I can only assume you, like most people don't hear the room and audience which make up most of the sound that reaches your ears at a concert.
You're being too harsh.
The music played through speakers is demonstrably different in sound to an actual instrument collection/group from which that sound came.
In short when you play an instrument's recorded sound through a set of speakers... its different isnt it..
That difference no matter how good the recording is .. has been captured, quantified,, researched and explained by some very smart people.
The aim then was to counteract or to put back what a recording takes out of a performance purely from the music heared perspective
BBE achieves this goal.
Band aids perhaps but each storage medium and each storage method has drawbacks.
These are simply there to alleviate their impact on the sound heared through an audio system and BBE is one that puts back what a recording and amplification appear to remove through the act of recording.
Not so much hidden but rather not displayed in the form thats easy to understand.
The electronic grounds and collector currents and pin allocations are too much detail that detracts from the understanding of what tge circuit is trying to achieve .. i know ive seen the dataflow diageam somewhere but cant track it down yet.
Scott.. yes the sales pitch is always to be treated with caution.
But the wide take up of dolby for example would appear to support its claims.
Similarly so with BBE.
I've seen it used in lots of audio equipment over the years.
I do appreciate that from a purisys point of view the less you do to a music performance the more true to life it sounds... but by that logic any recording.. ni matter how good is in fact going to perturb the qualities of that same live performance.
So a purist who claims to have the best reproduction quality because they dont use any of the processing available is missing the very salient pount that by recording the perfornance they have indeed produced a less than perfect rendition of that same live perfornance.
BBE is the result of painstaking comparison of the audible qualities of a live performance with the recorded version of that and electronically compensating for that difference.
Just the act of playing an instrument through amplified speaker output is enough to alter the instrument's natural sound. BBE puts it back where it was supposed to be soundwise.
Its not difficult to imagine a comparison of ab instrument with tgw very best recording and discerning the difference..
Phase manipulation does have value, you only have to look around this site, rePhase for example. What the BBE does by taking two wide bands of frequencies and shifting one by 180° and the other by 360° is not the right way to go about it. It is taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and in the process will make a big mess.
I'd say that rephase ...whatever it is cant really be appreciated if its not taken up by companies in their products.
Having the best method is no good if Noone can access it in the things they use
I dont think a 360 degree phase shift sounds right does it... still its used all over the place which attests to its effecavasy. ..sorry for spelling.
360 degree phase shift??? Is that even possible? Technically you can`t speak of any phase shift either I think.
Where is the difference to the original signal?
"The all-analog 482i Sonic Maximizer restores natural brilliance and clarity to an audio signal by the use of two integrated functions. First, it adjusts the phase relationships between the low, mid and high frequencies through adding progressively longer delay times to lower frequencies, creating a kind of mirror curve to neutralize the effect of loudspeaker phase distortion. Second, the Sonic Maximizer augments higher and lower frequencies as loudspeakers tend to be less efficient in their extreme treble and bass ranges. The end result is a dynamic, program-driven restoration which reveals more of the natural texture and detail in the sound without causing fatigue that is often associated with exciter effects, psychoacoustic processors or excessive use of equalizers."
http://www.bbesound.com/products/sonic-maximizers/482i.aspx
I got a copy of this unit, the Behringer SONIC ULTRAMIZER SU9920.
While I don`t use the 2-band EQ this unit will clean up the sound somehow. Hard to describe.
That looks the same. This is from the chip datasheet
"The input signal is separated into three regions : bass (20Hz to 150Hz), middle (150Hz to 2.4kHz) and treble (2.4kHz to 20kHz). These regions are then joined again with the middle and treble regions phase shifted -180 and -360 respectively with respect to the bass signal. This phase shift adjusts the delay time characteristic for each band and minimizes the distortion of the rising section of the audio signal."
"The input signal is separated into three regions : bass (20Hz to 150Hz), middle (150Hz to 2.4kHz) and treble (2.4kHz to 20kHz). These regions are then joined again with the middle and treble regions phase shifted -180 and -360 respectively with respect to the bass signal. This phase shift adjusts the delay time characteristic for each band and minimizes the distortion of the rising section of the audio signal."
A phase shift of 360° does add up to the same amplitude but the impulse answer isn't the same. That's not always audible or even rarely except for some A/B comparisons. But the phase shift is caused by something, by a longer way the sound has to travel, by filters or by an actual delay. The problem is, that delay may add up to the same amplitude at frequency x but frequency y does change the amplitude and phase at a different rate and while x adds up to the same, you'll end up with a completely different phase alignment at frequency y. And THAT does not add up to the same amplitude and you can hear that.