A recent thread discusses a Stereo Times interview with Duke LeJeune of AudioKinesis. A passage in the interview struck me as relevant to an idea I've been trying to advance on this thread, namely that omnidirectional ambient cues are necessary for creating the illusion that "you are there." In the interview, Duke says: We are accustomed to thinking of reflections as causing coloration and degrading clarity, and philosophically we dont like the room adding to the recording something that was not originally there. But if the reverberant field is done right (which is something we can come back to), timbre is more natural and clarity is actually improved! Thats right, controlled tests have shown that speech intelligibility is improved by normal in-room reflections. Apparently the ear is better able to decipher complex sounds when it gets multiple looks in the form of reflections. The direction that reflections arrive from plays a role as well. Reflections that arrive from the same direction as the direct sound are more likely to be perceived as coloration than are reflections that arrive from the sides. And, reflections that arrive from the sides are more effective at imparting a sense of spaciousness and envelopment. One benefit of my recommended 45-degree toe-in is that it ensures a relatively large proportion of the reverberant energy will be arriving from the sides. The ear derives tonal balance from a weighted average of the incoming sounds, so the reverberant energy plays a significant role there. When the spectral balance of the reflections is very close to that of the first-arrival sound, perceived timbre is richer and more vivid. This is why we listen to grand pianos and choral groups in lively recital halls rather than in thickly-padded rooms. In my opinion the goal of high-end audio is to recreate, as closely as is practical, the perception of listening to live music. Interesting thoughts on the role of reverberant sound in creating what Duke calls "the perception of listening to live music," which seems to be another way of saying the perception that "you are there." |
To me most studio recordings sound like "there are here", and most live recordings sound like "you are there". It's probably caused by the extra cues for space and ambiance I'm not familiar with. I don't think it has to do much with the quality of the equipments. |
Generally, I prefer "You are there". In this instance( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FTEdn-Xvck ), I'd prefer she were here(Aussie women are VERY musical)! BTW- If you are easily offended....... DON'T WATCH! You've been warned. |
As horrifying as it is to audiophiles, the future of creating the illusion that "you are there" may be digital signal processing. Tgrisham posted a thread today about a Stereo Times article about 3D audio. That got me searching the web for related information. In five minutes, I turned up this: ...we try to produce the illusion in a listener of being in a "virtual" acoustic environment which is entirely different from that of the space in which he (or she) is actually located. We are thus attempting to achieve the long sought-after goal of making a listener in his living room hear sound as if he were in a concert hall.
The availability of modern electronic technology for processing acoustic signals digitally has transformed our ability to generate this illusion, almost irrespective of the environment (living room, office or automobile interior) which surrounds the listener. The approach that we take is to process acoustic signals prior to their transmission by loudspeakers. We undertake this processing in order to generate the illusion in the listener that sound is coming from a number of "virtual" sources in well defined spatial positions relative to the listener. Of course, the intention of conventional "stereo" sound reproduction by loudspeakers is to produce just such an illusion, but two channel stereophony is capable only of producing acoustic virtual source images over a very narrow range of spatial positions, these being restricted to positions in the plane of, and in between, the two loudspeakers used for reproduction. The use of modern signal processing techniques can remove this restriction, even when only two loudspeakers are used for reproduction.
A number of approaches to "3D Audio" have been developed in recent years, but few have correctly tackled the basic signal processing problem that has to be solved. This is the design of a processing scheme that ensures that the correct signals are produced at the listener's ears. In order to achieve such a goal, the processing scheme has to account for the effect on the signal of the loudspeakers, of the transmission path (including room reflections), and of the effect of the listeners head and torso on the propagation of sound to the ears. The central problem to be tackled is one of "inversion" where all these effects have to be "turned upside down" (and thus compensated for) before the signals are transmitted by the loudspeakers. This is a problem with many technical subtleties, but by tackling it correctly, it's solution can produce remarkable results. That is from University of Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. Soon we will be able to forget all about listening rooms, paradoxical or otherwise. :-o |
Ah, point taken - my mistake. It is a mixing space, indeed. In one of those links, though, the room is indeed described as mostly anechoic, which is why I assumed that it is mostly dead. I also assumed this from looking at the pictures of the walls. I did not notice that the floors were wooden when I first looked at the pictures, that would most certainly make a difference, though I still don't think the room would sound like what a musician would call "live." I apologize for my misunderstanding, anyway. |
One thing I will say is that Blackbird Studio C is designed to be a recording space, and most definitely NOT a listening space. Learsfool - According to the Blackbird Studio website, Studio C is a space for "editing, overdubbing, and mixing." In other words, it is NOT identified as a recording space. Maybe by "recording space," you meant re-recording space, i.e. mixing space. In any case, Studio C is not designed to be a room for recording performers and instruments with microphones. It is a room for editing and mixing those recordings after they have been captured elsewhere. As such, it is a listening space "par excellence." In my view, ALL editing and mixing rooms are listening spaces. That seems to me to be an uncontroversial statement. Maybe I am missing something. As they say, it would be mostly quite dead, and any reverb heard in there would sound very strange indeed if you were actually physically present. My understanding is that Studio C is NOT acoustically dead, and that that was the whole point of using massive amounts of diffusion and very little absorption. It is definitely designed for multi-track recording of electronic instruments primarily. Again, my understanding is different. According to the website, Studio C is described as being designed for BOTH stereo and multi-track mixing. I have several thoughts I would like to share with you about some things in those articles, which I think would be better to send you in a private email, as they would be slightly off topic here - I will do this hopefully tomorrow, through the audiogon system, if you don't mind. Of course. :-) |
Hi Bryon - I have just read and digested the two links above. I fully understand where you are coming from now. One thing I will say is that Blackbird Studio C is designed to be a recording space, and most definitely NOT a listening space. I can tell by looking at the photos that if you were actually present in that room with musicians playing something in there, it would not sound like any space you have ever heard before, either live or recorded. As they say, it would be mostly quite dead, and any reverb heard in there would sound very strange indeed if you were actually physically present. It is definitely designed for multi-track recording of electronic instruments primarily. I am very curious what it would sound like to play my horn in there. The ideas behind it could certainly be implemented in an audiophile's listening room, but I am not at all sure that one would want to do this for orchestral music in particular. I have several thoughts I would like to share with you about some things in those articles, which I think would be better to send you in a private email, as they would be slightly off topic here - I will do this hopefully tomorrow, through the audiogon system, if you don't mind.
I agree that the question I posed at the end of my last post is probably another infinite staircase. :) |
Ultimately for me, the main point in all of this is that even your paradoxical listening room would greatly vary from audiophile to audiophile. Learsfool There may be a variety of ways to create a paradoxical listening room, but I suspect they would have a lot in common - for example, the liberal use of mathematically-derived diffusion. An extreme example of this approach is George Massenburgs Blackbird Studio C. That recording space is perhaps the apotheosis of efforts to construct a paradoxical listening room. According to Massenburg: The room is conducive to accurate work because we have taken away the boundary effect by eliminating the walls. Blackbird Studio C is described elsewhere in the following way: The experience of this room is that one is unaware of sound reflection from the walls: it sounds almost anechoic, yet it has reverberation. Of course, no ordinary audiophile can construct such an ambitious listening space. But Blackbird Studio C seems to me to be an existence proof that a paradoxical listening room is possible. And its acoustical design approach could be implemented, on a more modest scale, by ordinary audiophiles like us. For instance, if one switched out the speakers in such a room, this would have a much greater effect on the sound than switching out acoustic treatments while keeping the speakers the same. Or would you not agree? No, I dont agree. But that is probably another infinite staircase. :-) |
Hi Bryon - no, you are not going mad, though you have indeed gone far down the rabbit hole with this one. But that's OK by me - it is always interesting to read your posts! You are always very thoughtful and express yourself very clearly. Ultimately for me, the main point in all of this is that even your paradoxical listening room would greatly vary from audiophile to audiophile. And I still believe that both the recording and the speakers would still have a much greater effect on the "you are there" illusion. For instance, if one switched out the speakers in such a room, this would have a much greater effect on the sound than switching out acoustic treatments while keeping the speakers the same. Or would you not agree? |
In the course of this thread, I have suggested at least three possible approaches to constructing a listening room, each with distinct consequences for creating the illusion that "you are there." A listening room may be constructed so that it
(1)
acoustically emulates a recording space. (2)
accurately reproduces what is on the recording. (3)
sounds interesting, as judged by the individual listener. RE: Approach (1). A lot of the discussion has focused on the benefits and liabilities of approach (1) constructing a listening space that acoustically emulates the recording space. I have acknowledged that, although it may be an effective way to create the illusion that you are there, it is not a practical approach to constructing a listening room. Its impracticality results from the fact that, to the extent that your listening room emulates a particular recording space, it will fail to emulate acoustically dissimilar recording spaces. Hence approach (1) makes your listening room recording-specific, which, for most audiophiles, is an unacceptable drawback of this approach. RE: Approach (2). Constructing a listening space that accurately reproduces what is on the recording is the prevailing approach in the design of professional recording studios. Accuracy is achieved by making recording studios, to a large extent, acoustically unreactive. However, most audiophiles, myself included, seem to prefer a listening space that is considerably more acoustically reactive than a typical recording studio. The evidence for this belief can be found by looking at the virtual systems here on Agon. It could be argued that most audiophiles simply ignore the acoustical treatment of their listening rooms, and so their rooms tend to be acoustically reactive by default. Or that most audiophiles would rather put money into new equipment than a better room. Or that acoustical treatments rank low in WAF, which makes their use less likely. I think theres a lot of truth to those observations. Nevertheless, I believe that audiophiles also prefer acoustically reactive rooms for more rational reasons (rational in the sense of consistent with their goals). Some of those reasons: Unreactive rooms require a large amount of amplification to reach realistic SPLs. Unreactive rooms can result in poor speaker performance for many consumer speakers, which are designed to interact with the listened space and voiced by manufacturers in a reactive room. Unreactive rooms are often perceived as less lifelike, and hence less musically involving. I would add this list that unreactive rooms are less likely to create the illusion that you are there, though I recognize that this is a point of controversy. For these and other reasons, I think approach (2), while the conventional approach to recording studio design, is of somewhat limited value to the average audiophile. RE: Approach (3). Constructing a listening space that sounds interesting, as judged by the individual listener, seems like a natural solution to the shortcomings of approach (2). But it has its own liabilities. To begin with, it potentially suffers from the same problem as approach (1), namely, it may result in a the listening room that is recording-specific. In addition, tastes change over time, both as a consequence of age and as a consequence of acquired expertise. In light of that, approach (3) may also suffer from being too listener-specific. Finally, approach (3) gives little or nothing in the way of specific guidance to the audiophile other than do what sounds right. That advice, while simple to understand, is not simple to implement, since it does not describe any smaller, instrumental goals that would make the advice actionable. Thus all three approaches above leave a lot to be desired. I believe that there is a fourth approach - to try to construct a listening room that sounds different for each recording. On small recordings, it would sound small. On big recordings, it would sound big. Its characteristics would change as the recordings change. In other words, the approach is to try to construct a listening room that
(4)
sounds paradoxical. Yes, I know, I have gone far down the rabbit hole with this one. But if you will follow me a little further, you will see that I have not gone completely mad. What I am trying to express is the idea that the acoustical characteristics of some listening spaces are psychologically ambiguous. That is, some listening spaces sound like they have different physical features under different conditions. With some recordings, the listening space sounds like it has one set of physical features. With other recordings, it sounds like it has another set of physical features. So, from a psychoacoustic standpoint, the listening space is paradoxical. Hence the term paradoxical listening room. I have a hypothesis about how a paradoxical listening room is created, namely by the combination of: (i) neutrality (ii) complexity RE: (i). Neutrality. In using the term neutral, I am violating my oath not to mention that word on this thread, lest it be perceived as a violation of a cease fire that was arrived at after months of painstaking negotiation. However, it is the right word for the discussion at this point, and so worth the risk. To say that a listening room is ACOUSTICALLY NEUTRAL is to say that it has a LOW AMOUNT OF CONSTANT INACCURACIES. An inaccuracy is constant when it stays more or less the same under varying conditions. An example of a constant inaccuracy is a room mode, the frequency and relative amplitude of which stay more or less the same across different recordings. A constant inaccuracy is another way of saying a "coloration." As colorations are reduced, the listening room becomes more neutral. And as the listening room becomes more neutral, it has the potential to become more paradoxical, provided that it is also sufficiently complex. Which brings me to
