do you get any front to back soundstage?

No they most certainly don't Bub. The newer stuff gets close to SOTA but the Olive kit was as good as mono in comparison with what was available out there. Having said that, mono is kinda cool.

But if imaging is so unimportant I wonder why producers and engineers go to such great lengths to create it?

 

Well, that's somewhat incoherent. And irrelevant to the point it answered. And I think just plain wrong...

An interesting point when considering definitions is that 'stereo' means 'solid'...

Paul

 

Its not irrelevant or wrong. Again, look at the stereo equations. The speakers must be setup at 30 degrees to normal for the image to work properly.

 

Anex is right Paul, the original Alan Blumlein stereo paper accepted that widening the listening angle beyond this (or moving the head) resulted in unstability of the phantom images that make up the soundstage.

The classic result is the hole in the middle but some Phillips research in the 40's identified that it also could result in the illusion of a height element.

So if you are interested in recreating the stereo image as intended, you have to follow certain guidelines. If you are not interested in stereo, then I fail to see why you don't stick to one large corner mounted horn speaker!

 

Good question. (IMO)

 

Was there any mention of having them too far toed in?

I have mine aimed so they cross over about 2ft behind my listening position. If they are toed in more the centre image is still good but the bits between seem to disappear and I either hear stuff from left/right or centre. Toed out less and I get a more 'diffuse' sound but the centre image suffers.

 

yeah yeah yeah!!

how about 4 though? might aswell

 

Might be something to do with woofers being below tweeters in most setups?

It's also, to some extent, that you just expect low bass sounds to come from "down there" and high HF sounds to come from "up there".

Michael.

 

I suspect it is also dependent upon axial response of the speakers and phase (vs. frequency - ie. crossover effects) so different speakers will produce different imaging for the same angle, and their optimimum imaging at different angles
....And room effects of reflected sounds from adjacent surfaces will also affect the 'sweet spot' and 'optimum angle' of the speakers.

In other words...
- some speakers will image better than others
- some speakers will image better at certain frequencies than others
- some speakers will have a different 'optimum' toe-in angle to others
- any speaker will have a different optimum angle dependent upon the listening room and relative location to the listener

 

It's certainly there in real life. A lot of my live music experience is of chamber choirs, soloists and small musical ensembles in a wide variety of churches, cathedrals, restaurants, meeting rooms (civic halls, church halls etc.) and ordinary (household) rooms, as well as simply listing to things around me - at work and at home. And depth (distance) information is definitely what I hear in real life (although, particularly in the case of, say, a large concert hall, often less so than I hear via a stereo system).

I don't hear depth information when I listen to live (amplified) bands, whether in large or small venues. Actually, in these circumstances I don't usually hear much apart from dstortion.

Which doesn't mean you should dismiss what other people want - simply accept a difference in priority and what constitutes personal audio nirvana.

Slightly different argument, and wouldn't want to disagree with what is important to you.

With a multi-tracked recording, of course they're 'engineer sound effects', but the fact you can hear depth means its something your hearing system can detect and therefore it's a set of rules/guides/conclusions that your brain has learnt from what it has heard in real life.

Get what you're saying? - Yes - imaging and depth are of limited (no) musical importance to you, and you're probably right. But who else said the only emotional involvelment is getting excited because a guitar appears off axis?

Try it, I don't think you'll like it. (To my ears) There's a difference between mono from a stereo system (a spread of sound coming from somewhere in space) and a single speaker (definitely determined as coming from a point source and therefore somewhat 'constrained')

Yes you do - see comment above

Not with acoustic ensembles.

Surprisingly they are, because they recreate the sound patterns which our hearing system interprets as depth

One the one hand, I don't spend most of my free time singing and making music to be told that my musical interest is in 'illusion'. On the other hand it's all an illusion, and you wouldn't be interested in audio if you weren't interested in that illusion. It's just which bits of the illusion you believe are most important.

Oh yes, and I'm definitely interested in technology... to understand how we interpret 'music' and can reproduce it with a greater illusion of reality.

