered through right ear is perceived differently from left.

Not only that, I read a few years ago where it was found people understood speech better in one ear vs the other using telephones if they had spent years in office work and held the phone to one ear all the time vs the other.  Presumably due to the location of wired desk phones.  

[esldude]

4 hours ago, STC said:

 

I am still reading the first one but I still cannot find reference for two loudspeakers  playing simulataneously. 

I don't think it is in the links I provided.  Those were more to show how under anechoic conditions people have a tendency to hear forward sounds in their head rather than externally if they can't move their head.  Research about such things goes back to at least the 1940s.  

[STC]

Deleted.  ( You just answered)

 

I still don’t think you will hear the sound inside your head. 

[semente]

6 hours ago, esldude said:

I think it was in Toole's book or referenced someone else's research.  If the listener is equidistant from speakers in an anechoic chamber and their head is held immobile, they hear imaging mostly inside their head much like with headphones.   If their head is not held immobile apparently very small movements of our head are important.  As the imaging then moves outside their head.  That is one of the advantages of the Smyth Realizer.  Head movement is brought into the sound you hear thru the phones. 

 

I am taking the word of others on this not having the chance to try it out in an anechoic chamber for myself. 

 

If you have a pair of small active speakers then grab an extension cord and take them out to the lawn.

[pkane2001]

13 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

The "in your head" sound with headphones is because the acoustic clues are too indistinct - one's ear/brain can't interpret their true meaning - so the sound "pushes inward". The equivalent with speakers is that the sound is trapped in the cabinets, the imaging doesn't lift out and lay beyond them.

 

The solution in both cases is to improve the reproduction chain; the better resolved acoustic data now is clearly understood by the brain - and the soundfield then stretches beyond the transducers.

 

Sorry, Frank, but that can’t be right. I listen to speakers and headphones using the same exact system. Headphones sometimes produce in-your-head sound while speakers never do. It’s not the reproduction chain, it’s how the sound transducer delivers sound waves to my ears.

[pkane2001]

11 hours ago, esldude said:

Some info I have read indicates head movement is important for the illusion of space.  So having your head held still or wearing headphones so the soundfield never moves, impacts your ability to hear space and imaging at a distance.  

 

This is very interesting.  This is certainly the method used for 3D vision, but I never considered that hearing might work the same way. I’ll have to think about how to test this. Thanks for the paper reference!

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Sorry, Frank, but that can’t be right. I listen to speakers and headphones using the same exact system. Headphones sometimes produce in-your-head sound while speakers never do. It’s not the reproduction chain, it’s how the sound transducer delivers sound waves to my ears.

And it's not right - like most all of fas42's "theories" (notions?). Headphones produce images that are seemingly inside of one's head for the simple reason that headphones are isolatory. In normal hearing all sounds are heard by both ears. Localization occurs due to the time delay and complex phase relationship between the arrival of a sound to each ear. In headphone listening, the sounds each ear hears are isolated from the sound that the other ear hears, thus confusing the "auto-locating" facilities in the brain. Without those cues, the brain doesn't know precisely where to locate the sound source in space, so it locates everything either at the individual ears or between them.

 

 

 

[Abtr]

Shouldn't a stereo recording done with two small microphones placed inside your own two ears and then played back to you through headphones reproduce much of the original soundstage?

https://gizmodo.com/clever-earbud-microphones-bring-3d-audio-recording-to-y-1740527800

[sandyk]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

And it's not right - like most all of fas42's "theories" (notions?). Headphones produce images that are seemingly inside of one's head for the simple reason that headphones are isolatory.

 

 Not necessarily. It also depends on the actual recording.

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, Abtr said:

Shouldn't a stereo recording done with two small microphones placed inside your own two ears and then played back to you through headphones reproduce much of the original soundstage?

https://gizmodo.com/clever-earbud-microphones-bring-3d-audio-recording-to-y-1740527800

 

Thats a cool gadget, the downside being that I have to attend every performance I want recorded and that nobody can listen to my recordings, since their ears and head are not shaped the same as mine 

 

 

[Ralf11]

My point is that because your 2 ears are not identical you will be better at localization

[Abtr]

17 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Thats a cool gadget, the downside being that I have to attend every performance I want recorded and that nobody can listen to my recordings, since their ears and head are not shaped the same as mine 

I wonder how critical the actual shape of your head would be for accurate sound perception. Wearing glasses or growing a beard, etc., doesn't seem to impair spatial hearing; or maybe the brain adapts..

[Ralf11]

there are some studies out there if you want to search for them

 

(nothing in my memory bank - that has pointers active right now tho...)

[fas42]

14 hours ago, STC said:

However, I have trouble in perceiving sound extending beyond my room walls despite most of the visitors claiming to hear so. Perhaps, my visual clue plays a bigger role.
 

 

That's interesting --- that backs up what you said in the previous post about perceiving a "hollow" in the middle with stereo - your brain works a litle differently from others, and highly likely mine.

[fas42]

7 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Sorry, Frank, but that can’t be right. I listen to speakers and headphones using the same exact system. Headphones sometimes produce in-your-head sound while speakers never do. It’s not the reproduction chain, it’s how the sound transducer delivers sound waves to my ears.

 

Sorry, you didn't read my post right - I said, "The equivalent with speakers is that the sound is trapped in the cabinets, the imaging doesn't lift out and lay beyond them" - speakers only create a weird, in-your-head sound when connected out of phase with each other, and you're dead centre between then.

 

And, it's all about effective quality of the reproduction chain - the audio friend I visted a couple of days ago uses a rig that most here would look at with scorn - but he using my methodologies, and I would take listening to the sound he gets over almost anything you hear at a high end audio show.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

 

 Not necessarily. It also depends on the actual recording.

 

How it works is that you can get recordings with HUGE acoustic cues in them - then the spatial meaning is super obvious, on the rubbishiest playback. The you get recordings which are super simple, super clean - the audiophile collection stuff; the cues on these are well highlighted, and again a lovely soundstage is thrown up, because what the ears react to is very clear. The next group is the normal recordings, where no-one went to any special effort to emphasise those cues - and this presents as a flat picture for most playback. Finally, you have "poor" recordings, which typically just sound awful ...

 

It's the last two groups which are the really interesting, because the cues are all there, but they are relatively subtle, or buried deep in the "messiness" of the recording. Here is where the optimised playback really starts to shine, because those "hidden" cues now register, and the structure of the recording unfolds, to create sometimes very spectacular soundscapes.

 

It's like taking a conventional car over a very bumpy country road, versus a vehicle where the suspension has been tuned to handle more extreme undulations. The people in the first car exclaim, "What a terrible journey!"; those in the second comment, "Gee, I saw some fabulous country in that drive!".

[pkane2001]

6 hours ago, gmgraves said:

And it's not right - like most all of fas42's "theories" (notions?). Headphones produce images that are seemingly inside of one's head for the simple reason that headphones are isolatory. In normal hearing all sounds are heard by both ears. Localization occurs due to the time delay and complex phase relationship between the arrival of a sound to each ear. In headphone listening, the sounds each ear hears are isolated from the sound that the other ear hears, thus confusing the "auto-locating" facilities in the brain. Without those cues, the brain doesn't know precisely where to locate the sound source in space, so it locates everything either at the individual ears or between them.

 

 

 

 

That’s got to be at least partially true, since crossfeed introduces some extra clues into the recording that seem to help the brain place the sound outside my head.