Article: Calibrating My Ears at the San Francisco Symphony

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Great article @austinpop! A friend of mine wrote a similar post about his first serious experience in a concert hall in our local forum. 

 

You provided a great insight to show the limitation of a typical stereo system when compared to a real live concert hall performance. At your 12th row seat, the sound that you heard was 90 percent of the hall sound. With such overwhelming surround ambiance it is not a mystery why the pinpoint accuracy will be missing when you move away from the front stage.

 

Good job! I will be using this post often. Thank you.

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30 minutes ago, esldude said:

I would note one reason you can't get real dynamics in your home, is darn near all the recordings are compressed. 

 

Dynamic range in concert hall is mostly influenced by the lateral reflection. 

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38 minutes ago, firedog said:

I wouldn't be surprised if in the not distant future we will be able to use DSP and psychoacoustics to make a "virtual reality"  playback that is good enough to fool us into thinking we are hearing the real thing. Enough cues, and our brains will fill in the rest. 

 

The technology is here but the implementation is tedious. The sound in concert hall consists of two parts. Direct and reflected sound. Most classical recordings are a mixture of close miking and from the critical radius where the reverberation and direct sound ratio are equal (more or less). 

 

In real life, the sweet spot is much further away than the critical distance where the microphones were placed to do the recording. We are essentially listening to 90 percent of the hall's sound and only about 10% of the direct sound from the performers.

 

The rest of the 40 percent of the actual concert hall sound is not in the recordings. It is a myth to believe you can reproduce the concert hall sound with only 40% of the actual sound in the recording. It cannot be done. Furthermore, the reflected sound comes in surround mode from thousands, if not millions of different angle all around the listeners head giving the sense of envelopment. This reflected sound if reproduced in the recording it will sound fuzzy because the speakers will be sending this reflected sound from only two angle as opposed to the millions in a concert hall.

 

A good room with diffusers, can help to reproduce the balance of 40% of the reflected sound but due to the limited volume of our normal listening room it can only give a marginal sense of envelopment. Also notice that in recordings, you only have TWO location of the source. Unlike a live concert performance, the reflected direction of the reverberation in listening room is rather monotonous as the direction cannot vary beyond the two speakers radiation point.

 

 

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6 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

I agree with much of what you say.  But, there is a solution that works extraordinarily well in dealing with the issues you cited - discretely recorded multichannel sound.

 

+1 to that. Two speakers system cannot adequately portray a concert hall sound. I have always preferred multichannel format over stereo  for full orchestra. Most Mch SACD's rear channel carries the rear hall ambiance. This is closer to concert hall performance as the additional channels/speakers are reproducing what couldn't be included in the main stereo channel. There are also other 5.1 where the rear or surround channels are not true stereo sound but mere discrete mono channels for creating a sense of surround sound by projecting sound from side and rear. This is more useful for movies.

 

Having said that, even the 5.1 or 7.1 is still far from realism. In my system of 72 channels of hall ambiance alone vs  5.1  (I do not have 7.1 music tracks), the difference can be heard easily. I still think that is still far from realism.

 

Nice to know another fan of multichannel format.

 

Cheers!

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Concert halls are just a place where the acoustics is modified by the surface, shape and design of the hall to enhance to listening experience. There are now new adjustable panel design to modify the frequency response of a hall to adapt for different type of music genre, especially for rock music. 

 

DSP can play a bigger role to enhance the overall acoustics of a hall to overcome inherent limitations of the hall due the fixed nature of the reverbs.