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What Does Holographic Sound Like?

And how do you get there? This is an interesting question. I have finally arrived at a very satisfying level of holography in my system. But it has taken a lot of time, effort and money to get there. I wish there had been a faster, easier and less expensive way to get there. But I never found one.

Can you get to a high level of holography in your system with one pair of interconnects and one pair of speaker wires? I don't believe so. I run cables in series. I never found one pair of interconnects and speaker wires that would achieve what has taken a heck of a lot of wires and "tweaks" to achieve. Let alone all the power cords that I run in series. Although I have found one special cable that has enabled the system to reach a very high level of holography -- HiDiamond -- I still need to run cables in series for the sound to be at its holographic best.

There are many levels of holography. Each level is built incrementally with the addition of one more wire and one more "tweak". I have a lot of wires and "tweaks" in my system. Each cable and each "tweak" has added another level to the holography. Just when I thought things could not get any better -- which has happened many times -- the addition of one more cable or "tweak" enabled the system to reach a higher level yet.

Will one "loom" do the job. I never found that special "loom". To achieve the best effects I have combined cables from Synergistic Research, Bybee, ASI Liveline, Cardas, Supra and HiDiamond -- with "tweaks" too numerous to mention but featuring Bybee products and a variety of other products, many of which have the word "quantum" in their description.

The effort to arrive at this point with my system has been two-fold. Firstly, finding the right cables and "tweaks" for the system. Secondly, finding where to place them in the system for the best effects -- a process of trial and error. A lot of cables and "tweaks" had to be sold off in the process. I put "tweaks" in quotation marks because the best "tweaks" in my system have had as profound effect as the components on the sound. The same for the best of the cables, as well. For me, cables and "tweaks" are components.

Have I finally "arrived"? I have just about arrived at the best level that I can expect within my budget -- there are a couple of items on the way. In any case, I assume there are many levels beyond what my system has arrived at. But since I'll never get there I am sitting back and enjoying the music in the blissful recognition that I don't know what I am missing.

I should mention that there are many elements that are as important as holography for the sound to be satisfying, IMO. They include detail, transparency, coherence, tonality, and dynamics, among others. My system has all of these elements in good measure.

Have you had success with holographic sound in your system? If so, how did you get there?
sabai
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,308 posts
 
BTW i have a background in designing defense systems as well (digital mapping systems specifically hence my moniker).

I work for a private corporation in a different industry these days.

Also I am not a vendor though I worked selling audio gear in various places back in my college days.
chadeffect
586 posts
 
I had no idea holographic sound was so controversial. Obviously it is recording specific, but can anyone really doubt it's existence?

I have heard single microphones give the impression of depth! (Usually tube mics) Let alone multiple mics arranged to reproduce the stereo soundstage.

I may need to bow to others knowledge, but surely the delay between the microphones is what captures this. Even if this is faked using software at the mix stage of the process this can be quite convincing.

I do find that those spacial cues are the most delicate to capture and retain through the chain. Data compression like MP3s murder this information. But once heard cannot be denied. HD audio is the saviour for digiphiles looking for this.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,308 posts
 
Finally I will say that I believe Geoff is 100% sincere when he talks about mind matter interaction. Its your mind and his attempts to affect how you think that changes its interaction with matter. He can sell almost anything and claim success accordingly. If someone thinks it sounds better, that's all that matters, whether in fact it does or not.

At least that is my take on Geoff. Do I approve of this is true? Not the way Geoff does things as best I can tell. He is not forthcoming about anything much. He just pushes tweaks. It doesn't matter what it is. WIth his approach, a telephone book may have better results than tweak b, even if tweak b in fact does something.

At least this is my best guess. I could be wrong. I do not expect anything from GEoff to really help me learn anything, even anything about himself.

So it is what it is so take it for what it is.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,308 posts
 
Sabai, for the record, like Bryon, though we may not agree on everything, I concur that you seem sincere and are honest with your thoughts and truly interested in learning, so I commend you on that.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Speaking of stereo image and soundstage, and all that jazz, here's an interesting take by John Atkinson, editor Stereophile Magazine. The following paragraphs are excerpted from his article published in 1986.

"So there we have it: a perfect stereo image implies a perfect soundstage. All is rosy in the audiophile garden.

Hmm. A suspicious word, perfect. Where's the catch?

Well, we have only been discussing the interaction between the two loudspeakers and the listener. What about the amplitude-information only, two-channel recording? Where does that come from?

When it comes to recording music, there are two mutually incompatible philosophies. One is to capture as faithfully as possible the acoustic sound produced by a bunch of musicians, in effect treating a performance as an event to be preserved in a documentary manner. The second, which is far more widespread, is to treat the recording itself as the event, the performance, using live sounds purely as ingredients to be mixed and cooked. This, of course, is how all nonclassical recordings are made. The sound of an instrument or singer is picked up with one microphone, and the resultant mono signal, either immediately or at a later mixdown session, is assigned a lateral position in the stereo image with a panpot. As this is a device which by definition produces a ratio of amplitudes between the two channels, it would seem that every recording made this way is a true amplitude-stereo recording, capable of producing a well-defined stereo image.

Do such recordings have a soundstage associated with that image, however?

Sometimes.

When producing such a recording, the producer decides how much and what type of reverberation should be associated with each of the mono sound sources, and also decides where in space that reverberation should be positioned. There is no reason at all why the ambience surrounding, say, a centrally placed lead vocalist, should have any relationship with that around the drums. Or the guitar. Or the synthesizer. And if it doesn't, then the listener doesn't hear a soundstage. Rather, he hears a collage of individual musical events, bearing no spatial relationship to one another."
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