Wanna take it to the next level? Buy MORE speakers!

Just get a wall of Braun L46 Speakers

This is about the technology of how a soundfield should be and how things appear in it. It cannot be done with 2 speakers even if you employ some gimmick like Bacch.

Watch this interview by prog rocker Steven Wilson educating Darko.

Steven Wilson - Darko Interview

After that, you hit a show like MWave in Kansas City one year. Listen to a multichannel rig (more than 2 speakers) set up by Perlisten, Grimani, etc. Then, you go and sit in Axpona and listen to all the pairs of 2 speakers blaring away disappointingly.

Thereafter, you may truly conclude that you need more than 2 speakers.

No, you have a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COW BELL!

That Dickinson was a bit lackluster and the ’don’t fear the peeper’ is a bit overplayed.

But, here’s something from the real Dickinson that will not just take care of the fever, but also cause a revelation within ya.

Dickinson - Revelations

If you’ve ever heard music played through a surround sound system and think that it sounds realistic or even pleasant, then by all means go ahead and add more speakers to your system.

@aewarren , Could it have been that you heard some awful multichannel setup, wrong codec, etc on some cheap barrel bottom receiver (stereo equivalent of a 10 dollar bluetooth boombox)?

Here’s an excerpt from a guy who sells high end purist stereo equipment that many guys around here own. I mean, it is this guy’s livelihood, but, at the least he’s being honest about what multichannel audio sounds like.

"and you just close your eyes and you’ve never heard a soundstage like this. I don’t particularly like listening to it because when i go back to my li’l stereo system or my big 2 channel stereo system, I am let down. Yes, there is a soundstage, the speakers disappear, all that magic happens, but, man...you hear that in a good surround system and it will blow your hair back, it’s spectacular"

Paul McGowan - Stereo Soundstage Vs Surround

The guys who have such rigs, listen to it on a daily basis aren’t lying when they say they are let down by whatever high end stereo sounds like (after listening in multichannel for a bit)......There are several high end audio manufacturers who sell purist stereo audiophile equipment, but, actually do their personal listening in multichannel audio for their own personal listening pleasure.

(Yeah, it costs more...because of course, more speakers and pertinent gear costs more! Bigger room costs more to treat, a bigger house costs more, etc... But, that’s the inherent cost of the next level experience, i.e., when you turn it up a notch).

the Next Level....is....optimizing the media. and if your preferred music was originally mastered to 2 channel, then that is going to be the most truthful way to hear it. the very finest, most developed 2 channel system will take you furthest.

unless your fundamental source recording is multi-channel......surround sound is changing the target. instead of wanting the musical essence of the original performance, your goal is some sort of derivative.

so what music is most important to you? how was it recorded?

turns out Next level, is getting the music right, not bastardizing it. adding more speakers is more for effect, not connection.

i have a separate Trinnov 9.3.6 surround sound Home Theater system. music through it does sound good, and fun, and.......funky. but it’s not in the realm of my 2 channel for true connection. it’s something.......different. YMMV.

@mikelavigne Since you make a reference to the "essence" of the musical performance, visit some grand acoustic space nearby where you live and check out an orchestra, wind ensemble, etc.

For example, there is one near where i live.... Yes of course, the orchestra’s performing in front of me, but, there’s sound coming from behind me, in front of me, above me, to either side, etc...it’s a dome...makes ya wonder how the essence of it can be like that because it doesn’t sound much like stereo at all.

If we are talking about some li’l basement bar with a 7 ft ceiling and some guy screaming into a 100 dollar PA system, that’s a different experience (anything works there, i suppose). I would suggest that you experience a big hall, sit on the money seat and determine how you would recreate an experience closer to it at home. I also understand that you’re an analog enthusiast with high end turntables, etc. So, maybe it wouldn’t work for you because this is part and parcel of the digital domain.

A mere two speakers has inherent issues and limitations. But so far, to my ears, it’s hard to get multi-channel to sound as good on music. I’ve tried up-mixing 2 channel recordings to a 3 channel with derived center using various methods because I always hear a tonal issue with the phantom center caused by interaural crosstalk. But my best efforts have introduced issues of their own.

