Blue or red pill?

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, STC said:

 

If that sounds to you as deliberate echoing ( whatever it means) then what you call room a room that is reverbrant everywhere and all around?  

 

Every time you address room behaviour, to make it react to sound in a very specific way, such as only leaving the rear reverberant, i would call "deliberate echoing". Also, a completely anechoic situation. If a room is furnished in a conventional manner, so that it's pleasant to be in, and doesn't sound "weird" when you're talking, then I would see that situation as being normal. I've been in a couple of rooms heavily treated to suit the playback likes of the owners, manufacturers of audio gear - and I didn't like them.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

Either way, whether there is or not a difference, the fact that it is so subjective, so debatable, and with little real proof (even after results of this "UNCONTROLLED" test), that "why does it really matter"?

 

The answer is that it is in just in fun and what audiophilia is really all about.

 

For me, this is personal ... it really pisses me off that so much audio playback is so bad - I gave up going to live concerts and shows because the sound reinforcement systems were so awful. They can get it right, there have been one or two which showed that there are at least some people out there who know what they're doing - but the majority is rubbish.

 

Anything that advances the state of play in getting a better overall standard of music via amplification chains is worthy of attention - I'm looking forward to the day when decent SQ is always on tap, and not just a rare 'accident'.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, semente said:

 

From what I have read there's no mechanism creating height in stereo images produced by a pair of speakers.

It's probably your brain that expects certain sounds to come from different heights.

 

The LeCleach presentation I posted previously or this:

 

https://theproaudiofiles.com/width-height-depth-in-a-mix/

 

How to Create Width, Height and Depth in a Mix

 

Height

So let’s start with height.

It’s a strange and interesting phenomenon that we hear high pitched frequency content as coming from above, and low tones coming from below.

Partially this is due to suggestion. We subconsciously equivocated “high” pitch with “high on a vertical scale.” Partially, this is due to common tweeter placement with speaker woofers most often being lower than the tweeter in vertical alignment. Partially, this phenomenon is also caused by the way low frequency tones project. The wider dispersion of low tones allows them to reflect off the nearest surface such as your desk. Higher tones are more directional and will reach your ear without as much near reflection over short distances.

For these reasons and probably others, we tend to hear high harmonic content as “up” and low harmonic content as “down.”

By creating contrast in the extremes of the frequency spectrum we can make a mix sound “tall.”

If just one naturally bright element like a bell or hi-hat is a touch brighter, and one low element like a kick or bass is a touch subby-er, the whole mix will expand.

 

I would largely agree with this - I don't particularly 'see' height as being an attribute of the sound, rather space is the character of the presentation I register, a sense of "bigness" to what I'm hearing. As they say , the walls of the listening area disappear, and an arena the size of a football field can be there, or, the concert hall - the information from interaction of sound with the room surfaces is ignored by the brain, and that of the recording acoustic completely dominates.

[fas42]

It's all illusory, but the presentation can be, yes, totally convincing - the difference between being so, and not, is black and white, at least for me - anything less than this level to me is flawed, and I find it easy to discern the actual distortion in the sound which prevents the illusion from forming, when it fails to meet the standard needed.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

So the question still remains can the spatial information in recordings, including depth (if accepted cues are there) be measured?

 

The height thing remains a mystery to me. Clearly it can be manipulated into the signal so height is perceived.There is a track on the Moody Blues Search for the Lost chord that sends out a little flying object that circles and orbits above you and around the room. I have heard it irrespective of the room where played. My question again would be can this information built into the signal post recording be measured ?

 

 

 

 

 

Not quite sure what the point of measuring the spatial information in the recording would be ... there are plenty of recordings with test signals deliberately recorded to make the depth aspect clear cut; and it should be possible to analyse these, and see what's in the waveform. Here, the depth aspect is strongly highlighted; but "normal" recordings would have the same constituents, just less prominent - the principle, for how the playback can reveal such, is similar to shining a light in 'dark' areas; the more powerful the beam, the more detail can be perceived.

