Spatial Audio: Reconstructing Reality or Creating Illusion?

[semente]

Interesting talk, not sure if it's been posted before:

 

 

[STC]

I am suprised that he never heard about Smyth Realiser in 2014. The gold standard for spatial hearing is binaural amd despite admiting that  he hardly mentioned about SR or BACCH. Head tracking is now a reality. 

[fas42]

Just listened to the intro - will follow through on the whole thing later.

 

My initial take is, a convincing stereo Illusion Reconstructs Reality, Created inside your head - if one goes to enough effort to optimise everything that matters. No time need for battlelines on either side - and every desired qualty is in place - timbre, "niceness", naturalness, etc.

 

Being bombarded with speakers delivering less than the ideal SQ sounds like an excellent recipe for fast delivery of listener fatigue, if not a full-blown headache ... .

[STC]

10 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Just listened to the intro - will follow through on the whole thing later.

 

My initial take is, a convincing stereo Illusion Reconstructs Reality, Created inside your head - if one goes to enough effort to optimise everything that matters. No time need for battlelines on either side - and every desired qualty is in place - timbre, "niceness", naturalness, etc.

 

Being bombarded with speakers delivering less than the ideal SQ sounds like an excellent recipe for fast delivery of listener fatigue, if not a full-blown headache ... .

 

Again misquoting. For music, Rumsey still prefers the multi channels. 

[fas42]

I'm not quoting, I'm stating my reaction to the introduction - what Rumsey prefers is irrelevant.

[NOMBEDES]

Wait.........I thought 92.3% of all audio was illusion?

 

~  What am I missing?

[STC]

Quoting @fas42

 

And nothing there is proven.  The talk is not about music reproduction. Technically, the rear reverberation or ambience is necessary via more than two speakers. He agrees to that. His reference to moving missile is a reference to a fixed visual scenery and the reference is 360 degree sound based on object oriented sound. In music, our stage is fixed to the front.  

 

His example of time aligned speakers is unclear as non of the the surround speakers for ambiance retrieval must be time time aligned. In nature it shouldn’t be. So I am not sure what is the reference. 

 

His reference to uncanny valley is just an opinion. Most seemed forgetting that stereo sound is a reference itself as we have learnt to identify stereo sound for what it is. For most people stereo sound is the reference as proper live unamplified performance exposure may form a very tiny portion of their sound reference.  

[STC]

16 minutes ago, NOMBEDES said:

Wait.........I thought 92.3% of all audio was illusion?

 

~  What am I missing?

 

Only the phantom images in stereo  are illusion. The rest still come within the realm of natural hearing. 

[fas42]

Well, I just viewed the key area of that video, from 0:55 on - and wish to thank semente very much for putting it up.  Rumsey is spot on in his thoughts on the issue of the "uncanny valley" - but then moves on to various multi-channel methods of dealing with it.

 

I had my stereo rig climb out of that valley, completely, over 30 years ago - and the experience just blew me away. Note how steep the rise is coming out of the deep dip - that's how dramatic the subjective change is, in the auditory world as well.

 

The hyper-critical sensing of "what's wrong" is where I'm playing with what I do - the good news is, that given enough effort to 'debug' all the factor causing audible anomalies, that  one then can sit comfortably, high up, on the good side of the valley.

[barrows]

All audio playback is an illusion.