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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: 2+3 surround sound??
Post Subject: Hafler effectPosted by Bill on: 7/16/2021
I feel that the correct objective of home music listening should be to reproduce as closely as possible what one can enjoy in a great concert hall with great musicians.Thus, I have been a advocate for surround processing for years. As stereo replaced mono, so should surround replace stereo.
I never go to Outdoor concerts as I prefer listening to music in a concert hall. A recording engineer friend who has done recorfdings in every major New York concert hall did some measurements and showed that most of the sound you hear in a concert hall is from the hall itself and not the musicians unless one sits in the first couple of rows. While stereo can give a perceived image of a concert stage with a back and possibly some side wall, it cannot give the effect of the concert hall side and back walls, ceiling and surrounding furniture and people reflections and sounds that makes up the concert listening experience.
Of course, like with stereo replacing mono, correct recording and playback is necessary with proper but not excessive multimiking and processing, as with stereo.
About 30 years ago, before digital processing, to get some hall sound, I used the so-called Hafler effect. One put a speaker in the back of the room and either used the plus side of each stereo front channel output to the two inputs of the back speaker, or sent the left and right signals through the use of the pass through of the front preamp to a rear amplifier and connected the two positive outputs to the speaker. Thus the rear channel would play back some of the room sound recorded while blocking out most of the front information.
As for the front center channel you could place two speakers, one on top of the other, tweeter next to tweeter, and play left and right channels through them. Or get a preamp with a mono mixer and feed to one speaker placed a couple of feet behind the left and right speaker., still using the original analog output to the main speakers.
Of course, all this could be precluded by doing digital signal processing using a top notch processor with as many surround channels as required. You could even feed your analog signals directly to the front left and right channels to keep their purity.
I went the other way, digitized all of my analog 15 ips master tapes and vinyl with an ampex 351 tape deck and walker proscenium turntable and curl phono stage to 24/ 88 or 96 and now use a Trinnov processor for 16 channels. I believe Romy was impressed with the effect.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site