 

Manipulated, 'artificial' recordings, say pop albums, have this in spades - the depth "ranking" of various sound elements is quite straightforward to hear.

 

The Moody Blues thing is just playing with phase manipulation between left and right channels, a very overt way of encoding location cues.

[fas42]

9 hours ago, mansr said:

No. Did you read nothing of what I wrote? There is no way to distinguish a near source from a more distant louder one. Any perception of depth or height in a stereo recording is our mind making things up based on what things usually sound like, possibly combined with room reflections. Have you ever noticed how the moon looks bigger when it's low in the sky? That's also our mind applying patterns that are usually right (objects overhead tend to be nearer than objects at the horizon) but fail in this extreme case.

 

Yes, the depth aspect is "made up", in the mind; but it relies on real clues in the recording. Loudness has nothing to do with it; if a sound is softly made close to the plane of the speakers, and a loud version occurs quite some distance back, the sense of the distances remains exactly as that. Room reflections are also irrelevant.

 

How well the key acoustic information is picked by our hearing systems depends entirely on the quality of the replay, especially in the setup's ability not to add too great a level of noise, distortion to low level information. In my travels I have heard the same recordings having zero depth, and a "messy" presentation; versus, tremendous sense of distance, and space, and a complex, rich vista of musical goings on - the only variable has been the level of tune of the rig.

 

People seem to find it very hard to accept that the ear/brain can "see" far greater detail when conditions are right to allow such; whereas it's common knowledge that the eye/brain works precisely so - err, it's all part of the human condition ...

[fas42]

11 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

can you list them?

 

the fuss is about the SQ - I can't get nearly that SQ on my DSD originals of Buddy Bolden playing live at the Fisk School 

 

Depends upon what aspect of SQ turns you on ... what I'm after is getting a sense of the performance being created by living, breathing humans, with all the subtleties that one hears when in the presence of live musicians doing their thing - the FR, hissiness, S/N, pops and crackles, etc, etc, fade as an annoyance, because the feeling of "realness" of the event itself comes through.

 

At the other end of the spectrum is the comical, caricature quality of that type of music as heard in old time cartoons, say. At times played by the 'toon characters using nonsense 'instruments' - which fits, because the quality is that "silly".

[fas42]

Of course, one could just record in mono - and all these 'questions' go away ... I find pure mono recordings just as satisfying as stereo, savouring them as musical experiences. So, I can locate the bits, left to right, in "proper stereo" - big deal!

[fas42]

27 minutes ago, lmitche said:

Yes, the difference in the arrival times of first arrival, floor and ceiling bounces likely accounts for the perception of height.  I'll have listen to some outdoor concerts to learn what happens there. Similar timing differences likely add spatial perception on the horizontal as well.

 

What matters is that our ear/brain is very, very clever at sorting out what the sound field means - vastly more than the simplistic sound reaching the left versus the right lobes at different times explanations, always put up in audio forums, ever give credence to - we're not robots when hearing! What we perceive can be manipulated by knowing how that extra cleverness works - some interesting experiments are being done in Auditory Scene Analysis, exploiting those "higher levels of interpretation".

 

With recordings, this cleverness can only be useful if all of the key information is not so blurred and confused as to be counter-productive. The latter is what yields messy, unlistenable to recordings, when playback quality is not sufficient - the brain gives up trying to make sense of it.

 

While one attempts to explain everything using simple arithmetical explanations of the sound waveforms, then one will always fail to appreciate what the mind is capable of - and better subjective quality will still remain far out of reach, no matter how hard you stretch to grab it ...

