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Posted by Paul S on
04-06-2024
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Easy to understand people investing in playback that includes a sense of space. In my own case, the more "space" I get, the more I want... to a point. So far, I have not been willing to sacrifice Musical power and density to get more "spatial cues". Neither have I gotten around to "mid-fi rear channels" yet, although this is now on my bucket list. Anyway, I have been meaning to start this thread for a while, with the idea of discussing the "sonic aspects of space in home audio", along with any ramifications that might attend efforts to "create space at home".
Paul S
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Posted by rowuk on
04-07-2024
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Space means so many things at the same time:
1) the size of the venue
2) the location of the individual instruments
3) the space between the instruments
4) the size of the instrument
Unfortunately, we can only guess about the original venue unless we have a video. If our presentation is "plausible" then I am usually happy. My reference for #4 is a DG record of Schuberts "Schöne Müllerin" with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore (DG2530 544). The piano has proper "weight" and "size" and Fischer-Dieskau has a very "humanlike" location in the stereo spread. One of the technically most satisfying recordings that I own.
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Posted by Paul S on
04-07-2024
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All you mention, Robin, and more. So, what is it that informs us of these things? I think it is simplistic to say it is UHF or ULF, even though these play into it. I believe there are also matters of "phase", and frequency response as one hears it while listening. I think "real life spatial cues" may be different than what we settle for from playback, and that "lifelike" space rendered during playback can actually surprise or even startle us. I am being very general now largely because I need to be somewhere else as I type this, but I hope to close in on what we are hearing that suggests space to us. Ideally, whatever it is, we want it to be different for different recordings, etc., and preferably "plausible" for all recordings, either despite or because they are different, one from another.
Paul S
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Posted by Romy the Cat on
04-08-2024
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I agree with Rowuk, but I would like to add one more aspect
that, I feel, is much more important than anything else. We universally
understand that bedroom pajamas are clothing to wear at home and not clothing to
go, let's say, to work. Why? Over thousands of years, the choice of materials,
designs, and colors for the pajamas was mentally associated with people as
something private. The very same is true with sound. Our hearing mechanisms and
the capacity of the human brain to process acquired sounds are based upon which
our musical instruments are designed, and the theory of musical harmony,
orchestration, and many other musical aspects are recognized. If we have a
simple guitar playing in our living room and we are completely blind, we
clearly understand if it is a private play or a public performance. Our brain
has a deeply sited mechanism to knowledge reverberation time in heard sound and
reconstructs a mental picture of performing avenue. Am I saying that we know if
it is a public or private performance? Yes, but it is not the objective.
Here is where the second factor of hearing kicks in. Musical
harmony has a full impact on us when we can hear the “natural” environment. Try
to play a trumpet in your closet or a violin in an anechoic chamber, and you
will hardly understand what instrument is playing and, most importantly, what
the instruments are trying to express with sound. With the listening systems we
experience in our 500-600 hundred square feet listening rooms, we clearly have
a clear message that it is a boutique sound reproduction effort. In my view, there
is no way to talk about proper sound until we exceed 1.5 seconds of
reverberation time at 60Hz. The sound in the 500-600 hundred square feet room
with 0.3 -0.5 seconds at 60hz cannot produce a sound that has a fully intended esthetical
and ethical payload to the listener. This is why I greatly support reverberation
injection in truly high-end audio. I very much do not support having playback
in vast listening spaces. It has its complications, but with the proper LF infusion,
our typical 500-600 hundred square feet of listening rooms can take our brain
to a very comfortable listening mode.
It is interesting how high-end audio has hugely progressed into
the realm of sound reproduction but altogether avoided the subject of space
reproduction. From my current standing, I feel if a person spends more than,
let's say, $20,000 for playback, then instead of buying new speakers, new
amplifiers, or new cable elevators, the best investment would be to deal with room
acoustics. There is a trick in it. Contemporary “high-end audio knowledge” does
not offer a person any understanding or benefits of longer reverberation time;
it just insists that a person must kill reverberation time in high frequencies
instead of extending it at low frequencies. Very unfortunate. To me, most of
the acoustic efforts in the typically high-end audio listening rooms look like
an attempt by a castrated person to produce a child.
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Posted by rowuk on
04-09-2024
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Well, I don't know if I should be ashamed of playing my trumpet in the closet...