@asctim  A lot of this can be attributed to a void of information about how the codecs themselves function... effects, ambience, what gets pulled up to the height layer, what's retained in the bed layer, etc, etc. On @mikelavigne  's quote below about the funky sound, his Trinnov with that 9.3.6 might sound great for movies/games, but, i have a feeling that it got a bit too complex for music.  Perhaps, I would have used the word "funky" as well when i had a rig that got too complex. It would be quite hard to get the room/placement etc right to accommodate that high a speaker count and keep the quality of the speakers high.

i have a separate Trinnov 9.3.6 surround sound Home Theater system. music through it does sound good, and fun, and.......funky. but it's not in the realm of my 2 channel for true connection. it's something.......different. YMMV.

At some point, i had some discussions with one of Sony's guys behind their 360 reality technology. For music, you may want to keep the speaker count a li'l lower.

Ideally, for music, you take a compass and draw a circle, your speakers should be equidistant sitting on the perimeter of that circle. Even a center channel may not be necessary (could cause more problems than not for music in a single sweet spot). You may need a couple of heights (equidistant, maintaining the radius upwards) or may not need them, depending on the quality of the bed layer speakers. In most cases, a speaker count higher than a 5.2.2 may not work too well, start to act a li'l "funky". If the heights get a li'l too close, it may start to fall apart again...In other words, you may need to turn some speakers off and have a calibration saved separately for movies and music.

The idea is to blend it together so no speaker stands out or is even remotely localizable in a seamless soundfield. Depending on the codec and processor you're using, they may come with different features to tweak it just right.

Here's an example.

I have had artists over, played their own tracks for them on both stereo and my multichannel rig. I have asked the question over and over..."How would you want your track/album to sound?" Not a single one of them has picked stereo yet after he heard it upmixed into multichannel...Artist intent, it is then!!

This issue with a more solid "meat on the bones" sound, and a sense that everything is dead solid perfect with golden age analog is fascinating to me because it's hard to know for sure why this is. We can look at the signal that was originally coming off the mic, and then see what happens by the time it's been laid down on vinyl, and it has been changed a lot. I read somebody talking about listening to test tones on vinyl. Simple, single sine wave test tones. They reported that the same tone on vinyl sounded nicer than when played through digital. How can that be when it's just a single tone sinewave? Can the digital really be messing that up, somehow making it sound thin and lacking? Looking on a scope revealed very significant amount of harmonic distortion and noise on the sinewave coming off the vinyl. It had been considerably embellished, and sounded nicer as a result. I think this is perhaps a happy accident. Sound coming from just two sources in a room when it's supposed to present an entire sound field is inherently lacking, and may perceptually benefit from some kinds of enrichment. There's also interesting cases where some noise can actually help us hear, or see better, allowing our minds to fill in what's missing. 

I've been looking for an example of this I found once that showed text that was very hard to read until random noise was added. I've run in to problems with a lack of noise on images that I stacked in an attempt to get rid of all noise in the shadows. The result is obvious banding in the shadows if you look closely. That's a digital issue but it'd probably be an analog issue to if it was possible to get the noise super low on an analog print that didn't have fine enough film grain. Film just doesn't work that way so it's not possible.  Analog has very fine resolution, but it's not all filled with real signal off the microphone because that gets smeared away beyond a certain resolution, which is usually lower than what digital can do. But the noise and distortion is being created in real time during playback, with the noise at a much higher resolution both in terms of timing and level. In the golden age they were only listening to that kind of playback, and so everything was optimized with those effects in play.

I read a long article about high resolution sound, and the guy in charge of re-mastering was saying that no analog is, by the definitions they had come up with,  capable of high resolution. Yet they convert master tapes to something crazy like 192 kHz 32 bit, and it's mostly  just recording a bunch of noise from the tape head at high resolution. But maybe that's the point!

Just thinking here, not making any claims with absolute certainty.

