Binaural recordings never got popular. I experimented with home-made binaural recordings in the 1980's, using my own head as the dummy head, and as far as I recall, the effect could be quite intesting. The things I recorded were not, so I don't have any of them anymore.
I actually bought a binaural record this April, the second binaural record of the Bourbon Skiffle Company. I think they sat too close to the dummy head, because I barely heard any difference with ordinary stereo - until they left the studio, that sounded quite realistic.
When agusting the volume of headphones I sometimes clap my hands to see how loud the music is in comparison, odd but it seems to work. I"m hoping to have a go at a cross-feeder, see if that helps bridge the gap between headphones and speakers, although I thing using a sub with headphones (so you can feel the bass) would also be necessary.
With Onkyo and HiFi world going, is this just showing a trend (possibly driven by the standard of current popular music) away from proper listening, to background "noise" ?
With Onkyo and HiFi world going, is this just showing a trend (possibly driven by the standard of current popular music) away from proper listening, to background "noise" ?
I once built a preamplifier including a crossfeed circuit based on Fig. 3 of https://patents.google.com/patent/US3088997A/en but wasn't impressed with the result. I never used it in practice.
Jan Didden once listened to some fancy digital crossfeed circuit with responses based on his personal head related transfer functions, the crossfeed circuit also corrected for head movements. He was very impressed.
Jan Didden once listened to some fancy digital crossfeed circuit with responses based on his personal head related transfer functions, the crossfeed circuit also corrected for head movements. He was very impressed.
One fault I definitely don't have is misleading people about how things work in order to bamboozzle them into parting with their money.
It's called integrity.
I do something very similar - I snap my fingers, and make sure I can hear that sound over the music.
IMHO, that trend is already at least two decades old.
Maybe more than that.
Thirty years ago, in my college dorm in the 1990s, I scraped together second-hand audio equipment on the tiniest of budgets so I could listen to music in my tiny room. But most other young people in the same dorm did not own any kind of stereo. For entertainment, they just went downstairs to the shared lounge, and watched TV.
The only time most of them wanted music was when they were having a party.
There were still decent bands with talented musicians making decent music back then. But you could tell that listening to music was no longer as important to young people as it used to be. Television, the VCR, and video games were claiming a lot of their free time, time that might have been devoted to music-listening a generation earlier.
Back then, I spent much of my tiny discretionary income buying second-hand CDs for a buck apiece; most of my dormmates spent their money on pre-recorded video cassettes of The Terminator and other block-buster movies.
Like climate change, we tend not to notice gradual progressions until things have already become really bad. Just this year (2022), over forty million people in Pakistan and Bangladesh were flooded out of their former homes by weeks on end of torrential rainfall, and are now homeless, poverty-stricken climate migrants struggling to survive.
And just this year, Onkyo declared bankruptcy.
Neither of those things was the thin end of the wedge. Both are watershed moments in processes that have already been going on for a long time.
-Gnobuddy
I only brought up headphones as they are the big trend at the moment and can offer a level of quality at a lower price greater than most have been able to have before.
I prefer speakers in most every way. The younger generation can't afford a house with a larger room and free standing speakers, they have been raised on headphones and earbuds. The sense of space of the room your in, is quite important but the younger generation have never listened to music that way. This year their well may be 30 new IEM offered up for sale and who knows how many DAP units but the home audio guys with free standing speakers and electronics will be few.
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You know I've been thinking about gratitude lately for what I get / got to have audio wise. Attending university in the late 70's / early 80's, everyone had stereo separates; some utterly massive for a dorm room. Large Sansui receivers with large JBL speakers comprised my friend's roomates system. One guy in my freshman quad had a Fender Rhodes, a Leslie, Combo Organ atop, Sansui amp...
I can remember hooking up a CD4046 PLL to the Rhodes trying to get it to chase notes - and singing through the Leslie for that Jon Anderson "Astral Traveler" effect. One time we put the same album on two different TTs and tried to sync them for a quad stereo in the quad. (FZ would have had us put two different albums on at the same time, but we werent that sophisticated...)
