Don't forget that the room you're in presents an acoustic (and visual!) context. There's no way around that. That context will influence your perception of the reproduced sound. How this exactly happens is still unknown and the reason why I had asked a more basic question about stereo perception under free field conditions. If that question can't be answered it doesn't make much sense to move on and make assumptions about how speakers or rooms should perform.
If you want to build a car but you know nothing about the environment it will be used in then it probably doesn't make much sense to ignore that fact and start choosing the tires.
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Really? Because you hold the truth? What you state is only true for very dry recordings, which sound awful anyway. As soon as there is some reverb, or spaciousness in the recording, the room is a carrier, not an offender, as long as we are not talking of bare walls and RT of a second or such. But hey, you must be one of these persons listening to "points" in space, not music..
Now your talking about the recording's content, not the speaker system's ability to reproduce it.
Your statements imply that room is active element.
Many "dry" recordings are not all that dry, but sound awful when listened to in overly reverberant listening rooms that swamp detail in the recording with the listening room's hall of mirrors static spaciousness. Reverberation in recordings becomes readily apparent when it exceeds the reverberation time of the listening space.
Points in space: Symphonic music, chamber music, jazz, big band, rock, pop, folk.......
you do realize though that this is NOT the ideal condition and that the best D/R is maybe not 0db? What you are talking about is the ITD gap, but you could have both..
dry recordings to me are bad because "dry" does not exist in nature.. In music's history this is a very recent, unfortunate development that should never have happened. We should remember this fact when we try to assess "what is best"...
Music is not point in space because instruments are not.. points! They do not radiate like that.. I listen mostly to music with real instruments, not synthetic sounds and mixes so I care about the conditions that makes that music come through first and I tolerate a slight loss for the other types, not the other way around..
I am a believer of SL's theories, that the sound shoud not come from the speakers only, and that is should be balanced with the natural reverberation of a balanced room (not a reverberation chamber!).
At the moment mine is 0.4 sec, with a decent ITD gap of 10ms. I am sure it could get much better, but there is no way I will make it an anechoic bat cave just because this is how control rooms are set to make artificial recording shine through!
And as you say, it just takes two listening spots, one close, one further to enjoy all styles. When I put some electro, I seat just a little over a meter from the speakers and reach full bliss.
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Using this as your definition eliminates the vast majority of recordings because they are using stereo as "the medium" and not as "a medium to convey a different space".
This was one of the major flaws in this threads subject experiment - that the goal was the recreation of a defined space. What if this was not what the producer had intended, but in fact it was the creation of an event within your space? Setting the above as the goal of stereo dooms it. Stereo is the medium and can be used however the producer and artists see fit. You cannot constrain it like you have done above.
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Correct but what other sensation than "there's reverberation in the recording" does that reverberation convey? Does it convey the perception of depth and space?
I fully agree. "Stereo" like we know it is for the most part the combination of miking techniques, effects, control rooms and speakers in those control rooms. It is a cultural phenomenon. The original is what the mixer/mastering engineer heard. So far so good - or bad (considering the lack of proper standards).
What I'm interested in by asking the question above is "what is the essence of stereo". If we would know for sure that real spaciousness can not be a property of 2-channel stereo, then a lot of circular discussions would simply go away.
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That's exactly the LEDE control room design approach as described in Newell, "Recording Studio Design"
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That's exactly the LEDE control room design approach as described in Newell, "Recording Studio Design"
but we are, LEDE believers! Just the other way around..and as long as we are not talking of unnatural RT's of 0.2 sec or such
lolo,
That is why I say that ultimately to recreate the sound that the engineer had in mind in the first place we would be using the live end dead end model with the speakers soffit mounted. By pushing the speakers out into the room we have changed the paradigm completely that was used to create the original source and then coming up with schemes to try and get back to that original sound field. No we do not live in recording studio engineering rooms and it would be very hard to duplicate most of that space, isolated rooms with both diffraction and absorption are hard to create in the home. With standard mono multi-microphone techniques and panned left to right recording recreating a real sound stage is not a real end result in the first place as that was never the original intention in most modern recordings. Recording of live musical ensembles requires very different recording techniques and microphone setup and it is really the outlier of the norm for most recordings. That is why many times I hear people say they prefer one type of speaker playback system for say rock and roll and a different system for chamber music. They are not very easy to correlate from one type to the other.
Let the disagreement begin, I am sure there will be much of that!
That is why I say that ultimately to recreate the sound that the engineer had in mind in the first place we would be using the live end dead end model with the speakers soffit mounted. By pushing the speakers out into the room we have changed the paradigm completely that was used to create the original source and then coming up with schemes to try and get back to that original sound field. No we do not live in recording studio engineering rooms and it would be very hard to duplicate most of that space, isolated rooms with both diffraction and absorption are hard to create in the home. With standard mono multi-microphone techniques and panned left to right recording recreating a real sound stage is not a real end result in the first place as that was never the original intention in most modern recordings. Recording of live musical ensembles requires very different recording techniques and microphone setup and it is really the outlier of the norm for most recordings. That is why many times I hear people say they prefer one type of speaker playback system for say rock and roll and a different system for chamber music. They are not very easy to correlate from one type to the other.
Let the disagreement begin, I am sure there will be much of that!
