Soundstage Width cannot extend beyond speakers

[gmgraves]

8 hours ago, STC said:

 

Does this mean that even if the stage is less than 60 degrees In the orginal event projected a wider stage than 60 degrees?  @gmgraves May have something to say about this. IMO, your playback cannot exceed the physical location of playback. 

This depends on a number of things. Some speakers make the soundstage sound as if it's much wider than the location of speakers. One kind of expects dipolar speakers such as ribbons, planar magnetics, and electrostatic panels to exhibit this characteristic. After all the "back wave" is bouncing off of the wall behind the speaker and this is going make for a larger sound surface. But I've heard other speakers do it too. The first speakers that I heard throw a soundstage that was wider than the speaker spacing was a pair of Acoustic Research AR-3ax speakers at the AR showroom on Broadway, NYC in the early/mid Sixties. And each of those was nothing more than a closed-box 12" woofer boxed-up with a dome midrange and a soft-dome tweeter. So clearly, this is not the exclusive purview of the dipolar speaker. The recording seems to play a seminal part in this phenomenon as well. True stereo recordings and strangely, some three-channel mono studio recorded jazz recordings do a credible job of this too. I have a Bill Evans recordings whereto accompanying quartet seems to stretch from one corner of the room to the other (no, Evans' piano stays anchored in the center channel and does not stretch from wall-to-wall like Mark Waldrep's (Dr. Aix) pianos tend to do!)

I can't really tell you why some speakers make images beyond the speaker's edges while others don't, nor why some recordings have that characteristic while others don't. I just know that it happens.

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, semente said:

In my tiny room I get reasonable imaging anywhere along the long wall that faces the speakers. Side-wall seats get nice sound but no imaging width which seems logical. Tonally it's OK on side-wall seats and quite nice anywhere on the 3-seat sofa facing the speakers.

But I do have some standing waves bouncing around yes.

I do too, but then I have a pair of curved-screen electrostatics. The section of the ESL driver that's facing you acts like a line source (it seems), so as long as the listener is within the arc of both drivers, he/she/it gets a decent stereo image. Obviously a speaker such as the MLB Radialsthaler does a similar thing, but over an obviously wider arc.

[gmgraves]

19 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

The fact that setups were getting the sound right 50 years ago shows how little true progress has been made in understanding - there's nothing new under the sun! Again, it's not the speakers, but how well the whole rig has been sorted - there's a continuum of behaviour: start with very best recordings, on a decent rig - and work up to all recordings, on a setup of highest quality that's been optimised to the last detail - there are places all along the spread between those points for systems to reside.

"...a setup of highest quality that's been optimised to the last detail..." Yeah like with an admittedly cheap NAD amp and "boom-box" speakers, you'd know! Like an old Turkish handyman that worked around my college campus once told me: " You can put a tuxedo on a goat. But it's still just a goat."

[gmgraves]

39 minutes ago, semente said:

 

That is not real 2-channel stereo.

Indeed it is not. I used to mike the entire "Schola Cantorum" ( the San Jose (CA) State University choir) with a single pair AKG-414s set to cardioid, seven inches apart on a stereo T-bar with the diaphragms 120 degrees from each other! No other mikes were required to get a perfect choral recording. If the recording venue isn't a live performance, you substitute the figure-of-eight pattern for cardioid, and pick-up lots of lovely hall sound to augment the chorus singing. I've tried it other ways, it just doesn't sound real. 

[gmgraves]

 

 

 

 

[gmgraves]

30 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Yes, but I’m pointing out that with Blumlein’s mic techniques described back in 1931, you can get a recording that will project a soundstage outside a stereo pair of speakers simply by adjusting volume of the mic feeds.

Would that it were this simple! True stereo miking does give a correctly phased image, and depending on the speakers and the room, that can surely give one a better shot at a wall-to-wall soundstage; complete with image front-to-back, and image height (one can not only tell, merely from listening, that the brass is back there behind the woodwinds, one can also tell that they are on risers!). 

But ultimately, how wide the soundstage is (beyond the speakers) is a function of speaker choice and room acoustics. 