Actually, I practice often with a practice mute that works like a bass reflex speaker in reverse - killing most of the volume of tone but with a port to allow me to breathe at regular intervals.
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Posted by Romy the Cat on
04-09-2024
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Practicing in a Closet has completely different objectives
and is well-used by musicians as killing the reflections highlights technical errors.
I do not think anybody would perform in a closet-like acoustic space, in
particular with a trumpet.>>
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Posted by Paul S on
04-09-2024
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So far, I am listening without specialized electro-mechanical
delay enhancement, so any space I am hearing is either a matter of "cues" captured during recordings, cues added to recordings by engineers or similar,
or they are sonic artifacts resulting from my stereo speakers and/or stereo speaker/room
interactions. I have shared that The Loudspeakers have a “flat frequency
response” (as measured during Troels’ developmental testing), and that they are
powerful FR. I have not done RTA in my room, and I may never do it, but it’s
safe to say, I think, that the “response curve” at my listening position is
likely nowhere near flat. I can say that whatever is preserved/presented to me
by my stereo speakers includes information
that suggests space and soundstage to me as I listen. I do not get space from
every recording at this time, and some recordings seem to do this better than
others; but the cases where it “works” prove that it can happen. Like Romy
says, I am not listening with exactly the same sonic expectations I bring to
the concert hall, etc. Of course not. So far, it seems to me that the space I
get is not a quality that comes from The Loudspeakers themselves but it seems
rather to be that they can do “space” if it’s “in the recording”.
Paul S
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Posted by Bill on
04-13-2024
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Yes, you are correct Paul that the space must be in the recording. Most don't have it, especially multi mike recordings and digital. Analog two mike have the best stereo, especially spaced Omni’s, and digital recordings from analog masters have more than straight digital. Higher bit rate digital original recordings have more than 16 bit.But stereo playback can only give the stage ambiance correctly, not the hall. Hall sound embedded in the best two channel recording usually just muddies the stage ambiance.Only a listening room with correctly placed ambiance( not surround) speakers can give that concert hall feel. Only multi channel recordings, with multiple ambiance channels, or two track recordings holding ambiance information decoded with auro 3d, or to a lesser extent dts or Dolby, can give that feeling of concert hall space.As far as reverberation time, Romy is correct that the recording has to hold the milliseconds of time of the concert hall it was recorded in. Very few do, except multi channel recordings. Romy uses his Yamaha reverberation units to recreate the reverberation time of several concert halls, and I have found a way with my Trinnov prepro using auro 3d and changing the delay timing of the ambiance speakers to mimic the concert hall wall and ceiling response times. The ideal of course would be the ability of a pre pro to do both auro 3d decoding and concert hall reverberation recreation, but there is no prepro available yet to do that. Bill
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Posted by Paul S on
04-14-2024
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Thanks again for further explication, Bill. I appreciate that you are heavily invested in all this. Taking into account not only what I have been told but also what I've heard for myself, I think I can squeeze a bit more soundtage from my current set-up and sources. It sounds like the soundstage gets out into the room, suggesting space, but it is not fully enveloping at this point. I have never before had the power, range and articulation that I have now, but the room is big, also porous, and I may have gotten it about as charged as I can with just 2 speakers and no processing. I have lots of drivers to choose from for processesd "FR" rear "injection", +/- as Romy has described it, and my next post-rehab project will be along these lines. I've lost touch with the Hollywood sound Producer I bought my original Marantz MA9S2 amp from, but last I heard he was all digital, full (modified) surround, and still making his own recordings. I guess that's one way to get the Sound and the Space you want!
Best regards,
Paul S
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Posted by steverino on
04-17-2024
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As a practical matter any room length shorter than 60 feet (20 Hz) is going to chop bass note waves - the smaller the room the higher the frequency with wave chopping. Also because of the size of the bass note waves, human ears have trouble locating their source. There is thus a problem of producing bass notes in dynamic woofers because the bass note emanates from a small area. The problem is obviously not in producing the musical bass note frequency but rather in the unusual projection of bass notes into the listening space.
The easiest way to avoid such problems is to play music with no bass content. If that is not desired then there really is no true way with current technology around this problem of playing a recording made in one space to be then reproduced in a different space. We all have our idiosyncratic ways of dealing with this problem in our home systems. My own approach for those times I want to feel more immersion is simply to position myself within the nearfield of the speakers but close to the boundary line. But to each their own solution.