Mark "Disruptor" Levinson fixed all of this for ya. The official studio master for anything that got released in the past 20 30 years is a hires digital file. There's no tape anywhere...You convert that file with Daniel Hertz's Master Class software and you will get what you tend to perceive with analog mastertape (if that's what you desire). After that, might you need to think about CD, Vinyl, etc? You don't really...

Ok, if you have a sentimental SACD collection , maybe you'd like to keep a SACD player around... 

The stupid premise of the original post should be enough to suck it into that black hole of darkness.....

Play this reference audiophile track on your stereo and feel the expansiveness of soundstage, speakers disappearing, etc. I get the feeling that she may have written this song just for you (to be in your feelings n all, as you usually are). How special...

Nicki Minaj - Reference Track

@deep_333  To me the phrase "awful multichannel setup" is redundant. Yes, I suppose a music surround system can be initially impressive, especially to the novice listener, but does anyone really want to be subjected to musical inaccuracy in the long term?

@aewarren I suppose all those guys who work at Sony, Yamaha, Sound United, Rotel, Dolby, Trinnov, Storm, etc must be novice listeners then...Who knows? You should perhaps teach them a thing or two about musical accuracy and how to not be a novice listener.

Driver quality is far and away the biggest contributor to speaker performance, followed by cabinet construction. Crossover component quality is third at most, presuming the crossover circuit is otherwise competently designed. 

I get why some enjoy experimenting with crossover components but they are not the weak link in the majority of speakers. Most often the drivers are what are mediocre. 

+1 @helomech 

I have experimented with a stash of crossover components from GR research. 400 to 600 dollars at most (or say under a 1000 dollars)  in crossover component upgrades gets the fidelity close to max (ime) and diminishing returns hit like a wall thereafter, as you go up in price. But, a crappy driver from a manufacturer is a crappy driver and there's no fixing that...

Manufacturers have cheaped out on crossover components so badly that the illusion of crossover component quality being the main culprit exists.

2 channel and surround are different

They are not different. The ultimate hope of a 2 channel rig (as you spend more and more and more) is that it hopes to provide the soundfield, spatial nuance and detail characteristic of a correctly setup multichannel rig.

For instance, as you spend more and more on a purist dac, there is code hidden away in fpga with the hope of creating the above mentioned, restricted by the challenges of achieving so with 2 speakers.

You will hear all kinds of detail in a multichannel rig (that you simply never heard in a 2 channel rig) by virtue of how some multichannel codecs uunpack your favorite stereo recordings....there are multiple speaekers assisting with this. Try an upmixer that comes with a multichannel processor that’s worth its salt and the right amount of correctly setup speakers. It should become obvious.

When 2 channel guys are in hot pursuit of cost no object "3D", etc, it continues to be a bit laughable for the same reason....Spending more and more up the wrong tree will continue to provide a gimped outcome. I could put up my multichannel rig (i didn’t even spend that much on it) against ANY cost no object stereo rig and it will run circles aound the latter. It would probably lose, however, to some guy’s ultra high-end multichannel rig, i suppose...but, some guy’s 2 channel? nah, it ain’t losing...

Some of you guys are not really strapped for cash.....try something different than what you’re used to, research the newer technologies and tweak it out...

@deep_333 

Why don’t you spend a minute or two describing to us “two channel guys” your awesome multi-channel rig. Obviously you have achieved this nirvana you describe.

Everything should be listed on my profile...Like i said, i didn't even spend that much on my multichannel rig. A lot of it is relatively affordable/high value stuff bought on closeout, nitpicked over time, etc (probably spent a whole lot more on stereo). I'm sure someone around here with deeper pockets could beat it out if he did explore that route.