[fas42]

I looked around to find the work by Theile and Wittex, and in doing so came across this very recent paper, http://www.pnas.org/content/109/29/11854.full.pdf , "Emergence of neural encoding of auditory objects

while listening to competing speakers" - no, people speakers . This is an investigation of what occurs in the neural regions of the human brain, when it selectively focuses on one auditory object, amongst one or more other such objects. I'm very interested in this research, because it is directly investigating how I perceive what is occurring in the sound field of competent audio playback - this shows in part how the brain operates when dealing with complex combinations of sound, and can focus on what interests the mind, at a particular moment.

[fas42]

34 minutes ago, STC said:

 

 

It is https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268188418_Principles_in_Surround_Recordings_with_Height

 

Thanks, I was able to track it down.

[fas42]

When everything is 'working right', in a system, it all comes together: the sense of space, depth; the ability to listen to, and enjoy, "appalling" recordings; being able to play at totally realistic levels, and have people who have no interest in audio whatsoever listen to such without even noticing the volume - there are no downsides, in any areas.

 

When people experience this in special cases or circumstances, it's a hint of what's possible, if one chooses to pursue the endeavour of extracting this level of performance.

[fas42]

13 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Nicely argued but in a sense, that you may have difficulty ( i dont accept you cannot at this point) measuring the cues, paraphrasing Mans, its not my problem. Without doubt the cues are there, without doubt they are perceived.That is the evidence. I do not contest for a minute that not all perceivers will perceive depth to same level or as consistently as for lateral distance. That does not invalidate that scientifically a (large) group can and do.

 

I'm curious whether you have had any listeners to a system which presented excellent depth, who didn't "get it", IOW, the illusion just completely failed to materialise for them, the cues did not register sufficiently to excite an impression of distance.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

When we use true stereo miking techniques to mike the space that these instruments inhabit while playing rather than the instruments themselves, all the cues that humans use to locate sounds: right and left direction, whether the sources are nearer or farther away, whether they emanate from eye level or above eye level or below eye level, and whether they are coming from behind us are all in the sound field being generated by that musical ensemble and are reinforced by the acoustics of that space. If we place a stereo pair of microphones in that sound field, depending on how the microphones are made, what their characteristics are, and where in the sound field that they are placed, they are going to capture whatever part of that sound field that they are capable of capturing. A stereo pair of cardioids, for instance, aimed at an ensemble on the stage of an auditorium, will not pick-up much hall ambience from behind them because the mikes are designed to not have much sensitivity to sounds coming from directions that are severely off-axis to the mike's polar pattern. But, from the direction at which they are aimed, these mikes will pick-up all the directional, loudness and phase cues being generated by the musical ensemble being captured. These are the same cues that tell us human listeners that a sound is coming from the left or the right of us, whether that sound is nearer or farther away, and whether, like the squeak of a mouse, it comes from somewhere on the floor beneath us, or like the caw of a hawk flying in the sky above us, it makes us look up at the source of that caw! That sound field can be captured simply by using the right microphones in the correct stereo manner. 

 

The position I come from is simply an extrapolation of this: whether the intention was to capture this information or not, and whether the cues are partially or completely manufactured on the mixing desk makes no difference - a sense of space and depth can be experienced in all recordings, unless they went to extreme lengths to explicitly prevent this! The better the playback, the more "powerful", convincing is the sense of this - the perceived space may not be a single one; it can be multiple spaces, of different sizes, overlaid upon each other - as would intuitively be the case, the more the mix is manipulated the more the spaces seem separate, distinct from each other - but still with full integrity; each retains its indivduality.

 

The advantage of aiming for the highest level of SQ is that all the recordings that one has can "unfold" in this manner - increasing the pleasure and satisfaction in the listening.

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, semente said:

 

What do you think would happen if the mics in the following video were pointing forward instead of downwards at the piano?

Would it sound like the piano was 10 feet below the speakers?

 

 

I would say, think how your ear/brain would hear the sound if your head were in the middle of where those mics were - and you then adjusted your head, to look at different points in the room, noting how the sound came across in each position.

