A Learned Experience

[Mallette]

Spent a relaxing afternoon in my "library in progress" yesterday. I set up a modest system with one of my Pany Class D recievers, a computer, and a pair of Frazier Mark Vs. The PAW scored a pair of marvelous recliners. They aren't the huge things you might think, They're upholstered and have wood legs like formal living room furniture, but more comfortable and fully reclining. Perfect for a library/listening room.

Family was out, so I kicked back with a beer and the extraordinary early Telarc CD of Michael Murray at the organ of St. John the Devine. It was done in the early 80s when CDs pretty much uniformly sucked, but this one was and remains a winner with LP like transparency with no harsh edges at all. The Franck Chorale #2 in B minor is the best recording of that noble and inspiring work I've ever heard and I was transported to the interior of St. John. One of the great fortes of the smaller Fraziers is their graceful rolloff of low bass. They get lower than speakers their size should, and do so cleanly and with authority while not attempting to do things they shouldn't. The Franck has that "quiet" bass I love so much and it came across wonderfully.

However, it was such a great experience I got to wondering why and realized how much a "learned" experience 2 channel is. It doesn't provide remotely enough information to reproduce a space like a cathedral and yet I realized my brain was sorting it all out in spite of the shortcomings of the medium. It's why the the numbers of 2 channel lovers have gradually decreased over the years to a niche. Younger people hear it as we once heard mono in the early days...dated, and missing the immersion they get from movies in surround. Of course, our rejection of attempts to date with surround are justified. While all the steering and mixing of movies works to produce an exciting environment music doesn't fair too well in the same situation and the enginners just don't seem to be getting it yet. My experiments with SoundCube a few years back produced a downright spooky immersion, but the available medium for such efforts is pretty well limited to DVD-A and that is a dead horse. It's a shame the Powers haven't made DSD mastering for multichannel available to the little guys, as they might well breathe life into a stalled technology. Of course, we audiophiles don't constitute enough market for them to care so it's probably not going to happen soon. Just as good, if not better, would be a standardized playback system for discrete multiple channel audio files. This is how I achieved my own "ideal" surround environment, but there is no way to distribute it in a "plug and play" way.

I believe surround will come, though it's hard to say from what source or sources. If even one of the player providers, Winamp, Media Monky, J River, whoever, would offer a multichannel player it might do the trick.

Anyway, I followed the Frank with the marvelous edition I have of Miles Davis "Kind of Blue." Pretty much the same experience. That recording is about as "perfect storm" as it gets with Miles at perhaps his moment of perfection and engineering that is flawless. Cymbals in particular shimmer here as in very few other recordings.

However, I experienced that same sense of the brain doing a lot of filling in of the sides and rear. Of course, it's effortless given 40 years of practice but I still crave to be "in the room" with Miles rather than listiening through an open window.

Of course, I'll take the window given there is no alternative. However, I still hope to be around when we have both an "audiophile grade" surround medium, new recordings using "capture the space" approaches to surround rather than attempting to create a space artificially, and processes to accurately recover and redirect the surround information that exists on two mike stereo recordings.

I remain convinced it will come.

Dave

[Chris A]

Dave,

I assume that you have an opinion of the "quality control authority", a.k.a., THX... has Tomlinson Holman helped or hurt multichannel become more realistic (in your opinion)?

Chris

[Mallette]

Dave,

I assume that you have an opinion of the "quality control authority", a.k.a., THX... has Tomlinson Holman helped or hurt multichannel become more realistic (in your opinion)?

Chris

Obviously hasn't hurt it any...[]

Successful surround, like all recording, is in the hands of the engineer. Gimme an old Teac 3340 four track deck and I'll deliver a space you can explore. Unfortunately, I can't deliver it to you without a hassle. Problem is that delivery systems that "mom and pop" can use to get recordings to the listener are either inadequate or too expensive. While it may be a while, my hope is on "smart" files that include directional information in each track that can be steered by a non-proprietary system to the correct, or most correct available, channel.

Yes, there are proprietary systems that multiplex, etc, but I am talking about metatagging here. It's the kind of thing an open source movement would do if there were such a thing for audiophiles.

My best surround was discrete wav files played back via Sound Forge. Raw, no mixer or any other processing applied. I do not know where the commercial surround releases go wrong, but they do so in a big way and I've yet to hear anything I'd confuse with reality. A truly realistic surround audio field would be downright dangerous and scary in the wrong hands!

Dave

PS - Bear in mind that Dolby Labs and LucasFilm are businesses and have little interest in establishing open standards. A couple of affordable programs for encoding DVD-A became availalble too late, and DVD-A never seemed "discrete" as it appeared to be on paper. I made a few test ones and the surround was just not the same as discrete playback. Could have been operator error, but these were simple packages and I made every attempt to be as direct as possible.

