One thing I’ve found very pleasurable is stereo crosstalk cancellation. I love the sound it creates, but find the methods used to achieve it difficult to live with. It tends to be a real "head in a vice" kind of listening experience, often with a divider panel right in my face. I’ve always thought that 2 channel stereo upmixing to more channels could be a better solution, but there’s no easy way to do it cleanly. There are sophisticated methods but I haven’t tried them yet.
Last night I decided to try a rather messy and easy way of turning two channel recordings into three channel playback. The center channel is created by simply summing L+R, the Left channel is mixed as L-R, the Right channel is mixed as R-L. It occurred to me that if these three channels were played through speakers positioned correctly they would produce crosstalk elimination while also allowing sounds from different directions in the sound field to approach the head in roughly the right directions. It works and sounds pretty good, but the more surprising thing was how pleasant it sounded anywhere in the room. I tried setting up the speakers closer or further apart, arranged in a U-shape, or all flat against the wall. Regardless it produced a nice sense of spaciousness on stereo recordings with center panned vocalists and instrumentals staying behind the center speaker no matter where I moved in the room, with a respectable sense of depth. This ain’t accurate. It’s messy. But if you’re not in the sweet spot, or even if you are in the sweet spot, it does make center panned sounds much cleaner as there’s no interference patterns or cross talk on anything panned center, and overall it’s just a downright pleasant arrangement to listen to when you’re sitting off axis or moving around the room.
In some ways, this arrangement is "pleasurably better."
