I don't see how your question is related your quote of what I said
I think that in a normal room "low freq localisation cues" such as ongoing (phase) ITD can never dominate because such cues are not useful in reverberant spaces, they are working only outdoors or under special anechoic test conditions
therefore I believe it really makes no difference whether a stereo system is "able to reproduce signals below about 1kHz without too much of room influence" - at least from this pespective
It depends, if cross talk cancellation is allowed then there is higher chances
Ever tried this?
Attachments
Except, I would replace "speaker and recording" with "playback system and recording". There is no such thing as "just a speaker", it is merely the last step, the final link in a reproduction chain.
I note in the comments since, not a single person has addressed quality: imagine talking about testing the visual system on images, and completely ignoring brightness, contrast, frame rate, resolution, colour saturation, colour accuracy and the other dozens and dozens of attributes that are used to very precisely describe the "quality" of the test material ...
Frank
I find this sort of comment amazing ... I would have gotten out this game decades ago if that that was the best that could ever be achieved ...
That "image snapping into place" is the real deal, everything else is kindergarten stuff - once you've tasted the best cognac you understand why people go to the trouble of making the stuff, and even if you're condemned for the rest of your life to drinking cheap brandy it won't change your understanding of what the real goal is, and what's possible ...
Frank
In video, all of these have very definable standards based on ITU Rec. 709. If a television can be nudged into compliance of this standards, it is considered accurate. But let's be real, those of us who have done video calibrations know folks like a set that is really out of ITU Rec.709 compliance. Too dark, colors too faded, and I cannot see anything with the lights on are pretty typical comments, even though SMPTE recommends viewing in a dark room.
Music playback has no standard, and quality is determined subjectively by the listener.
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That is certainly true for a flooder type of a loudspeaker, not so for high directivity speaker.
There is a good reason for that. Why standardize something that does not work very well, like stereo triangle.
You had me worried for a minute. I though the first paragraph was a description of how you listen.
As you then say, doing so is pointless has has nothing to do with listening to and capturing the emotion of the music. When I listen to classical music I sit back in my chair, close my eyes, and hope to achieve a state of semi-consciousness only to be jarred back to reality by the end of the performance.
When I listen to jazz you will find me nodding my head and tapping my foot.
When I listen to rock you would see a crazy, glazed eye, 66 year old dude jumping around playing air guitar.
It still works reasonably well, or it seems to for most. For that matter so does mono.
Heck, most people enjoy the sound in their car - despite a stereo presentation where you are listening right next to the left channel (US driver side) in an utterly resonant condition filled with competing diffraction cues.
I sometimes marvel at the claims of "room contribution", the horror of it all. Then I think about what's going on in the car.
This is a sad state of affairs: no standards, people accepting mediocrity, a very poorly defined language for conveying attributes of the perceived sound, an extremely basic and limited methodology for testing "quality" ... what a mess!!
Big trouble is, there's no money in it, for the big boys - or they can't see how to make a motza out of it - so it's all just enthusiastic amateurs who end up wasting lots of energy in spirals of arguments with their bretheren, going nowhere fast. You just shake your head at times ...
Frank
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I am sure it works if that is all you have. There are folks out there just like myself who don't think stereo works, and have migrated away from it.
it is true for any normal listening room
any loudspeaker of a no matter how high directivity simply cannot transform a room into an effectively anechoic space
it is rather the listening room that would have to be made extremely dead for low freq ITD cues to work
stereo can work but not with conventional forward firing speakers in a conventional stereo triangle
What does a low freq ITD waveform look like? All directional cues come from transient events. How many of these occur devoid of higher frequency components?
What is angular resolution of two voices singing the same part? How close do you need to be for voices to come from two directions when singers are side by side?
Is localization of sub woofer do to low freq cues or do to high distortion typical of subs both in time domain and in frequency domain?
What is angular resolution of two voices singing the same part? How close do you need to be for voices to come from two directions when singers are side by side?
Is localization of sub woofer do to low freq cues or do to high distortion typical of subs both in time domain and in frequency domain?
There are also low frequency transient events. Just because the room acts as a filter that distorts the low frequency wave front coming from two speakers doesn't mean the distortion is ignored by our hearing. In such a situation our hearing receives lower frequency localization cues that are inconsistent with higher frequency cues.
Such a situation is normal for natural sounds within a room but it needs to be eliminated in sound reproduction.
Such a situation is normal for natural sounds within a room but it needs to be eliminated in sound reproduction.
That is simply, and completely - wrong.
You should not continue to repeat it, it's so totally wrong.I don't know if you caught my reference to IRCAM earlier in the thread, but that's where I learned multi-track. I've often worked with 24 track playback into 24 or more speakers, or 4 channel source into 40 speakers, and over at GRM (Radio France) up to 200 channels. So you might say I like multi-track.
However, with a good setup, stereo can do amazing things. In some ways even more amazing than multi-track. I know, I've heard it done many times. It can be tough to do in small rooms, but that's a room limitation, not a stereo limitation. Anyone who says it doesn't work, just hasn't heard it done well, period. Classic stereo is capable of amazing realism. And that's a good thing, as so many millions of recordings were published in 2 track.