Acoustics experts - a little help please

Setting expectations straight, 3D is a foolish concept concept in purist stereo.

A BACCH processor will trick and give some semblance of 3D in a stereo rig.

You will need a multichannel rig with ceiling speakers, back speakers etc and object based audio processors for true 3D.

But, if you turn everything loud enough with the stereo and everything’s smacking the face left and right, it could help you not think about (obsess about) 3D. These type of obsessions tend to occur at low listening levels.

Having said that, hang 6 inch traps (absorption) right above your listening position with an air gap like what @mashif  did.

It will mitigate the impact of standing waves/modal issues heightwise. 

(Floor and ceiling are parallel surfaces)

I have 9 foot ceilings and I sit in a 9 foot equilateral triangle with my speakers. Do I need to treat the ceiling?

So if bacch is out of the question..... here are some things you could try to achieve the goal of tricking yourself into deepening/layering the soundfield...incrementally.

- a sub sitting on the front stage or a front corner did no favors for above mentioned goal. Get a pair of microsubs that are easy to move around/hide away like the kef kc62. You will need to keep them somewhere behind or near the couch on either side, use a crossover betwern 80 to 100hz and experiment. Keep an open mind and stray away from the 'group think' on dovetailing/where a crossover should be set.

- Sidewalls are far enough away that they may not matter much,  proximity of couch to the back wall is the biggest culprit, said distance is too small for correctQRD diffusion formula to work properly. Some diffusion at the equivalent of reflection points on the ceiling may bear some fruit on the 9 ft ceiling.

- Your 2 way speakers appear to be nothing to write home about. A  concentric driver design such as a TAD ME1TX monitor/standmount would be a conducive speaker, if you can afford it. There are some things designed into tads, in consideration of phase characteristics when more than 1 speaker is in a space (as would be the case with stereo).

On the cheap, a Tekton impact monitor could serve as an alternate perhaps, but, less forgiving than the tad. You'd have to get more ocd with placement, toe-in and interspeaker distance. The latter's array produces some semblance of a horn+concentric driver hybrid

- Watch out for some culprit electronics that have a soundfield 'flattening' effect....couldn’t say much about a Hegel, but a very famous brand that starts with a 'M' tends to have that effect and so on...

It may be the best you could do in consideration of your room's limitations.

So I downloaded some audio apps to my phone. One of them measures RT60. I put my phone in my listening position and clapped my hands at both right and left speaker positions. I don’t know if this is the correct way to do this since there were no instructions and I can’t find any online. Anyway, multiple tries from these 2 positions gave me RT60 readings of 0.34 - 0.36 msecs. From my research it seems anything below 0.50 is good. But what does this tell me other than I have an acceptable reverb level? . 

If it wasn’t that obvious earlier, try moving your seat forward as a test, closer to the speaker/away from the back wall....I would wager that a midfield listening distance not more than 7 ft and playing with toe-in may increase the perception of depth and layering....free of cost, to begin with...

(Before trying other speakers, tinkering with subs, etc)

Not sure if your read the whole comment... @thom_oz 

The definition of 3D is getting a li’l blurred here. I have a couple of combinations of purist stereo, especially one built around a pair of tads that will do what you’re trying to describe and more.

Multichannel ’Object based’ 3D audio is a technology that only came around 2014 onwards for residential use and it is a different thing. It has nothing to do with channel based stereo or older/legacy ’channel based’ multichannel audio. The current proved-in upmixers for object based audio are 360 reality (Sony), Auromatic (Auro 3D), Neural X (DTS), DSU (Dolby) and a couple that are proprietary to Yamaha.

With the latter, it doesn’t matter what the quality of your recording was. A setup for object based would comprise of a minimum of 5 to 7 bedlayer speakers and 4 to 6 height/ceiling level speakers. This technology will pick up some trash stereo mix and discretize it, put it up as a sonic dome all around you, stretching from the perimeter of bedlayer+ceiling speakers and beyond. Sound engineers can also produce a object based audio mix for such formats, in which case you won’t need to upmix anything (considered a native mix),

When set up correctly, it didn’t matter that you had 9 or 11 speakers, all of them will disappear and you should feel like you’re floating around in a sonic dome/sphere. Sound objects will materialize and disappear, materialize/disappear, materialize/disappear anywhere in space inside this sonic dome....like ’flowers’ blooming and going away.....it’s called 3D.

"Hey, i got my almost 100 year old technology called stereo, but, now i have a muscle speaker and it is all 3D now"...doesn’t quite work like that. Some purist stereo streamer/dac manufacturers have some dsp "enhancements"/ soundstage tricks hidden away through FPGA, etc...didn’t matter, phase is off, etc and it is still limited by 2 speakers sitting up on the front stage.    

Why is this 3D not all that  prevalent? a simplifed answer is that it costs a lot, needs a huge room, steep learning curve, probably requires hiring a professional, etc...

