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

Ultimately for me, the main point in all of this is that even your paradoxical listening room would greatly vary from audiophile to audiophile.

Learsfool – There may be a variety of ways to create a paradoxical listening room, but I suspect they would have a lot in common - for example, the liberal use of mathematically-derived diffusion. An extreme example of this approach is George Massenburg’s Blackbird Studio C. That recording space is perhaps the apotheosis of efforts to construct a paradoxical listening room. According to Massenburg:

The room is conducive to accurate work because we have taken away the boundary effect by “eliminating” the walls.

Blackbird Studio C is described elsewhere in the following way:

The experience of this room is that one is unaware of sound reflection from the walls: it sounds almost anechoic, yet it has reverberation.

Of course, no ordinary audiophile can construct such an ambitious listening space. But Blackbird Studio C seems to me to be an “existence proof” that a paradoxical listening room is possible. And its acoustical design approach could be implemented, on a more modest scale, by ordinary audiophiles like us.

For instance, if one switched out the speakers in such a room, this would have a much greater effect on the sound than switching out acoustic treatments while keeping the speakers the same. Or would you not agree?

No, I don’t agree. But that is probably another infinite staircase. :-)

Hi Bryon - I have just read and digested the two links above. I fully understand where you are coming from now. One thing I will say is that Blackbird Studio C is designed to be a recording space, and most definitely NOT a listening space. I can tell by looking at the photos that if you were actually present in that room with musicians playing something in there, it would not sound like any space you have ever heard before, either live or recorded. As they say, it would be mostly quite dead, and any reverb heard in there would sound very strange indeed if you were actually physically present. It is definitely designed for multi-track recording of electronic instruments primarily. I am very curious what it would sound like to play my horn in there. The ideas behind it could certainly be implemented in an audiophile's listening room, but I am not at all sure that one would want to do this for orchestral music in particular. I have several thoughts I would like to share with you about some things in those articles, which I think would be better to send you in a private email, as they would be slightly off topic here - I will do this hopefully tomorrow, through the audiogon system, if you don't mind.

I agree that the question I posed at the end of my last post is probably another infinite staircase. :)

One thing I will say is that Blackbird Studio C is designed to be a recording space, and most definitely NOT a listening space.

Learsfool - According to the Blackbird Studio website, Studio C is a space for "editing, overdubbing, and mixing." In other words, it is NOT identified as a recording space. Maybe by "recording space," you meant re-recording space, i.e. mixing space.

In any case, Studio C is not designed to be a room for recording performers and instruments with microphones. It is a room for editing and mixing those recordings after they have been captured elsewhere. As such, it is a listening space "par excellence." In my view, ALL editing and mixing rooms are listening spaces. That seems to me to be an uncontroversial statement. Maybe I am missing something.

As they say, it would be mostly quite dead, and any reverb heard in there would sound very strange indeed if you were actually physically present.

My understanding is that Studio C is NOT acoustically dead, and that that was the whole point of using massive amounts of diffusion and very little absorption.

It is definitely designed for multi-track recording of electronic instruments primarily.

Again, my understanding is different. According to the website, Studio C is described as being designed for BOTH stereo and multi-track mixing.

I have several thoughts I would like to share with you about some things in those articles, which I think would be better to send you in a private email, as they would be slightly off topic here - I will do this hopefully tomorrow, through the audiogon system, if you don't mind.

Of course. :-)

Ah, point taken - my mistake. It is a mixing space, indeed. In one of those links, though, the room is indeed described as mostly anechoic, which is why I assumed that it is mostly dead. I also assumed this from looking at the pictures of the walls. I did not notice that the floors were wooden when I first looked at the pictures, that would most certainly make a difference, though I still don't think the room would sound like what a musician would call "live." I apologize for my misunderstanding, anyway.

As horrifying as it is to audiophiles, the future of creating the illusion that "you are there" may be digital signal processing. Tgrisham posted a thread today about a Stereo Times article about 3D audio. That got me searching the web for related information. In five minutes, I turned up this:

...we try to produce the illusion in a listener of being in a "virtual" acoustic environment which is entirely different from that of the space in which he (or she) is actually located. We are thus attempting to achieve the long sought-after goal of making a listener in his living room hear sound as if he were in a concert hall.

The availability of modern electronic technology for processing acoustic signals digitally has transformed our ability to generate this illusion, almost irrespective of the environment (living room, office or automobile interior) which surrounds the listener. The approach that we take is to process acoustic signals prior to their transmission by loudspeakers. We undertake this processing in order to generate the illusion in the listener that sound is coming from a number of "virtual" sources in well defined spatial positions relative to the listener. Of course, the intention of conventional "stereo" sound reproduction by loudspeakers is to produce just such an illusion, but two channel stereophony is capable only of producing acoustic virtual source images over a very narrow range of spatial positions, these being restricted to positions in the plane of, and in between, the two loudspeakers used for reproduction. The use of modern signal processing techniques can remove this restriction, even when only two loudspeakers are used for reproduction.

A number of approaches to "3D Audio" have been developed in recent years, but few have correctly tackled the basic signal processing problem that has to be solved. This is the design of a processing scheme that ensures that the correct signals are produced at the listener's ears. In order to achieve such a goal, the processing scheme has to account for the effect on the signal of the loudspeakers, of the transmission path (including room reflections), and of the effect of the listeners head and torso on the propagation of sound to the ears. The central problem to be tackled is one of "inversion" where all these effects have to be "turned upside down" (and thus compensated for) before the signals are transmitted by the loudspeakers. This is a problem with many technical subtleties, but by tackling it correctly, it's solution can produce remarkable results.

That is from University of Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.

Soon we will be able to forget all about listening rooms, paradoxical or otherwise. :-o