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.
OP,
Yes, sorry… I completely misread your initial comments. My bad. I can tell you from my point of view that mono does not hold my interest…. for a second. I have a number of well recorded mono albums… I generally cannot get through two cuts. Admittedly I am using two speakers. On the other hand I know more than one person who are completely fine with it. I have no grand sweeping conclusions, other than stereo is absolutely essential for my enjoyment and three too many. |
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. Your point, though, is well taken. Realistically there's no way two or three or 5 sources of sound can precisely and accurately pull it off. But accurate and engaging are not necessarily the same thing so at least we can go for musically engaging while we wait for the future to arrive. (of course tomorrow never comes, but we all know that) |
Absolutely not and never will be. If you want home theater multi channel / surround / atmos - those are "effects" IMHO and are based off of the stereo foundation. Those have there place for home theater and if that’s what one likes, cool. It’s all subjective of course. Again, those are effects and are way more "unnatural" IMHO to listen to music. I don’t care for it. A superbly setup 2chnl creates some of those multichannel "effects" naturally and is the standard. For 2chnl, when you get right down to it, there can only be one single main listening position - the sweet spot - its physics. That sweet spot (larger - smaller) is system/setup/room/acoustic dependent. |
You can identify a number of sounds/loudspeakers greater than your number of ears. If you go to a choir, for example, you can hear many voices singing and also hear the lady talking to her husband sitting behind you. You can also hear a single voice or a single speaker using both ears, unless you are deaf in one ear. |
@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… Heres some info on its development and technology at Princeton. Interesting stuff. I’d love to demo this at some point. |
@redlenses03, I'm not talking about home theater, at least not as we envision it today but, rather, a truly transformative evolution in the collection and reproduced presentation of audio information that will undoubtedly happen given enough time and technological advancement. We didn't always have stereo. Adding separate low frequency devices already takes us out of the purely 2 speaker configuration to sometimes great benefit. I also absolutely agree that a really good home theater audio set up is at best a mediocre to poor music audio system. They may both like water, but one is fish and one is a duck. quack quack |
@soix 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. As we know, every component, every circuit or length of wire has a signature it adds. What we often forget is every feature of the room also adds it's signature to the sound and that's where DSP can be so powerful. I've heard it in the Kef LS50W where the onboard DSP was used to account for the speakers being placed on an open shelf and the result was very surprising. If I hadn't seen them I'd have assumed they were appropriately placed in the room, away from the back wall. Stage depth of lateral projection were very good for such little rascals. |
@ddd1 You certainly point our one of the often overlooked challenges, miking. Got to first collect the sound before one can even think about reproducing it. I'm sure we'll get there. I wonder what the arguments will be about in Audiogon a hundred years from now. I think we can assume the power cord debate will never be settled |
@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. |
Let y’all know when my playing about with surround Walsh gets a bit deeper into it. Even with just a 2ch source, with current mixing, interesting things occur.... ...even in a crude space. Linkwitz himself said ’ignore the room’, and I’m certainly attempting that....*L* Got to... ;) BACCH 'sounds' interesting, under my circumstance.....thanks for the hint. 👍👌 |