[Quiet_Hollow]

It would help if the producers mentioned, on the album, how the content was mic'd or mixed. Then a purist listener could place their speakers accordingly. Binaural recordings can get down-right spooky real, but with the headphone caveat. Listening to low dispersion nearfield monitors in a quasi-anechoic environment could certainly pull off the immersive effect too. But we're still stuck with what makes the final cut in the source. I think the metadata idea would be very slick. All that would have to be figured out is what constitutes a universal system transfer function for comparison. [:|]

[Mallette]

I think the metadata idea would be very slick. All that would have to be figured out is what constitutes a universal system transfer function for comparison.

Yezzir, there's the rub. All we need is a program to decode and steer. Problem would be that the level of Linux (or Windoze) programmer with the skills to do it probably isn't an audiophile...

However, it's certainly doable. There is a commercial effort underway to do it as we speak. Maybe someone can refresh my memory as we discussed it here a while back. Anyway, I understand their goal is absolute positioning....that is, if you had a room whose walls were made of 4" full range drivers, the sound would be directed to a specific point. If you only had a pair of speakers, the signal would be blended left to right across the soundstage as if two mikes were used.

That's the theory, and I don't see any insurmmountable problems including routing the amplification precisely to where it's needed and keeping the load balanced.

OK, that's reproduction. Getting the info into the channel file isn't a big deal at all.

OTOH, I'd be happy with a simple scheme to keep 4 wav files in thier original state and get them to 4 speakers. I rather doubt I could afford the system above and 4 speakers works very well, thank you, when fed with a 4 mike 360 degree soundfield.

Anyway, at the current rate of progress I don't expect to hear anything like realistic surround location recordings anytime soon.

Dave

[dtel]

Blu Ray is helping alot with multi channel, I was surprised at the difference, but I would still rather a good 2 Ch recording.

Sounds like nice recliners.

[oldtimer]

Pics of the recliners please....[H]

[Mallette]

Pics of the recliners please....

They're good. Told the PAW I'd love to have three more for the new listening room when that happens, though I think these are a rare find of looks and comfort.

I'll get something in once I get the library set. We've gotta get a couple of young men to get the books and shelves up there. I am past that, I fear...

Dave

[Mallette]

Thanks for the Pmail links, QH. These psycho acoustic schemes often work very well. However, none are as successful as a real acoustic image done with 4 mikes placed to record a perfect 360 degree coverage. The most perfect mike for this purpose (though not my favorite mike) is the Crown PZM. 4 of them mounted at 90 degrees to each other overlap coverage about as cleanly as is possible and do not produce any phase issues. When you sit in the middle of 4 identical speakers playing back the 4 streams you have the perfect inverse of the recording setup. It doesn't get much better than that for reproducing an acoustic space/time event.

The psycho acoustic schema don't quite get it perfect due to the brains ability to detect being fooled by phase and time. Same reason some of us can always detect a mixer no matter how clean or expertly used. It changes natural relationships in a way that simply cannot completely satisfy the "organic" audiophile.

Of course, audiophiles are such a minute portion of the population that "instant" or "artificial" will continue to rule as most "listeners" (mainly watchers with subwoofers) could care less.

We'll only get satisfaction as technology continues to trickle down and eventually provides a solution hacked from commercial and open source projects targeting other things.

Dave

[Marvel]

Gimme an old Teac 3340 four track deck and I'll deliver a space you can explore.

Even a 2340 would work for most, as a playback device. I have a 3340S sitting here gathering dust.

My first RTR was the TEAC TCA-42, but for playback only, the TCA-40 would work great for 4 channel, even though it only did 7 3/4 ips.

Bruce

[Mallette]

Did some browsing on that Bedini site. Hard to tell if he is genious or certifiable.

Just like Tesla. Did the Powers do such a job on Tesla we still can't determine if he was a da Vinci or a nut case? AC remains an incredible leap of genious, yet his aether theories of power transmission are considered lunacy. Mark Twain swears on a stack of bibles he walked into Tesla's lab to find him levitated in a blue glow one time.

Bedini's site rambles and so does he. The audio demos are pretty cool, but there is no way to determine the source of the files so they don't prove much. He has pictures of an electric healing machine...Okies.

Not totall dismissing him...or Tesla. I am not qualified to do so. When it comes to Tesla credible people observed incredible things from his hands, and powerful people destroyed his large scale experiments before they could be tested.

All very strange, indeed. Especially in a 2 channel forum...[:^)]

Dave

[Mallette]

Gimme an old Teac 3340 four track deck and I'll deliver a space you can explore.

Even a 2340 would work for most, as a playback device. I have a 3340S sitting here gathering dust.

My first RTR was the TEAC TCA-42, but for playback only, the TCA-40 would work great for 4 channel, even though it only did 7 3/4 ips.

Bruce

Love the 3340S. Love to have one...

I suspect a lot of audio history was made on those. It put multi-track in the hands of the people.

Dave

[DrWho]

Yezzir, there's the rub. All we need is a
program to decode and steer. Problem would be that the level of Linux
(or Windoze) programmer with the skills to do it probably isn't an
audiophile...

