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.

128x128johnk

Showing 1 response by yoyoyaya

The absence of punctuation in the OP caused me reading fatigue:))

Aside from that, if the music in question is pretty much any genre outside of acoustic music, recorded since the 1970's, what we are listening to is, in fact "the sound field as it originally existed", since that sound field was created by the engineers of the recording.

Listening to music is a cognitively complex process, so it's hardly a revelation that the increased musical information provided by a stereo recording caused an increase in brain activity.

The logical fallacy is in the speculation that more brain activity = listening fatigue.

More brain activity might equal more pleasure.