[gmgraves]

1 minute ago, Jud said:

 

Please do bother to read Blumlein’s 1931 patent in full before opining.

If you are referring to British Patent #394,325, I've read it several times. And I'm not opining. I'm posting from quite a bit of experience here.

Also Blumlein's stereo microphone arrangement covers a certain type of microphone; i.e. a crossed pair of figure-of-eight mikes. I rarely have used it, preferring, instead an X-Y or a true stereo mike (such as a Telefunken ELA-M-270, or an Avantone CK-40) and on occasion some variation of an ORTF setup and very occasionally a mittle-seit (Mid-Side) setup. Since almost everything I have done has been before a live audience, I use cardioid pattern instead of figure-of-eight (except when I  do M-S, then the side mike is a figure-of-eight) because I need to exclude as much audience noise as it practicable.  

[gmgraves]

20 minutes ago, Blake said:

 

Warning off topic post!

 

And don't forget Frank's source- a generic laptop, with no external DAC in his system!  Therefore, I am assuming Frank is using the 1/8" headphone output jack of his laptop, then using a headphone jack to RCA splitter cable to his NAD amp.  What happened to soldering connections, etc. that Frank mentions all the time?

 

By the way,  I have no problems with Frank's setup.  I am no audio snob and I believe Frank means well (to be clear, I have no animosity for you Frank).  As long as Frank enjoys his system, that is great. But I find it perplexing because Frank is always preaching to the CA members about the need for optimizations and how his system achieves sonic nirvana.  Suddenly bad recordings miraculously sound good on his system.  Also, with Frank's setup, he claims the sound staging and imaging remains perfect, even when walking around the room, he gets identical sound as compared to sitting in the sweet spot.  

 

  

None of us have any real problem with Frank, except that he posts much and says little and his assertions are a very far-fetched and include more fantasy than they do reality. I will say that he has a powerful audio imagination. I expect that the frustration we feel because Frank won't tell us exactly what he does with his "method" is simply because it's all in his head. Perhaps his "fiddling" is real, but his results certainly aren't, they can't be. One can bend the laws of physics, but one can't break them (and one bends them at one's own peril).

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

re: breaking the laws of physics - they may well be broken inside a Black Hole, and Franks is very far down the Rabbit Hole...

We don't live inside of a black hole and we certainly don't listen to our stereo systems inside of one. But as you say, the laws of physics certainly don't exist down Frank's rabbit hole! That's for sure. 

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

Those people with the braincells to join the dots should be able to note the common message, originating from a variety of people who have pursued a certain goal in audio, from a variety of angles - those who are fanboys of the established experts will be unable to see past this limiting of their vision ... will be interesting to see how this evolves, .

People who are fanboys of the established experts in aeronautics also are unable to see past the need for wings on aircraft too. This limits their vision. 

One thing about a certain type of audiophile that has always puzzled me. Every day, each one of us counts on engineers and engineering to get us to work and back, to keep our food from spoiling or homes warm, our computers working reliably, and thousands of aircraft flying all over the world. Yet theses same people question the engineering behind something as relatively simple as reproducing music in the home. We see posts like this one of Franks. The "established experts" don't know what they are talking about and are limiting our vision and theirs. It's just this sort of selective belief in the world of technology that makes a lot of audiophiles look like a bunch of kooks to the rest of the educated population.  

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

George, you keep reinforcing that you're a bit of a silly bugger, you know ... .

 

You just don't want to consider that some things in audio are more important than you currently think. Achieving a high standard of SQ requires being fastidious in ways you can't take seriously, and hence you always miss the intent of what I'm saying ... I would find it easy to achieve your standard of playback by not being fussy enough - but I'm not interested in compromising ...

Lemme correct that for you, Frank: "I just don't want to consider that some things in audio are more important than I currently know they are". And even if they were you certainly don't want to tell us what they are. What you have told us simply does not make the quantum leap in audio improvement that you assert!

[gmgraves]

On 10/18/2018 at 2:56 PM, semente said:

 

"the experience remains (almost) as captivating" this I agree.

