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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The open project: a lateral cross-injection.
Post Subject: Fixated on spatial separation?Posted by Romy the Cat on: 4/6/2013
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 decoud wrote:
Is it not strange that we are so fixated on spatial separation in sound? Instruments in an orchestra are spatially separated because you can't have one musician sitting in another's lap, not because the music demands it. Music is intrinsically time- not space-varying. So insisting on spatial separation is an insistence on reproducing an aspect of performance that is incidental to the essence of the music: in an ideal world you would not have it.
  
I have written a long replay to the post above but accidently deleted it from my MS Word document. That sucks and I do not feel to write it again. Still the subject is important and feels to briefly comment about it, interrupting my deck re-building project….

I disagree with everyone regarding the spatial separation. I do not think it is unimportant and I do not think that it is important as “steverino” feels. The fact that many composers and musicians do use spatial location as an expressive tool is irrelevant to me.  If Mahler insisted that brass section in M3 has to sit off the stage then does it mean that if my playback can’t handle it (let pretend it is mono) then I am not able to hear the M3 at home? 
The point that I am trying to make is that in audio there are two spatial separations.

Fist is the reflection of original performing event. This is a complicated subject as practically no one nowadays records properly: poly-microphone techniques and barbaric editing in most of the cases make the original spatial separation if not irrelevant but for sure less imperative. You can search for years an orchestra where first violins are able to enter with chairs escalating delay but even if you find them then rest assured that it will be killed by multiple microphones.

The second spatial separation is truly audio trick and from some perspective it shall not be relevant. The trick is that as irrelevant it is the ability of playback to make that trick says a LOT about   the quality of playback.  The little dirty secret of audio is that we do not truly recognize amplitude but we do recognize phases.  It is not about the “recognition” but rather an impact that audio doe to us – it is not amplitude but phase centric. So, here is that purely irrelevant audio trick – the ability of playback to do spatial separation become like some kind of certification of quality. Of cause there are many other evidences of quality but surprisingly the spatial separation is very very handy and very easy to use. It is like pH test of water in spa – if pH is off then all kind of problems comes….

The Cat

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