RE: (ii). Complexity. To say that a listening room is ACOUSTICALLY COMPLEX is to say that has a HIGH AMOUNT OF VARIABLE INACCURACIES. An inaccuracy is variable when it changes under varying conditions. An example of a variable inaccuracy is a randomly diffused reflection, the frequency and phase of which change significantly across different recordings. As variable inaccuracies are increased, the listening room becomes more acoustically complex. And as the listening room becomes more acoustically complex, it becomes more paradoxical, assuming it is sufficiently neutral. So, my hypothesis is that, in combination, neutrality and complexity create a listening space that is paradoxical, in the sense that its acoustical characteristics are psychologically ambiguous. A listening space that is ambiguous approximates the benefits of one that acoustically emulates the recording space, without the liabilities of the latter approach, namely making the listening room recording-specific. So, for the audiophile who listens to a wide range of recordings with vastly different recording spaces, a paradoxical listening space is the closest he can come to having a different listening room for each type of recording. In light of this, constructing a paradoxical listening room may be the best way to consistently create the illusion that you are there. |
Neither: "They Are There" |
My point was mostly about the difficulty of getting the cues on the recording to be omnidirectional. If you achieve it, I think you also get a whole bunch of extra stuff from your room that you probably dont want and would likely swamp the recorded cues. Cbw I think this is a possible outcome, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am somewhat more optimistic about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for omnidirectional ambient cues at the listening position that are reasonably accurate relative to those on the recording. If I understand you correctly, I think you are saying that one can, effectively, simulate ambience cues that approximate the cues on the recording, but are not sourced from the cues on the recording. Actually, thats not what I was trying to say, though thats a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote. Looking back, I can see that what I wrote was ambiguous. I was trying to talk about the ambient cues that ARE, as you put it, sourced from the recording. So what I meant was that
I am more optimistic about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for reasonably accurate omnidirectional ambient cues, sourced from the recording and audible at the listening position. Having said that, as I discussed from my post on 9/11, the ambient cues during playback will always be a COMBINATION of the ambient cues of the recording and the ambient cues of the listening room, assuming that the recording contains them and that the listening space is at least somewhat reactive. With that in mind... Strictly speaking, ANY ambient cue (omnidirectional or not) added by the listening room constitutes an inaccuracy, in the sense that it adds, subtracts, or alters information about the music as it is represented on the recording. But listening to a recording in a completely unreactive listening room (in effect, an anechoic chamber) would not be a rewarding musical experience, by any conceivable standard. Hence, it seems to me that virtually all audiophiles, myself included, are willing to tolerate a certain amount of inaccuracy for the sake of a more rewarding musical experience. The question then becomes: What are acoustical characteristics of those inaccuracies? In other words, some listening room inaccuracies are more musical than others, which seems to me to be a rather uncontroversial thing to say. I guess the point I am wandering around in search of is: The goal of creating omnidirectional ambient cues at the listening position does, as you point out, result in inaccuracies. But ALL listening rooms result in inaccuracies. So we might as well try to design a room whose inaccuracies enhance the experience of listening to music, and for many audiophiles, that means enhancing the illusion that you are there. |
I have not had time to read through the posts. I have achieve the 'you are there' experience for the majority of my recordings. This is achieved by lowering the 'noise' and removing electronic artifacts. I put noise in quotes because there is also noise and distortion you cannot hear. I believe it also takes a highly resolving source (i.e. DAC). I do not think the recording is a limitation. The spatial cues are there, they are masked by most equipment.
Interesting, as I saw this thread today, and realized the same experience last week. |
Hi guys - I think, after reading the latest posts, that Cbw is probably correct when he says "about the ambience cues in the recording. The primary signal in the music is generally going to dominate, and the cues are softer, lower SNR, and more diffuse. So, if you succeed in taming the distortions I mentioned for the primary, you also greatly diminish the omnidirectional nature of the cues -- probably completely out of existence. If you dont succeed in taming the primary reflections, then theyre likely to overwhelm the reflected cues. But this is an argument from theory, and there may be some middle ground where it could work." I don't think you would diminish the omnidirectional nature of the cues out of existence entirely, and there may be some middle ground there.
I also agree with him that you would be obscuring info on the recording by creating ambient cues with the room. He is right in saying I wouldn't prefer too live a room, however I wouldn't want one too dead, either. I personally think the most important quality of the room is it's size, that it is not too small. Of course, this has more to do with my preference for horns (and the more directional nature of the horn speakers does help focus the soundfield for sure) and the type of music I listen to - acoustic music seems to require much more space in the listening room than electronic music, even if it is a very small group of musicians on the recording. I would certainly not call myself a purist in any kind of audiophile sense, though. There are definitely many different ways to achieve good sound, and many different types of rooms that it can be achieved in. |
Bryon, I agree with most everything in your recent post. I would like to point out one detail that I tried (probably unsuccessfully) to make in my most recent post. You say: -reactive room is a listening space with significant ambient cues. Hence a listening space that significantly interacts with the ambient cues of the recording during playback. A.k.a., a live room. My point is that a reactive room reacts to everything in the signal, not just the ambience cues. Thus, with the drum hit I was talking about the direct wave reaches the microphone first* as a primary signal, then come the echoes, reverb, etc. in its wake. The cues come later, smaller in amplitude, and more stretched in time than the primary signal. So a room that reacts to the cues will always react also to the primary signal, and that signal will generally be stronger than the cues. *While it is technically possible for a signal to reach the microphone before the direct wave, I don't think it is a big factor in most recordings. |
Bryon, I agree that experimentation is really the only way to answer some of these questions and likely the only way to find an ideal listening environment for a persons particular taste (aside from hiring someone who has the experience to design a room based on your expressed preferences -- though even that might take a few iterations or adjustments since it is unlikely that it will be right on the first pass (unless youve already heard exactly what you want and can point to it and say I want that.)) My point was mostly about the difficulty of getting the cues on the recording to be omnidirectional. If you achieve it, I think you also get a whole bunch of extra stuff from your room that you probably dont want and would likely swamp the recorded cues. And even then, to the extent that the cues on the recording are omnidirectional, theyll be mistimed and out of phase. Im not sure its physically possible (outside of electronic intervention) to get the cues *on the recording* to be both omnidirectional and sound realistic. The various kinds of room colorations you mention, what you are calling source distortion, echo distortion, and temporal distortion, are definitely things to be addressed. But it seems to me that these are precisely the kinds of things that an acoustically treated room DOES address. Source distortion is typically addressed by absorption or diffusion at the first order reflection points on the side walls and the ceiling. Echo distortion is typically addressed with diffusion behind the speakers. Temporal distortion is typically addressed by balancing the ratio of absorption to diffusion to achieve a specific reverberation time. Right, I agree. But my point is again about the ambience cues in the recording. The primary signal in the music is generally going to dominate, and the cues are softer, lower SNR, and more diffuse. So, if you succeed in taming the distortions I mentioned for the primary, you also greatly diminish the omnidirectional nature of the cues -- probably completely out of existence. If you dont succeed in taming the primary reflections, then theyre likely to overwhelm the reflected cues. But this is an argument from theory, and there may be some middle ground where it could work. My view is that omnidirectional ambient cues are more valuable than strictly accurate ambient cues for creating the illusion that "you are there." Having said that, I guess Im not as skeptical as you, Cbw, about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for omnidirectional ambient cues that are REASONABLY ACCURATE to the recording. If I understand you correctly, I think you are saying that one can, effectively, simulate ambience cues that approximate the cues on the recording, but are not sourced from the cues on the recording. If thats the case, I agree (with the caveat that if the cues on the recording are strong and not well-matched to the room, you are likely to get a mess). To achieve this, you will be structuring your listening space to create a certain ambience. If that matches well with your music, you may have a very pleasing live sound. If it doesnt, well, youll have to learn to live with it (or maybe have some movable absorption panels that can deaden the room effect when its not desirable). I think, though, that purists will not like this approach. To the extent that you are creating ambience cues from the listening room, you are obscuring information on the recording. Learsfool, for example, might not like this approach for his listening, since hes expressed a strong preference to hear precisely what is on the recording down to the differentiation of concert halls on fifty-year-old records. That probably wouldn't be possible in a room that was not very dead, or with a soundfield that was not very focused. |
Cbw I have been giving more thought to your theory, and I have some fresh speculations
You mention two parameters that determine whether a playback space creates the illusion that you are there or they are here, namely whether a recording has ambient cues or not, and whether the listening room is live or dead. To these, I think its useful to add a third parameter, namely, whether or not the listening space is acoustically similar to the recording space. With that in mind, I think there are
FIVE SIGNIFICANT CATEGORIES: (1) reactive room, ambient recording, acoustical similarity (2) reactive room, ambient recording, acoustical dissimilarity (3) reactive room, non-ambient recording (4) unreactive room, ambient recording (5) unreactive room, non-ambient recording SOME DEFINITIONS TO GO WITH THEM: -reactive room is a listening space with significant ambient cues. Hence a listening space that significantly interacts with the ambient cues of the recording during playback. A.k.a., a live room. -unreactive room is a listening space with insignificant or no ambient cues. Hence a listening space that minimally interacts with the ambient cues of the recording during playback. A.k.a., a dead room. -ambient recording is a recording that contains ambient cues of the recording space. -non-ambient recording is a recording that does not contain ambient cues of the recording space. -acoustical similarity refers to the acoustical similarity of the listening space to the recording space, as discussed in my second post from 9/14. Each of the parameters that define the five categories is a continuum. A room is not either reactive or unreactive. Reactivity is a continuum, with maximally reactive rooms at one end and minimally reactive rooms at the other. Likewise for ambient cues on recordings. Likewise for the acoustical similarity of the listening space to the recording space. Since each parameter is a continuum, the five categories that they define are each idealizations, in the sense that actual members of each category will APPROXIMATE its idealized description. Taking the five categories one at a time
(1) reactive room, ambient recording, room similarity =
YOU ARE THERE... In my view, this maximizes the illusion that you are there, as I have suggested in earlier posts. I acknowledge, however, that this is not the most practical approach to building a listening space, since the greater the acoustical similarity the listening space has to the recording space, the LESS acoustical similarity it will have to different recording spaces, and the more your listening space will be recording-specific. (2) reactive room, ambient recording, room dissimilarity =
YOU ARE CONFUSED
In my view, this would be the mess that Cbw was describing in his last post. To the extent that the ambient cues of the listening space are different from the ambient cues of the recording space, it could result in a confused, contradictory, or paradoxical set of ambient cues at the listening position. In other words, you are confused. (3) reactive room, non-ambient recording =
THEY ARE HERE
In my view, the absence of ambient cues in the recording combined with a reactive listening space is what creates the illusion that they are here. This is perhaps the most straight forward of the five categories. And in some ways, it is the easiest type of illusion to create. Of course, if you dont like the sound of your listening room, then you wont like the way they sound when they are here. (4) unreactive room, ambient recording =
YOU ARE ALMOST THERE
This is the trickiest of the five categories, I think. As I have argued in previous posts, I dont think that you can fully create the illusion that you are there without omnidirectional ambient cues at the listening position. So, as a listening room becomes less and less reactive, I believe it will sound less and less like you are there. Having said that, I should acknowledge that this comes close to creating the illusion that you are there. The bidirectional presentation of the ambient cues of the recording provides some significant information about the recording space, though as I have argued, it doesnt present that information with the correct DIRECTIONALITY, which limits the illusion that you are there. Of course, all this assumes that the playback is stereo. If playback were multichannel, then an ambient recording played back in an unreactive room could, in theory, create the illusion that you are there." I say in theory because, as other posters have pointed out, most multichannel music mixes leave much to be desired, and hence typically fail to create the illusion that you are there. Nevertheless, the multichannel playback of ambient recordings in unreactive rooms to create the illusion that you are there is the prevailing methodology in movie sound, where it achieves some success, I think. I should also acknowledge that there is a significant advantage to a SOMEWHAT UNREACTIVE listening room when playing back ambient recordings, namely, that it prevents your listening room from being recording-specific. But I dont think thats the ONLY way to prevent your listening room from being recording-specific (More on that in a future post). (5) unreactive room, non-ambient recording =
