"They are here" vs. "You are there"

Bryon, I agree with most everything in your recent post. I would like to point out one detail that I tried (probably unsuccessfully) to make in my most recent post. You say:

-“reactive room” is a listening space with significant ambient cues. Hence a listening space that significantly interacts with the ambient cues of the recording during playback. A.k.a., a “live room.”

My point is that a reactive room reacts to everything in the signal, not just the ambience cues. Thus, with the drum hit I was talking about the direct wave reaches the microphone first* as a primary signal, then come the echoes, reverb, etc. in its wake. The cues come later, smaller in amplitude, and more stretched in time than the primary signal. So a room that reacts to the cues will always react also to the primary signal, and that signal will generally be stronger than the cues.

*While it is technically possible for a signal to reach the microphone before the direct wave, I don't think it is a big factor in most recordings.

Hi guys - I think, after reading the latest posts, that Cbw is probably correct when he says "about the ambience cues in the recording. The primary signal in the music is generally going to dominate, and the cues are softer, lower SNR, and more diffuse. So, if you succeed in taming the distortions I mentioned for the primary, you also greatly diminish the omnidirectional nature of the cues -- probably completely out of existence. If you don’t succeed in taming the primary reflections, then they’re likely to overwhelm the reflected cues. But this is an argument from theory, and there may be some middle ground where it could work." I don't think you would diminish the omnidirectional nature of the cues out of existence entirely, and there may be some middle ground there.

I also agree with him that you would be obscuring info on the recording by creating ambient cues with the room. He is right in saying I wouldn't prefer too live a room, however I wouldn't want one too dead, either. I personally think the most important quality of the room is it's size, that it is not too small. Of course, this has more to do with my preference for horns (and the more directional nature of the horn speakers does help focus the soundfield for sure) and the type of music I listen to - acoustic music seems to require much more space in the listening room than electronic music, even if it is a very small group of musicians on the recording. I would certainly not call myself a purist in any kind of audiophile sense, though. There are definitely many different ways to achieve good sound, and many different types of rooms that it can be achieved in.

I have not had time to read through the posts. I have achieve the 'you are there' experience for the majority of my recordings. This is achieved by lowering the 'noise' and removing electronic artifacts. I put noise in quotes because there is also noise and distortion you cannot hear. I believe it also takes a highly resolving source (i.e. DAC). I do not think the recording is a limitation. The spatial cues are there, they are masked by most equipment.

Interesting, as I saw this thread today, and realized the same experience last week.

My point was mostly about the difficulty of getting the cues on the recording to be omnidirectional. If you achieve it, I think you also get a whole bunch of extra stuff from your room that you probably don’t want and would likely swamp the recorded cues.

Cbw – I think this is a possible outcome, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am somewhat more optimistic about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for omnidirectional ambient cues at the listening position that are reasonably accurate relative to those on the recording.

If I understand you correctly, I think you are saying that one can, effectively, simulate ambience cues that approximate the cues on the recording, but are not sourced from the cues on the recording.

Actually, that’s not what I was trying to say, though that’s a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote. Looking back, I can see that what I wrote was ambiguous. I was trying to talk about the ambient cues that ARE, as you put it, “sourced from the recording.” So what I meant was that…

I am more optimistic about the possibility of constructing a listening space whose acoustics allow for reasonably accurate omnidirectional ambient cues, sourced from the recording and audible at the listening position.

Having said that, as I discussed from my post on 9/11, the ambient cues during playback will always be a COMBINATION of the ambient cues of the recording and the ambient cues of the listening room, assuming that the recording contains them and that the listening space is at least somewhat reactive. With that in mind...

Strictly speaking, ANY ambient cue (omnidirectional or not) added by the listening room constitutes an inaccuracy, in the sense that it adds, subtracts, or alters information about the music as it is represented on the recording. But listening to a recording in a completely unreactive listening room (in effect, an anechoic chamber) would not be a rewarding musical experience, by any conceivable standard. Hence, it seems to me that virtually all audiophiles, myself included, are willing to tolerate a certain amount of inaccuracy for the sake of a more rewarding musical experience. The question then becomes: What are acoustical characteristics of those inaccuracies? In other words, some listening room inaccuracies are more musical than others, which seems to me to be a rather uncontroversial thing to say. I guess the point I am wandering around in search of is:

The goal of creating omnidirectional ambient cues at the listening position does, as you point out, result in inaccuracies. But ALL listening rooms result in inaccuracies. So we might as well try to design a room whose inaccuracies enhance the experience of listening to music, and for many audiophiles, that means enhancing the illusion that “you are there.”

Neither: "They Are There"