What is nearfield listening?

Nearfield is listening close to the speakers so that most of the sound reaches your ears directly from the speakers. Its an attempt to take room acoustics and reflected sound out of the equation, much like listening to headphones. SOme speakers are designed for nearfield listening ie to sound "best" listening nearfield. The focus may be more on flat on-axis frequency response along with detail and perhaps also dynamics to some degree. SOund artifacts that require room acoustics and reflected sound to be heard, like imaging, soundstage, and "air" are not a consideration.

YEs, good point. NEarfield listening requires tighter co-location of drivers for proper integration/coherency across the audible sound spectrum as Rrog indicated, although that often helps with imaging, soundstage and detail in non/less nearfield listening configurations as well. Proximity of drivers becomes less important geometrically when listening from a more distant location/perspective.

Onh,

True the spatial cues are in the recording, but i'm pretty sure reflected sound and the proper time delays for reflected sound to reach your ears is needed to deliver a big 3-D soundstage from a stereo recording as opposed to just 1 dimension between the two speakers. The proof would be in hooking up a pair of speakers outside with no rear or side walls and see.

Csontos,

Proper distance to rear and side walls within certain parameters so that reflected sound does not arrive at your ears too soon, which results in early reflections that smear the sound, is the key.

The general guideline I've read and followed with excellent results is that reflected sound should travel at least 10- 12' further to reach your ears than the direct sound in order for 3-D spatial cues in the recording to be delivered constructively . Particular room dimensions are not required. Of course, there are many other aspects of room acoustics that can come into play as well, so the exact best position will vary based on other considerations from there.

My philosophy is that the 3-D sonic cues exist to various degree in most recordings (including mono recordings). TO not reproduce these correspondingly in a 3-D manner dduring playback represents a form of distortion in that what is in the recording is not reproduced as accurately as possible. Granted that it is a kind of distortion in playback that is not as offensive as certain other kinds most likely, but 1 dimensional stereo or monophonic sound is a distortion nonetheless, pretty much by definition, since sound is a 3-d natural phenomenon.

"But how can a recording incorporate sound not yet in existence?"

A recording can only capture what was put into it by the producers.

"Has the reflected sound deliberately been eliminated during mixing in order to reintegrate it during playback? "

I would guess not normally. But different amounts of reflected sound in recordings can and will result depending on the specific production techniques used.

How does speaker response and an-echoic specs relate to this?

I think those practically are best determined using electronically produced test signals, which are different, not real recorded music.

How do you 'engineer' sound?

Isn't that exactly what all sound recording engineers and producers do? I believe they typically use near field listening techniques and monitors designed for near-field listening to do this in order to take room acoustics out of the picture in that acoustics will be different in each case where the recording is played back by the customers who buy their product.

SOme labels, like Mapleshade for example, have production techniques specifically designed to optimize soundstage and imaging overall.

Also a lot of early hi-fi recordings, like those from MErcury Living PResence, for example, were made with an emphasis on maxing out sound quality, including soundstage and imaging, when such things were still quite novel and marketable on a relatively large scale (compared to today).

They will often use nearfield listening techniques (or headphones) to take room acoustics out of the playback picture. Most consumers do not care about soundstage and imaging when listening.