YOU ARE NOWHERE
In my view, the absence of ambient cues in both the recording and the room creates an otherworldly you are nowhere effect, like youre listening in outer space (yes, I know thats impossible). This may seem like a revision to what I said in my last post, when I agreed with Cbw that the category of weak recorded cues + dead room would result in the illusion that they are here. But I suspect that, when Cbw was referring to dead rooms, he was not referring to COMPLETELY dead rooms. Hence my earlier agreement with him that partially dead rooms (thus partially reactive) could create the illusion that they are here. I am now saying that, to the extent that a room is unreactive, non-ambient recordings will create the experience that you are nowhere. |
Hi Bryon - once again, you and Al and Cbw and Dgarretson have provided some excellent posts with much food for thought! Let the speculation continue, indeed! I have really enjoyed reading all of it, and you are certainly correct that although very few of us can design and build the rooms we might wish, there are many low cost ideas that can greatly improve any room. I envy all of the folks on this site who have a dedicated room, I don't even have that myself. Maybe in my next house! |
A brief interruption to say a few words about the nature of this thread... As Al pointed out several posts back, this thread is full of speculation. I myself have speculated at a furious rate. I just want to say that I do not regard speculation as great way to reach reliable conclusions. I regard carefully controlled TESTING as a great way to reach reliable conclusions. In that sense, I am an empiricist. Unfortunately, I cannot currently afford to build a highly customized listening room, like some of the ones posted here on Agon. In light of that, I am left to speculate on the basis of my experiences with (1) customized listening rooms for professional mixing; (2) customized listening rooms at audio dealers; and (3) my own quite humble listening room. The purpose of this post is to explicitly acknowledge that I do not believe that speculation can ever be an adequate substitute for carefully controlled testing. Having said that, not all speculation is groundless. Speculation can be grounded on prior experiences, theoretical knowledge, and sound reasoning. I have made an effort to ground my speculations, though that may not always be apparent, which is my own fault. My thanks to other posters who, it seems to me, have made an effort to do likewise. It would be nice if some folks with extensive experiences with customized listening rooms or expertise in acoustics would chime in, as it would elevate some of our speculations to the level of highly informed or even expert opinion. Until that happens, let the speculation continue. |
I am doubtful that on non-binaural recordings headphones can be said to give an accurate reproduction of ambient cues, or anything else, because of the fact that they bypass the pinnae, and inject the sound from the sides instead of from the front. This is a good point, Al. I should have chosen an anechoic chamber rather than headphones to illustrate my view that omnidirectional ambient cues are more valuable than strictly accurate ambient cues for creating the illusion that you are there. On a side note, how do you edit a post after its been posted? Can you give me a link to instructions here on Agon? Dgarretson Glad that you joined in. I had never heard of the crossfeeding process you describe. I would love to hear it some day. Connecting it to this discussion, I would say that, like binaural recordings, it once again illustrates the importance of the DIRECTIONALITY of ambient cues for creating the illusion that you are there. Cbw Wow! A lot of great thoughts and insights. Consider doing the playback in exactly the same space as the recording. You set up the speakers and the equipment to optimally reproduce the soundstage, and put the listener in the position of the microphone that recorded the performance. Thus, your listening space exactly reproduces the recording space. Is this the optimal space for creating the you are there experience? I dont think so
The real goal in this approach is not to PHYSICALLY replicate the recording space, but rather to approximate it in some important ACOUSTICAL parameters, including: relative balance of direct and indirect sound, relative balance of reflected/diffused/absorbed sound, time delay of first indirect sound, reverberation time, and so on. Optimizing these acoustical parameters of the listening space so that they have values that approximate those of the recording space is the kind of resemblance I have in mind. I should probably drop the word resemblance altogether from this discussion, because it does conjure up images of physical likeness. I should stick to words like emulate, to avoid the idea that this approach is about PHYSICAL resemblance. Its not. Its about ACOUSTICAL resemblance. You are quite right to point out that acoustical resemblance during playback cannot be achieved simply by creating a facsimile of the recording space. Creating an acoustical resemblance between the listening space and the recording space takes into account things like the number of sound sources in the listening room (two, assuming you are listening in stereo) and the position of the listener relative to those sources and to room boundaries. It also takes into account a host of other variables, the manipulation of which, with any luck, results in a listening space that acoustically emulates the recording space, at the listening position. With that in mind... The various kinds of room colorations you mention, what you are calling source distortion, echo distortion, and temporal distortion, are definitely things to be addressed. But it seems to me that these are precisely the kinds of things that an acoustically treated room DOES address. Source distortion is typically addressed by absorption or diffusion at the first order reflection points on the side walls and the ceiling. Echo distortion is typically addressed with diffusion behind the speakers. Temporal distortion is typically addressed by balancing the ratio of absorption to diffusion to achieve a specific reverberation time. In light of this, I do not believe that the various kinds of distortion you mention are, in themselves, reason to believe that this approach is doomed to failure. IF this approach were tantamount to constructing a listening space that was a PHYSICAL replica of the recording space, then I would agree with you that it would be doomed. But the approach is to construct a listening space that, in important ACOUSTICAL respects, emulates the recording space, AS HEARD FROM THE LISTENING POSITION. It seems to me that that approach is not doomed to failure, though it is certainly bounded by constraints, both practical and theoretical. So you have a range of recordings (from heavy cues to none), and a range of rooms (from live to dead), but it doesnt seem possible to have an optimal room for both ends of the spectrum (which I think youve said)
I agree that it is not possible to have an optimal room for all recordings. A person must choose on the basis of the recordings they tend to listen to, or the ones they are the most interested in optimizing, for whatever reason. To sum up, I think to the extent that you succeed in making the ambience cues from the recording omnidirectional, theyll be mis-timed, out of phase, and probably polarity flipped. And that is on top of all of the very strong room cues that you will necessarily generate to get the recorded cues to be omnidirectional. Or, to put it another way, I dont think it is possible to get the recorded cues to be omnidirectional without seriously compromising the you are there effect. This is an interesting argument. As I understand it, you are saying that the measures required to create omnidirectional ambient cues in the listening space would, in effect, destroy the accuracy of the ambient cues of the recording, as heard at the listening position. In a way, you are saying what Al said in point (3) of his post from 9/13 - what he described as a tradeoff. So my response to your argument is the same as my response to his observation: My view is that omnidirectional ambient cues are more valuable than strictly accurate ambient cues for creating the illusion that "you are there." Having said that, I guess Im not as skeptical as you, Cbw, about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for omnidirectional ambient cues that are REASONABLY ACCURATE to the recording. I wish I had the resources to build some rooms and put these theories to the test! So, my theory:
1) Strong recorded cues + live room = a mess tending toward they are here
2) Strong recorded cues + dead room = your are there but bidirectional cues
3) Weak recorded cues + live room = they are here but if the room is sufficiently like the recording space, you approximate you are there for that space
4) Weak recorded cues + dead room = they are here (or in a studio) Now this is a nice way of organizing things! But I dont agree with it all. I think you are absolutely correct about scenarios (3) and (4). But, as I've indicated above, I dont think category (1) would necessarily result in the mess you anticipate, provided that careful attention were paid to acoustical design. I am also doubtful that scenario (2) would result in the illusion that you are there, for the reason I have stated many times in this thread, namely that I dont believe the bidirectional presentation of ambient cues can create the illusion that "you are there." In effect, scenario (2) is an approximation of an anechoic chamber, and I dont believe you can create the illusion that you are there under those conditions. Having said all this, I should reiterate something I mentioned earlier in this thread, but that may have been lost in the discussion by now: I don't believe that constructing a listening space that emulates a particular recording space is the BEST approach to building a listening room, for many of the reasons that have been pointed out, and some that have not. I do believe that it is a VALID approach, especially for audiophiles who tend to listen to one type of music. For folks who listen to a wide range of music with vastly different recording spaces, constructing a listening space that emulates a particular recording space is probably NOT the best approach. In the latter case, the best approach is probably a balance of: (1) Emulation of some set of recording spaces. (2) Creation of a listening space that provides a balance of attributes important for the hearing exactly what is on the recording. To the extent that an audiophile chooses (1), he is favoring colorations over accuracy. To the extent that he chooses (2), he is favoring accuracy over colorations. (1) is the approach of some audiophiles who are primarily interested in creating a playback space that they themselves find interesting; (2) is the approach of recording studios, where accuracy is the Order of the Day. The use of the word "coloration" above is not pejorative. Although I am an outspoken (read: notorious) advocate of the absence of colorations in equipment, I have a much more mixed view of colorations in the listening room. Although many listening room colorations are destructive (think: room modes, flutter echo, comb filtering, etc.), some room colorations, I believe, are beneficial. Among other things, they can enhance the illusion that "you are there." |
...I composed my response, above, before seeing Bryon's most recent post. But I think everything still stands. |
Bryon, regarding your recent post on ambience cues, directionality and listening rooms, I think you may be overlooking some aspects of what is going on with respect to the cues in the recording versus the cues from the listening room.
Consider doing the playback in exactly the same space as the recording. You set up the speakers and the equipment to optimally reproduce the soundstage, and put the listener in the position of the microphone that recorded the performance. Thus, your listening space exactly reproduces the recording space. Is this the optimal space for creating the you are there experience? I dont think so, but it illustrates some issues:
1) Consider a single drum hit. From the optimal listening position, the stereo effect tells you that there is a drum set on the stage, left of center. What does the wall directly to the right of the speakers see? It sees two sources (the left and right speakers), separated in time by the distance between the speakers. The reflections along the wall will see a delay between the two sources that varies something like the sine of the takeoff angle. The same for the left wall, other objects in the room, etc. This effect does not exist in the original performance. These echoes come to your ears as something other than what the single source on the recording produced. Lets call it source distortion.
2) Now lets replace the pair of speakers with a single speaker in the position of the drum set. The drum hit now behaves as a single source: the direct wave travels from the speaker to the listener as it should, and then hits (say) the back wall and comes back to the listener at exactly the same time as the echo in the recording gets to the listener as a direct wave. Thus, you have achieved your goal of reinforcing the primary cue. But the recorded echo itself then travels to the rear wall and comes back to the listener as a secondary echo that did not exist in the original performance. Lets call this echo distortion.
3) Of course, your room is not exactly the configuration of the recording room, so on top of #1 and #2, you hear your primary room echo and the echo on the recording at different times. Lets call this temporal distortion.
In general, to get ambience cues on the recording to be omnidirectional in your listening space, you would have a) primary echoes from your listening room that were stronger than the secondary recorded echoes, and thus dominant, b) recorded ambience cues reflected by your room that arrived at your ears too late (i.e., the reflected ambience cues will be out of sync with the directly radiated (from the speakers) ambience cues), and c) many of the reflections suffering from source distortion.
I see this as a continuum. If you succeed in recreating a recording space perfectly, you get source and echo distortion with it. If your space is some average of the spaces you prefer (say, a generic jazz club), or you listen to recordings recorded in more than one place, youll also get temporal distortion. If you manage to suppress echo and temporal distortion (or the recording has weak ambience cues), then the direct echoes from your room will dominate, and youll actually get a they are here effect, rather than the desired you are there effect. If you suppress your room so that the recorded cues dominate, you get you are there cues but theyll be bidirectional (but only if the recording has sufficient cues -- if it doesnt you may get a somewhat dead or recording studio sound).
So you have a range of recordings (from heavy cues to none), and a range of rooms (from live to dead), but it doesnt seem possible to have an optimal room for both ends of the spectrum (which I think youve said), and it doesnt seem possible to get time/phase correct omnidirectional ambience cues that arent dominated by your room, rather than the recording (short of electronic intervention, which you and Learsfool have said is not desirable).
To sum up, I think to the extent that you succeed in making the ambience cues from the recording omnidirectional, theyll be mis-timed, out of phase, and probably polarity flipped. And that is on top of all of the very strong room cues that you will necessarily generate to get the recorded cues to be omnidirectional. Or, to put it another way, I dont think it is possible to get the recorded cues to be omnidirectional without seriously compromising the you are there effect.
