What? Many people's dream is to recreate that live concert experience.
And there are people who use the DSP reverb programs of their AVRs, to recreate
reverberated mess a more enveloping feeling.
You are also well informed about psychoacoustics. Therefore I am very surprised about that claim coming from you Amir, because IME it's exactly the other way around:
The treated, well controlled room is reproducing side channel information million times better! Therefore the
enveloping feeling is becoming stronger - if it's in the mix! If it's not in the mix, and the track of a mix was kept mono, then there should be no enveloping feeling, it should be in front of you.
And why is that? Because as every mix engineer will tell you:
if everything is wide, nothing is wide.
That's thee effect of treated rooms. You have a dancepiano dead center and then the wide pad will be perceived as much broader.
Or you have the lead vocal kept in mono, sometimes even with the ambience in mono, but the backing vocals are mixed wide with lots of side channel. That tends to make the lead vocal sound much better and the backing choir, too.
For untrained ears, used to listen in "reverb chambers", the lack of that reverb at first may initially be perceived as a "lack of spaciousness" and if asked, they would say they prefer more reverb.
But it's the same with reduced room modes: at first it sounds like a lack of bass. Because the hearing was adopted all life long to the sound of a ringing bass, that masks everything.
It takes some time to accomodate, start to listen and then begin to hear, how much the room moodes were masking everything and that, the bass did not become less trong, but stronger and how poor and weak it was sounding before.
And this is probably even more true for hearing finer details, like ambiences in a mix (= judging spaciousness).
A mix that I like to use, how well a setup can reproduce spaciousness and depth, or antiphase/side channel - is the snare in Michael Jackson's Billy Jean. It is mixed with a predelayed stereo ambience, where the snare hits dry dead center, but the tail of the snare goes into LR and then fades into the back (side channel).
I highly doubt this can be heard in a reverberating room. In a reverberating room, there is just "a nice snare".
I ask again: how is it possible, in a reverberating room, to hear the ambiences of the tracks in a mix?
But if the ambiences and their level cannot be judged in a mix, how is it possible to talk about details or quality of sound reproduction?
Yet the same people read stuff online and turn their listening rooms into padded cells and wonder why it doesn't sound that way. Sadly their solution is to go buy another power cable....
The ones that treat their rooms are the ones that buy power cables?
IME the ones in untreated rooms are the ones that are tricked into all the audiophile BS - simply because they cannot hear any details (see above paragraph).
So the problem is the following:
People (and "experts") are talking about "listening", but they never describe, what they are hearing. They use technical terms, derived from measurements, that suggest great competence. But what people do not understand, that these terms are useless, if they are not connected with concrete explanations of what they hear in certain mixes.
I am becoming suspicious, because I start to notice, that some highly regarded experts seem to avoid the use of concrete, verifiable mix descriptions, like the plague but instead use a lot of technical terms and measurements, that have no concrete meaning (without defining of what the concrete effect on elements in a mix is).
It reminds me about reference mixes the AES is recommending - but AES seems not to specify, which elements in these mixes are the reference part and what to listen for.
