bludragon Wrote: > I have to say I've never got the whole soundstage thing. Sure, I can > easily notice this sound is from the left, this is in the middle etc, > but to notice this sound is in the middle, but behind that one seems > beyond me. > > Or maybe I just don't listen to any music where this matters?
A lot of it comes down to psychoacoustics, or the ability of the brain to place sounds based on clues in the audio combined with visuals (or imagined visuals). So, a drum at mid volume is either close by being played softly, or further away. If another drum is louder, then it's probably in front. This, combined with filtering, reverb and other room acoustics effects gives placement - the shape of the ear modifies the sounds we hear, mimic that and you can fool the brain into all sorts of instrument placement. So an accurate transducer should replay all this relative placement of the instruments (or imagined as most of it is created on the mixing desk). Well recorded drums are a b*gger to get right, but when they are well recorded they can sound fantastic. My favourite is still from the 70's and the albums by the Tubes, some of the drum patterns and rolls sound like you're sitting in the middle of the kit, as does Frank Zappa's albums from that era, Sheik Yerbouti is a good example (I say that because I was at the recording at the Apollo in London and got near front row seats, one of the best ever concerts I went to, I was heavily into Punk and Zappa really opened my ears to musicianship.) I've also worked with Dolby 3D sound for games and you can even get some vertical placement as well. In those cases it's down to HRTF (Head Relative Transform Functions) which model the effect that the shape of the ear has on the sounds you hear. If you think about it the human ear is designed to hear sounds from the front and is shaped accordingly, sounds from the back are affected by the shape of the ear performing filtering on the sound. It's impressive if done right, if not HiFi exactly! I can hear depth to the sound stage on my system, height, perhaps not because I don't think it is mixed in, but in theory you could get that as well by HRTF modification of the sound, but then it gets tiring to listen to for any length of time. Don't forget that you listen through stereo and look how well you can place sounds because of ear shape, so placement of sounds through stereo speakers is entirely possible - you should expect it from an accurate system and correctly recorded music. Sometimes twin mike recordings are best for this. Paul -- CardinalFang ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CardinalFang's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=962 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18878 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