So, my theory:
1) Strong recorded cues + live room = a mess tending toward they are here
2) Strong recorded cues + dead room = your are there but bidirectional cues
3) Weak recorded cues + live room = they are here but if the room is sufficiently like the recording space, you approximate you are there for that space
4) Weak recorded cues + dead room = they are here (or in a studio)
All of this comes with the caveat that what I say may be true for certain kinds of cues and not others. |
Hello all, another interesting thread from Bryon. As a sidebar, after years of casual listening to quite decent Sennheiser HE60 electrostatics through the stock head amp, I recently had an opportunity to hear an all-out custom tube head amp driving current top-model Sennheiser dynamic headphones. For the first time I think I "got it" regarding what headphones can achieve in terms of disintermediating electronics and room affects from the music. The key insight was that I had never heard a headphone set-up that approached my regular stereo in quality. Most audiophiles outside of the "head-case" niche are likely in the same boat. IME the gain in detail and separation out-weighed the loss of natural acoustic space.
On a lark I set about modifying my Headroom line-level processor to the point where I felt that the advantage of the crossfeed process was not off-set by degradations in the electronics that had relegated this unit to storage for some years. Briefly, crossfeed has the effect of shifting forward and tightening images that in normal listening appear furthest to the side and rear. Only images that are way out to the side and rear seem affected. The effect is to make a headphone "sound stage" analogous to the experience of a conventional listening room. So I am inclined to agree with Al, that this more forward sound stage is natural, with the caveat that a process like crossfeed can spook the ear into hearing a natural sense of the room acoustic, while preserving the advantage that headphones have in being unfettered by reflected sound. As with so much in hi-fi, its all about the implementation. |
Thanks Bryon. Yes, you interpreted my point no. 3 as I intended it, that the inclusion of what was direct sound in the recording space in an omnidirectional listening space presentation represents a significant inaccuracy, which must be traded off against the benefits of the omnidirectional listening space presentation. The reason you didn't see no. 3 previously is simple -- it wasn't there when you started composing your previous response :-). As I mentioned in my subsequent post, I added it in sometime after initially submitting the post to which it was added, and by that time you were obviously working on your response (as shown by the fact that you referred to the headphone part of my post as item 3, rather than item 4 which it subsequently became). I suppose that the bottom line in the tradeoff we are referring to comes down to matters of degree, which in turn are dependent on the speakers, the constraints imposed by the particular listening space, the types of recordings that are listened to, and the preferences of the listener. The only exception I would take with respect to your last post would be the statement that: I believe that headphones (in the absence of a binaural recordings) illustrate that, in that headphones will give you the most ACCURATE sound of the ambient cues of the recording, but not an OMNIDIRECTIONAL presentation of those cues. I am doubtful that on non-binaural recordings headphones can be said to give an accurate reproduction of ambient cues, or anything else, because of the fact that they bypass the pinnae, and inject the sound from the sides instead of from the front. Although of course they can be extremely revealing and analytical. And once again a tradeoff is involved, because their accuracy (in the sense that you are using the term here) is aided by the absence of room effects. Best regards, -- Al |
3) Omnidirectional presentation in the listening space presents in an omnidirectional manner not only the reflected sound that was captured in the recording space, but also the sound that was captured in the recording space via the direct path between instrument(s) and mics. The directly captured sound, of course, having a significantly earlier arrival time at the mics. Intuitively that would seem, at best, to invoke a significant tradeoff. Yes, Al, I did miss this when responding to your post. Dont know why. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that, if you construct a reactive listening space with an omnidirectional sound field, that omnidirectional sound field will include both the DIRECT and the INDIRECT sound from the recording space. In other words, some of the sound that was DIRECT in the recording space is now INDIRECT in the listening space, which is, strictly speaking, an INACCUATE ambient cue. If that is the tradeoff you are referring to, then
In my view, it is a worthwhile tradeoff. I believe that the value of providing a listening space in which ambient cues can arrive at the listening position omnidirectionally outweighs the value of hearing the exact ambient cues on the recording without the addition spurious ambient cues created by the listening space. The criterion for that judgment is: Which is more valuable to creating the illusion that you are there? In other words, OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues are more valuable than STRICTLY ACCURATE ambient cues for creating the illusion that you are there. I believe that headphones (in the absence of a binaural recordings) illustrate that, in that headphones will give you the most ACCURATE sound of the ambient cues of the recording, but not an OMNIDIRECTIONAL presentation of those cues. The result is the ABSENCE of the illusion that "you are there." In my view, if you value accuracy above all else, then listening through headphones or in an acoustically inert room is superior. But if you value the experience that you are there, then listening in a room that supports omnidirectional ambient cues is superior, even if some of those ambient cues do not exist on the recording. This is an especially worthwhile tradeoff if the spurious ambient cues created by the listening space RESEMBLE the kinds of ambient cues created by the recording space. This brings me to
listening rooms do not come anywhere near capable of recreating the original recording space, if this space is a concert hall (or a good jazz club, for that matter) - so this means that the listening space will ALWAYS be fundamentally different from the recording space
Learsfool I think you slightly overstate the case here, but the general point that you are making is one that I have acknowledged throughout this thread. That is to say, constructing a listening space that CLOSELY resembles certain recording spaces can be nearly impossible, unless we were all very rich men. However, that does not mean that we must abandon the concept of resemblance altogether. To me, the listening space can still APPROXIMATE the recording space in ways that enhance the illusion that you are there. I mentioned some ways in a previous post. Admittedly, a close approximation may require more architectural design and more acoustical treatment than most of us can afford, but I believe that audiophiles can learn lessons from great listening rooms in order to improve their own listening rooms, even if it is only on a very modest scale. As it turns out, many of the features that make a listening room great are available to the thrifty audiophile in a more modest version, if he has the inclination to try. Incidentally, I am not holding myself up as a exemplar of conscientiousness about listening room acoustical design. Hardly. But I have the belief that it is The Great Frontier for audiophiles. That goes for me, and frankly, for most Agon folks, judging from the virtual systems on this site. |
Bryon and Al, you both make some very interesting points! In general, I agree with most all of them, particularly Al's. Regarding this bi-directional vs. omni-directional subject, though, I do think it is very important to remember that in a good concert hall, sound is really not coming from EVERY direction at exactly the same moment. Acousticians try to design the overall space so that as much of the sound as possible goes directly to the audience, and that the reflected sound is channeled in such a way that it interferes with this as little as possible. So although sound does come from many different directions, it does not come from all of them anywhere near equally, and the overall effect is not PRIMARILY omni-directional, only secondarily so. Again, this is assuming a well-designed hall, and I am admittedly over-simplifying. I think the point I am trying to make here is similar to Al's point no. 3 he asked you to reconsider. (On a side note, this is why some musicians I know claim that even stereo reproduction sounds fake, and do as much of their listening as possible to older mono recordings! I don't go that far myself, but I have been exposed to a truly great mono set-up, and had to admit that it was at least as realistic as the best stereo set-ups I have heard.)
This point leads to another - listening rooms do not come anywhere near capable of recreating the original recording space, if this space is a concert hall (or a good jazz club, for that matter) - so this means that the listening space will ALWAYS be fundamentally different from the recording space, as I believe you put it, in these cases, and this is why I believe you are overestimating it's importance. It must be a very good listening space indeed, beyond the capabilities of the vast majority of us, to come close to recreating the sound of a concert hall in their listening room. I am not suggesting the room is unimportant (it can definitely help in the ways you suggest), but merely not as important as the speakers, and certainly not as important as the recording itself, which is by far the greatest factor.
Another point I would make, per our discussion of speaker types, is that while I think I understand your comment that "neither [speaker type] is inherently superior to the other, when considered independent of the listening room," in practice, one cannot listen to the speaker independent of the listening room, so while that statement may be true in theory, it doesn't have any practical value.
As for the binaural recording issue, I have absolutely no experience with this - I have never heard a binaural recording. The subject is interesting, and I would like to hear one sometime, but until then I will remain skeptical, for the reasons I already stated. And I still remain convinced that though the very best types of headphones out there may be able to provide some ambient cues, they will not be of anywhere near the quality of normal speakers. I do not claim to know the scientific reasons behind it, but it has much to do with what Al alluded to about the ears not picking up the sound in the same way. I read a very good article about this subject a few years ago written by an engineer, but have no recollection of where, unfortunately. I may try a Google search, and if I can find it, I will share the link. |
Thanks very much, Bryon. With the clarifications, qualifications, and further exposition you have provided, I find little or nothing to disagree with. Although as we both agree, a lot of what has been said remains in the realm of hypothesis, that is conceivably refutable or subject to further qualification.
When you have time to return here from the real world :-) please take a look at item 3 in my previous post, which I added in some time after initially submitting the post. I believe you may not have seen it when you composed your response, and I'd be interested in your comments on it.
Best regards,
-- Al
|
One more thing about binaural recordings
While binaural recordings, literally speaking, are bidirectional, they nevertheless RECREATE the same information that results from the OMNIDIRECTIONAL arrival of ambient cues. That is precisely the point I have been trying to make about the listening room, namely, that it must RECREATE, to whatever extent possible, the same information that results from the OMNIDIRECTIONAL arrival of ambient cues, if it is to create the illusion that you are there.