The problem is that neither OS allows the
time sensitive bit streams that such a system would require. Even a
single Dolby/DTS digital bitstream can get easily interrupted and is
very hardware dependant.

In college I spent a really long time with the help of some
really good programmers to find/create a generic multi-channel framework, but
it's an incredibly complicated problem...which at the end of the day is begging for a dedicated hardware implementation, but then that's not
accessible to a wide enough audience.

With all that in mind, I
have busted out some multi-tracking studio software and done some of my
own surround mixes and whatnot, but the problem I always run into is
that all the speakers in my setup aren't the same....which I personally
find extremely distracting. I've actually given up on the idea of
surround sound unless all the speakers are identical - and even then,
the nearfield room acoustics surrounding each speaker can't be
guaranteed to be the same either.

I also find it interesting how
many people will pause a movie, or talk during a movie to point out how
awesome the surround effects were. I've thought a lot about this and
shouldn't the system draw you deeper into the movie so that you're not
objectively noticing these effects? There's nothing wrong with getting
enjoyment from the system itself, but if you're more interested in the
movie itself, then is such a system really improving your enjoyment of
the movie?

Then I start thinking about the holographic 2-channel
sound and start to question similar things....are we enjoying the gear
or the music itself? At the end of the day, a really good song is still a
really good song on my crappy blown out car speakers, and the most
awesome 2-channel home setup. I defniitely enjoy the gear and find audio
an incredibly deep engineering design problem which makes it even more
fun, and don't see anything wrong with that. But if we're claiming the
music as the goal of our systems, then I think the priorities shift
quite a bit...

Well I'm just rambling and my lunch break is over,
but I think the topic of what we're trying to achieve is in fact a very
interesting subject.

[Chris A]

The problem is that neither OS allows the time-sensitive bitstreams that such a system would require. Even a single Dolby/DTS digital bitstream can get easily interrupted and is very hardware dependent.

Select from the following OSs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTOS#Examples

Chris

[Mallette]

Mike, have you read my paper on the subject? It's still mbsdar.com. It's about the only link working as someone was letting me use server space for the big audio files and apparently no more. I appreciate it, whoever it was. Wish I could figure out port forwarding so I could use my own...

Anyway, the system described there works, and works well. Identical speakers are best, but not mandatory. I used 4 Frazier's to test it and my test subjects all were completely fooled by the surround illusion in jerking around to look at a door that "opened," but only in the recording. Good fun.

I still have the one location recording I did with the system, but it is huge at 4X24/96.

Mixing surround just doesn't seem to work well, or there are issues engineers haven't figured out. Using the system I describe makes the process organic such that playback is the precise inverse of recording.

SoundCube lives, and i hope to be able to return to these experiments someday.

Dave

[Quiet_Hollow]

All very strange, indeed. Especially in a 2 channel forum...

It's all good. He's not certifiable. Bedini was building amps for a good while, and the B.A.S.E. (the hardware version) is not unknown to broadcast audio. The audio files are his attempts at a plug-in for software emulation of his hardware. That website, well, the guy has got a ton of work on his plate.

If one looks into it enough (and I mean read , re-read, re-read again even slower from multiple sources, then look at the math) you'll realize Tesla was working well within the confines of mother nature....it's just that nature is truly that spectacular.

[Mallette]

If one looks into it enough (and I mean read , re-read, re-read again even slower from multiple sources, then look at the math) you'll realize Tesla was working well within the confines of mother nature....it's just that nature is truly that spectacular.

That being the case one winds up wondering why no one every tried his power schema on the scale he said was required for it to work. You wind up with:

1. Tesla was wrong.

2. Scientist are bullheaded.

3. The conspiracy claimed by so many in Tesla's name is for real and the "powers" don't want free energy for all.

None of the above is a very satisfying answer.

In any event, I've begun a bit of study of Walter Russell. No way I can either comprehend or make any judgements on his "science," but I find his theology to be oddly in line with my own.

Dave

[Don Richard]

Family was out, so I kicked back with a beer and the extraordinary early Telarc CD of Michael Murray at the organ of St. John the Devine. It was done in the early 80s when CDs pretty much uniformly sucked, but this one was and remains a winner with LP like transparency with no harsh edges at all.

I must have missed that one. I checked and found I had 2 Michael Murray Telarc discs recorded at other locations. It seems Murray traveled about during that time recording for Telarc, including the great organ at Methuen and the twin organs at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, reputedly the largest organ in the world:

[Mallette]

Yezzir, DR, I have the Methuen on LP. Very fine as well. If you like these, you'll definitely like the St. John as well. It's all good, but that Franck B minor chorale is definitive both in engineering as well as performance.

Dave

[Don Richard]

As far as recordings go, I would like to hear a 4 channel recording of the above pictured organs at the First Congregational Church. There are two sets of pipes as shown on the album cover facing across from each other located in a tee shaped nave in this large building and that could be a natural match for that style of recording. Better yet, I would like to hear them live, maybe on the next trip to LA.