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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The invisible sound barrier

Post Subject: The invisible sound barrierPosted by haralanov on: 1/15/2012

There is a sound reproduction problem that is very rarely recognized as a problem at all, and it is among the most important problems in audio at all.

The feeling is that the sound is contained in an invisible balloon and it is not allowed to flow freely in the air towards the listener’s ears. The boundaries of this invisible balloon are just in front of the listener, right in front of his nose, and the musical river’s flow is stopped by the balloon’s surface, so the ears hear only the sound information of the musical river but not the expression of that musical river. It may sound stupid, but it is as the musical river “knocks” at the internal surface of the balloon and the listener can hear the attempts (!) of the musical river to perforate the invisible balloon, but not the musical river itself. The sound of Music is heard somehow indirectly (because it is "circling" around the loudspeakers) and the music is presented like popping balloons containing sound memories of the original music event and the listener does not have the feeling he/she is part of the musical event – the same as watching a concert at 17" TV. All this directly affects the musical expression of a given system.

Pretend you are on the beach and you are having a sun bath – you can feel the energy of the sunshine directly with your skin. Now pretend you are watching a movie and there is a scene where somebody is having a sun bath. What happens here? Now you can see there is sun, you clearly recognize it is sun, you know it is sun, but you can not feel the physical properties of that sun (light intensity, temperature, the "touch" of the sun rays and so on). Well, the same is with audio. The "invisible sound barrier" problem is one of the biggest problems in audio, it is the one that is extremely hard to be solved, and unfortunately it is the one that is recognized once in a blue moon…

Best regards,
P. Haralanov

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