Now I will pause for a brief resumption of my life. |
Your last post, while of course highly thoughtful, I would have to very respectfully say strikes me as being essentially a set of hypotheses, which are subject to challenge and skepticism in several ways
Al You are absolutely correct. Nearly everything in my last post I would consider a hypothesis, not a fact. Looking back at my post, I can see how I failed to make that clear. Usually, I am careful to include lots of phrases like in my view, As I see it, I believe that and so on. In other threads, I have often used the words hypothesis and proposal. But in my last post, there is a shortage of such words and phrases, which could easily give the impression that I regarded its contents as a group of generally accepted facts. I do not. I was struggling more than usual to organize my ideas, and so certain things got missed. In any case, like you, I regard the contents of my last post as a collection of hypotheses. That is to say, they are proposals about what MIGHT be true, proposals that have some evidence to support them, but that, like all proposals, can be defeated by other evidence. Having said that, lets look at the evidence
RE: (1) TIME SCALE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LISTENING SPACE AND RECORDING SPACE
there is little reason to expect, in general, that omnidirectional presentation in the listening room will augment or better present the omnidirectional information that was captured in the recording space, because of the vastly different delay times that are involved. I acknowledge that the time scale differences between the typical recording space and the typical listening space can be quite significant. But I dont know that those differences warrant much skepticism about my view that the omnidirectional presentation of ambient cues in the listening space helps create the illusion that "you are there." Here are some of the reasons
(i). You are quite right that the time scale of the first order reflections in a typical concert hall, being somewhere around 25-40 ms, cannot be reproduced in the listening room, since the listening room would have to be the size of a concert hall. However, a concert hall is the worst cast scenario. Many recording spaces are considerably smaller, to the point where the first order reflections of the recording space might be on roughly the same time scale as the first order reflections of the listening room. So the closer the size of the listening space is to the size of the recording space, the closer the time scales will be, and the less of an obstacle differences in time scale will be to creating the illusion that you are there. But even in cases where the listening space is much smaller than the recording space, there are still reasons to believe that the listening space can make a significant contribution to the illusion that "you are there." Which brings me to
(ii). It seem to me, and this again is a hypothesis, that even when the recording space is so large that it is impossible to construct a listening space whose first order reflections can exist at the same time scale, you can construct a listening space that, in important respects, EMULATES the larger recording space. First, you can absorb the first order reflections of the listening space. This will lengthen the time before reflections reach the listening position, and, in effect, acoustically "enlarge" the listening room. Second, you can reflect or diffuse the second, third, and fourth order reflections of the listening space to provide a SUBSTITUTE for the first order reflections in the recording space. Admittedly, an analysis of the order of reflections would be significantly different between the two spaces. But a listening space that sustains higher order reflections with an amplitude and time scale similar to the lower order reflections of the recording space will, by doing so, RESEMBLE the larger recording space. I believe that kind of listening space allows the ambient cues in the recording to be presented in a way that APPROXIMATES the amplitude, time scale, and directionality of the ambient cues as they sounded in the recording space, contributing to the illusion that you are there. (iii). Finally, matching the reverberation time of the listening space to that of the recording space can further enhance the illusion that "you are there." This can be accomplished even when the listening space is rather small and the recording space is rather large. This is another respect in which the differences in time scales involved in different spaces is not an insuperable obstacle to an effort to create the illusion that "you are there" by constructing a listening space that presents ambient cues in a way that approximates the way they were presented in the recording space. In light of this, it seems to me that the approach to creating the illusion that you are there by constructing a listening space that provides the omnidirectional presentation of omnidirectional ambient cues is not defeated by differences in time scales, since (a) the time scales of the listening space are not always radically different from the time scales of the recording space, depending on the type of music; (b) the higher order reflections of the listening space can, to some extent, act as substitutes for the lower order reflections of the recording space; and (c) matching the reverberation time of the listening space and the recording space can be done (nearly) regardless of the size of the recording space. In my view, these measures constitute partial solutions to the limitations imposed by differences in time scales between listening spaces and recording spaces, even when the recording spaces are very large, like concert halls. And because of that, I do not feel that differences in time scales create serious doubts about my view that the omnidirectional ambient cues of the listening space can be used to augment the omnidirectional ambient cues of the recording space, and thereby enhance the illusion that "you are there." Having said that, I acknowledge that differences in time scales is something that must be carefully addressed in the listening room, if you are serious about creating the illusion that "you are there." It seem to me that part of your skepticism, Al, is focused on my suggestion that, in order to create the illusion that you are there, ambient cues must be presented OMNIDIRECTIONALLY. In my last post, I tried to provide several arguments that express why I believe that. What it essentially comes down to is that, in order to create the illusion that you are there, the directionality of ambient cues in the listening space must resemble, as much as possible, the directionality of ambient cues in the recording space. And in the recording space, the ambient cues were OMNIDIRECTIONAL. Hence, in the listening space, they must be OMNIDIRECTIONAL. That does NOT mean, however, that the speakers must be omnidirectional (more on this below). Here is a quote from a speaker manufacturer who expresses more or less the same thing Ive been saying:
why do anechoic chambers sound so odd and artificial? We are accustomed to hearing the acoustics of the room we are in and spacial cues coming from many directions. Although a recording contains the acoustics of the concert hall, during playback those spacial cues are not coming from the original directionsthey are all coming from the two speakers in front of usvery artificial. It is a crude and unnatural way to simulate an acoustic environment. We need to hear those spacial cues coming from all around us. In an anechoic chamber they don't. In contrast, I suspect the reason stereo works as well as it does in our homes is because of room acoustics. In a way, the room reflections are substitutes for the ones we would get at a live event. The reverberant field in our home listening room surrounds us with sound, not as a simulacrum of the actual location of the recording, but as a substitute. Those cues in the recording can then be interpreted as if coming from their original directions. This is not an appeal to authority. I dont regard this manufacturer as any particular authority, nor do I necessarily agree with his views on loudspeaker design. Its just something I found that expresses, in a slightly different way, what Ive been trying to say. RE: (2). BIDIRECTIONAL VS. OMNIDIRECTIONAL SPEAKERS There would certainly seem to be ample empirical evidence, such as in the system descriptions posted here at Audiogon, that high quality directional speakers are not necessarily at a disadvantage, relative to speakers with broad or omnidirectional dispersion characteristics, in creating a reasonably good "you are there" illusion. I agree with this. In my response to Learsfool in my last post, my point was NOT that omnidirectional speakers are inherently superior to highly directional speakers at creating the illusion that you are there. My point was to express doubt about HIS suggestion that highly directional speakers were inherently superior to other designs at creating the illusion that you are there. In my view, neither is inherently superior to the other, when considered independent of the listening room. However, I do believe that some speaker radiation patterns will work better than others in PARTICULAR listening rooms. RE: (3). HEADPHONES
it seems to me that the major problem with headphones is not that the sound is presented bidirectionally. Per my item 2 above, speakers that present bidirectionally can, at least in many circumstances, present a reasonably good "you are there" illusion. The bidirectionality of most speaker designs is not equivalent to the bidirectionality of headphones. To state the obvious, once you place bidirectional speakers in a listening room, they create a reverberant sound field. Hence the sound at the listening position is, to some extent, omnidirectional. The only place bidirectional speakers create a completely bidirectional sound field is in an anechoic chamber. In the real world, bidirectional speakers create SOMEWHAT OMNIDIRECTIONAL sound at the listening position. In contrast, headphones always create a COMPLETELY BIDIRECTIONAL presentation. In light of this, the success of bidirectional speakers at creating the illusion that you are there is not a reason to believe that headphones can, by virtue of similar directionality, create the illusion that you are there. The reason is because the sound field of bidirectional speakers is no longer purely bidirectional, once you put them in the listening room, while headphones remain completely bidirectional, come what may. I'll add that on normal stereo recordings of classical music, if they are well recorded, minimally mic'd, and minimally processed, I can clearly hear ambient cues and hall effects on my Stax headphones. Yes, I agree with this, as I mentioned in the last paragraph of my last post. Headphones DO provide ambient cues from the recording. But they do not present them OMNIDIRECTIONALLY, which is how they sounded in the recording space. That is why I dont believe headphones can create the experience that you are there on typically micd recordings. Which brings me to... I have two or three binaural recordings, and they can be truly spectacular in their "you are there" realism, when listened to with headphones. I have not head a binaural recording through headphones, though I do not doubt, from what I know of the technique, and testimony like yours, that it can create the illusion that you are there. So none of my comments about headphones apply to binaural recordings. Having said that, it seems to me that the success of binaural recordings at creating the illusion that you are there SUPPORTS the things Ive been saying about the importance of the DIRECTIONALITY OF AMBIENT CUES in creating the illusion that you are there. Unlike typical recordings, binaural recordings contain robust information about the DIRECTIONALITY OF AMBIENT CUES. That is the reason, I believe, that they can create the illusion that "you are there." For the vast majority of recordings, which are not binaural, the directionality of ambient cues must somehow be recreated IN THE LISTENING ROOM, if you want to create the illusion that "you are there." Or that is my hypothesis, anyway. :) |
Hi Bryon, Your last post, while of course highly thoughtful, I would have to very respectfully say strikes me as being essentially a set of hypotheses, which are subject to challenge and skepticism in several ways: 1)Along the lines of some of our discussion earlier in this thread, there is little reason to expect, in general, that omnidirectional presentation in the listening room will augment or better present the omnidirectional information that was captured in the recording space, because of the vastly different delay times that are involved. Those timing differences will cause our hearing mechanisms to respond in completely different ways, per the Haas Effect and the Precedence Effect (for which Wikipedia links are provided in one of my earlier posts). 2)There would certainly seem to be ample empirical evidence, such as in the system descriptions posted here at Audiogon, that high quality directional speakers are not necessarily at a disadvantage, relative to speakers with broad or omnidirectional dispersion characteristics, in creating a reasonably good "you are there" illusion. 3)Omnidirectional presentation in the listening space presents in an omnidirectional manner not only the reflected sound that was captured in the recording space, but also the sound that was captured in the recording space via the direct path between instrument(s) and mics. The directly captured sound, of course, having a significantly earlier arrival time at the mics. Intuitively that would seem, at best, to invoke a significant tradeoff. Among other reasons for that is the fact that the frequency response curves of our ears vary considerably as a function of the direction of the sound source. 4)It seems to me that the major problem with headphones is not that the sound is presented bidirectionally. Per my item 2 above, speakers that present bidirectionally can, at least in many circumstances, present a reasonably good "you are there" illusion. The major problems with headphones are two-fold, as I see it: (a)The sound we hear from them essentially bypasses the pinnae, thereby altering both frequency response and directional cues. (b)Nearly all recordings are not mic'd to be compatible with headphone listening. A recording mic'd to be properly compatible with headphone listening needs to be recorded binaurally, which as you probably are aware means it is recorded via microphone capsules inserted in the ears of a dummy human head. I have two or three binaural recordings, and they can be truly spectacular in their "you are there" realism, when listened to with headphones. Although the degree of that realism can be expected to vary somewhat from listener to listener, corresponding (I believe) to the anatomical differences that may exist between the heads and ears of each listener and the dummy head that was used. FWIW, I'll add that on normal stereo recordings of classical music, if they are well recorded, minimally mic'd, and minimally processed, I can clearly hear ambient cues and hall effects on my Stax headphones. They do seem somewhat less prominent than when I listen via speakers, but I suspect that is due mainly to the relatively lean sonic character of these particular headphones. 5) So why dont we just say that BOTH the listening room and the equipment are important factors in creating the illusion that you are there, though neither is as important as the recording. Or we could leave that last bit out, and just say that ALL THREE are important. I agree with both sentences. By which I mean to imply that in general my feeling is that the recording is the most important of the three variables, at least with respect to the role that ambient cues play in "you are there" realism. So in conclusion, I have no conclusion :-). At least, beyond what I've said earlier. But those are some thoughts that come to mind in response to your latest post. Best regards, -- Al |
I think you are correct when you say that "ambient cues" in the recording will always combine somewhat with those in a listening room. However, after reading your post and thinking about it, I still think that the equipment, specifically the speakers, will have an even greater effect. Learsfool You may be right about this. Now that I am giving it more thought, it does seem that some speaker designs are considerably better than others at creating the illusion that you are there. So why dont we just say that BOTH the listening room and the equipment are important factors in creating the illusion that you are there, though neither is as important as the recording. Or we could leave that last bit out, and just say that ALL THREE are important. Thats probably the most realistic view, in light of the fact that their relative importance is likely to vary from recording to recording, listening room to listening room, and equipment to equipment. That whole topic is a lot like the Which is more important: Source or Speaker? threads that pop up from time to time. Talk about an infinite staircase. So, moving on to speaker design
...some speaker types will lessen the "ambient cues" of the listening room, such as horn speakers. This is actually another reason why many musicians prefer them when they hear them - the shape of the horn itself helps direct the sound more where you want it to go, minimizing some (of course not all) of the effects of the room in which they are placed. Therefore, one can hear more of the "ambient cues" on the recording as opposed to those of the room. This directness of horn speakers also tends to more closely approximate the "you are there" effect
It is certainly true that highly directional speakers minimize the ambient cues of the room and maximize the ambient cues of the recording. But I am skeptical that highly directional speakers are inherently more likely to create the illusion that you are there. In order to explain my skepticism, I have to say a few things about sound DIRECTIONALITY
A sound may be unidirectional, bidirectional, multidirectional, or omnidirectional, depending upon the number of sources, the nature of the acoustical environment, and the position of the listener. In reality, there is something like a continuum of sound directionality with unidirectional at one end and omnidirectional at the other. In most interior spaces, ambient cues are typically OMNIDIRECTIONAL, i.e. they arrive from all directions. Likewise, in most recording spaces that are not acoustically inert, ambient cues are typically omnidirectional. That is NOT to say that ambient cues are EQUAL IN ALL DIRECTIONS. It is only to say that they ARRIVE FROM ALL DIRECTIONS (at the microphone). This fact bears directly on how to create the illusion that you are there, as I will now try to show... As I mentioned in my previous post, creating the illusion that you are there is achieved by creating a playback space that is as similar as possible to the recording space. There are two approaches to this. The first approach is to construct a listening space whose ambient cues resemble the ambient cues of the recording space. The second approach is to construct a listening space whose ambient cues are minimal. Both approaches have liabilities, but it is the liabilities of the second approach that are relevant at the moment, for the following reason: To the extent that you minimize the ambient cues of the listening space, the sound arriving at the listener will not be OMNIDIRECTIONAL. It will be BIDIRECTIONAL, assuming you are listening in stereo. Even if the recording has OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues, what you will hear at the listening position is the BIDIRECTIONAL presentation of OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues. In other words, by minimizing the ambient cues of the listening room, the sound will arrive at the listening position primarily from TWO directions (the locations of the speakers). This means the ambient cues of the recording will, likewise, arrive primarily from TWO directions. But in the recording space, the ambient cues arrived from EVERY direction. That difference is the fundamental limitation in the approach of minimizing the ambient cues of the listening room when trying to create the illusion that "you are there." Hence... (1) The BIDIRECTIONAL arrival of OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues cannot create the illusion that "you are there." In contrast... (2) The OMNIDIRECTIONAL arrival of OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues can create the illusion that you are there. RE: (1). This is why headphones and anechoic chambers cannot create the illusion that you are there. Both headphones and anechoic chambers create a BIDIRECTIONAL presentation of ambient cues. But the ambient cues in an acoustically significant recording space did not arrive from only two directions. They arrived from every direction. This difference in directionality between an acoustically inert listening space and an acoustically significant recording space is an insuperable obstacle to creating the illusion that you are there. RE: (2). This is why an acoustically reactive listening room is a critical element in creating the illusion that you are there. The acoustically reactive listening room creates an acoustical space in which the ambient cues of the recording can be presented omnidirectionally, JUST AS THEY WERE IN THE RECORDING SPACE. If, on the other hand, your listening room is acoustically inert, you reduce the possibility that the ambient cues from the recording can arrive from all directions. And if the ambient cues of the recording do not arrive from all directions, your playback space will be fundamentally different from the recording space, which destroys the illusion that "you are there." Incidentally, this also explains negative reactions to recording studios that briefly appeared with a live end and dead end. In that design, one side of the listening room has an abundance of ambient cues, while the other side has virtually no ambient cues. That creates a more or less HEMISPHERICAL presentation of OMNIDIRECTIONAL ambient cues, which is not at all like the experience that you are there. Not surprisingly, this recording studio design was unpopular with recording engineers. This brings me to why I am skeptical about your view that highly directional loudspeakers are inherently superior to, say, omnidirectional loudspeakers when trying to create the illusion that you are there. If you were to place highly directional speakers in an acoustically inert listening room, for example, you would create a highly BIDIRECTIONAL presentation. That means whatever ambient cues are in the recording will not arrive at the listening position from all directions, as they should. In fact, if you went far enough with this approach, you would approximate the sound of headphones and anechoic chambers, which is not at all the sound that you are there, as you point out. So if the listening room is acoustically inert, highly directional speakers are probably NOT the best choice. Finally, I hope all this clears up the puzzlement you expressed when you said:
the only thing I would actually strongly disagree with was something you said at the end, that headphones are great for hearing the ambient cues - in fact I would say just the opposite. To me, listening on headphones, no matter how high their quality, sounds nothing like live music; nor does the presentation resemble a real space in any way, shape, or form. Headphones are great for hearing the ambient cues IN THE RECORDING, but terrible for hearing the ambient cues AS THEY SOUNDED IN THE RECORDING SPACE, because in the recording space, the ambient cues were omnidirectional, whereas in headphones, they are bidirectional. In other words, I agree with your comment that the sound of headphones does not resemble a real space in any way, shape, or form. But the reason is NOT because headphones fail to provide the ambient cues of the recording space. The reason is because headphones fail to present the CORRECT DIRECTIONALITY of the ambient cues of the recording space. With headphones, you are hearing the BIDIRECTIONAL presentation of OMNIDIRECTIONAL information. But in the recording space, you would hear an OMNIDIRECTIONAL presentation of OMNIDIRECTIONAL information. That is what the real world sounds like. And that is what we must make our playback space sound like, if we want to create the illusion that we are there. |
Hi Newbee - I didn't take that comment personally, I just felt like responding to what is after all a very common comment made here on this site. You are by no means the only person who has made such a comment. I'm not offended by it, I just see it as a common misperception and was trying to explain it.
