I have never liked the falsely generated effects of a third speaker. Haven't been wowed by surround either.
Maybe someday I will hear a system with nine electrostats that is nice, someone else will have to pay for it though.
Most definitely - and, in stereo in particular, more of the seasoning that most appear to realise.
You are misquoting Scott and you know it.
Trying to recreate a proper soundfield is a worthy cause and given right at the dawn of stereo they realised there were issues which were swept under the carpet one could consider a huge conspiracy from the panpot brigade? People sit in their studios knowing they are doing a suboptimal job of making a stereo illusion
You have fundamentally misunderstood stereo reproduction. There is nothing false about using three (or more) loudspeakers.
Scott Wurcer objects to 'effects boxes,' we hear that from him constantly. I don't want them either, I just want to hear what is on a recording. If a recording is mixed and mastered for surround, and if the surround system dacs, amps, and speakers as good as I would use in a stereo system, then it might sound quite good. Haven't heard it yet, so I don't know.
I’m pretty sure that’s what I said.
Short of putting a stage in your listen room......whatever it takes to gitter done!
Isn’t the shuffler (in theory) similar to what Polk was doing in the early SDA line......blending mids and tweets left to right and vice verse for a phantom center?
Such an aspiration necessitates a shuffler! Without one, what you hear is a distorted version of what was recorded.
It sounds like an effect. Now there is imaging between the center speaker and each side speaker. Add some more speakers to fill in those holes if you want. It gets expensive to add more speakers if sound quality is to be maintained.
I have tried the Waves shuffler. Yes, it produces an effect. Unless the same shuffler algorithm was used during mixing and mastering, I don't want it.
Then that is good and I apologise if I misunderstood.
Shuffling in its proper usage pertains to narrowing stereo width at higher frequencies commensurate with the effects of the bandwidth limitation of our spatially separated ears and the shadowing of ours heads that lies in between them.
Your means of reproduction is littered with comb-filtering, the effects of which a third loudspeaker could ameliorate - and indeed largely circumvent altogether for the most part. And without a shuffler your means of reproduction will always be comprised by the presence of your head to a much larger extent than it needs to be.
It is worth emphasising that the room in which you listen produces an effect - specifically, early reflections and later reverberation act to blur the significant frequency response ameliorations that are inherent in uncompensated two loudspeaker stereo.
Related to my previous comments regarding our perceptual learning, most people listen in their rooms completely unaware of the distortion they are being subjected to. But once they have heard three loudspeaker stereo, the defects in two loudspeaker systems are forever easily discernible.
I’m not playing devils advocate, I’m a subjectivist by y’all’s definition.
I don’t disagree with the use of measurements either, just trying to find correlation between the two (as is the subject here).
Are you saying your a subjectivist too Bill?
I’m with ya on the whole definition/understanding thing.
To me ambience is the spatial cues relayed by your system, as you say room and physicality’s included.
Are you familiar with the work Polk did (or still does?) in his crossed l/r signal stuff? I’ve not learned enough about it to get deeply into it but it sure seems built on the premise you describe.
The premise is long established. Google will likely help if you search for the original "EMI stereosonic shuffler". And (as seemingly always and increasingly so in audio) there are a number of contributions by Michael Gerzon that will likely prove exceptionally enlightening.
That is a different subject and is not actually stereo in its true sense. It most definitely is worthy of discussion, just not in this thread I would suggest. The shuffler in its original, most simple sense can be thought of as bridging the gap (at about 700Hz or so) between the frequency range where sound pressures at the ears determine localisation, and higher frequencies, where the sound energies at the ears is the more dominant factor.
There’s no similarities here at all ? Of course it’s different approaches.
Polk Audio SDA Speakers: 1985 Review of SDA-SRS
https://www.audiosignal.co.uk/Resources/Stereo_shuffling_A4.pdf
Polk Audio SDA Speakers: 1985 Review of SDA-SRS
https://www.audiosignal.co.uk/Resources/Stereo_shuffling_A4.pdf
The consequence is a recording of Mahler's 4th that plays back as Slipknot is as accurate as one 99.9999% convincing save for a minor infidelity reproducing the subway below the orchestra. It's difficult to understand how anyone recognizes the sound of anything, reproduced or real, in that philosophy.
We each carry our own reference with a statistical distribution varying with age, acuity, health, gender, experience, etc.. Ironically that extreme relativism appears to be rooted in an idealism that demands only one reference is valid for everyone and anything less than perfection demands abandoning all goals beyond simple taste.
No, they are different schemes. Shuffling attempts to compensate for the differences in our hearing of stereo in different frequency bands (and also sometimes relatedly to compensate for coincident microphones being closer to each other than our ears). Interaural crosstalk cancellation is normally applied in stereo because of the errant belief that stereo crosstalk is a defect. In fact crosstalk (the left loudspeaker heard in the right ear and vice versa) is actually a requirement for the stereo illusion to work. Where it is applicable is in "transaural stereo" to enable binaural recordings to be replayed via stereo loudspeakers (rather than headphones). However, in my own system I use what might be considered an amalgamation of both schemes - often to great effect but often revealing encoded information that was not audible otherwise.
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