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Posted by Paul S on
04-17-2024
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Too true, Steve. As it happens, the distance between sidewalls just in front of my speakers is over 50 feet, and a wide hallway opens to large rooms along and at the end of its course. I have said all along in my The Loudspeakers thread that an "ongoing issue" for home hi-fi is the acoustic power needed to charge a room adequately, and, just as you say, LF and ULF are particular cases in point, especially with regard to "natural sound", such as Bruckner symphonies, etc., where the "real" acoustic matrix is obviously well beyond the capabilities of playback. Hence the title/header of the thread, "What Passes for Space... (etc)". Like Romy said, we wear metaphorical PJs when we listen to hi-fi, accepting synth delay injection, etc. Of course, the fact that "It's Impossible!" is part of the fun!
Best regards,
Paul S
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Posted by Romy the Cat on
04-18-2024
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I sincerely feel that all those conversations about space
and the rest of the Audio G-spot words are irrelevant until people who engage
in conversation are exposed to a properly implemented Auro 3d or any other objects-oriented
Space reconstruction algorithm. All that Dolby crap, or what I do with
reverberation injection, is not genuinely proper space reconstruction. Almost
is hypothetically promising, but unfortunately, it has a lot of compromises as
they are trying to replicate what Auro 3d is doing poorly. They cannot break the
Auro 3d patent and use angles instead of elevations, a methodologically
compromised concept. A correctly implemented Auro 3d is a very different
reality.
Now the question is, what doesn't mean “properly implemented
Auro 3d”? In my mind, unquestionably, the main right and left channels should
not be included in Auro 3d and should be sourced directly from our high-end
2-channel systems. The better quality we have Auro 3D surround channels, the
higher the degree of ratio between direct and time-delayed surround channels
the system can afford. My *feeling* is that if we use regular consumer Auro 3d
processors and receivers for a typical $1K to $5K, Then we should be able to
replicate a small listening avenue with stunning results, assuring that the sound
from main channels is not compromised. If we go for full replication of a large
concert hall, I think the quality of surround DACs, amplification, and speakers
should be higher. I do not know if the contemporary few thousand-dollar Auro-enabled
receivers can deliver this quality. Also, the modern, the most expensive Auro
3d enabled receivers would permit time alignment, but to do it manually with
nine channels would be kind of a pain in the ass.
Bill went in another direction, and he has his Auro 3d
processor, which has a full-time alignment functionality integrated with
crossover functionality. This is amazingly comfortable; if you change your
crossover slope or crossover point, it automatically calculates time alignment.
Insanely comfortable! Now, an open question is how the quality of his DACs
compared to the quality of our selected high-end discrete DACs and how his
digital filters compare to the quality of our discrete analog filters at the
line level. I do not believe in digital filtration; it is my conceptual belief
as I insist that topologically digital cannot change volumes without impact on
sound intelligibility. However, my position may or might not be correct in practical
applications.
One way or another, any conversation about space
reconstruction makes sense only after familiarizing with object-oriented space
reconstructions. If you plan to explore this opportunity for your system then
buy tickets to New Hampshire, visit Bill and learn about his results. You might
or might not like everything he does, but I assure you it will give you much to
discover about space construction. I am hugely surprised that all those audio
morons who write for audio publications celebrate each month a new amplifier,
new fuze box, or a new cable elevator but did not invest any efforts to learn
how proper space reconstructions can benefit the listening experience. They
might do it now, as I did not follow audio press for quite several years, but
at the time when I was an active reader, I did not see any looking in that
direction.
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Posted by Bill on
04-18-2024
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Trinnov audio, the maker of my pre-pro has come up with a way of cancelling the problem of smallish room bass called Waveforming. They place multiple subwoofers at be front and rear of the room, then using their technology, they time align them to remove the reflection of the bass from the back wall and the return reflection from the front wall. Haven't heard the effect myself, from what I’ve read about it it does work. Just takes two to eight subs on the front and back walls, in squares or rectangles, depending on room size, to accomplish it.
May try it when it’s available to the public if that occurs before I go to the old fogies home. Then, maybe Romy will have to step in.
https://www.trinnov.com/en/blog/posts/trinnov-releases-its-free-waveforming-online-design-tool/
Bill
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