But the imaging starts losing quality once you move away from the tip of the isosceles triangle.

 

And I'm actually one of those listeners which finds timbral accuracy more important than soundstage...

Yeah, I think it's more important too, but still, there is is something magical about the playback of a recording that gets the soundstage just right, and the entire ensemble just opens up in front of you and you can sit in the dark and pick out each instrument in that ensemble one-by-one; right to left, front to back and stage to proscenium. Unfortunately, few recordings contain the information to do that, because almost nobody records that way or ever have. Most recordings that I have that can do that are ones that I myself have made. Most modern recordings are made with multiple microphones and thus have no real "soundstage" because the instruments are either pan-potted into a line across the stage, or they are pan-potted into three monaural groups (traditional jazz arrangement one group of instruments in mono on the left of the stage, one in the center - usually the vocalist or the soloist, and the rest of the ensemble in a mono group of the right). Jazz producers have been doing "stereo" jazz this way since the 1950's. I suspect that Rudy Van Gelder "invented" this methodology, but I don't know that for certain.

I have a French CD set of Charles Munch conducting the French National Radio Orchestra In what turn out to be recordings made of live broadcasts from the Paris Opera House in the mid 1960s. The engineers used the ORTF microphone setup (a hanging bar over the ensemble, about half a meter long with two cardioid mikes hanging from it at either end of the bar, each mounted 45° off of straight ahead and at opposite angles. The result is the kind of holographic imaging of a symphony orchestra that only some type of true stereophonic mike technique can produce. Every time I listen to the program of Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc, I am mesmerized by the incredibly detailed and correct stereo image. 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

Everyone has their own perspective ... I have never, ever worried about "phase accuracy" - I would have to look it all up, right now, to get a handle on that stuff - many roads to Rome, etc ...

True, but Frank, you seem to be on your way to Brindisium!

[gmgraves]

20 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

I have, George, many, many times - it's low level distortion in the reproduction, noise if you prefer that term; caused by multiple weaknesses in the replay chain. And these have mentioned by me over and over again - and are addressed by most people to some degree, as you are happy to tell me many times. But not enough ...

 

Can't cause a quantum leap, eh? Let's try another analogy, which, horror of horrors, involves vehicles: police here have camera technology in their patrol cars which constantly 'hunts' for number plates in passing vehicles, registers the numbers, and does an immediate check in the big database for anything untoward - with no human input. Now let's say the camera lens was a bit dirty, the scanning algorithms were a bit glitchy, the camera mounting was wobbling from vibration of the engine, etc; just a combination of negatives which confused the number recognition process - it is now, completely useless ... a quantum leap, in the wrong direction!

 

Yes, that's how it works for our ears. Enough has to be working right for our heads to decode the input - and the tiniest imperfection will be sufficient for that processing to fail - I have been in the position of coaxing a rig to cross that barrier far too often, and the frustration of trying to find the one thing that's causing failure - you don't want to know about it!

Why do you keep assuming that everybody else's system is flawed, drowning in "low level noise and distortion", while your system and only your system is working correctly, and further that only you have the knowledge to make it so? 

Like I've said many times, I'll bet that most folks here have their systems sounding AT LEAST as good as yours does (and based on what you say yours consists of, from the source through to the speakers, Id say that most systems are a good deal better than yours) and I'd be willing to bet that my office system sounds better than the system you tout here a hundred times a day!

[gmgraves]

6 hours ago, fas42 said:

Do you experience completely invisible speakers, irrespective of what's being played back, and irrespective of where you're listening?

Well, this is possibly the silliest thing you have ever said, Frank. Of course not, and neither do you. If you insist that you do, you are either lying or hallucinating, or deranged. When I play back one of my own masters, I get as near to completely invisible speakers as I think modern audio can bring one, but it certainly isn't irrespective of what's being played back; that is a completely ridiculous assertion. I'd go so far as to say that if your system makes everything sound "good" irrespective of the quality of the equipment or the recordings, then your idea of good sound is not the same as what most of the rest of us think of as good sound, and that your system is probably very flawed. No system should homogenize all recordings to the point where they sound alike, good or poor.

