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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: 2+3 surround sound??
Post Subject: Sorry, but wrongPosted by Bill on: 8/4/2021
I do not mean to be negative and criticize Romy, but he is wrong on surround sound. It is the implementation and not the concept which should cause vomiting, like with the vast majority of two track recording which are unlistenable. With the right engineering and reproduction, the surround experience far exceeds the two channel. First, all “surround sound” means is that one is using any number of channels to add to the two channel experience by trying to recreate a three dimensional sound field rather than the two dimensional that stereo produces. Romy seems to be trying to equate surround sound to the experience he had with four track recordings back in the 60’s and 70’s that failed from poor miking and misunderstanding of what a concert hall experience represents. What one should be trying to do is produce an effect that mirrors as closely as possible what one experiences when one attends a live concert which brings joy to the listener. This is difficult as most performances rarely do this, and recordings, even in the best of engineers hands rarely capture the moment. All of us have probably listened to and own thousands of recordings, but only revert to a few of them when demonstrating their systems and listening alone. When one attends a concert, one is not listening to just the musicians, but also the surrounding reverberation field. Matter of fact, depending to where one sits in relation to the musicians, the further one sits away or to the side , the more the surround effects overtakes the direct sound of the players. A recording engineer friend in New York has measured and feels that the direct sound from the musicians makes up probably less that 50% of the sound for the average concert listener. Thus the surround concert Hall effect is as important as the musicians playing ( think Avery Fisher vs. Carnegie Hall.) Mono gives us a one dimensional, stereo gives us two dimensions spaced in front of us, and in the best of systems sound behind and sometimes to the sides of the speakers, similar to what one would hear in a stadium or listening through a door at a concert hall. Many channels of information can give us a closer feel to what one experiences at a live venue., especially if one can negate the negative effects of our own room's reverberations on the experience. I have been experimenting with surround fields since my father purchased a Fisher console stereo system back in the early 60’s. I added a spring loaded reverb appliance to try to recreate at least some sense of the reverberation.(type 1. Surround). Next came the Hafler effect in the 70’s of outputting the positive speaker terminals to a speaker in the back of the room to get some of the Hall effect out of the front channels to the rear. (Type 2. Surround)In the 80’s and 90’s I experimented with the various types of decoders to either produce artificial hall reverberation based on studies of various music venues (type 3. Surround and what Romy is using), and four channel recordings either on tape or vinyl (type 4. Surround.)Next in the early 2000’ds was Dolby digital and dts which recorded 5 to 8 channels of information to obtain a surround field of the musicians and the hall. (Type 5. Surround.)Finally, in the past few years, Dolby Atmos, DTS Pro and Auro 3D have produced 12 to 36 channels of both hall and reverb information to get close on the best recordings by the best engineers to the live concert experience. (Type 6. Surround).
Romy has by far the best two channel system that I have ever heard. Recently, he has added a reverberation field mimicking what one would hear if one attended a concert in that particular hall engineered, while still keeping his front channels at their same level. This has given him to my ears a superior listening experience to what he had. I have gone another way. I have set up a 16 channel system with 7 floor Edgar horns, six inexpensive height, and one overhead speaker (all under $150 each) and one subwoofer channel, all controlled by a Trinnov Altitude 16 pre-pro, which is a computer with software which can do speaker and room frequency, amplitude and timing correction, plus channel decoding. In addition, it can remove hall information in a two or multichannel channel recording and send that information to the proper surround channel. All are using Behringer active crossovers and relatively inexpensive ($100 to $400 per channnel the total of 31 amplifier channels. Each channel has less than +/- 2 db inter and intraspeaker amplitude variation and less than 0.1 seconds time alignment variation at the primary listening position. Using Auro 3D for multi channel and Auromatic decoding for two channel recordings, I have now what I would consider to be the best recreation of a concert hall experience I’ve ever heard with a large percentage of recordings I,ve kept over the years. All of my analog and digital recordings have been transposed to hard drives except for about 75 of my best SACD discs. Gone are my Walker turntable with Kondo cartridge and Curl phono stage, and my Ampex 351 tape deck with several hundred 15 ips second generation master recordings from the best studios, all sold after transposing to digital disc drives. Except for the Edgar horns and Trinnov pre- pro, I have less than $10,000 invested in the system, less than I paid 20 years ago for one amplifier or preamp. I am sure Romy will elucidate what he has heard with my system. I have found his two channel to be the best by far of what I’ve heard and his surround experience has started him on the right track towards what can be obtained. But his method of obtaining it by using artificial reverb information from concert halls far removed from the recording, while satisfying, has been superseded by what can be obtained with the best processors available. On the other hand he does come close to what I have for a few hundred dollars compared to over $19,000 for my processor alone. As in everything high end, the cost increase far exceeds the value obtained.
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