I would say that its the recording of the space that is the completely unnatural thing, the dry recording is the more realistic, handing it over to the room you are in, to add reverberation, as in reality. real world sounds do not contain the essence of the room in them already, the room imparts the essence of the room. the performance is unrelated to that and is different depending on where it is performed, instruments themselves do not speak of the reverberant space.
now of course recordings of performances in concert halls or other spaces are what we are used to and the acoustics of the concert hall may be more impressive than our homes and invoke a larger than life feeling; so we have traditionally strived to have a reasonably controlled room so that the recording of the space is more accurately conveyed, without a second space being incorporated into the mix, but to call this more natural is incorrect IMO.
now of course recordings of performances in concert halls or other spaces are what we are used to and the acoustics of the concert hall may be more impressive than our homes and invoke a larger than life feeling; so we have traditionally strived to have a reasonably controlled room so that the recording of the space is more accurately conveyed, without a second space being incorporated into the mix, but to call this more natural is incorrect IMO.
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Yes!but we are, LEDE believers! Just the other way around..and as long as we are not talking of unnatural RT's of 0.2 sec or such
Control rooms are typically small, and don't provide the space to get monitors sufficiently far from the front wall. And the monitors themselves are typically small, and suffer woofer bloom well up into the lower midrange. It should be no surprise that in such an environment a dead front wall (and a relatively dead room overall) would be advantageous. For many of us our listening rooms are different, and pose different acoustic problems. What works (perhaps) in the control room (for control room purposes) doesn't work for us (for satisfying music reproduction).
Further, for most music styles (and for movies), the recording engineer is trying to create an "acoustic scene" de novo, whereas for orchestral recordings there is an actual "acoustic scene" to be reproduced . . . in overall feeling and as well as one can, anyway. This difference in intent has repercussions all the way up and down the recording/reproduction chain . . . these discussions need always be framed by the question "what's it supposed to sound like?" and, at least as important, "who's doing the supposing?".
There's that basic presumption . . . that the "original source" is the recording engineer's control room. Where that is true our listening rooms and reproduction equipment should strive to match that control room.
For orchestral recordings the original source exists outside the control room (which is just a way station between the concert hall and the listening room). What it "sounds like" in the control room doesn't matter.
It is true for about 99% of all recordings.
It might not matter to you but how many recordings exist that didn't undergo post production in a *drum roll* control room??
dewardh,
I don't know what recording studios you have been in but the better ones I have been in I wouldn't call small in the least. And the front wall is the live end, there is a rather large window, tilted down typically that is there, I am not talking about a blind room for final mix where you no longer see the performers, you are looking at them through a large glass window. How is that a damped front wall? The front wall is very live. the back wall is usually very dead with absorptive wall. We are talking about music, I will not bring movie tracks into the discussion that has nothing to do with music reproduction, that is a completely different paradigm. If we are going to talk about movie tracks we have to talk about multi-track playback and distributed sound systems. We can't mix these two very disparate sound sources together, if you do that neither one will be done correctly.
I don't know what recording studios you have been in but the better ones I have been in I wouldn't call small in the least. And the front wall is the live end, there is a rather large window, tilted down typically that is there, I am not talking about a blind room for final mix where you no longer see the performers, you are looking at them through a large glass window. How is that a damped front wall? The front wall is very live. the back wall is usually very dead with absorptive wall. We are talking about music, I will not bring movie tracks into the discussion that has nothing to do with music reproduction, that is a completely different paradigm. If we are going to talk about movie tracks we have to talk about multi-track playback and distributed sound systems. We can't mix these two very disparate sound sources together, if you do that neither one will be done correctly.
dry recordings to me are bad because "dry" does not exist in nature.. In music's history this is a very recent, unfortunate development that should never have happened. We should remember this fact when we try to assess "what is best"...
Music is not point in space because instruments are not.. points! They do not radiate like that.. I listen mostly to music with real instruments, not synthetic sounds and mixes so I care about the conditions that makes that music come through first and I tolerate a slight loss for the other types, not the other way around..
I am a believer of SL's theories, that the sound shoud not come from the speakers only, and that is should be balanced with the natural reverberation of a balanced room (not a reverberation chamber!).
At the moment mine is 0.4 sec, with a decent ITD gap of 10ms. I am sure it could get much better, but there is no way I will make it an anechoic bat cave just because this is how control rooms are set to make artificial recording shine through!
And as you say, it just takes two listening spots, one close, one further to enjoy all styles. When I put some electro, I seat just a little over a meter from the speakers and reach full bliss.
Real sound sources are complex radiators in space, but microphones and ears receive summation at fixed perspective. Head motion with reproduced sound reveals fixed perspective of microphones and speakers.
SL believes in compromise; good reproduction in modest domestic living spaces, with normal furnishings. So do I.
SL also believes that highly coherent speakers make reflections at any level less intrusive.
I don't read 99% of what's published (even here on diyaudio) and I hardly ever listen to 99% of what's recorded. On those rare occasions when I might do so I don't much concern myself with the "accuracy" or the "imaging" of the obviously contrived presentations. I have noted that very few in the audience for that 99% show any evidence of caring either. So I find it a little . . . peculiar . . . when "audiophiles" wax poetic about the presentation of "music" intended for the iPod or the "automobile listening environment".
YMMV
haha, thats gotta be one of the most arrogant posts ive seen in a long time. i've got news for you, the vast majority of ALL types of music is recorded with several mics, a few for fill, soloists etc and then mixed afterwards in a control room, even those claiming to be live. 99.9% is understating it, far less than 1 in 1000 recordings will be just a mic in a room, which seems to be the only style accepted by you as pure. The rest of the world enjoys only a pale approximation of real musical appreciation.
I would argue that the girl in a **** Datsun on the way to work with a bad radio, probably has a more pure musical enjoyment without all the audiophile hangups to get in the way.
I would argue that the girl in a **** Datsun on the way to work with a bad radio, probably has a more pure musical enjoyment without all the audiophile hangups to get in the way.
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