The next year I was in a quad that was two rooms divided by a cinder block wall with a shared bathroom. Sound, especially bass just sailed right through that stuff. The guy on the other side kept me up late, so the next morning when I got back from class I dropped the needle on "Dance of a Volcano". He got the message. My roommate then had a Les Paul copy and a perfect Princeton Reverb; I had a red EB0 bass I just played through my stereo. We both happened to arrive early from break and jammed so loud that night to no consequences. Two guys just learning how to play too.
I think headphones can offer a nice airy treble, better than most cheap speakers. They can also play louder than most cheap speakers. Dollar for dollar, they are better than speakers at those qualities.
But IMO, stereo imaging suffers massively with headphones. For me, that is an enormous reduction in quality. I don't enjoy listening to music in mono on speakers, either.
But, thinking about it, lots of people do now listen to music using a monophonic Bluetooth speaker - or worse, the monophonic penny-sized speaker in their phone.
It's pretty shocking to me - like going back to the days when all we had to listen to was a portable AM radio.
-Gnobuddy
This makes no sense to me. Isn't that "stereo"? Why would you need to make it different for headphones than speakers?
Are they? When I listen to recent commercial hits trough headphones and I flip the mono switch on the amplifier, the difference is comparatively tiny. They surely have been optimized - or at least validated - for mono and headphones playback. The stereo/spatial effect is surrogated by a algoritmic reverb that cancels itself in mono. The reverb trick is also one of the first thing explained on today's home mixing tutorials - just record in mono, then enable the magic plugin and stereo is ready.
A regular stereo recording of acoustical instruments often sounds bad in mono and sometimes does sounds funny on headphones, usually when the mixing engineer adds too much ambient reverb, I believe. Surprisingly, some of the best recordings I heard recently that have been (accidentally) optimized for headphone in a good way are live recordings of street performances that have been made with consumer portable equipment.
Because of the crosstalk from the left loudspeaker to the right ear and the other way around that you have with loudspeakers.
For example, with the loudspeakers and listener in a triangle with equal sides, sound left and silence right means 30 degrees left from centre. With headphones it sounds like the sound source is right next to your left ear.
Ok... But left is left and right is right. A speaker on each side vs headphone... Still left and right. What am I missing?
I get as you walk through a "field" you get different sound profile, but the input is the same. I feel like you describe the room and acoustic difference, not the actual signal.
I get as you walk through a "field" you get different sound profile, but the input is the same. I feel like you describe the room and acoustic difference, not the actual signal.
I can't stand ear-buds, and never use them.How? With open back headphones and only two ears, I can get a much better soundstage than in the listening room with speakers...
Are you talking about those peanuts people stuff in their ears?
I've never listened to binaural recordings made with an artificial head, so I can't say if I hear the same imaging problems with those.
Those caveats made, I've never heard a good stereo spread with any headphones I've ever tried. Open and closed back make no difference. Extra-aural and intra-aural make no difference.
Sure, I can hear things that are panned (or placed) hard left, or hard right. But everything in between collapses to one big sound in the rear centre of my skull.
I don't know exactly why this happens. But, for me, there is no doubt that it does - the effect isn't subtle at all. Stereo image disappears, all I've got left is loud noises hard left, loud noises hard right, and a mixed jumble of sound in the middle, sounding as though it's inside the rear of my skull.
I've listened to mono with headphones (identical L and R signals), and all I hear is a single sound in the rear centre of my skull. The rearward placement is particularly annoying - the sound seems to originate either inside the back of my skull, or just out side it.
Mono through a pair of speakers in a room doesn't do this. I still hear a central image, but it's in front of me, where it belongs. Not behind my head.
All stereo imaging is an illusion, a trick that exploits a blatant and dramatic failure of our ear/brain mechanism. When listening to a pair of speakers in a room, our ears think there are sounds in between the speakers. In reality, there aren't any sounds originating from there.
Imagine if our eyes made an equally gigantic mistake. If you stood in a parking garage with two identical pillars left front and right front of you, you would see only one single pillar in the middle, right in front of you!
Somehow, headphones disrupt the auditory illusion of stereo. I'm sure researchers who study audio and hearing could tell us why. But I myself don't know (I only have guesses).
