magiccarpetride;684612 Wrote: > If I make a change/upgrade and report on this forum how that upgrade > extended the soundstage by at least five feet into the depth, where I > can now pinpoint cellos as they're playing three to five feet behind > the vocalist, how to measure that and provide a reality check?
I considered starting a new thread for this, because I promise you, I'm not raising it in a thread entitled 'Audio Myths' because I think it falls into that category. But since the subject of the soundstage was raised here I thought it could make an interesting aside to the main topic, and I think it DOES pertain to the question of objectivity versus subjectivity. I've often wondered how our brains construct a soundstage from two channel reproduction, so I thought I'd get input from those here with more experience than me. In every day situations we are able to place sounds using various cues, such as relative volume (both left/right and near/far), and probably slight differences in arrival times. If a sound comes from a point on my left, for instance, then the sound in my left ear will be lounder than that in my right ear, and it may be that the arrival time in my left ear will be sufficiently ahead of the arrival time in my right ear to aid me in placing the source. Similarly, sounds, such as voices, that are close to me will be louder than those further away, so I can use my experience of how loud a voice should sound to estimate a distance. Nevertheless, there have definitely been occasions when a sound that is directly behind me, for instance, has sounded as though it's directly ahead of me, or more accurately, it's source has been ill defined, and I've put that down to the fact that the locus of all points where the source would have equal volume and time delay in both ears would be a vertical circle with me at the centre. I have to turn my head to resolve this ambiguity. This is probably what a bird digging for worms is doing when you see it cocking its head to one side. Similarly, our ability to place the height of the sound source seems to me to be difficult to explain - I assume it is something to do with the shape of our ears. So when the sound source is PHYSICALLY in various places our anatomy and our experience allow us to determine the location of the source. However, when it comes to sound reproduction from two speakers, I can easily see that relative volume and phasing can help me to locate a source laterally (left/right), but I'm not so sure about how our brains allow us to construct height and depth. I suppose relative volumes in the mix can give cues about near/far, and maybe minute phasing differences among voices and instruments can create the impression that some sources are nearer than others. But the real physical differences in the live sound are, for the most part, lost if you put a microphone in front of each voice/instrument. The relative volumes and phasing differences are lost, except maybe if each instrument bleeds into the neighbouring microphones, but in the case of multiple tracks recorded at different times then even this is lost. Unless a performance is captured live by a couple of microphones representing our speaker locations then it seems to me that the sound stage, such as it exists in the recording, is something that the mixing engineer has created after the event. And for the life of me, I can't see where the height of the soundstage comes from. Since the sound all comes from two point sources, rather than being physically at different heights, the anatomical shape of our ears can't come into play - that just allows me to work out where my speakers are. What if I was to lean my speakers backwards to lie on the floor - would the sound stage rotate backwards as well? I don't think so. So I don't deny that the sound stage in two channel music reproduction cannot be experienced - far from it, it is what contributes to our enjoyment of well reproduced music - but I suppose my question, after all that rambling, is how much of the soundstage actually exists in the recording, and how much is down to our powerful imaginations. -- chill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10839 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92918 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
