Why is the divider necessary? A waveguide or an array can reduce off axis response by 75%. Seems like that would be nearly as effective as a physical barrier, and looks a lot better.
I have only read the first three pages of the thread. Sorry if this was asked, but wouldn't this only be of significance to reproduction of purely acoustic material? I understand that even studio recorded material is not recorded in a "live" setting, but through a combination of tracks of discrete instruments.
But if music in your living room is expected to be a reproduction of the 'live' experience, the vast majority of 'live' experiences that people have to music are recieved in the presence of amplified speaker setups that pretty much introduce the same crosstalk that you're proposing to eliminate? Orchestral and small acoustic presentations excepting.
But if music in your living room is expected to be a reproduction of the 'live' experience, the vast majority of 'live' experiences that people have to music are recieved in the presence of amplified speaker setups that pretty much introduce the same crosstalk that you're proposing to eliminate? Orchestral and small acoustic presentations excepting.
Very Good Question brainerd! It challenges the weaks of Ambiophonics!
First you'd need to know that there's two types of stero localization. Volume panning, and Delay panning (If the right speaker has a Delay of 5ms, the sound sweeps to the right). Your ears (or your brain rather) support both ideas. The Delay panning doesnt work perfectly with normal stereo setup, the volume panning however works perfectly.
With Ambiophonics its the exact way around: Changes of Volume between the left and right speaker usually tend to break up the soundstage; what you get is a disaster (provided you have good enough speakers to know what it actually should sound like). Ambiophonics only work with Delay panning.
Picture a microphone in front of an orchestra. The sound of a trumpet that is 45° to the left from the microphone will strike the Left microphone first, than the right one, creating a Delay of a few miliseconds of the right signal. In Ambio the left microphone gives the sound signal to the left speaker and the left speaker goes to the left ear (and not also your right ear like in common stereo. In stereo setup, the left sound of the left speaker also strikes your right ear a few miliseconds after the left that creates another delay, and endangeres you of actually localizing the speaker!). The same goes for the right microphone. That means with your Ambio System you hear the exact same thing you would hear in front of the orchestra, provided your ears would be on the same spot as the microphones at the recording.
If you feed the same signal into Stereo speakers the sound does move to the right, but you rather have the feeling of a stereo effect rather than the true 45° panning to the left.
Unfortunately todays DJ's, Mixers, whatever... tend to stick to the volume stereo panning. In stereo, if you turn the balance of your amplifier slightly to the left, the sound does come rather from the left. Similar to headphones.
If you want Ambio or not, its a question of what recordings you listen to, what taste you've got (Ambio is not perfect), and what you want to do to your stereo system and your room treatment.
Since your support Delay panning and volume panning the sound coming from your Ambio speakers will always tend to try to move to the middle. Ambio is not the perfect system.
If you choose Ambio, some Stereo Recordings might not sound good. Make sure the recordings you buy are live and not with an ARTIFICIAL STEREO effect.
Whatever you do: Dont use RACE software of a TacT Processor! It's crap, believe me, whatever they say! The best thing there is, that is flawless without any mistakes, perfectly clear, with no phase problems is always Mono. One speaker, in front of you, no more. If you want more surround you can always add speakers next, in front and around you. Just bridge them into the same amplifier in Mono.
Best Regards,
Wolfgang
About crosstalk:
Theres a mistake many people make that first hear about Ambiophonics. They think that Ambiophonics tries to remove crosstalk and that that is unnatural.
Wrong. When the microphone is in front of the stage, there is crosstalk. A trumpet from the left strikes both L/R microphones, the right one with a slight delay. With no crosstalk only the left microphone would pick up the sound.
That's all the crosstalk needed. That's the exact same way your ears pick up sounds every day. With Delay Panning. (Lets ignore pinna cue's for once, thats too complicated and thats probably the reason why live music will never be reproducable the same way with your stereo system. So forget about it. It will probably never work anyway because the ear localizes the speaker -> 0° in front of you with Ambio, -30°/30° side to side with Stereo)
Now stereo speakers add another wave of crosstalk that has nothing to do with the music. The sound of the left speaker alone strikes the left ear first, than the right ear. Thats crosstalk, and that makes you localize the speaker. The right speaker does the same. If the sound is recordet in Mono you basically get a slight Delay feedback at 100% a few ms long within the whole sound stage. Thats one problem.
In Ambio the sound of both speakers comes from exactly in front of you. That Delay Feedback doesnt exist or is minimal.
When you play stereo recordings with Delay panning, in Ambio you get what your ears would have heard in place of the microphone. In Stereo you get, well... something. In High-End speakers it even works.
To summarize the answer questioned in the first paragraph: Ambio doesnt remove crosstalk. It prevents the speakers from adding crosstalk, that has nothing to do with the music, as normal stereo setup does.
