On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 10:13:13PM +0100, dw wrote: > Care to send a clip of an impossible-to-sound-as-good-as-with-stereo > recording for me to play with.
If it's anything I produced myself you'd just say I engineered it to fail with XTC :-) Which indeed I could easily do... I've been listening to XTC using all processors I know of, in at least four very different rooms, and using all sorts of source material. Some things sound rather well: e.g. binaural recordings made using a dummy head, or using similar techniques such as closely spaced omnis with some baffle or disk between them. But those sound terrible on speakers if not processed, so that is not the kind of material most people would encounter. As to material produced for conventional speaker playback, some of it produces a 'nice' sound, with a clear spatial effect, as long as you are not trying to focus your attention on individual sources or instruments. Which is something I can't avoid doing being a trained sound engineer, but also something any musician or critical listener will do at some time. What almost certainly *fails in major ways* will be e.g. - opera (or other forms of stage drama) recordings meant for stereo listening (i.e. not the DVD productions which have all the singers at the center to match the video), - anything that has off-center bass (from ancient music with double bass flutes to reggea), - many organ recordings, which when XTC-ed produce an organ that seems to be wandering all around, making me seasick. > ps. You misunderstand the nature of my A-HYBRID filter, I think. I > certainly hope so. Then I hope you will explain it. > pps. I am sure M Gerzon knew that ambisonics (low order) has theoretical > sweet spot the size of a pea, but it still sounds good to some people, In fact first order AMB has some perception merits that are worse than for conventional stereo. Its great advantage is that it is surround *wihout any preferred directions*. Which makes for a very natural effect, even if the 'sweet spot' can be small. But it's never as restricted as it is for XTC. > His fans are still as self-righteous as ever. Some of his fans hate me because I (and some others) have pointed out the limits of first order and moved on to higher order AMB, which is where things really start to work even in real-life and even in really adverse conditions. > ppps How are higher-order microphones coming aloing these days, or are > we still happy truncating the infinite series at one order above an omni? There are none ATM that can produce full frequency range higher order, and I doubt there will ever be. But we don't really need them either. Ciao, -- _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