6 hours ago, fas42 said:

If you have never achieved that, then you're not in the ballpark of what I'm after - a fully immersive soundscape, which can be as loud as your ears can handle without being damaged, while you remain completely at ease with all aspects of the SQ.

It's a nice goal to be after, but you can't be there nor can you get there from where you are. Not with your mid-fi equipment and a PC with a sound card (you don't even have a proper DAC, or so I'm given to understand) and "boom-box speakers".  

 

6 hours ago, fas42 said:

Interesting time at the audio friend down the road yesterday - there was of up and down in the quality that we were getting, and it took until the end of the session to realise where the 'bug' was. Yet it was peaking well enough to run Deep Purple's Machine Head at solid, intense volume - and the full soundscape of that production came through extremely well; I haven't heard another system apart from mine nail the presentation of this type of material as competently.

And again, you have said nothing. What was the "bug", Frank? And how can you tell what a system is doing, when you don't ever seem to listen to anything but studio produced music (at least you never mention anything else)? All artificial and electronically manipulated to a fare-thee-well. If that's all you use to judge your progress, It's impossible to actually get anywhere as most studio-made pop recordings are all over the place and no two groups have the same idea about what their "music" should sound like! How can you find a baseline with that kind of program material? It might fun, it might be your preferred music. But it's not real and says nothing about how a system should sound. 

[gmgraves]

6 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

 

Well I’m afraid I’m with Frank on this one. I play hundreds of recordings and virtually none...no make that none give the impression that the sound is originating from my 2 loudspeakers. Every single recording sounds different, usually in many respects. Some have a huge sound stage....deep, wide and high,  others may lack the height element, some, especially old jazz recordings tend to be left, centre, right, others are kinda tunnel shaped...a quite narrow perspective with lots of depth.  Very very few sound downright bad, but when they do its because the various instruments tend to crowd one another and occupy the same acoustic space, so sound confusing as no 2 musicians can be in exactly the same position. Generally, as long as there’s spacial resolution between instruments, the  recording will sound acceptable as instruments are well resolved from one another. 

Yesterday I was listening to a Mozart work for Oboe. The orchestra was well placed, each instrument properly positioned in its own acoustic space,  there was oodles of timbre, the decay of notes was a delight, the oboe sounded light, bright, agile and perfectly joyous, with a lightness of foot and amazing forward momentum.  Its sound dimensions exactly matched what you’d expect to hear from a wooden horn recorded a few feet away. All the details were present, key sounds, breath sounds etc. Ambience was exactly as it should be and the recording generally was first rate. 

A hi-res file downloaded from Qobuz or HighResAudio?  No, Internet Radio....Swiss Classics transmitted at a lowly 128kbs. Could you hear the difference between it and high res? Of course....depth and layering wasn’t anything like SOTA,  the music lacked body, weight, intensity and power compared to the best and most disturbing, internote silences sounded wierd...not concert hall silences, which still carry atmosphere....no these were ‘dead’ silences, pitch black, lifeless and probably something to do with the compression algorithm. 

My point about the radio is that on a well resolving system even highly compressed data sources can sound good with no hint that the source of the sound is 2 loudspeakers in a listening room. Swiss Classical Radio and my system were getting the basics right and that led to an altogether pleasurable and believable musical experience. Could it have been better? Very much so. But did the missing elements spoil the listening experience? No. Why? Because it got the basics right. 

Nobody is saying that it can't be done. Some recordings are recorded correctly and render a realistic sound stage. But most commercial recordings, alas, are aimed at the lowest common denominator. In the past these were so-called brown-goods, cheap console phonographs with flea-powered amplifiers, speakers with magnets so small, one needed a magnifying glass to see them and mounted in cheap veneer wood cabinets with perforated MFD backs on them or, vinyl-covered boxes with hinged tops to access the the cheap 2-pole motored record changer and a luggage handle on the side to carry the thing with. When I was a teen, every girl had one. Nowadays? I don't know. Do they aim recordings toward iPods and smart phones?