Bryon, your last post is fascinating. I think you are correct when you say that "ambient cues" in the recording will always combine somewhat with those in a listening room. However, after reading your post and thinking about it, I still think that the equipment, specifically the speakers, will have an even greater effect. The multchannel system example I gave before would create even more chaos in this area, no matter what the size of the room. And some speaker types will lessen the "ambient cues" of the listening room, such as horn speakers. This is actually another reason why many musicians prefer them when they hear them - the shape of the horn itself helps direct the sound more where you want it to go, minimizing some (of course not all) of the effects of the room in which they are placed. Therefore, one can hear more of the "ambient cues" on the recording as opposed to those of the room. This directness of horn speakers also tends to more closely approximate the "you are there" effect of live acoustic music, whether orchestral or jazz, especially in terms of physical impact.
Other speaker designers like to create a different sort of presentation, which many reviewers love to call more "laid back." This can sometimes be quite nice, Sonus Faber would be a good example of this type of sound. It is a beautiful sound, but it tends to de-emphasize the "you are there" effect - the soundstaging of these speaker types tend to obscure the "ambient cues" and they certainly do not have anything like the same physical impact, by design. Many audiophiles will say they much prefer this type of "laid-back" presentation, even for very large-scale music. There is of course nothing wrong with this, and it can be a very pretty sound, as I said, but for me it is most definitely not a sound that I would describe as life-like.
To go back to the term "coloration" for a moment, this actually illustrates why I personally do not like the way audiophiles use the term. For me, the more "laid-back" presentation of say a Sonus Faber speaker is much more of what I would describe as a "colored" sound as opposed to the more direct, lifelike presentation of say my Cornwalls (not that I am in any way promoting my Cornwalls as the best thing available, please understand, I am speaking of very general differences in speaker types here). I can hear more of the colors that the musicians on the recording are trying to create on my Cornwalls than I can on say a Sonus Faber Amati, as great as those speakers sound in their own way.
However, I fully realize that this is NOT the way most audiophiles use the term, and I would bet that most of you reading this are now scratching your heads, convinced that horns are some of the most "colored" speakers out there. But I digress, I certainly don't mean to turn this into a discussion of the merits of different speaker types.
As I said, I do agree with much of what you said - the only thing I would actually strongly disagree with was something you said at the end, that headphones are great for hearing the ambient cues - in fact I would say just the opposite. To me, listening on headphones, no matter how high their quality, sounds nothing like live music; nor does the presentation resemble a real space in any way, shape, or form. Frankly, I have always been very puzzled by those audiophiles who claim they are great for anything whatever, besides not disturbing anyone else with what you are listening to. They create no soundstage whatsoever, and imaging is also very poor, and of course stereo channel separation is greatly heightened, all of this resulting in a very artificial sound indeed. This of course assumes that the goal is to come as close as possible to the sound of live acoustic music in a good performance space. If you just want to rock out, than most of the above won't apply. I will say for them that they perhaps allow one to hear more of some kinds of detail, but definitely not the "low-level" detail we are speaking of here. I realize that you also said they are lousy at creating illusion that "you are there," but aren't the ambient cues a very important part of creating that illusion? |
Where I would differ with you would be on the subject of the listening room being much of a factor at all in picking up what you are calling "ambient cues" in the recording. The listening room is of course a big factor in the sound of a system as a whole, however I would disagree that it has much effect on this specific issue
Learsfool I have some thoughts that bear on your view that the listening room doesn't have much effect on creating the illusion that you are there. As I mentioned in a previous post, my view is that ambient cues are the principal determinant of the illusion that you are there. The ambient cues of the recording are the most important. But the ambient cues of the listening room are, in my view, quite significant. Before I say exactly how, I should say
A FEW WORDS ABOUT AMBIENT CUES: So far, I have not defined ambient cue. Heres a stab at it: Ambient cue: Audible information about the features of a physical space. Ambient cues provide information about features of a physical space like: size, shape, materials, and object position. Ambient cues are contained in the relations between direct and indirect sound, including: relative amplitude, relative duration, relative phase, relative frequency content, relative harmonic content. In an anechoic chamber, there is (virtually) no indirect sound, and hence (virtually) no ambient cues. In the real world, there are an abundance of ambient cues. So much so, that animals, and to a lesser extent humans, can use those ambient cues to echolocate. The point is that, in virtually all physical spaces, ambient cues are ubiquitous and highly informative. This brings me to
THE IMPORTANCE OF AMBIENT CUES IN THE LISTENING ROOM: Every listening room contains an abundance of ambient cues. The specific characteristics of those ambient cues are relevant to the audiophile, for the following reason: During playback, the ambient cues of the recording space are COMBINED with the ambient cues of the listening space. The combination of the ambient cues of the recording space with the ambient cues of the listening space creates, in effect, a NEW SET OF AMBIENT CUES. I will call this new set of ambient cues the playback space. In other words: Recording space + Listening space = Playback space The playback space is what the audiophile actually hears at the listening position. It is the combination of the ambient cues of the recording space and the ambient cues of the listening space. When trying to create the illusion that you are there, an audiophile tries to create a playback space whose ambient cues are as close as possible to the ambient cues of the recording space. As I see it, there are two possible ways to go about this: 1. Construct a listening space whose ambient cues resemble the ambient cues of the recording space. 2. Construct a listening space that minimizes ambient cues. The first approach is largely impractical, especially for those who listen to a wide array of music with vastly different recording spaces. However, I did read about one Rives audio customer who approached Rives with the request to build 4 different listening spaces, each optimized for one of four different types of music - symphonic, jazz, vocals, and rock. The far more practical approach is to minimize the ambient cues of the listening space. But this can be done only up to a point, since ambient cues in the listening space are essential for creating a realistic soundstage, another crucial factor in creating the illusion that you are there. This creates something of a dilemma for the audiophile: To the extent that he constructs a listening space whose ambient cues resemble the ambient cues of a particular recording space, his listening room will be optimized for only one type of recording. To the extent that he constructs a listening space that minimizes ambient cues, he will diminish the realism of his soundstage. The way out of this dilemma is some kind of balance between the two approaches. The exact nature of that balance probably varies from room to room, recording to recording, and listener to listener. But I suspect that there are some generalizations to be made. Otherwise companies like Rives wouldn't be in business. Regardless of which approach is taken, the inescapable fact is that the ambient cues of the recording space will always be combined with the ambient cues of the listening space, to create the ambient cues the listener actually hears at the listening position (what I am calling the playback space). The only way to escape this fact is to listen through headphones or in an anechoic chamber, both of which are great for hearing the ambient cues of the recording, but lousy at creating the illusion that you are there. |
Learsfool, FWIW, I did not say that musicians, or for that matter non-musicians, didn't have some interest in audio. I referred to 'high end' audio in the context that we use that term.
In my mind, those that use the term high end, myself included, are 'audio' hobbyists. Amongst my friends, family members, and guests, I can find no one really interested in the hobby aspect, beyond making a socially correct observation about my system or music collection, although we will often discuss music itself or the music scene.
My comment was of course nothing more than a personal observation based on personal experience, and I should have known better than to have trotted out what amounted to an old canard in the presence of a professional musician who also happens to be an audio hobbyist. My apologies. :-) |
Hi Bryon - we are generally in agreement here. Where I would differ with you would be on the subject of the listening room being much of a factor at all in picking up what you are calling "ambient cues" in the recording. The listening room is of course a big factor in the sound of a system as a whole, however I would disagree that it has much effect on this specific issue, depending of course on the type of recording. The equipment would have a much greater effect on it in general, particularly if we are speaking about vinyl (which I almost always am). If we are speaking of digital, then there are much less "real" "ambient cues" on the recording, but there are many more of them on orchestral recordings up until they became mostly digital in the late 80's. Particularly up until the mid 60's or so, just about all of the "ambient cues" on an orchestral recording will be "real" rather than "virtual." After that, even the good labels started using more and more mikes, though there were notable exceptions, such as Decca London's ffrr stuff, which sounds better than anything else done in the 70's (speaking very generally, of course) as far as regards this specific issue.
What you say about the room having more of an effect would be true, however, in the case of some of the multi-channel recordings out there which some others mentioned earlier on in the thread. Then you have more speakers to deal with, and the whole would be more influenced by the room itself. However, they have yet to make a multi-channel recording that any professional classical musician I know has ever thought sounded at all realistic, so I remain very skeptical about such recordings. Frankly, most of them end up sounding quite similar to a Bose -type system, where the music sounds like it's traveling in all sorts of crazy directions, which I guess some think sounds cool, but it certainly doesn't sound like a "real" acoustic space. But that's really not part of this discussion.