I know for a fact that headphones confuse our hearing mechanism in at least one other way - they dramatically hamper our ability to tell how loud (SPL) a sound is.
Again, I don't know why (but have my guesses). However, the effect is very real - there has been an enormous increase in the percentage of people with hearing damage, starting within months of the early 1980s release of the Sony Walkman.
Back then (maybe still) the BBC routinely administered hearing tests to potential new employees before hiring them, and the people administering the tests were shocked to find that large numbers of young people were suddenly quite deaf, particularly to higher frequencies.
It took a while to make the connection - but eventually it was found that all the deaf young people had spent lots of hours listening to their shiny new Walkmans.
-Gnobuddy
An electronic audio signal is an artificial thing, a human-created concept. Our ears did not evolve to process it - it's completely unnatural.
All actual audio sources exist in some sort of acoustic space, even if outdoors. Our ear/brain mechanism evolved to process these real acoustic sources, in real acoustic spaces.
Animal hearing evolved over hundreds of millions of ears to extract quite a lot of information about the acoustic space. If you were blindfolded and taken first into a small room, then into a large one, you would immediately know the difference, just from the sound of your own voice.
Likewise, your ears and brain can easily tell the difference between, say, a bathroom with walls and floor surfaced with ceramic tiles, and an identically-sized closet lined with carpeting, drapes, and soft hanging fabrics.
I think it's self-evident that the problems with headphone sound occur exactly because our ears and brains are deprived of all that information about the acoustic space we're in (and the acoustic space the original sound was created in, if it was a live sound).
For decades now, with most types of popular music, recording engineers have worked to take out all but tiny traces of the original room in which the musicians performed. These days there usually never was an actual acoustic performance by the entire band in a single room. Most of the sounds probably went through a DI box straight to the record interface, and onto a WAV file.
Mix engineers then try to add back some sense of space using panning and artificial delay and reverb. All these artificial effects are much cruder than you'd get in an actual acoustic space, with its millions of reflected and delayed sound-paths.
For a long time now, we've mostly been listening to music that has only poorly mimicked what our ears were designed to hear: actual acoustic sounds in an actual acoustic listening space.
Headphones may be one of the final nails in that coffin.
I remember listening to The Eagles Greatest Hits in Dolby Stereo on a Sony Walkman. I could hear the lovely reverb on the tracks. I could turn up the sound loud enough to drown out the noises of the city around me. But the stereo image was poor compared to a pair of speakers, even poor ones such as you might find in a boombox.
-Gnobuddy
Agree.
Plugins aside, a simple "pan pot" - a cross-fader that varies loudness of a signal in the left and right channel, like a stereo "balance" control - can be used to give an illusion of stereo in a mix. You pan some signal sources left, some right, and vary the amount of panning. Done well, the illusion of instruments spread across a sound stage appears.
You can also change the loudness and amount of reverb applied to a signal to make it appear to move forwards or backwards in the virtual acoustic space. Turn down the level on an instrument, turn up the reverb on it, and that instrument will appear to move backwards in the stereo mix, further away from the listener.
I'm pretty sure an automatic plugin is not going to have any of those subtleties. Probably it behaves more like one of those guitar FX pedals that produces "stereo reverb", an effect that lets you create a big wash of guitar sound spread out between two speakers.
Note that a big wash of spread-out sound is a very different thing than a pan-potted sound source that appears to be quite localized, sounding as though it comes from one location placed somewhere within in the stereo image. Not spread out, localized to one place.
I don't really own any recordings made in the era ASD (After Speakers Disappeared). Mainly because the era AMD (After Music Disappeared) mostly set in at about the same time, at least as far as music that interests me goes.
-Gnobuddy
Back in the 80's we had a thread in the local (DEC) Music forum titled "Is Rap Music?" I wish I could dig that one up again...I probably commented back then that it wasnt, in my perception.
Last Wed I played guitar / sang at the little open mic place doing old late 60's folk rock tunes; I had invited my son down to watch me and there was a whole one other person there. He did some kind of rap thing against I assume what was a track off his phone, which I've noted is a common thing there. He actually stayed and watched me perform, attentively observing my voice and songs, offering a comment and perception or two. I couldnt have done the same for his performance.