The weakness of Ambio is, as mentioned, volume panning only , that is used so often nowadays; too often to let Ambio survive.
Best regards,
Wolfgang
Dear Patrick Bateman,
I've gotten myself one of these crosstalk cancellation things and the product is absolutely disgusting. The wave cancellation removes all the finesses of music, all the magic is gone and the sound quality is horrible. For High-End systems, dont even think about it.
But if you have speakers costing below 5000$, by all means, use the TacT. There's no problem, and you wont figure out the difference. I've connected mine to the Home Cinema and it works quite nicely.
Best Regards,
Wolfgnag
I have never heard a recording that sounds better to my ears in standard stereo than an an ambiophonic set-up, studio jazz and rock included.
I am more than happy with ambiophonics. However the idea of listening to orquestral music in mono surrounded by an array of ambience speakers is one I´d like to try out sometime. Should be absolutely listening fatigue-free.
I am more than happy with ambiophonics. However the idea of listening to orquestral music in mono surrounded by an array of ambience speakers is one I´d like to try out sometime. Should be absolutely listening fatigue-free.
Think about the amount of pattern control you'd need to have full intensity at the right ear and effectively zero intensity at the left ear. What's that - a 5 degree coverage angle? Not gonna happen with any waveguide I've ever seen.
Has anyone looked into pinna simulation for headphones? It seems to me that this may be an alternate route to the same (or at least a similar) goal. Headphones naturally eliminate right-left crosstalk, but sound unnatural largely due to the absence of pinna cues (plus the ambient soundfield of course, but high-quality FIR reverb may be 'good enough' if done properly). It might be a tougher problem to solve than Ambio, but I'm not sure - I'd be interested in hearing about any experiences.
The goal of Ambiophonics (and stereo or highfidelity) is to faithfully reproduce whatever the recording microphone (or the pot panning program or the electronic composer has coded) Realism is not the same as live. If the recording engineer records the Vienna Choir Boys singing in their shower room then you should want a reproduction system that can sound like this as closely as possible.
If a recording engineer deliberately records music in a room with a public address speaker system then that is what you should hear when you play that recording. You should feel like you are at the microphone during that recording session. Obviously if you don't like what a recording engineer has recorded you are free to make any changes you like as you play it back.
The stereo triangle cannot deliver the above recorded realism (or perspective) even if the two chanel recording is perfect in resolution and you have perfect amplifiers, speakers, and cables.
Even if the recording engineer, trys to compensate for the known deficiencies of the stereo loudspeaker triangle by manipulating the mic or computer signals, most listeners will not hear what he hears on his monitors since stereo ITD and ILD distortions of this type are impossible to compensate for and are very individualistic and subjective.
Basically, unless you make your own distorted custom recordings, you want a listening system that can fully reproduce what is on the disc. Most discs of live or synthesized sound actually do contain realistic (natural) levels Interaural Level Differences and Interaural Time Differences that come close to the binaural cues you would get if you were there. (Of course the frequency response and dynamic range must also be captured for the recording but that is the easy part.)
However, the third part of human binaural hearing mechanism is the pinna direction finding part of the ear. The brain requires that the ILD, ITD and the pinna directional sense all agree closely. So in stereo, for a mono soloist, the ILD and the ITD say the sound is in the center but the pinna say the sound is coming from the sides, and thus the brain says the music is canned or not real. The changes in the ITD and ILD and the comb filteering caused by the speaker crosstalk also clue the brain into realizing that the soundfield is not normal and this sometimes triggers the tweaking instinct.
In stereo reproduction, a central sound is boosted by three dB at the lower frequencies compared to the same sound coming from the side. Some recording engineers try to compensate for this and some don't. They can only adjust for this if the center signal is mono and from a particular spot mic or computer channel. Some listeners get accustomed to this extra warmth and find live perfomances or corrected discs cold.
So realism is a very difficult word to define.
Ralph Glasgal
Home Page
I don't know where this comes from, but Ambiophonic reproduction delivers whatever time or level differences are on a recording unchanged to the ears. It works fine with electronic music panned by computers in time or amplitude.
In contrast, in stereo for a sound from the side (recorded by head spaced micorphones or panned) the recording will have a time difference between the channels of about 700 microseconds. If this recording is played back via the stereo triangle this time will be reduced to about 220 microseconds and instead of sounding at the far side it will sound about 30 degrees to the side. In Ambiophonics such a 700 microsecond ITD on a disk will sound from 90 degrees to the side just as the microphone and the disc have it.
Crossfeed is designed with externalizing the sound in mind. There are several plugins for foobar as well. Nokia phones have a feature like this built into their phones too. Absolutely something that should be standard on any headphone listening setup.
