On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 09:19:07PM +0100, Stefan Schreiber wrote: > Fons Adriaensen wrote: > >> On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 02:04:21PM -0400, Marc Lavallée wrote: >> >>> The perceived "directional bandwidth" of stereo recordings is better >>> than what conventional stereo (with cross-talk) can reproduce. >> >> This is again a game of words. >> >> Most stereo recordings are made to be reproduced by two speakers, >> seen by the listener at an angle of 60 to 90 degrees, and such that >> the signals from either speaker reach both ears. That is the way it >> is supposed to work. There is a solid theory behind this. Calling >> this 'crosstalk (a term which has a negative connotation as a defect >> of audio equipment), and the cure 'crosstalk cancellation' amounts to >> gross intellectual dishonesty. The signals you find on the vast majority >> of stereo records are _not_ meant to be delivered one-to-one to the >> ears. >> > > And people listen to the same stuff via headphones?
The fact that many recordings intended for speaker reproduction (in particular those using panned mono sources) work also on headphones is remarkable, and an illustration of how adaptive our hearing can be. But almost always you can improve the results on headphones by introducing the sort of 'crosstalk' that a speaker system would produce. Either using HRTF, or in the simplest case a highpass filter on the difference signal (which is a crude approximation). The exceptions are binaural recordings of course, which should be left as they are. The simple fact is that there is *fundamental* difference between signals supposed to be correct when delivered 1-to-1 to the ears, and those intended to be reproduced using two speakers. The vast majority of available records are of the second kind. Ciao, -- FA _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
