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


Is the seated-centered solo listening to music a dated tech? Is the design of modern loudspeakers that facilitates stereo wrong? Are we surfing a compromised tech please recall early 3 channel was superior they used stereo because it was a compromise? I have worked with a research group that used MRIs and sound to light up areas of catatonic people’s brains the research showed that higher quality playback lit up more areas but that stereo caused the brain to work harder is this a source of listening fatigue? After all, we are processing 2 unnatural sources that trick the mind into perceiving a sound field wouldn’t it be better to just have a sound field that actually existed? Stereo is a unnatrual way to listen to music its something that sound doesn’t do. Real music floods a space in all directions stereo design requires beaming and narrow dispersion to form an image is this just wrong? Mono had benefits over stereo modern loudspeaker design can make one speaker with a 360d radiation pattern that can form a soundstage for listeners almost anywhere in a room yet we still sit mostly alone seated dead center not wanting to move much because the image collapses just all seems wrong to me today. The more I experiment with non-traditional sound reproduction the more right it feels to me and those hearing it. Music should exist in a real space not a narrow sliver of it.

128x128johnk

OP,

 

Yes, sorry… I completely misread your initial comments. My bad. I can tell you from my point of view that mono does not hold my interest…. for a second. I have a number of well recorded mono albums… I generally cannot get through two cuts. Admittedly I am using two speakers. 
 

On the other hand I know more than one person who are completely fine with it. I have no grand sweeping conclusions, other than stereo is absolutely essential for my enjoyment and three too many.

If I correctly understand what you're saying, JohnK, then, yeah.  I can easily imagine systems in the future comprised of 30 or 40 or more "sound generating devices" spread around the periphery of a space, maybe wall and/or ceiling mounted.  They'll be of some future technology that energizes the air to create the compression/rarefaction that is sound without the need for a moving mass driver.  The amplification electronics will precisely measure and deliver to each device the exact amount of energy and frequency to create real performance presence.  I'm not being glib as I don't doubt we'll get there and when we do people will look back at our chunky speakers with their moving diaphragms and dumb amps and pity us and wonder why we'd even try to reproduce music that way.  But we're not there yet.  Your point, though, is well taken.  Realistically there's no way two or three or 5 sources of sound can precisely and accurately pull it off.  But accurate and engaging are not necessarily the same thing so at least we can go for musically engaging while we wait for the future to arrive.  (of course tomorrow never comes, but we all know that)

Absolutely not and never will be. If you want home theater multi channel / surround / atmos - those are "effects" IMHO and are based off of the stereo foundation.

Those have there place for home theater and if that’s what one likes, cool. It’s all subjective of course.

Again, those are effects and are way more "unnatural" IMHO to listen to music. I don’t care for it. A superbly setup 2chnl creates some of those multichannel "effects" naturally and is the standard.

For 2chnl, when you get right down to it, there can only be one single main listening position - the sweet spot - its physics. That sweet spot (larger - smaller) is system/setup/room/acoustic dependent.

You can identify a number of sounds/loudspeakers greater than your number of ears. If you go to a choir, for example, you can hear many voices singing and also hear the lady talking to her husband sitting behind you. You can also hear a single voice or a single speaker using both ears, unless you are deaf in one ear.