There are different stereo mic setups and not all pickup the delay the same, and some not at all (coincident mics for example). So this a bad generalization or assumption. I do agree with you though that the majority of popular music is multi-track recording done in different locations sometimes and mixed together later. This is cheaper or maybe easier today than doing a real stereo recording.
I thought this too at first, but it is not a defect of ambio but rather a defect or limitation of pan-pot stereo. Pan-pot stereo on a stereo setup also compresses width (yes a little less than ambio) because hard panned material will come only from the speaker location (+/-30deg vs +/-5deg). I have found ambio reveals the type of stereo recording better than stereo would ever dream because stereo is only accurate up to about 1.6-3.2Khz. This "defect" or limitation has been known even by the inventor since the beginning even though vector summation and duplex theory suggest it is "good enough".🙄 Unfortunately, panning knobs have reigned supreme because of their simplicity. 🙁 Ambio attempts to bring in more of the spectrum in terms of spacial reproduction.
For a stereo mic setup that captures time difference or the recording has used a time spacing method (not sure correct term), then this is true, but I think he is referring to pan-pot stereo and hard panned material will emanate from the speaker location.
For this reason, I find the ambio variation OSD might be of help in this area, for now I enjoy the solution from Robin Miller and Howard Moscovitz over at electro-music. It is always easier for our hearing to focus on sounds coming from directly in front of us because our hearing/brain and eyes are all designed to find and focus on things in our field of vision. Therefore, it is easier to control spacial effects directly in front of us, especially since it might work with the room better.
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Dear Mr. Glasgal,
700ms is about 0.7 seconds. I would rather go for 7ms with Delay Panning. 0.7 seconds is rather a Delay, or Echo (PingPong effect). Have I misunderstood something?
I discovered the Program AudioMulch through RACE software, and I have created a few tunes to test volume panning with Ambiophonics. I don't know why it works with your system, but it definately doesnt work with mine. You do get a Volume panning, but only between the Left and Right speakers and that's about 10-20°. The Delay didnt work perfectly then.
Best Regards,
Wolfgang
Sorry, that ms is microseconds.
I don't know why your AudioMulch/RACE program is not working but there are hundreds of users out there who have made it work. It may be that the signal you are playing is not really going through the program. This is a common problem. Some computers absolutely refuse to let you route a digital file or CD input to anything but the output soundcard. Also sometimes the Audiomulch output cannot be sent to the computer digital output. Also, you must actually have a digital output and an external DAC or be able to convert to analog in the computer soundcard. I have to say that for all these reasons it can be cheaper and less frustrating just to get the TACT box which also has speaker/room control, surround sound features, and lots more.
The Robin Miller VST program mentioned above is also RACE but you can use this one (or any VSTs) with more programs than AudioMulch. On the other hand it is not direct, in that additiional VST plugin processing software is involved. The direct RACE formulas configured directly in a program like AudioMulch allows you to see exactly what is going on and you can use AudioMulch contraptions to make any changes you like.
When you get it working, it should sound just like the best barrier you have ever tried and maybe better since it operates down to lower frequencies than most barriers can.
Ralph Glasgal
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/10962-stereolith-loudspeakers-question-3.html#post1618680
"A short experiment with a baffle like used in ambiophonics i did some time ago showed a result that is not substantially different from the SLS, maybe a bit better, but you really need that legendary vise for your head. "
"A short experiment with a baffle like used in ambiophonics i did some time ago showed a result that is not substantially different from the SLS, maybe a bit better, but you really need that legendary vise for your head. "
For Ambiophonics, it now makes no sense to use a baffle. A new free program works with Java and PCs, MACs, Linux, etc. It is the easiest yet to install and use and you can rotate your head or recline as much as you like. It works with any speakers. Go to:
Stephan's Software and click on Ambiophonictranscoder.
Ralph Glasgal
I have tried Stephan Hotto´s RACE implementation and I am very impressed. Having crosstalk cancellation without a physical barrier before me is quite something. So far I can´t route the laptop´s cd player through the XTC software so I´m having to convert cd´s to wave files and load individual tracks one at a time. I still have to try analog to digital and back conversion of my beloved SACD´s. Quite inconvenient, but it certainly pays off nontheless.
There is no question to my ears this is miles ahead of the standard stereo triangle. Everybody should try it.
There is no question to my ears this is miles ahead of the standard stereo triangle. Everybody should try it.
Now THAT is terrifically interesting software. I'm running my tape measure around the room to see how I can get that 20 degree angle with a minimum of humping around multi-hundred-pound speakers...
If y our room is big enough just move back as far as you can. If you are normally two meters from the speakers just try to get six meters from them or thereabouts. The angle is really not all that critical and there are the adjustments you can use to tweak things if you are at least in the 15 t0 30 degree range. There are detailed instruction on the Ambiophonic website if you need them.
Ralph Glasgal
Home Page
Ralph Glasgal
Home Page