Maybe others aren't as critical of recordings as I am. To me a recording either sounds like music playing in a real space, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, I generally don't get any pleasure out of listening to it critically. And keep in mind that I do not listen to the overproduced, contrived, studio-bound stuff that has characterized pop music for more than 50 years. To me, "slumming" is listening to classic film scores (from people like Rozsa, Tiomkin, Herrmann, Bernstein, Goldsmith, etc.) as well as jazz recordings and sixties folk (very occasionally). Mostly I listen to classical music, and only rarely do I hear a classical recording that meets my criteria. The live, Saturday night concerts of the Boston Symphony from WCRB via the internet (192 kbps) come mighty close in spite of the occasional compression artifact. And, of course I have my favorite performances and recordings like anyone else.

But this idea of being able to optimize one's system with just a few tweaks  (many of which simply defy the laws of physics) and thereby render one's system able to make all recordings sound good or to make "the speakers disappear" with virtually any recording, makes no sense to me. It simply cannot be. After all, there's only so much one can do with commercially available gear and virtually every one of the actions available to the audiophile are tertiary in their effect. None, either together of separately are going to make a difference that is of a magnitude to make the kind of quantum leap in SQ that Frank and several others tout here. 

Also Frank talks about modifying commercially available equipment (such as his NAD amp). If he has the knowledge and skill to do that, why not just roll his own from scratch the way Alex does? Modification is so limiting because you can't alter the circuit too much from stock as the original case and circuit boards get in the way. I used to do that. I remember in the early nineties taking a brand new Hafler preamp and replacing all the resistors in the signal path with low-noise metal film types and replacing all the capacitors in the signal path with "Wonder Caps" (audio quality polypropylene capacitors). When I was finished, I couldn't get the cabinet back on the thing!

'Tis a puzzlement. 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

No laws of physics are damaged in the pursuit of better sound . Why one can get this 'miracle' to happen is a combination of the facts that virtually all electronic circuitry, especially these days, intrinsically does its job well enough; and that the ability of human hearing to make sense of things is remarkable, provided not too much damage is caused during playback!

 

What I address, and as do others, coming from a variety of angles, is to reduce that damage to low enough levels.

 

It's all about Subtracting Badness, NOT, Adding Goodness!  There is a limit to how many things can be "bad", and provided enough issues are dealt with, then the results automatically follow.

 

 

Mainly history. Don't worry, I've thought of that many times over the years; and something like the Dutch & Dutch 8C active monitors is exactly what would have come out. But life gets in the way; plus, I never felt I had enough answers, to handle every situation - it would have irritated me intensely if I developed some kit, and people could then demonstrate that in certain circumstances it couldn't perform as well.

 

Modifying is a 'sharp', fast way of experimenting, to get answers. I did do my very own chip amp design, and build, as a step towards that active monitor idea - and I was happy with how they performed. But getting a first working prototype together, versus commercialising something is a huge jump - I'm no businessman; it's not in my DNA ...

Frank, I've had scores of audio systems in my life and have heard hundreds more, and I've never heard one that does what you say yours does (or even comes close). Based on my experience and knowledge of electronics and sound, I have to come to one of two conclusions: Either your idea of a totally transparent audio system is so different from mine that you are bragging about sound quality that I and many of us here see as merely an ordinary level of performance; or  that you are delusional. Because the type of sound that you say you are getting, where all recordings sound great and the speakers disappear no matter what's playing, simply isn't possible. I suspect that if I were to hear your system (too bad it's not possible), with it's PC/sound card source, its' cheap NAD amplifier and "boom box" speakers, I fully expect that I would exclaim: "You got me to come all the way down here to Australia to hear THIS???!! It sounds no different than a thousand other low-end audio systems out there, pleasant, but no cigar. And you're right, you have got a system through which all recordings sound the same - mediocre! And the explanation for your 3000+ posts is simply that you don't know any better.

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

 

There is one more possibility, that is that Frank is just pulling your chain. He has these delusional stories put together and has repeated them over and over, talking about his magic processes that will turn a Crosley toy into a high end reproducer. One that images in ways that no one else has ever heard before, etc, etc, etc. I've witnessed Frank play this game across a couple of audio websites over the last few years, getting lots of folks going while he sits in a chair LHAO.