Newbee, I would say to you that it has always puzzled me when people state that musicians are not interested in good sound. As another fellow musician who contributes here on audiogon, Frogman, recently stated in a different thread, there are probably many more audiophiles proportionately among musicians than there are in any other single profession. It must be admitted that audiophiles are a VERY small percentage of the general population - the percentage of musicians interested in good sound is MUCH larger in comparison, even if it isn't a majority, a point I am not sure I would concede. A great many musicians simply cannot afford a high-end system - (I am one of the lucky ones with a full-time job with decent benefits, and my system is certainly nothing to brag about cost-wise compared to much of the folks hanging out on this site!) but that doesn't mean they don't appreciate a good system when they hear it. Most professional musicians have to put at least as much money into their instruments alone as many folks on audiogon put into their systems, not to mention other costs, and there just isn't enough left over for most to justify buying a high-end audio system. The total dollar value of the instruments you are listening to if you attend a professional orchestral concert would stagger you, and that is of course where our priorities must lie. |
I also agree with those near the beginning of the thread (I think Newbee was one) who stated that the recording itself is the very biggest factor in creating a "you are there" experience - a far bigger factor than these other factors under discussion for most of the thread. I was one of the people who suggested this earlier in the thread. In my view, the illusion that "you are there" is created by ambient cues during playback. The biggest determinant of ambient cues during playback is the recording. Then the listening room. Then the equipment. I suspect the reason so much discussion has focused on listening rooms and equipment is because the characteristics of recordings are outside the audiophiles control, except in the sense that he can make an effort to find recordings with interesting ambient cues, as Al pointed out. On the other hand, listening rooms and equipment are inside the audiophiles control. So, while they have a lesser role in creating the illusion that you are there, discussions about them may lead to conclusions that are more actionable. It is simply not a high priority for most engineers now to recreate the actual sound of the hall. The engineer
adds digital reverberation to create a false ambience
As you seem to imply, recordings of this kind DO contain ambient cues, but they are not ambient cues of REAL recording spaces. They are ambient cues of VIRTUAL recording spaces. I suppose there is no reason why, in theory, a virtual recording space couldnt be as interesting as a real one. In practice, the best recording spaces I have heard have always been the real ones. So it is regrettable that they are becoming less and less common. I want to hear what that orchestra sounds like IN THAT SPACE
For me, [there] are much more important traits for a system than "neutrality," though I don't propose to start that discussion all over again. I am merely trying to explain why musicians place such a high priority on soundstaging and imaging. They are crucial to creating a "you are there" experience. I agree that, for many recordings, creating the illusion that you are there greatly enhances the listening experience. I also agree that soundstaging and imaging are crucial to creating the illusion that you are there. However, I believe that soundstaging, imaging, and the illusion that "you are there" are all connected to the characteristic of neutrality. I am hesitant to mention this, because I dont want us to get trapped back on the infinite staircase of our neutrality discussion. So, leaving the term neutrality out of it, and using the somewhat less controversial term coloration, I would say that many colorations diminish the illusion that you are there. Here is an argument that expresses one of the reasons why: (1) Decreasing colorations tends to increase resolution. (2) Increasing resolution increases the audibility of ambient cues in the recording. (3) Increasing the audibility of ambient cues in the recording enhances the illusion that you are there. (4) Therefore, decreasing colorations tends to enhance the illusion that you are there. (5) Therefore, increasing colorations tends to diminish the illusion that you are there. There are various qualifications and exceptions I would make to the argument above, but it captures the spirit of my view. |
FWIW, I sort of agree with Byron's last paragraph, but mostly wherein he stresses the importance of 'resolution'. Not so much neutrality, which for me is as much about tonality as anything else, but this is a can of worms not worthy of discussion at this time. And for me, resolution is found in the absence of distortions in the equipment and set up, assuming the capability of the speakers and electronics to actually reproduce the micro information in the recording in the first place. "Detail" is to me a false god for the tyro who might think that enhanced information in the high(er) frequencies is really balanced. Just MHO of course.
And, FWIW, I agree with most all of Learsfool's observations. Unfortunately all of the professional musicians I know have little interest in high end audio, just like most of my friends. |
Hi Bryon - I have just read through this entire thread now, and there are alot of very good comments by you and Al and many others about the effect of the listening room, ambience cues, etc. I would agree with most of it. However, I also agree with those near the beginning of the thread (I think Newbee was one) who stated that the recording itself is the very biggest factor in creating a "you are there" experience - a far bigger factor than these other factors under discussion for most of the thread. Someone said, and I will lazily paraphrase here, that you cannot put into your listening room something that was not in the recording in the first place. I would like to add to this by going back to my comments on mixing - you also cannot put back into the listening room something that the mikes may have picked up, but the engineer subsequently mixed out.
To take modern orchestral recording as an example - there will be at the very least several different mikes onstage, located in the middle of the orchestra. There will usually be absolutely no mikes anymore out in the hall, where an audience would be. These mikes are usually also much closer to the instruments than they were in the days of analog recording as well. This has the effect of pretty much entirely eliminating the acoustic ambience of the hall itself - in fact, many engineers don't even like to record in concert halls anymore. It is simply not a high priority for most engineers now to recreate the actual sound of the hall.
The engineer then takes these tracks, mixes them, and then adds digital reverberation to create a false ambience, one that he thinks sounds good. It may or may not sound anything like the actual space anymore. I guess my point with all this is to say that no matter how much you can make your listening room recreate the experience of a concert hall, it will not put back the sound of the original hall very closely, since the engineer has already removed that. This is not even to bring up the question of which hall would you like to recreate and why (this is another problem with the "absolute sound" concept).
This is one of the main reasons that most musicians who are audiophiles have a marked preference for the older recordings from the so-called "golden age," where folks like Mercury and RCA just hung a couple of mikes up out in the concert hall and therefore created much more of a "you are there" experience than anything recorded today. They were recording the sound of the music in that particular space.
Which leads me to another issue. Onhwy61 wrote "IMO the original question is another example of overstating the importance of soundstage/imaging in high end audio. As a system's resolution increases you'll hear more soundstage information, but in and of itself that information isn't really important to the enjoyment of listening to music. As an example, hearing Harry Belafonte's voice bounce off the different surfaces at Carnegie Hall is at most interesting. It's a good test of the lower level resolution of a system. But what does it have to do with Belafonte's performance?"
Well, my answer to that question is - a very great deal! Speaking as a performer, each different venue that we play/sing in changes our performance, sometimes radically so, much more than the typical audience member realizes. Belafonte, to use your example, must sing quite differently in Carnegie Hall than he does in the Copacabana or the Hollywood Bowl or Symphony Hall in Boston or insert your favorite jazz club/symphony hall here. To use a more personal example, if my orchestra goes on tour, as a French horn player whose bell faces "the wrong way," I have an even bigger adjustment to make than most musicians do, including the actual timing of my entrances, because of the differences in hall reverberation, liveness/deadness of the stage itself, etc. Note lengths can vary quite a bit from night to night on a tour, for another example.
So where am I going with this? Well, this is where the importance of soundstaging and imaging comes in for musicians when they are listening to a recording. I want to hear what that orchestra sounds like IN THAT SPACE. We LOVE listening to recordings of the same orchestra in different halls, or listening to different mixes of the same performance in the same hall (RCA did this in the 80's, the name of those recordings is escaping me at the moment). We like to be able, given a really good recording, to tell exactly how the orchestra was set up. One famous opera example is the recording done at the Met that Bernstein did for DG (of all companies!!) of Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role. That recording has great sonics which really do create a "you are there" experience, but you need a system that has an appropriate soundstage and images well to fully experience it (a great many orchestral musicians favor horn speakers driven by tube electronics to achieve this). Or to use a jazz example, I love being able to hear the subtle differences that Ella Fitzgerald has in the same song sung at different venues on different recordings from the same label/producer. These are captured very well on those old Verve and Pablo recordings, and greatly adds to the pleasure of listening to the recreation of that particular performance (by the way Bryon, perhaps this helps explain why musicians consider recordings as performances than what I have said before). For me, these are much more important traits for a system than "neutrality," though I don't propose to start that discussion all over again. I am merely trying to explain why musicians place such a high priority on soundstaging and imaging. They are crucial to creating a "you are there" experience. |
Cbw I have reread your posts in an effort to construct an argument that expresses your objection. Here is my best guess
(Cbw-1) Increasing some colorations, like brightness, increases the audibility of ambient cues in the recording. (Cbw-2) Increasing the audibility of ambient cues in the recording enhances the illusion that you are there. (Cbw-3) Therefore, increasing some colorations enhances the illusion that you are there. (Cbw-4) Therefore, increasing neutrality does not always enhance the illusion that you are there. If this argument expresses your objection, then I think your conclusions are correct, but those conclusions don't constitute an objection to my views. While increasing neutrality may not ALWAYS enhance the illusion that "you are there, in my view, it USUALLY does. To see this, its first necessary to look at premise (Cbw-2)... RE: (Cbw-2). As I mentioned in a previous post, increasing the audibility of ambient cues from the recording does not NECESSARILY enhance the illusion that you are there. In other words, ambient cues BY THEMSELVES are not a sufficient condition for creating the illusion that you are there. There are other conditions necessary for creating the illusion that you are there. For example, a certain degree of transparency. In my view, colorations that grossly distort a recording in order to emphasize ambient cues probably wont increase the illusion that you are there, since those gross distortions are likely to diminish the illusion that you are there in other ways for example, by reducing transparency. You may be thinking, Instead of colorations that GROSSLY distort a recording, what about colorations that SLIGHTLY distort a recording? In other words, could a small amount of coloration, just enough to emphasize ambient cues, but not enough to significantly reduce transparency, enhance the illusion that you are there. I believe the answer to this is: Possibly. This is where, I agree, things become subjective. Whether a small increase in ambient cues at the expense of a small decrease in transparency has the net result of enhancing or diminishing the illusion that you are there is probably a judgment that varies from listener to listener. But none of this casts doubt on my view that, USUALLY, reducing colorations enhances the illusion that "you are there." The reason is because reducing colorations tends to increase RESOLUTION. Which brings me to... Regarding the issue of my information theoretic approach to resolution, my view is that resolution can be understood as information about the music. If you combine this with my suggestion that increasing resolution increases ambient cues, then you get: Increasing information about the music increases ambient cues, which is something I think is self-evident. But none of this entails that more information, BY ITSELF, is a sufficient condition for enhancing the illusion that you are there. As Ive stated in previous posts, creating the illusion that you are there is not reducible to ambient cues. I would now add: It is not reducible to resolution. And it is not reducible to information. Hence, when you say, regarding my definition of resolution in terms of information
you would get vastly more information by dumping the low frequencies entirely in favor of enhancing the highs -- you'd maximize the information about the music, but the result wouldn't be music. So I think some other definition is in order. It does not matter if dumping low frequencies would maximize the information about the music, (a point about which I am skeptical), because creating the illusion that you are there is not reducible to maximizing information, just as it is not reducible to resolution, or ambient cues. In my view, the resolution of (i.e. information about) ambient cues is the PRINCIPAL, but not the only, determinant of the illusion that "you are there." That is why I have spent so much time talking about ambient cues. Returning to the issue of equipment colorations
I acknowledge that SOME equipment colorations might enhance the illusion that you are there. This is a corollary to the point I made about listening rooms on 9/5, namely, that the illusion that you are there might be enhanced when the colorations of the listening room RESEMBLE the colorations of the recording space. But the problem with relying on room colorations to enhance the illusion that "you are there" is that, while the colorations of recording spaces are infinitely variable, the colorations of listening rooms are largely constant. So even if the colorations of the listening room enhance the colorations of some recordings, they are likely to detract, confuse, or obscure the colorations of other recordings. A similar problem arises for the use of EQUIPMENT colorations to enhance the illusion that "you are there." While the colorations of recording spaces are infinitely variable, the colorations of any given component are largely constant. So even if the colorations of a component enhance the colorations of some recordings, they are likely to detract, confuse, or obscure the colorations of other recordings. I believe this limits the effectiveness of using colorations, whether in equipment or in listening rooms, to enhance the illusion that you are there. Another drawback, equally significant, to the use of colorations to enhance the illusion that you are there is that colorations tend to diminish resolution, and less resolution means less audible ambient cues from the recording itself. In light of all this, I believe that the practical approach for the audiophile who listens to a wide range of music is to (1) minimize colorations both in the equipment and in the listening room; and (2) increase information about the music, to the extend that is possible. In other words, enhancing the illusion that "you are there" is, with a few possible exceptions, most practically achieved by increasing neutrality and increasing resolution. |
I say that because of the different time scales that are involved. Given that sound propagates through air at roughly one foot per millisecond, the arrival times at the listener's ears of wavefronts that are launched from non-aligned speaker drivers would most likely differ by less than a millisecond. While reflected sound in a hall typically arrives at the microphones many milliseconds after the direct sound. Good point, Al. |
I wonder whether, as a generalization, speaker designs that emphasize time-alignment are better at presenting ambient cues, all other things being equal. Do you think so? I'm not certain, but my suspicion is "no." I would guess that lack of time alignment would not obscure ambient cues, it would just change their sonic character, in a manner comparable to its effects on the sonic character of the initial note. I say that because of the different time scales that are involved. Given that sound propagates through air at roughly one foot per millisecond, the arrival times at the listener's ears of wavefronts that are launched from non-aligned speaker drivers would most likely differ by less than a millisecond. While reflected sound in a hall typically arrives at the microphones many milliseconds after the direct sound. Lack of time alignment would change the timing or phase relationships between the "fundamental frequency" of a note and its overtones/harmonics, thereby affecting its sonic character, but I believe that effect would apply similarly to both directly captured and reflected sound (although of course the frequency balance of the reflected sound may differ from that of the directly captured sound). It's interesting to note in these Wikipedia writeups on the Haas Effect and the Precedence Effect that our hearing mechanisms have thresholds demarcating different kinds of responses when similar sounds arrive at our ears with timing differences of approximately 1, 2, 5, 10, 30, 50, and 80 milliseconds. Best regards, -- Al |
Hi Learsfool. Your initial comments about the role of mixing are well taken. Onhwy61 brought up something similar when he pointed out that many recordings have no real ambient cues, but only "synthetic" ambient cues added during mixing. Al and I both posted some thoughts about that regrettable fact, which you may find relevant, when you get a chance to look.