Quite right. Imaging isn't the be-all and end-all of music (in fact it's relatively unimportant (IMO)) but it is part of the total 'illusion of reality'

 

Ah, it all depends on your perception of 'normal'

...and conversely your perception of abnormal

(because, of course, there is no grey in between - we must pass immediately from the happy, warm acceptable state that is identified as 'normal' into that abyss that can only be described as 'abnormal'. Anyone who dares allow their concepts to stray a hairs-breadth away from 'normal' is, of course to be castigated, publicly insulted, to have scorn thrown upon their every thought - for, of course, by definition the posession of one 'abnormal' thought means that all other thoughts must also be abnormal - and to be cast out of society)

 

Wow Chris, you spend a lot of time quoting

Naim stereo does excellent stereo with the speakers flat against the wall so that kind of fcuks up the Technical paper some geezer wrote in the 40s.

Chris, I may well not have been to as many concerts as yourself. However the only concert I attended that gave any sense of depth (as opposed to a wall of sound) was Pink Floyd. They were only able to provide depth because they had a six (as I could count anyway) speaker set up around the hall.

The fact I can point out where the drums are coming from does not to me indicate depth of sound, only what my eyes are telling me.

And once more for clarity. A speaker cannot fire out the sound of a guitar and have it stop one metre in the room, I refer you back to the pathetic comment earlier in the thread about how someone was able to walk amongst the soundstage.

Not possible with two speakers.

 

Gary,

The human auditory system is developed to locate images in three dimensions.

One of the reasons that the stereo image is not percieved as being "real" is the manner of the recording. The use of digital reverb (as is common on most studio recordings) will give an impression of depth/distance. It is however, merely one of the parameters used by the brain to locate sounds in three dimensions and consequently will never be totally convincing if used alone.

It would be safe to say that current recording techniques are sufficient to allow a reasonable impression of depth, by synthesising one or more of the components used by the brain in the location process but I would agree that the "walk in soundstage" is little more than a dream in most cases. And of course it is recording specific.

One problem appears to be that most engineers fail to realise that loudspeaker stereo relies on the conversion of intensity differences to phase differences around the head. Many sound engineers have still not adapted to stereo, preferring "multiple-mono" recording strategies.

The capacity of wholly convincing three dimensional imaging does IMO exist, and could be encoded on CD without issue. Indeed binaural recordings can be very impressive but of course require the use of headphones (often sounding worse through loudspeakers). But most multimiked recordings are compromised to begin with and then of course, there's your room!

When sound passes across the head from a single source, the unequal distances from the source to each ear introduce a tiny time-delay, and the acoustic properties of the head and pinnae alter both high-frequency response and loudness. When the entire acoustic environment of the head, neck, and upper torso is taken into account, this complex effect is known as the ARTF (anatomical-related transfer function), or HRTF when the effect of the head alone is considered.

The auditory portions of the nervous system then process this information to create additional "dimensions" of the auditory experience. When this information is missing, audio reproduction is not experienced as being fully "real."

Given that the perception of image relies, as said above, on the brain processing loudness and phase differences from around the head, and given the way in which recorded sound has both it's loudness and phase altered substantially by the listening room, is it any wonder that we struggle to get a totally convincing image at the listening position?

Pointing out the difficulties is different to suggesting it does not exist. It is simply a challenge to maximise it. And IMO Naim's loudspeakers, with their HF units being placed so close to walls, are compromised in that the HF portion of the sound arrives with it's phase and loudness corrupted by the room boundaries regardless of the listening position. This applies to any wall mount loudspeaker I suspect, and is one of the reasons that depth perception increases when the monitors are in free space and the listening position is in the nearfield.

 

Nice posts, ChrisPa, I appreciate a singer's POV and I know what you're talking about.

 

I'm with Gary on this one. I rarely hear soundstage at live performances and as a result find it a distraction when it is added to recordings. You may like it but in my book it just ain't natural.

 

I find it best to put my replies in context. It seems to me that most of the rambling disgreements on this board occur as a result of the discussion being (rapidly) twisted away from what has actually been said in previous posts.

No, it just says that your mileage, with the equipment you have, will be different to that experienced in the original papers/experiments.

Obviously. If a band is simply using a pair of speakers, then the likelihood of you being in any sort of stereo 'sweet spot' is approximately zero.

And, the amount of distortion being produced by most bands' kit is further adding to (and therefore bu**ering up) the phase information your brain needs for spatial interpretation.