[fas42]

51 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 In my not inconsiderable experience, this is wrong. Mixing consoles have no facility for vertical placement of instruments nor do they have any way of moving an instrument forward or back ion the soundstage Individually miked instruments can be assigned to one channel on a mixing board and then can be "pan-potted" anywhere from all the way into the left speaker with nothing coming out of the right speaker to all the way into the right speaker with nothing coming out of the left speaker, or anywhere in between and that's it! It literally has nothing whatsoever to do with playback side. If the imaging cues aren't in the recording you are playing, the finest playback equipment in the world will not put them there. It's that simple. 

 

 

I'm not worrying about vertical positioning - and they can move sounds back and forth, by the application of reverb. The latter can create deeply cavernous spaces, with ease - yes, totally 'fake', but one's hearing can pick up the meaning, with no problems ...

 

It does depend on the playback, because if this is not of sufficient quality the cues are too confusing, too subtle; it just sounds like a mess. One reason pop recordings can be unpleasant to listen to is because the depth information is too tangled - presented at a high enough quality level, the mind can untangle what's going on, and everything makes sense. This is so reliable that I use complex pop recordings to assess unknown rigs - if what I hear is a mess, it means that the playback is doing too much damage to the cues, and it's a fail - for that system.
 

Quote

 

I'm sorry. There may be "something" there but it isn't an accurate representation of the actual sound stage. Accurate imaging is in the hands of the recordist, not in the hands of the hi-fi enthusiast doing the listening. If the recordists are using true stereo microphone techniques, the resultant recording will exhibit pin-point imaging in all three dimensions. It cannot be done with multiple microphones in a mixing console or with spaced microphones. 

 

Remember: "Stereophonic" is from the Greek word "stereos" which means solid and solid is three dimensional; that is to say that it has width, height, and depth. Stereo microphone techniques give you width, height, and depth. Spaced omnis give you width only, and individually miked instruments give you multi-channel monaural sound.  Only A-B, X-Y, Coincident miking, Middle-side miking, and ORTF (or some variant of it such as the Decca tree) can give real stereophonic sound. Everything else is just a collection of monaurally captured instruments mixed down into two channels and called stereo. Yes, there is a place for that kind of recording, Jazz has traditionally been recorded with each instrument individually miked and then in the final mix, the instruments are grouped into three groups: Left, right, and the "featured player" or vocalist is equally mixed into the right and left channel and appears halfway between the two speakers or in what is referred to as the "phantom third channel". This was started, IIRC, with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder in the early days of stereo, and continues to this day. They do something similar with rock bands. Multi-channel playback, it might be, but stereophonic sound it isn't!

 

 

Consider a jazz trio: the three are complete separated, use headphones to synchronise their playing with each other; the left player is set up in a huge hall, and recorded; the centre one is in a normal sized room, and mic'ed the same way; and then the right player is in a tiny recording booth, and similarly captured. The three tracks are mixed, with the lateral positions adjusted to give that left, centre and right, but no other 'fixing'.

 

In the playback, what will a listener hear?

[fas42]

What would interest me is whether those who are so determined that depth can't  be perceived are also biologically adjusted such that this illusion can never happen for them, via two speakers or less - the less meaning that mono also does the trick, though I haven't explicitly tried a single speaker only - my feeling is that this will make no difference, based on my experiences so far.

 

If people refuse to accept that the quality of the reproduction is the crucial factor, not anything else, then they will make no progress in understanding - over 30 years of registering it this perceived behaviour of the sound field has been rock solid, it always 'works', or doesn't, depending upon this 'parameter' - and hideously expensive rigs have been miserable failures at getting decent results, because the required quality levels weren't there.