Glad that you are joining the discussion. |
Hi Bryon - you have once again started a very interesting thread indeed, and while I have not yet been able to read all of it yet (which I will do as soon as I get a better chance), I do have one immediate comment on the recording aspect, something I don't think anyone has brought up yet.
The very biggest effect on the sound of the recording, even one where very few mikes were used, is the mixing, particularly in today's world of digital recording. Two different engineers (or the same one, for that matter!) can and will create a completely different sound from the exact same mike placement in the same hall from the same live session. I cannot emphasize this enough - most people, even audiophiles, have absolutely no idea how much the mixing has to do with the final sound, and how different it is from what the mikes are picking up. This is where the engineers love to get very creative, putting their own personal stamp on the recordings. There are times when this is a good thing, but unfortunately they are very few - most engineers nowadays create digital mixes that often sound nothing like the sound in the hall they recorded in. Sometimes the conductor will have a big input into the sound of the mix, sometimes not, and even if he/she does, there is still the limitation of the initial set-up in the first place, which usually the conductor doesn't get involved with, leaving it to the engineer. Which is almost never a good thing, IMO.
I am looking forward to reading the rest of this thread, looks like there are alot of interesting comments so far! |
You kind of make my point while simultaneously avoid addressing it. I must confess, I do not get your point. What is it? |
I do not think of resolution this way, and I dont think most audiophiles do either. The term resolution is used by audiophiles to describe both a characteristic of an individual COMPONENT and a characteristic of a whole SYSTEM. Hence the term resolution says something about how a system sounds. I am not claiming ownership of the term resolution. I am expressing what I believe to be the prevailing use of the term among audiophiles. For the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate a definition of resolution: The absolute limit of information about the music that a format, component, or system can present. You kind of make my point while simultaneously avoid addressing it. If resolution is determined by audible metrics, then "perceived detail" is likely one of them. And ambience cues live in the detail. If you take an information theoretic approach to resolution -- as you seem to imply with your definition -- then I think you will be unhappy. The overwhelming majority of the information is in the high frequencies. Given the way human hearing works, you would get vastly more information by dumping the low frequencies entirely in favor of enhancing the highs -- you'd maximize the information about the music, but the result wouldn't be music. So I think some other definition is in order. Which gets us back to my earlier point: the experience (you are there) is subjective. For some people a brighter system might provide it better than a more neutral system. And for those people, the realism obtained might outweigh the realism lost. |
Al wrote:
a very key factor seems to me to be what might be referred to as resolution in the time domain. I completely agree with this. Though I failed to mention it, the same thing occurred to me during my discussion with Cbw about FREQUENCY response, which I believe is less important than TRANSIENT response when it comes to the retrieval of ambient cues that create the illusion that you are there. A notable example would be a speaker having sloppy transient response, whose output tends not to stop as immediately as it should when a sharp transient concludes. Such a speaker will tend to obscure the reflected energy that had been picked up by the microphones some tens of milliseconds after the arrival of the directly captured sound. In light of this, I wonder whether, as a generalization, speaker designs that emphasize time-alignment are better at presenting ambient cues, all other things being equal. Do you think so?
perhaps the reason such a [large] room would enhance the "you are there" illusion for classical music is not because its large dimensions produce room reflections that begin to mimic those of the hall (which in turn is far larger still), but rather because its large dimensions REDUCE the amplitude of those reflections, as heard at the listening position, thereby reducing the degree to which room acoustics obscure our ability to hear the reflected energy that the mics had captured. This is an interesting thought. When considering the value of a large listening room, I was thinking of the fact that larger rooms tend to have longer reverberation times, and hence the ambient cues of the listening room might naturally augment the ambient cues of recordings with large recording spaces. But you are certainly right that the AMPLITUDE of reflected sound at the listening position is just as important as the DURATION of reflected sound (i.e. reverberation time) in the listening room. Hence there seem to be two competing strategies for the presentation of a recording's ambient cues: (i) The use of ambient cues of the listening room to augment the ambient cues of the recording. (ii) The minimization of ambient cues of the listening room so as to reveal the ambient cues of the recording. Since (i) will be helpful only for those who listen to recordings with similar recording spaces, (ii) is probably the more practical approach for most audiophiles. Onhwy61 wrote: IMO the original question is another example of overstating the importance of soundstage/imaging in high end audio. If you look again at the OP, you will see that I didnt say anything about the importance of creating the illusion that you are there relative to any other audiophile goal. In fact, in my subsequent posts, I havent even expressed a preference for the experience that you are there over the experience that they are here. The reason is because I enjoy both, depending upon the type of music, the quality of the recording, and the characteristics of an audio system, especially the listening room. In addition, my comments have not been about soundstage and imaging. They have been about AMBIENT CUES, with respect to recordings, listening rooms, and equipment. The discussion of ambient cues is not equivalent to the discussion of soundstage/imaging, since the former is a considerably broader topic than the latter. For example, ambient cues on recordings can be heard through headphones, where soundstage and imaging are a non-factors. As a practical matter very few recordings actually have real ambient cues. This is true even in classical recordings. The current trend in studio recordings is to completely suppress the acoustics of the recording site and to synthetically create an ambiance at a later stage in the recording chain. Literally there's no real there to be transported to. I am aware of this regrettable fact. Current recording trends being what they are, many (perhaps most) recordings do not contain ambient cues of REAL recording spaces. They do, however, contain ambient cues of VIRTUAL recording spaces, added during mixing. You may feel that a virtual recording space is not one worth visiting, and hence the effort to create the illusion that you are there for such recordings is a waste of time. I have some sympathy for that point of view. But I do think that some virtual recording spaces are worth visiting. Think: Pink Floyd. I also agree with Al that recordings that contain ambient cues of real recording spaces are out there to be found, though it takes some looking. Cbw wrote: If you define resolution in purely technical terms, then you could increase the resolution of your source, and thereby your system, but that could have no audible result (because, for example, the signal-to-noise ratio of your overall system may be the limiting factor). So "resolution" then says something about your gear, but nothing about your sound, and is therefore disconnected from realism, ambience cues, and the "you are there" experience. I do not think of resolution this way, and I dont think most audiophiles do either. The term resolution is used by audiophiles to describe both a characteristic of an individual COMPONENT and a characteristic of a whole SYSTEM. Hence the term resolution says something about how a system sounds. I am not claiming ownership of the term resolution. I am expressing what I believe to be the prevailing use of the term among audiophiles. For the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate a definition of resolution: The absolute limit of information about the music that a format, component, or system can present. |
Bryon says: But I wonder whether those colorations would contribute to the illusion that you are there. My suspicion is that the answer is often 'no.' That is to say, colorations that enhance ambient cues might nevertheless fail to contribute to the illusion that you are there because they might also make the music sound less real. I, for one, have a hard time experiencing a bright system as one in which I am there. I considered this when I posted, but I think it is probably very listener-dependent. I have a preference for tonal balance even if it comes at the expense of some detail. But others have a preference for detail. This explains the existence of equipment that makes me want to run screaming from the showroom (and, I suppose on the flip side, equipment that makes the detail-lovers want to fall asleep). For the detail-lover, the increase in detail may add to the realism and the "you are there" experience, despite what you or I might think is an unnaturally colored system. But, of course, I'm talking about two points in what is almost certainly a continuum of listeners, and everyone likely has their own idea where realism starts and ends, and how they weight the various tradeoffs in putting together a system. Increasing resolution is not the same thing as increasing perceived detail, since the latter may be increased, as you pointed out, by changing a systems frequency response (i.e. making the system brighter). Increasing resolution is a matter of increasing either (1) format resolution, or (2) equipment resolution. I guess that depends on how precisely you define your terms and how you measure the results. If you define resolution in purely technical terms, then you could increase the resolution of your source, and thereby your system, but that could have no audible result (because, for example, the signal-to-noise ratio of your overall system may be the limiting factor). So "resolution" then says something about your gear, but nothing about your sound, and is therefore disconnected from realism, ambience cues, and the "you are there" experience. But if you appeal to audible results, then "perceived detail" is one potential measure of resolution, and therefore may contribute to realism, etc. |
Al, I agree with you about the purist recordings, but then we're talking about what amounts to probably less than .1% of recording output.
Your point about the sound aura. There are venues and types of music where the acoustics of the venue are part and parcel of the performance. I'm thinking choral or organ works in cathedral type settings. In a more typical concert hall I too hear that cushion of air that accompanies the music, but I don't think of that sound as integral to the musical performance. As audiophiles we focus so much on the sound of things even when some of those sounds are purely extraneous to the music. |
As a practical matter very few recordings actually have real ambient cues. This is true even in classical recordings. That's probably true for many or most releases by the larger classical labels, whose recordings are generally heavily multi-mic'd and heavily processed. However in my experience it is usually not true in the case of smaller labels that are either audiophile-oriented or are otherwise high quality. See my post in this thread for a list of some of these labels. As a system's resolution increases you'll hear more soundstage information, but in and of itself that information isn't really important to the enjoyment of listening to music. FWIW, my own experience suggests otherwise. Whenever I attend a classical concert in a good hall, I am IMMEDIATELY struck by the ambient "aura" that surrounds each note, for many if not all instruments. (Perhaps "aura" isn't the best word to use, but it seems to capture what I'm trying to relate). And its absence on many recordings, or inaccuracies in its reproduction, are major factors that distinguish live music from reproduced music, in my experience. Best regards, -- Al |
This is a good, intelligent discussion.
IMO the original question is another example of overstating the importance of soundstage/imaging in high end audio. As a system's resolution increases you'll hear more soundstage information, but in and of itself that information isn't really important to the enjoyment of listening to music. As an example, hearing Harry Belafonte's voice bounce off the different surfaces at Carnegie Hall is at most interesting. It's a good test of the lower level resolution of a system. But what does it have to do with Belafonte's performance?
As a practical matter very few recordings actually have real ambient cues. This is true even in classical recordings. The current trend in studio recordings is to completely suppress the acoustics of the recording site and to synthetically create an ambiance at a later stage in the recording chain. Literally there's no real there to be transported to.
With my rant out of the way, "you are there" is a my preference and I consider it more accurate. |