@deep_333  why would you say:

"Setting expectations straight, 3D is a foolish concept concept in purist stereo." -?

I’m primarily listening to CD thru McIntosh MX-113 and a 2200 amplifier, and Sonus Faber Cremona speakers. My experience with this is 180 degrees opposite your assertion.

It is dependent on the recording quality (and most modern releases won’t cut it) but in my treated room listening to pop, jazz, classical and even some older electronic music I can get a massive sound stage with well-defined height, width & depth. Sometimes the center image seems to float behind the speakers and sometimes well on front of them. On many tracks a single element will sound like it’s behind the wall that’s behind my head.

The effect can be even more pronounced when listening to my (spotlessly clean) vinyl with a Rega P6 and Ortofon 2M Black cart. I blame this added sense of space to the crosstalk & delay inherent to vinyl playback, that and the extremely high quality of some vintage lacquer cuts from tape-not-digital. "Lush" barely describes the experience.

Further, any stereo mix is not set in stone. If the mastering tech got too high the night before, you got a trash mix from him the next day.

Any enthusiast can a learn a few things from the pros and by himself, get some hardware, study some pertinent software and remaster something to his tastes. 

On your ’personal’ remaster, you can "fix" a existing trash legacymix,... enhance the soundstage, put some "depth" on it if need be, drop the noise floor, fix the anemia, etc on a stereo mix...or you can level it up to a full blown object based audio (atmos, auro, etc) mix on your own...

It is my favorite pasttime, in fact. The avg audiophile could learn to remaster something instead of tweaking away with fuses and cables.

@thom_oz 

The perception of detail is a relatively complex topic.

For example, i could play you a) a stereo mix on a pure stereo rig, b) move you to the next room -> run the same mix through an object based/3d audio upmixer and also c) compare the same stereo mix converted to a DTS X native mix played on the same

You will note that in the object based rig, you will perceive a lot more detail (previously submerged in stereo) because it is discretized, coming at you partially from a different speaker in 3d space other than the front stage with correct spatial nuance and phase information. You may think "holy crap, this was actually buried in that stereo recording?", yes it was....further, compression, etc is not an issue in such a dts x, atmos, etc mix, i.e. you can truly salvage some old legacy botched recording. In stereo, it is a reverberant field from a front stage and room interaction (correct phase? all bets are off). Your ability to perceive above mentioned detail could be a hit or miss.

I’ll leave headphones out (just a convenience thing really)...it has nothing to do with the reality of live music.

Here’s a interview with Darko and prog rocker Steven Wilson (he does a lot of atmos mixes). He left some things out, but,  gets into some pertaining line items.

https://youtu.be/NAEJYS5AFJM?si=aJUB38BxF9Vzr6-2

Room treatment is a basic foundation, room dependent, but, still follows a formula, stereo or otherwise.

thinking of object-based surround or 3D audio at all. For my uses and room I haven’t pursued expanding past 5.1 in my surround-sound music, and I only own one Atmos capable music disc (Abbey Road on Blu-Ray) anyway.

A point I was implying and not outright stating though should be clarified:  a simple, clean & accurate stereo setup in a moderately treated listening room can deliver spectacular results when playing back vintage, high quality stereo recordings delivered in any format. You might be blown away at the information you have missed, buried those records that you’ve listened to already 300 times. And if you’re hearing more on headphones than from your pricey, well regarded home speakers (rather than vice-versa) the untreated listening room or indifferent speaker placement may be the problem.

 @thom_oz  It would be silly to put the output of a turntable/phonostage through any ADC conversion for a different eco-system. Keep it as is...

But, as we both know, vinyl either came from master tape or a hires digital studio master.

If you like the sound of analog master tape...there is a solution to get the sound of analog master tape from any digital file. It could be files ripped from a CD,  hires files bought from qobuz, etc.

You can put such files through Mark Levinson’s/Daniel Hertz Master Class Software. It converts the file and produces the sound of analog master tape (whatever the secret sauce is). Such files can be played in stereo, sent to Bacch, sent to a atmos processor and extracted into a multi speaker array, etc. The sound of  master tape remains....

If you bought a daniel hertz streamer/dac, above mention function to get the sound of master tape is built in. Otherwise.. software it it..

@deep_333 I have around a dozen of SW’s 5.1 surround sound remixes and I’m a big fan (have not heard Atmos mixes of those yet of course). I wish Giles Martin had even half Wilson’s skill at this.

I have zero interest in running my records thru object oriented surround sound extraction. I’m happy to leave such separation to people with more skill and access to the multitracks. Also, running 50 year old vinyl thru 50-65 year old electronics makes way more sense to me than to digitize them.

It’s a rarity that a CD version of a vintage recording pleases me as much as the vinyl cut straight from tape (there are a tiny handful of exceptions where the original vinyl was botched - one example: Badfinger ’Ass’ sounded pretty bad when released, the 2010 cd is a profound improvement..