[fas42]

37 minutes ago, dalethorn said:

I've been making ad-hoc binaural recordings with the Sennheiser-Apogee Ambeo headset, and each recording sounds way different depending on numerous factors affecting the rooms I record in, or not.  It's clear to me that a quality recording setup that addresses ambient noise, reflective surfaces, ideal listening location, etc. is vastly more important than the 'HRTF' and related properties that headphone listeners read so much about.  I've been reviewing headphones for a few years, but haven't attempted "quality" recordings until a few weeks ago.  I think if the average headphone user could use the Ambeo headset for a few weeks, they'd appreciate their audiophile music recordings a lot more.

 

Recordings sound enormously different from each other - 'quality' recordings are boring, generally - for the same reason that a super smooth, straight highway is far less interesting that a winding country road, for an enthusiastic driver - they are both means for people to progress quickly between two points, but I know which I prefer ...

 

Which means the cues that provide depth information are not "standard" in their quality, and level. They are always there, but vary in their audibility - between every recording. The higher the "resolving power" of the playback rig, the more likely a particular recording will show obvious depth - ultimately, it becomes impossible to find a recording that doesn't present a 3D picture in some manner.

[fas42]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

Have you heard any Sound Liaison recordings? I consider them good quality and not the least bit boring.

 

No, I'll check them out ...

[fas42]

51 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 No, you can move an ENTIRE ensemble nearer or further by the ratio of direct sound to reverb, but you can't move individual instruments in an ensemble using reverb. 

 

You can't ?? ... if the instruments are recorded separately, as in my post of the jazz trio - and different levels, settings of reverb are added to the individual tracks, then the result is a layering of the depth positions - I hear this behaviour in nearly all pop recordings; it's clearly defined to my ears.
 

Quote

 

Simply poppycock. if the imaging cues are in the stereo recording, the cheapest, simplest stereo system will replay them in all their dimensions! My desktop system images beautifully and it consists of a $400 hybrid tube/SS amplifier and a $200 dollar pair of bass reflex "mini-monitors"!

 

 

If the cues are extemely obvious then, yes, the lowest order playback will make the presentation very clear. But if the cues are more subtle, then only better playback will reveal that detail - the cues in the recordings are not on/off switches for our hearing, either present or completely absent - again, everything in audio is a continuum; there are always shades of grey.

 

Quote

Three channel mono.  A group of instruments in the left channel, a group of instruments in the right channel, and a group of instruments and/or the vocalist in the phantom center channel! In you're rather extreme example, the center and right channels will have artificial reverb added to match that of the musician(s) in the left channel. But this is totally irrelevant to my missive. I'm not talking about ambience our reverb, I'm talking about "on-stage" imaging.

 

No, on a good system you will hear the performers overlaid upon each other, in the correct lateral position - with each 'operating' in the space as recorded - there will be a combined sound, and also the sound of each instrument echoing in the space as set up. In the hearing, you will be listening to the mix, and then soloing a particular player - exactly as if you had the controls of the desk under your hands.

 

The imaging is a function of everything you can hear; the amount of "on-stage" presentation will be a function of where and how it was recorded.

[fas42]

24 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

That's where you and I part company. In my experience, a recording either has decent imaging or it doesn't. Realistic imaging is what I do, what I got into recording for. Most orchestral recordings don't image at all because they use a forrest of microphones all mixed together electronically. Most Jazz recordings don't image at all because they are recorded using the traditional three-channel-mono arrangement. Some people don't care about such things, but it is MY THING! If the imaging is not on the recording, (and I've said this before) then the finest stereo system in the world can't make the recording image, I can pick-out a studio recording a mile away. To me the two-dimensional aspects of it stick-out like a sore thumb.  

 

Live, studio, and manipulated recordings all have a different sense about them - but they can all sound like the "real thing" - not necessarily real in the sense that all the musicians appear to be on a particular stage in front of me, in a particular venue; but real as in that a group of musicans have informally, or formally, got together in some fashion where everyone could be heard, positioning possibly to suit themselves and what they wanted to project - that they are not rigidly in the "correct" position for how one oftens hears that live is neither here nor there, for me; the sound they produce is everything, that they are in the "right place" is far less important.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

No. You can't. And even if you could, who would want to do do so? To what end?

