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Yes, Peter,

I know that in the Steinberg WaveLab use only Bob Katz’ metering system, still I thought that if they are cooperate then Katz’ Ambience Recovery might be available as a standalone plug-in. It is kind of suspiring that Mr. Katz was able to patent it as the notion of “kinky” channel-crossfeeding in order to make stereo to simulate the true binaural recordings are very old and used by headphone people for year and years. I always very welcome those experiments as I feel that stereo was very faulty concepts to begin with, not to mention how it is being used by the industry idiots. As I can see, it order Stereo to work properly it should be substantial amount of acoustic phase randominisation that takes place between a loudspeaker and listener. In case or “not helped air” I would estimate that it is necessary 25-30 feet minimum in order all Stereo mathematical algorithms got polished by phase randominisation and stop to me artificial. In case of our nearfiled listening (it is the way how I prefer because of many reasons) stereo is effective but incorrect was to reproduce live sound. It is very possible that some kind of K-Stereo processing might help a little…

Still, I do not think that Mr. Katz invented the channel-crossfeeding he rather juts parented the algorithms of digital extraction and injection. How I see it, being implemented it is superbly simple operation for digital and the whole processor, it is operates at I2C-bus level should be just one small DSP chip. It would be a perfect plug-in. The complete K-Stereo use would have power supplies, the data accusations stages, the stages that convert AES/EBU to I2C and then back to AES/EBU… I mean a lot of things that might not need to be done. The K-Stereo unit has also some custom dithers. My experiments with them suggest that good dithers are very-very useful tool at 16bit but since we go to 20-24 bit then all those dithers might become unnecessary.  Not to mention that most of my recordings as FM broadcasts where the HF FM noise does acts as very effective dither.

So, let to talk about the hypothetical “perfect” processor for a person who do digital only (I would LOVE to have this toy it at preamps or at speaker level - who would be up to the challenge?!!!). The K-Stereo unit might be very fine but look at the DNA1 unit from Weiss. Daniel Weiss’s machine should be even more interning (twice price) as it has many source-denoiser functionalizes.  Robert Witrak, the guy who run HDTT use it and he is absolutely ecstatic about the DNA1 performance. Though I have my disagreement with some aspects of Robert’s sound but his tape-hiss denoising is very high quality. Would the DNA1 be the ultimate toy to try? Well, not really. Application of custom dithers and other DSP processors crates own noise and here is where the Lavry noise shaping techniques might be very useful. You might read about Lavry’s Acoustic Bit Correction® at:

http://www.lavryengineering.com/white_papers/dither.pdf

The application of his noise shaping techniques along with custom dithers might be a good tool as well. 

OK, now the ironic part that I learned during my experiments with sound of some of those and the similar thighs. That is very important moment from my point of view.  When you have a better amplifies, phonostage or a cable for instance then you learn about their capacity what you plug them in. With the DSP devises and particularly with the devised of spatial reconstruction you learn about their benefits when you bypass them. This is a paradox that I have been thinking for years, I have no explanation to it but it is how my mind works.  The spatial reconstruction effect when it kicks-in impacts me as very positive but then what I shot down the effect then I begin to observe what did I sacrificed in order to have the spatial reconstruction. Still, I never heard the way how it is done at K-Stereo level and it might works very different then what I have experienced before…

I can wait what I put my 12 active channels playback back to the fully operation mode and will be able to try the K-Stereo opportunities…

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