Problems and concerns in what way? It is not exact same, but I thought still relevant and others may find it interesting.
Yes, thank you for sharing. I hadn't seen that article before. It was interesting. Here are some initial problems and concerns:
"The swell of the orchestra reaches a crescendo, all of the instruments together creating a swirling field of sound that fills the concert hall and surrounds the listener.
Anyone who has ever attended a classical music concert has probably encountered that joyous feeling of being completely immersed in sound. But most of us don’t have an orchestra at home, and a large orchestra probably would not fit in there, anyway. "
From the start, this article sets up a relative standard that many listeners may not have experienced in a genre that is likely less popular overall, and we already know that classical music concertgoers don't seem to fall into a single preference category (
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...cert-hall-acoustics-links-and-excerpts.51487/)
"
Engineers have been seeking ways to re-create the immersive experience of a live music performance ever since 1877, when Thomas Edison made the first crude recording of himself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
I'm not sure that a monophonic (presumable close-mic'd) recording of speech necessarily inspired these engineers to re-create an orchestral performance of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as an immersive experience.
"The ultimate goal has been high-fidelity audio, or hi-fi: the reproduction of sound without audible noise and distortion, based on
a flat frequency response within the human hearing range."
How does one define noise and distortion (including non-linear types like IMD and possibly hysteresis, as well as temporal ones like the relatively amplitude and timing with respect to early and late reflections, critical distance, so-called "reverberation" in small rooms), also where is the flat frequency response defined, like loudspeaker near-response, surely not the listening position?
"Even moderately priced consumer equipment can process sound accurately; given that humans only have two ears,
a simple stereo setup with two speakers would seem sufficient for the job."
Probably a single speaker would have been sufficient to reproduce Thomas Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
The authors seem to vacillate in their intended meaning of what "immersive" or "immersion" means. See the first paragraph above where they seem to suggest being surrounded by music, as opposed to the bottom of the page where they write "
A sense of immersion is crucial for a satisfying musical experience."
I have to ask you whether you truly believe the latter statement is really true. I think they're conflating subjectively experiential terms like sensorial spaciousness/envelopment/immersion with higher-order processing resulting in engagement/engrossment/?another term. As an example, VR creating the sensory experience of a different environment vs art/literature/music creating an experience transcending the environment in which you are physically, where the boundaries of your physical environment "fall away" and you are, for lack of a better term, enraptured.
I honestly hope that you may have had an experience at some point in your life, regardless of what others may describe as "immersion," like I am about to describe. I was a relatively talented but mediocre musician (piano and violin) growing up. As a freshman in college, my roommate happened to have his Sony Dream Machine mono clock/radio on to Karl Haas's Adventures in Good Music program, on this day featuring a memorial to the recently deceased Nathan Milstein and at this particular time playing his performance of Bach's Chaconne in D minor. I had played the other parts of the Partita but not this movement, nor had I ever looked at or heard this movement before. Nonetheless, I was utterly transfixed, and the walls of the small bedroom completely fell away in my perceptual awareness. Everything Olive and Toole write about listeners "hearing through rooms." sound quality, comb filtering--none of that was relevant.
The next one, for me, was the BSO playing the Nimrod variation by Elgar (from a good seat). Since then, my own lens with which to subjectively view all reported preference studies has been between a Sony clock/radio and the BSO in Boston Symphony Hall.
The flip side is listening to recordings like those by The Killers, less so Coldplay or Portishead, where I can have a satisfying musical experience, even in the car or a pub (or possibly more so), without "a sense of immersion." The dynamic compression actually suits The Killers for reproduction in a car or gym, whereas Coldplay and Portishead actually seem to take advantage of dynamic compression in tracks like "Fix You" or "Roads" where they successively add and subtract layers."
Probably it would be tedious for us both for me to keep going, but please let me know if otherwise.