But none of that means that spatial information does not exist in real life and cannot be reproduced with a stereo pair. It does and it can. If it's not important to you, then that's fine, but it's not the same as being unreal or a form of delusion to others.

Remove all the amplification, put a drum kit in some form of meeting room/village hall, and then wander around, and tell me your hearing system can't work out where the drum kit is. In quite a few of the concerts I perform in I end up in a choir located behind the orchestra, and I certainly can hear where the percussion is relative to the brass, wind, strings etc. (they're distributed all around me) ... and it's nothing to do with keeping my eyes open

'A speaker cannot fire out the sound of a guitar and have it stop one metre in the room' - A stereo pair of speakers with the listener in the correct relative position can persuade your brain that that is where the guitar is located.

'walk amongst the soundstage' never been able to do that (if nothing else, as you move you muck up the depth information your brain's looking for), but I have heard (stereo audio system sound stages) that give me the sense of listening to a 'scale model' of the sound stage. If someone chooses to wax lyrical with the metaphor of 'walking among the soundstage' then let them - not happened to me

And, actually, as I alluded to in an earlier post, in my experience, there is often (ususally) a more concrete location to the image from a stereo system than I hear in real life - but that doesn't ruin the quality or enjoyment of what I hear from the stereo system.

I believe SM has it about right in post #93 (other than me not being able to pass personal comment on Naim loudspeakers) although from my experience I do have general agreement that the speakers need to be away from back walls to get the best image of depth.

BTW & slightly OT, IME 5 channel sound sytems are crap at depth in comparision to a good stereo. They're great at placing sounds within the circus ring of the speakers, but do nothing to let the sound escape and spread around the (especially the front) speakers. They are a lazy way of creating spatial information because they subsume the detailed spatial information which our hearing systems listen for. But then maybe I haven't heard the appropriate multi-channel system yet (very likely)

 

If you listen to amplified bands, then you are unlikely to

It's not 'added' - you simply have a system where your brain is able to interpret the sounds as having spatial information - because they do

It is natural.

It seems to me that both you and Gary are doing the right thing. If you find it a distraction, then tailor your system to remove the distraction. Well done.

But please don't let's have anyone say it doesn't exist or have implications that those who appreciate it are deluding themsleves
about 'reality'

OT - I have this underlying desire to hold a bake off where we compare a good system to some real instruments/voice. I think for most the comparison would be fascinating.

 

Gary: the 1m thing, no course it can't stop 1m in the room, you wouldn't hear it then but just think about how we percieve depth, if I stood 1m into your room playing guitar you'd hear it right? Because the sound has travelled across the room to you, its not stopped anywhere, but you can localize where I am (forgetting visual cues) as the sound contains the correct cues for you to locate me. Its perfectly possible for stereo speakers to reproduce that. Height is pretty much the only real limitation on stereo which is probably why it has remained so popular for so long.

 

PPPS. and completely OT, I'll be singing in one of the choirs I sing with, live tomorrow morning on the Radio 4 Sunday Worship (this one's supposed to be with Ken Dodd, who, in this instance, isn't live, but the rest of the broadcast is live)

 

Yes but I fear we may be getting lost in translation.

Someone earlier said that they were able to walk amongst the soundstage. I gathered from that they stood up from the sweet spot moved forward and was able to hear the guitar that was front left now directly left.

That is not possible, that is a lie.

I am fully aware that the human can pinpoint sounds, IMO this has little relevence to this converstation, which admitadly I seem to have knocked well off topic, which was Depth in recordings I find distracts from the music because it has been set in an egineering studio.

However I can detect the magic of recordings done with everyone in the same room or with two mics, this then is true recording and what comes from that can provide the listener with clear clues as to where the instruments are placed. Some engineer sticking phsase corrections to give that impression are not good, IMO.

As has been correctly stated some of this goes right out the windw iwth electronica as well. But again where it has been used to excess I find distracting, better electronica treats the listener with respect and leaves sounds in position.

The best if extreme example I can give is Hendrixes rather over zelous use of left right pan on onw of his albums, I forget which now.

It was 'as the artist intended', but by god it seriously detracts from the excellent music.