Totally agree 100%.
Personally I would state that I have a totally different experience when
listening to the same recordings via loudspeakers versus headphones.
Headphones rarely give me a "the orchestra/band" is in front of me
presentation (and no it is not a function of cheap or crappy
headphones... I have some nice Sennheiser HD600's amongst others), but
tend to spread the sound across my head (hard to describe), whereas the
same recordings presented via speakers has a nice soundstage in *front*
of me.
- Neil
On 7/9/2011 4:38 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
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,
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