I heard MBLs at the recent show.
Visited the (big) room briefly, 3 times.
Liked them one time out of the three.
Visited the (big) room briefly, 3 times.
Liked them one time out of the three.
I heard MBLs at the recent show. Visited the (big) room briefly, 3 times. Liked them one time out of the three.
But when you say correspondence, it is a correspondence in one dimension only: the steady state sine wave magnitude response. If they were really getting a strong correspondence in all dimensions it would be like listening to headphones but without having to wear any. No, what they strive for is the worst of all worlds: neither the sound of a neutral transducer relaying the recording into a real room, nor the sound of headphones.The DSP “Photoshop” approach is to sit a mic where the listener would be and to diddle the knobs until there is a correspondence between the recording mic and one of the listener’s ears.
Depends on what you're trying to reproduce exactly. It is known to many here, and Toole wrote about this as well, that reproducing a whole orchestra playing in a particular 3D space using just two speakers is futile. But recorded audio is an artform in itself, musicians and their crew ultimately create a product that is to be played on two speakers. So it's not their actual performance that many audiophiles are trying to reproduce, but the recording of their performance that the musicians and their crew approved.But the AES approach is quite literally seeing the trees but missing the forest. Audio reproduction with stereo speakers is comparable to viewing a painting through a knothole.
stereo does something extraordinary, providing a stable image that, if done by the book (which includes the humble panpot), produces an authentic 'scene'.
Although I haven't brought this up yet, Toole's critique of room EQ applies to the sound treatment of rooms the way I've applied it to speakers. You can take a lot of the sound out of a room but you can't take the room out of the sound... only re-shape it.
Sorry if I seemed obscure. Let's say you have a belief about comb filters and so put up panels alongside the speakers to reduce that bounce. You've made a minor change in the room and so the room is little changed as a sound percept even though you're done something big to the output of the speakers.What does this mean?
On the one hand you say it is ridiculous to consider having Carnegie Hall in your living room and on the other you bemoan the lack of perfect simulation of the live event. The home audio system gives us the perfect hybrid.Respectfully, I believe you are thinking of a stream of bits flowing out of a speaker but aren't thinking in terms of cues which are the building blocks of perceptual consciousness.
What in stereo-at-home is comparable to looking at a perspective Renaissance painting through a knot-hole? For the painting there are various discrepant cues such as your lens accommodation, surface texture, reflections, lots of stuff I can't remember, and not to mention the saints can hold their breath interminably and have halos.
Perhaps you have comparable minimized false cuing with an in-ear bud in one ear and your head held stationary with a dental bite-board. Even so constrained, perceptive readers can probably recognize a bunch of cues that are discrepant with putting your ear on a door to Carnegie Hall. And in any more a natural listener position would have a whole lot more discrepant cues.
There is no difference except by degree between the body of discrepant cues for a large orchestra and the body of discrepant cues for a cowbell. (I use a cowbell for a Live-vs-Recorded demo. No professional recording engineer should be without his or her own.)
It is within that narrow body of cues that Cosmik at the control panel can simulate (surrounded by revealing discrepant cues that diminish the stereo illusion) that the audio specialists work their magic. I take for granted that the great recording teams know which cues to bank on in order to make the DGG recordings of Michael Tilson Thomas luminous.... if never entirely veridical. Call it an art form.
On the one hand you say it is ridiculous to consider having Carnegie Hall in your living room and on the other you bemoan the lack of perfect simulation of the live event. The home audio system gives us the perfect hybrid.
Do you know what a timing discrepancy between the ears tells you about the location of a sound? It tells you only that it lies along a certain line radiating out from the listener. Do you know what stereo over speakers does with a volume difference between the channels, but no timing difference? It produces a timing difference between the ears. And do you know what it does when the listener moves or turns their head? It maintains a remarkably stable 'bearing' for the source.
Throw in some cues to do with reverberation related to distance, plus some extra 'real' room acoustics and you've got yourself a beautiful illusion that isn't static like a binaural recording (you do accept that a binaural recording is related to 'reality' but is unfortunately static?) and perhaps resembles the sound you would get if your room was transported to the recording venue with its end wall open.
I can only think you haven't heard a very good system!
But the AES approach is quite literally seeing the trees but missing the forest. Audio reproduction with stereo speakers is comparable to viewing a painting through a knothole. A handful of the cues are present and these support the percept. But as soon as you move or turn your head, the discrepant cues destroy the image. What is left really is, as psychologists say, “veridical”; it sounds just like two speakers playing a recording. But it doesn’t sound like Carnegie Hall.
Bentoronto
Ah, spoken like a true engineer.Those changes are either measurable or not, regardless of whether they are perceived. Conversely, anything perceived can be measured (provided we know what to look for).
But you were confident that the illusion would show up on all of our PCs and monitors of varying quality under all the ambient conditions we were viewing them in.Ah, spoken like a true engineer.
Attached is a picture of a triangle (the one on top without the border). Everybody see it? Anybody know how to tell Photoshop how to find it? Well, that's the difference between perceptual heuristics* and a bit stream.
View attachment 28511
* I think the Gestalt psychologists of yesteryear might have called that the law of "good contour". I know the smart audio authorities out there might be wondering about the "illusion" of filled-in bass fundamentals, eh.