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Romy the Cat
Boston, MA
Posts 10,400
Joined on 05-28-2004
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Post #:
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64
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Post ID:
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29430
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Reply to:
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29429
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Place, I did everything to convince you that it is something serious.
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Guys, I think you’re missing something important behind all my joking around. What I’m really trying to get people to do is to think deeper—to stop being blinded by data that has no real connection to human sensuality.
Let me pose a question, and you can find the answer for yourself.
Bill has achieved excellent bass with his acoustic treatment. Everything seems fine; everyone nods approvingly. We convince ourselves that the secret lies in how bass reflects off the back wall, and Bill, being ingenious, introduced large panels spaced from the wall to control low frequencies. Wonderful.
But then Bill switches to Auro. Everything else is the same. The system is calibrated so that the transition from stereo to Auro should sound identical. Yet, in the same room, with the same equipment, I personally find the sound less interesting—and more importantly, the new beautiful bass has vanished. It’s back to what he had months ago: dull and uninspired.
Now, there are two possibilities.
The first is that the bass improvement had nothing to do with reflections at all—especially since Auro can simulate virtually any imaginable reflections.
The second is that Bill’s Auro configuration interacts poorly with his new room acoustics and needs to be completely rethought. In that case, the experiment I’d suggest is simple: sit comfortably in the new room, run Auro, turn off the rear channels, and then—slowly, very slowly—dial them in until (if ever) the bass returns to its stereo glory.
If he finds that setting, we must carefully analyze what makes it different from the “recommended” configuration, because that difference might hold the key to understanding what’s really happening.
But my instinct says he won’t find it—and here instinct itself must yield to reason. Rather than filling the void with casual conjecture, we might instead treat this as a small but genuine research question. If identical acoustic conditions produce dramatically different low-frequency behavior depending on the playback algorithm, then something measurable, repeatable, and potentially significant is happening. It deserves the kind of attention we usually reserve for real experiments: controlled variables, documented results, and honest scrutiny.
And if, after all that, the instruments reveal nothing while the ear insists otherwise, then perhaps the mystery lies not in physics but in perception itself—in that delicate, ambiguous frontier where expectation and sound intertwine.
I say this not to dismiss what we hear but to elevate it—to suggest that behind Bill’s missing bass might be a subtle truth about how phase, algorithmic reconstruction, and human sensuality meet in the act of listening. I don’t claim to know what that truth is. But I know it’s worth finding.
"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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