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

BACCH is dangerously interesting. I know that many will reject it as interfering with pure reproduction, and they are not wrong. But DSP is seriously impressive tech.

@surfcat Totally agree. Look, I’m a purist at heart and would always first skew to using room treatments to fix the all-important and oft-neglected room first and then look at DSP if absolutely still necessary, but BACCH looks like a totally different animal and the reviews from the people who’ve heard it sound amazing. Honestly, my first choice would be for a driver that’s a round orb that recreates sound like how we hear instruments in live space (Lansche?). Yeah, i know that’s not the way it’s recorded, but still. Then there’s Ohm, MBL, German Physics, etc. that seem to do a damn good job of generating that result but that can create a more diffuse imagery, which may actually be very accurate as that’s more how I hear live music. So maybe BACCH is overly focused and hyper real — think LED versus a good plasma HDTV — but it still sure sounds intriguing and I’d love to hear it, especially if I can get the basic essentials for under $1000. MBLs would cost me a truckload more $$$, that’s fer sure.

If I correctly understand what you’re saying, JohnK, then, yeah. I can easily imagine systems in the future comprised of 30 or 40 or more "sound generating devices" spread around the periphery of a space, maybe wall and/or ceiling mounted. They’ll be of some future technology that energizes the air to create the compression/rarefaction that is sound without the need for a moving mass driver. The amplification electronics will precisely measure and deliver to each device the exact amount of energy and frequency to create real performance presence. I’m not being glib as I don’t doubt we’ll get there and when we do people will look back at our chunky speakers with their moving diaphragms and dumb amps and pity us and wonder why we’d even try to reproduce music that way. But we’re not there yet.

@surfcat Actually, we may be closer than you think. Not sure if you’ve heard of the BACCH technology, but it looks pretty impressive and those who’ve heard it have been pretty amazed (apparently it works wonders with headphones too). And it’s already available in several product forms from a company named Theoretical…
https://www.theoretica.us/bacch-dsp/

Heres some info on its development and technology at Princeton. Interesting stuff.
https://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/PureStereo/Pure_Stereo.html

I’d love to demo this at some point.

Didn’t read the other posts, but almost all music is recorded in stereo so why wouldn’t you play it back that way and situate yourself in the position where it sounds best? Yes, there are speakers like Von Schweikert, Boenicke, etc. that use rear-firing tweets and others like Ohm and MBL that that are omnipoles, but as great as they may sound (and I do think they sound great) they’re the designer’s interpretation of the sound rather than how the engineer recorded it. And IMHO that’s perfectly fine and may even be preferable for many. For those who really care about optimal sound, having to sit in the sweet spot is a small price to pay and well worth the small effort. And I doubt even omnipole speakers, although they can sound very good off axis, sound as good or as balanced that way as opposed to sitting in the sweet spot. Hey, if you really care that much about walking around and getting the same (crappy) sound, just get a Bose Wave Radio and live it up.