@Thomas Lund calls this ability
"super power" and he states that we don't loose it when being in a room.
I never-ever experienced right proportions with subs far and crossed high (more than 60Hz) and I suspect localization is one of the causes.
This is a particularly interesting thread. Thank you for the link.
My take on reading through it is that there is general agreement spatial cues are possible from stereo bass below 80Hz in real rooms, but that room modes will destroy the effect. Poes’ point wasn’t that the effects don’t exist, but rather that for the type of music he enjoys listening to, bass in summed to mono and the effect is therefore not available. And that for those tracks where he has experienced the effect, it was small and easily lost, so overall for him not worth the effort. Further, he asserts that this is will be true for most listeners/consumers, so for most folks simply not worth the bother. I think this is also the viewpoint the Harman solutions are based on. One could argue that a smooth in-room FR is the single most important factor of sound quality, so to the extent that room modes are more effectively compensated for by using multiple subs summed to mono, for many listeners that is going to be the preferred solution.
Now, there are experts who say there are significant benefits to preserving spatial cues in the bass region when such exist in the recording. If I read correctly, j_j and Thomas Lund are two such experts. What I get from them is that the bass needs to come from multiple sources, positioned in the front and back of the room, perhaps also on the left and right sides, and the room modes have to be controlled. So there’s the rub. Acoustic controls, i.e. bass traps, to do this effectively aren’t ever going to happen in my home. One could have each individual channel play down to 40Hz, sum the rest to mono and then employ bass management or DBA below 40Hz, but that wouldn’t address room modes above 40Hz. So what’s the answer? Is it the
@KSTR method described in post #29 of this thread? I think that would get you only two channels of bass, L&R, whereas to get the full-on benefit j_j seems to be referring to, you would ideally have discrete spatial information preserved for every channel in the recording. Do you use the new Dirac ART, and have every channel play the full 20Hz to 20KHz range, and use subs only for LFE, when present? Would that even work to control the room modes? Is there another, better solution?
