In my experience, you have to be very close to the stage to get that kind of localization. IIRC, the far field (the point at which reverberant energy constitutes more than 50% of what we hear) is at something like Row H. And when you're that close to the orchestra, the presentation is substantially different from what a conventional two-channel system, with its limited width, can reproduce, unless you use crosstalk cancellation.
I used a poor example of what Griesinger had in mind, drawing on my faulty memory. So let me quote him:
"As the quartet plays tirelessly on stage we walk backward away from them into the hall... At first it is easy to localize each instrument, and tell which played each note. The sound has an exciting, attention-grabbing quality. As you walk back the sound remains close and exciting. But suddenly in distance range of one or two rows all the instruments blend together into a fuzzy ball of sound. The attention-grabbing effect is gone. We call the distance at which this happens the Limit of Localization Distance, or LLD." (From
this paper, second page.)
He reports good localization at Row X, near the center, in Boston Symphony Hall.
Since the best concert halls have an initial time delay gap of 20-25 ms, speakers should be at least 10 feet out from surfaces. Needless to say, this isn't achievable in most rooms. In my experience, if they're closer than that, the recorded acoustical space seems smaller. There can also be an uncomfortable "double image" effect in which both the original and listening rooms seem to be present at once. It's hard to describe what it sounds like -- "constipated" might be useful -- as you move the speakers out, the sound seems to bloom, open up, become more natural.
I have not been aware of the "double image" you describe from a setup which minimizes the early reflections while cultivating later ones (later than 10 milliseconds). Reports I get indicate the spatial presentation changes significantly from one recording to the next, which implies that the recordings' varying spatial cues (rather than the playback room's consistent spatial cues) are dominating perception. Imo this would indicate these later-arriving reflections are indeed acting as effective "carriers" of the venue cues on the recording, probably primarily the reverberation tails. See the last four paragraphs of this post for an example.
I think that the best treatment for a small room is diffusion. It suppresses the early reflections without removing energy from the reverberant field. With directional speakers, absorption tends to make the room too dead. Per Linkwitz, dipoles do best with the RT60 of a typical living room. With conventional omni/cardioid boxes, though, some absorption is needed for the best results, doubly so if the room is large, which increases the RT60 and at a certain point can cause discrete echoes.
This all makes sense to me.
Finally, one of the attributes of a good concert hall is low interaural cross correlation. Again, diffusion can help with that.
Yes, as can cross-firing directional speakers, such that the first significant lateral reflection for the left speaker is off the right-side wall, and vice versa.
At the end of the day, you're shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, but some results seem more pleasing than others!
Well, some deck chairs were closer to the lifeboats!!
Under what should have been very poor conditions - a small untreated hotel room at Axpona - one listener challenged my schpiel by asking us to play a recording he brought which was made in a concert hall he was familiar with. He later posted this on another forum:
"The recording was a FLAC rip of the CD layer of an RCO Live SACD: Shostakovich—Symphony No. 15; Concertgebouw Orchestra/Bernard Haitink conductor. It's a live recording from March of 2010 (Haitink made a much earlier recording of the same piece with the London Philharmonic; he was the first person to record all the Shostakovich symphonies.) For a couple of years, this has been my go-to symphonic recording when I have just a short time to get a sense of an unfamiliar system. It's an excellent performance, something I can listen to repeatedly without going nuts, which is important at a show. In terms of audiophilia, it's an extremely detailed yet atmospheric representation of an orchestra, with excellent dynamics and fully characterized instrumental colors (bells, solo turns by violin, flute, piccolo, string bass, trumpet, etc.)
And—with the right audio gear—it successfully renders the essence of (IMO) one of the greatest 3 or 4 concert halls on earth, the Concertgebouw (thus the orchestra's name) in Amsterdam.
I've heard music there, and there's truly a sense of sound being present in the air around you.
"
The multichannel program on the RCO Live SACDs (there are dozens) get this last aspect right; so did the Bienville Suite, nearly to the same degree, despite the presence of only two channels. My concern when Duke told me about the rear-firing drivers was that this would impart some generic, Bose-like spaciousness to the recording, but that wasn't the case—
what I heard was the unique acoustic signature of the Concertgebouw." [emphasis Duke's]
Here is the room, for context. The quasi-triangular speakers have rear-firing drivers whose responses were tailored to their task. You can also see two of the four small subs we used, peeking out from behind the main speakers. Photo by Scott Hull of Part-Time Audiophile.