Everybody can hear AE, and a listening room creates some as well, but not Notre-Dame-de-Paris-amounts as discussed in a previous thread where my mom was mentioned. In monitoring, you need to hear what is in the source - which could be a cathedral, or bone-dry Steely Dan.
Science is the best method we have found for systematically improving recording, reproduction, medicine etc. Sometimes, however, human perception is just the best place to start
... to find a cause, not just correlation. I miss that in most of the discussions of "AE". If the need for causation is acknowledged, it is served with just speculation. I've even found notions like "... with the onset of the single tone ...", which doesn't make sense in my book at all (Fourier).
I haven't had any plans to celebrate with that study because it is done with headphones. Headphones are able to tell about audibility, but ears do not cover all perceptions especially at LF and therefore also dynamics with wide range transients. I've been repeating that studies using headphones only are not valid for all-inclusive GD studies.
The problem with this "shortcut" is that you can get all sorts of anecdotes from wives in kitchens, hard of hearing mothers, and all sorts of people (often second-hand females, for some reason) about the obvious and magical improvements resulting from... speaker cables, power cables, shamanistic rituals to expel the reverb demons, and so on. There's ample evidence that we absolutely cannot simply "trust our ears", and should be even more skeptical of second-hand accounts from other people's ears.
Not quite. As I said above, every theory must comprise a causal reason for an effect to occur - basically that *is* the theory. That's missing here (as far as I know). So, we have no theory. Hence we cannot test it. As I said before, it might not be the 'stereo' thing and localisation of phantom sources, but it could simply be decorrelation speaker one and two in conjuction with room modes. I do not dismiss observation, but without reasoning, how to properly recreate it to begin with, just doing things somehow?
Spoiler: don't read if calculations are not for you.
You are simply changing the frequency response at the ears. Duh.For all of you who have doubts about AE, it’s quite easy to set up a listening test to hear the difference between mono and stereo bass. If you want, your can also invite your mother to the listening test if she's interested.
First, set up your subwoofers in a stereo configuration on each side of your main speakers, and obviously connect them in stereo. Open a DAW and put an HPF on the master track, and set it at 80 Hz and with a 24 dB slope. Import all kind of different music tracks you want to test, and just listen to what happens to the bass under 80Hz in isolation when toggling between mono and stereo on the master tracks (most DAWs should have that functionality).
To me, it's easy to hear the effects @Thomas Lund describes as “big”, “open”, “free”, “pleasant”, “light” in favor of stereo bass, in opposite to mono bass, which is described with words like “unpleasant”, “claustrophobic”, “small”, “restricted space”.
How much of a difference it makes is of course highly dependent on the audio production, and if they contain stereo bass information or not.
No, the artist should have heard the final studio mix in the mastering suite. They often use subwoofers and EQ. So do mixing studios, actually.
Artists don't buy mastering suite's material, they buy the control room's finished result unless they are involved in the mastering, not many do and if they do is out of idiosyncrasy.
re-"mastered" = not what the artists expected. Sound engineer included. Re-phasing, the point you mentioned, is not that good of an idea, if you want to distribute the load over two little speakers, but it may help with room resonances.
If by the "remastered" you mean the use of the era's three-channel recordings then yes.
It doesn't really matter. The artist is generally not the creator of the recorded product. That's the sound engineer: it's his/her skill that creates the sound and its attributes. On a (very) few occasions, it is the same person. Not general practice.
Like I said in my post above, mixing rooms are also often using subwoofers. So, shared or not, it's often mono.
But it doesn't matter if phase "varies wildly between channels" if the mixing and mastering setups had subwoofers. A home subwoofer setup will more resemble the studio setup than a two-speaker home stereo.
So, that is arguably better to be summed, then, because it is far more likely to be an artefact of multi channel, multi mic recording tracks being mixed with different level, timing, recorded in different rooms, sometimes with leakage across mics from other instruments (especially bass), just causing a wild potpourri of phase madness. The chances of it being some pure capture of something found in the (one and only?) performance space and relayed to the listeners in their homes as 'auditory enhancement', is approaching vanishing point.
It should be obvious, that a remastered = manipulated 50s recording cannot stand as an example. But you also don't acknowledge my criticism regarding the so called scientific method.
Your post comes as I had a look around of what 10 major studios use as control rooms.