I’ve listened to pretty much every configuration (5.1 through 13.4.4) and while it provides a cool effect it doesn’t move me in the way that even a mediocre two channel system does. Movies? Sure - give me that immersive feeling with planes flying overhead, the sound of bullets ricocheting through the side, rear, and atmos speakers - it makes sense for this kind of foley info to come from all sides. For music however it just sounds gimmicky and fake. I’m speaking for me of course and shouldn’t influence even a single member of this forum. I also don’t have much interest in others telling me what I should and shouldn’t enjoy. Like ketchup on hot dogs or black licorice. Someone making a face and pretending to be disgusted doesn’t impact my enjoyment one whit. Plenty of people here describe the process of procuring, cleaning, and listening to a record (including having to get up to flip it after 22 or so minutes) to be a horrible, exhausting experience. I can’t get enough of it, and the joy of hearing music come from a spot where a speaker isn’t still seems magical to me. There is an evolutionary reason our ears are shaped the way they are and two channel setups are optimized to take advantage of that physiology.

You probably heard some rig set up for movies by a "HT enthusiast"? If so, that’s never a good example. Such rigs are typically set up to get everything exaggerated/make adrenalin pour like the niagara (i.e., wanting that helicopter sound to pan from top front to top back, effects everywhere, panning sounds around a grid, etc). Some of these HT guys are in the habit of setting up six 18inch subs in a small-ish room and tearing up the drywall (Hint: avsforum). Everything would indeed sound gimmicky, awful and fake for music. A lot of parameters change though when you have to set it up for music.

For instance, many guys have figured out by now that you need to put subwoofers, in specific spots in a room? i.e., the optimal location for a low bass transducer is not where your speaker is? The room decides it, physics, acoustics, etc come in play, etc? It wasn’t so back in the days...

Similarly, a certain fulfillment of soundfield requirements can’t be met by setting just 2 speakers up front.. It requires additional speakers in other optimal areas of the room. It’s just the science/technology behind how it works out in a room.

@deep_333

First you say “it’s the same” then later admitted “it can be better - if spend more”.

And your title “Wanna take it to the next level? Buy MORE speakers” implies improvement for surround speakers vs 2 channel.

Surround “envelopement” and “fidelity” are two different objectives- one is NOT objectively (factually) better, but you may have personal preferences favoring one

@kennyc

Stereo and multichannel have the same sonic goals, in essence, w.r.t how a soundfield, spatial cues and detail are offered to a listener in a room... except stereo gets there half baked, multichannel optimized for music gets a whole lot further. It is not really a preference thing.

You see these manufacturers trying different tricks... putting additional tweeters behind their cost no object speakers, etc? (except speaker shall only be a measly 100k now)...Or that fpga code magic in some 70k dac to unlayer, unfold, create spatial cues, better detail, etc better than ever? Why do you think that is? If the number of speakers remains restricted to 2, well, it is only able to get so far. Even a mediocre horse could pull a carriage further than a super cadillac dog...

I said my multichannel rig can run circles around my own stereo rig (which costs magnitudes more) and beats out any cost no object stereo rig i’ve ever heard. In other words, i didn’t even spend that much on my multichannel rig and it is able to do so. Could it get beat by some guy’s cost no object multichannel rig? Maybe, it could.. I did hear a very expensive multichannel rig set up by Anthony Grimani/Grimani systems once in a huge room that blew everybody’s socks off. Maybe...his multichannel setup did a li’l better than my multichannel setup in that large room....But, the case remains that i’ve always been let down by all kinds of cost no object stereo rigs i’ve heard.

For example, let us suppose that a guy already has a pair of Mofi sourcpoint 8s or Borresen X1’s and 2 subs...These are high value, but, not very expensive speakers. All he would need is three more sourcepoint 8s or three more Borresen X1s, 3 additional channels of amplification and a processor worth its salt. I would prophesize that such an exploration could provide a much better outcome at a lower cost..... than the guy ditching his Borresen X1s altogether and buying a pair of Borresen M1s for a 100k instead (i.e., sticking with some stereo only upgradititis).

@deep_333 --

Interesting topic. Never heard a well set-up multi channel system to convince me of its sonic/musical merits (which is also saying, implicitly, that I’ve heard a range of bland ones), not to say there aren’t good ones out there.

