Is the seated-centered solo listening to music a dated tech?


Is the seated-centered solo listening to music a dated tech? Is the design of modern loudspeakers that facilitates stereo wrong? Are we surfing a compromised tech please recall early 3 channel was superior they used stereo because it was a compromise? I have worked with a research group that used MRIs and sound to light up areas of catatonic people’s brains the research showed that higher quality playback lit up more areas but that stereo caused the brain to work harder is this a source of listening fatigue? After all, we are processing 2 unnatural sources that trick the mind into perceiving a sound field wouldn’t it be better to just have a sound field that actually existed? Stereo is a unnatrual way to listen to music its something that sound doesn’t do. Real music floods a space in all directions stereo design requires beaming and narrow dispersion to form an image is this just wrong? Mono had benefits over stereo modern loudspeaker design can make one speaker with a 360d radiation pattern that can form a soundstage for listeners almost anywhere in a room yet we still sit mostly alone seated dead center not wanting to move much because the image collapses just all seems wrong to me today. The more I experiment with non-traditional sound reproduction the more right it feels to me and those hearing it. Music should exist in a real space not a narrow sliver of it.

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Showing 1 response by panzrwagn

Multicell horns are used to reduce the level of early reflections in the listening space via tight control of their dispersion pattern. Most famously, the Altec 203B 'Long Throw' 2-Cell with a 20x40 degree pattern was 6dB hotter at 100 ft than other multicell with a 40X100 pattern. They had unmatched reach and clarity before distributed delay systems, but the same goal: improve the direct to reflected sound balance for improved speech intelligibility. What audiophiles call 'detail'. Same goal in the studio: more direct, less reverberant field. As for listening fatigue, sorting out the direct sound from the reverberant field would seem to be far more strenuous than listening in stereo. Suggest reading "The Language Game" by Christiansen And Chater, C. 2022 for a good description of how the brain  parses the sound field for language purposes.