 

Well, the starting point is that the system replay is of a sufficient quality to allow one to hear this - this is a dog chasing its tail scenario; if I have a system that is not of a high enough standard, then I won't hear any more depth than anyone else.

 

It's not a case of "wanting to do this" - it just, is ... it's a by-product of the SQ being of a high standard, which also means that all the sound elements have a quality of "realness" about them.

 

Quote

 

I have a good system and I hear only overproduced, artificial sound, and I don't like it.

 

 

 

 

But not good enough - I have heard scores of "good systems", and they don't make the grade. Just plugging together a bunch of "premium" components is a guarantee of nothing - for me, such an ensemble will have lots of obvious problems; in its raw state it's just a starting point, for evolving to competent sound.

 

Quote

Look I'm tired of arguing this minutia back and forth and trying to explain to people who have never recorded in their lives what is and what is not possible to do with stereo. I don't even understand why people are arguing with me. Everything I have said is well known to anyone who has ever made a real stereo recording using tried-and-true stereophonic miking techniques and those who don't know about it can read-up on it. Studio pop recordings are different. I don't do those (but I have worked in studios that made them) and I don't care about the artificial processes and the work-arounds that studios use to avoid making honest, real, stereo recordings. 

 

Fair enough being tired of the back and forth - but what you do, with recording, is only half the story. The listener, with his rig, is completely out of your control - and he can make what you, or anywhere else, record sound awful - or brilliant.

 

My personal quest is that every recording sounds as if it's the production of living, breathing people - when the 'natural' musical sounds, whether live voices or acoustic instruments, are complete convincing ... if a system can't do that, then it's not performing as well as is possible.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

 

and it will never be done at 44.1k sample rate

 

Ummm, wrong ... I've achieved this countless times over 30 years, when I put the effort in - you're confusing your personal experiences with what's possible - which is understandable, because at the moment it's mainly people like myself who have the patience, and the attitude and desire to make it happen, who will succeed. The good news for everyone else is that some recent extremely expensive units that play CD material are now sorted out enough to make good sound happen - if you don't want to hand over the moolah, you'll need to be patient and wait for trickle down to eventually make it commonplace.

[fas42]

13 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

 

you are just easier to please or i have a different meaning of "natural live convincing"

 

 I'm the hardest "person to please" that I know - which is why I find most high end playback just a version of listening to a louder, transistor radio. And the reason is simple - I have no difficulty hearing giveaway flaws in the sound, no matter how impressive aspects of the reproduction may be to some.

 

Convincing means exactly that - that you are unable to determine whether the sound is from, say a live individual singing, or a recording. People may want to think that what they're hearing is somewhere near that goal, but put on a different recording and it often fails, badly. There are plenty of other benefits to this standard, such as completely immersive, overwhelming, "big" sound from just left and right, and competely invisible speakers, no matter where you are in the room.

 

If you don't undestand the concept I'm describing, then you have never experienced it, from audio playback.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

It doesn’t matter whether they were multi miked or recorded at different time. What matters is if you are good recording and mixing engineer, you could pan pot those recording and create a stereo recording which when played over a stereo system will still create the illusion of soundstage and phantom image. Do you think norah jones Come away vocal was recorded with a stereo microphone?

 

Whether it is a purist stereo recording, or a confection, matters little in terms of hearing space, and depth in the recordings. If just a stereo pair microphone, single take, then everyone is in the same room - if otherwise, then there are or could be multiple spaces, of various sizes, positions, and character in front of one - all at the same time. This might sound confusing, to the ear, if the replay if not of a good standard - assuming such is in fact  the case, then it's easy to "grok" the individual spaces - if well done in the mastering then this is a very rich, satisfying world to explore - like investigating a well thought out garden, .