@phusis Many of these HT guys set up their gear optimizing for multiple sweet spots (including the mother-in-law seat), a.k.a. every sweet spot got compromised...not to mention some chair with a huge backrest covering the guy’s entire head! These are very straightforward observations one can make. There’s also a trend there which goes, "I paid for all these extra speakers, so i better hear them discreetly". The seamless soundfield went downhill that day and every speaker screeched on its own. It’s a bit too much of the quantity over quality with those guys, etc, etc. Hence, running into a setup that sounds good for music can be rare with that crew (Many of these guys are not audiophiles to begin with).

A typical scenario implies that I would listen to a multi-channel system quite different from my own with regard to the specific components used (not least the speakers), with the more interesting and relevant experiment being the one that was made around a component-similar expansion of my existing setup and seeing how that would turn out.

You would indeed fine tune the existing stereo setup for music before you added anything to it for multichannel.

What’s the worst thing that could happen? Maybe, you ended up with a killer rig for all the movies, tv, games, etc (but got a bit lackluster for music) and dropped it back to 2 channel for music, i.e. a 2 channel/multi-channel hybrid system.

What’s the best thing that could happen? Maybe, the multichannel add on did indeed blow the socks off your 2 channel and you stuck with it for all your content (music, movies, etc),

Even the best passive crossover components can’t escape the fact that they’re impeding with the amp to driver interface, potentially much more so the more complex they are, and it also means only taking partial advantage of your amp’s performance envelope instead of having it looking into a purer load actively.

What some may feel is gained from a "purist," analogue approach with quality component passive crossovers to others is missing the bigger picture in not taking into account its negative effect with regard to amp to driver interfacing. The quality of a DSP acting as a digital crossover actively is not irrelevant, but from my chair its overall sonic impact is of a significantly more "benign" nature as a line level, prior-to-amplification measure compared to a passive configuration on the output side of the amp, which affects both amp and driver performance more severely.

I tried the active route with a GR speaker kit and minidsp’s stuff. It is easier with a diy kit, you simply set the passive crosssover aside and interface with the minidsp kit. I didn’t get the best sound there and i almost felt like the minidsp unit was borderline faulty.

Storm Audio (not cheap) lets one go active with any number of speakers on their multichannel processors. When i did have that processor, i wasn’t thinking about the active route too much, i.e., was already invested in passive configurations and ended up selling it.

@deep_333

Sorry to hear of your 2 channel struggles- you want a complete system with high sonics but are severely limited my your budget.

High End Audio is an expensive hobby because to bring sonics significantly above box store offerings, custom/expensive parts (Mundolf, Vishay, transformers, etc) , material advancements, vibration mitigation, custom casework, plus a small niche market drives the cost of doing business way up. This is a hardware based hobby so the latest tech is going to be costly. Trying to accomplish high level sonics by using lower cost alternatives is nearly impossible- no short cuts, although we wish there were.

It’s good that you at least take a break from high-end audio as it was causing you much grief- hobbies are supposed to be enjoyable. Desktop audio might be a budget friendly option - there’s a significant market size. Or maybe you can build your budget through additional income to fund your hobby.

Anyway, glad you landed in a good place.

@kennyc Awww, Lol, .aren’t you the guy with a Salon2 and that blew your mind or something some time ago? Go ahead and raise the bar for everyone first, i.e. put the money where the mouth is. 4 million is what you need to spend to be a niche trendsetter perhaps (worthy of the enlightening speech you gave above). Work 6 jobs if it came down to it and show everyone what you’re made of.

Here, this is waiting for you...no shortcuts indeed.

$4,000,000 Horn System

After that, we could find out if i could beat the snot out of a ’no short-cuts’ rig with whatever i’ve got.

@kennyc  I have some combination of stereo gear that would be considered high end by this forum''s standards perhaps..I would deem it high performance more so than "high end" because "high end" could also mean trash that's just priced high some days.

I could create the presentation of the TAD Reference with my current lower TAD model and a couple of open baffle subs. With BACCH on the front end, it seems to be about as good as stereo gets. The TAD Reference (for as long as it has been around)  is still considered a benchmark for the high end-ish sound in some circles.

But, it all loses to multichannel ime...don't know what to tell ya (Hearing is believing). A redirection of the tweaking fuel/energy for some guys could get them there, perhaps.