IMHO he's just playing everyone a hoot and having the time of his life doing so. In the end he either has been banned or had so many put him on IGNORE that he moves somewhere else to play the Flim Flam Man game elsewhere.  LOL

Handle him as you deem appropriate.

I have considered that possibility; that he's getting his laughs by looking like a fool. While certainly plausible, it just seems odd to me. But then Frank is an odd duck. I do revisit the possibility from time to time. Glad to know that I'm not the only person who has wondered about this. If so, talk about a strange subset of the audio hobby!

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, MrD said:

It is entirely possible to produce a realistic soundstage and have the speakers and room completely disappear and listen entirely off axis on most recordings after 1960. This is a London Phase 4  digital transfer on a DAC and transport costing a $1000

 

You are aware that all Decca (London) Phase-4 recordings were recorded using dozens of microphones to 16-channel recorders? I read somewhere that they then mixed those 16 tracks down into 4 groups, two panned to the right channel and two panned to the left, with the centermost left and right group summed together for a phantom center. Hence the "Four" in Phase-4. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the sound of real music (some good performances, though!). 

[gmgraves]

19 hours ago, MrD said:

I wasn't born yesterday! Try again....DG Philips Angel Living Stereo Verve Columbia Reference Recording ect ect ect

It's all the same.....

Yes, at some point, every record company went the multi-track, multi-mike route. Too bad too as some great performances were marred by terrible sound: distorted strings, no imaging, improper balances, etc. 

[gmgraves]

On 10/18/2018 at 2:53 PM, fas42 said:

 

Exactly. What happens with high quality SQ is that there is no "best spot" - if I sit in the prescribed, correct position there is zero advantage to be gained. As Peter says, you can walk around, doing some useful things as well at the same time - the experience remains as captivating as it would locking oneself rigidly in one spot, not daring to move a muscle, in case some of the "magic" is lost ... .

That's just wrong. Whether or not there's a "sweet spot" depends almost entirely on the speaker design and to a small extent, room acoustics. Some speakers are less critical in this regard than are others, but with some speakers the "hot seat" is just that and extremely rigidly so at that. I once had a wonderful sounding pair of ESL speakers from a company called Innersound. They sounded marvelous, but you had to use a flashlight to find the spot where your listening position intersected the speaker's radiation pattern. Once you found the place where you could see a flashlight beam (on top of your head) reflect equally from the center of each diaphragm back to where you were sitting, you had the angle of the speakers' toe-in and the distance just right. If you then sat in that exact spot and didn't MOVE A MUSCLE, you got glorious sound. But move your head one iota in any direction and the everything above about 5 KHz was gone. For a while I contemplated searching antique stores looking for one of thos

 

e head clamps 19th century photographers like Matthew Brady used to hold clients heads still while the incredibly slow photographic emulsions of the day, took their portraits! In the end I decided to get other speakers. Sure, that's an extreme example, easily the worst I've ever seen. I have heard other speakers do something similar (though not to that extreme) so, don't try to tell me that there is no such as a "sweet spot" because there is. I suspect that Frank's "boom-box" speakers that he's always bragging about don't have much in the way of tweeters, so naturally his high frequencies (such as they are) don't "beam." 

[gmgraves]

On 10/28/2018 at 2:52 AM, Blackmorec said:

You’re  trying to determine which of 2 presentations is best without having any idea what that presentation should sound like....no reference, just the comparison of 2 pairs of variables (although played on both systems the signal must be considered a variable due to its complexity and the way we listen).

That's not what DBTs are for. They are not for deciding which of two samples is "better", just if they are different. Better is a judgement call fraught with extraneous influences such as personal taste. One man's audio Holy Grail is another man's chipped coffee cup. But if two units under test truly sound different from one another (assuming that volumes are matched exactly - not that hard to do with digital sound level meter), then that difference should be immediately obvious. If there is no difference, that should be immediately obvious as well.