Pick your poison...2-channel or multi?

Phil,

Fidelity? It's why I listen to surround.

What I hear when I listen to a surround system is all that garbage two channel leaves in front of the performers is stripped away giving me access to the instrument in a way that two channel cannot. Detail and texture that borderlines on "real", to a much greater degree than the thin and over detailed 180 degree two channel presentation.

Sibilance once part of the recorded performance dissappears
strident strings become rich and full.

The ability to hear behind added delay and reverb on a singers voice provides me with an insite to the performance, a bloom two channel guys pay 6 figures for, I have never heard with a two channel system without cheating with the acoustics (I did the cheating), especially below $10K. The dramatic environment changes from one disc to another and a sense of scale dipoles give but without the homogenous tendencies.

Of course I get the benefits of being included in the soundstage and control of the soundstage presentation, very powerful psych-acoustic effect. Then their is the fill between the speakers when percussion instruments are used as they project much like the do in real life at the listener when mic'd that way.

So I am wondering exactly what fidelity I am missing?

What details my $40,000 two channel system is also not providing? A more refined system that mimics what top studios use to make recording decisions on.

We are on extreme end of the philosophical scale, you like the idea of simple, no crossover no extra goodies, I embrace the opposite, digital crossovers for each sub, multi-channels with multi element crossovered speakers.
Control the signal. The result....the same? We both enjoy our systems this way.

As for delay and timbre's, my system is consistent you can listen to a simple voice or instrument decay without a shimmer or pulse. The amplifiers and speakers I use are as phase accurate and harmonically balanced as I can find.

Speakers are flat period, what hurts with two channel helps with surround.

I'm sorry Thomlinson Holman let you down, really me more than you...

So what Fidelity was missing? Could the fact the surround doesn't allow you to hone in on one aspect of the recording as easily be the perception it is not as clear. Could you have assimilated all that grunge carried by two channel systems to the listener as detail? Do you have time to expand? You have a great deal of experience so magical, or holistic isn't going to be good enough.

Describe the physical event that either ques you in to timing errors or reinforces proper timing. What keeps you awake with surround? Could High Frequency hearing loss be the problem for the percieved lack of focus? You need that artificial edge created by two channel to make it sound clear?

I don't know what's the issue? What Fidelity is gone, because my surround system gives me more.

Ok Phil...we're getting somewhere. Enlighten me...how would you charactorize "fidelity"? Can you pinpoit where MC loses it?

I think it would help me and others out if we can somehow "think how you would think".

Ecclectique..."wake up and smell the coffee"...Track #2 from George Duke's album entitled "Cool". Great album; I would highly recommend it. IT SOUNDS SPECTACULAR IN MC DOLBY PROLOGIC II. :0

Sorry, it slipped!

Phil...it sounds as if the 20.2 experience had everything IYO except fidelity. Is this a true statement?

Cdw,

How I think? Hear how I hear is more like it.

I'm a bit into my sixth decade on the planet. My high frequency hearing is well-preserved for my age. My earliest memory of hifi goes back to 1956, when most hifi systems were still monaural and tubes ruled. I also could sit by my Mom's Fada table radio with its tubes ablaze and dial in pre-Castro Havana cha-cha on the shortwave, or feel daring listening to cold war jabbering between classical music swells from East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Moscow. Dad's '49 Buick and '51 Oldsmobile had tubes in the dash and a paper cone speaker. It sounded great in the midrange compared to what was to come. Someone on the block bought a Chrysler with a turntable in the front seat. There was live music every week even in small towns like where I was located. Soon stereo and tubes, and recordings where engineers were just learning. I was in the hifi business during the whole 4-channel debacle. I investigated contemporary new wave MC with optimism and hoping to like it.

When I was a kid, my school system made regular trips to Philly for the Philadelphia Orchestra youth concerts and some of the regular evening concerts as well, during the school year. I went to every one I could go to, from the time I was 8. So figure it....I was hearing that orchestra during Eugene Ormandy's tenure as music director. He was on the podium for almost every performance. I played instruments in a performance setting. In college I was near Pittsburgh and hence regularly heard the Pittsburgh Symphony, William Steinberg conducting. Later in grad school, it was the Hartford Symphony and then I lived in Boston for an extended time and had a share of season tickets in Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood during Seiji Ozawa's tenure at the BSO. Along the way, being in the northeast where density of live music performance venues is much higher than in California, I heard the full wash of popular music touring figures during about a 25 year span, many in very small venues where I could hear the primary sound.

I've also played music in recording studios, giving me the reference of what happens to a performance on the way to vinyl and CD. I've recorded field performances on a paid basis, further informing understanding of the relationship between what's real and what's recorded. Point is, you are not hearing from an inexperienced person. Most of the MC proponents I meet who try to sell me on this technology have not matched the range of my experiences with live, recorded and reproduced music, let alone my accumulated experience with hifi.

So much for biographical context. You will discount my accumulated experience if you don't agree with what I hear, just as, unless you know you are colorblind, you will tend to trust your own eyes if you see the sky as purple and I say it is blue. I accept this. I don't expect to convince anyone of my (perhaps minority) MC/2C opinion on the basis of an Audiogon post. But I might might make you question yours. More to the point, someone new looking to sort out what they think about this, may find value in this thread.

Fidelity is simple. A person singing has to sound human. An instrument should sound natural and consistent with the experience of hearing it live, whether it is an unmiked cello or Junior Brown's old Fender amp with guit-steel plugged into it. Massed instruments should have both harmony and clash, just as in real circumstances. If the recording was made in a hall, live, I should hear the characteristics of the hall as though I were at or near the mic location, if the miking scheme was simple. If the recording was multi-tracked, multi-miked, overdubbed and the performers were not present simultaneously, then we're already in the realm of artifice and we have no reference for the original sound. We can only possibly surmise whether we're hearing what the recording, mix or mastering engineer intended. In any case, fidelity has to give me a convincing illusion of the intended performance, or convey the character of what the recording, mixdown and mastering engineer captured. Neither a recording alone, a system or individual component can do it by itself.

If you read my prior post to D-Edwards, you know part of what I describe as being more compromised in MC than in proper 2C is "tone." Tone was once commonly understood among hifi enthusiasts, but progressively less so over the last decade. People have been distracted by resolution and detail over tone. Effects, breakdown analysis, picayune critique of details. I find fewer and fewer people listening holistically or even able to comprehend what I mean by that. Headphones in iPods aren't helping. Hifi pushed away from holistic rendering of fidelity in the 1980s and except for a swelling of various underground rebellions, it hasn't really recovered. I blame Krell's debut and embrace by the market as the emblematic inflection point for the devolution of fidelity in hifi. Some other people blame the transistor, the Redbook CD, or the original Dynaco Stereo 120. Maybe line source speakers and power cord obsession too. But Krell was the leading edge of a trend toward atonal but scaled sound reproduction as the signpost for "hifi." Multichannel sound comes from the same roots -- engineers attempting to recreate complex wave behavior through a combination of software logic and dissected propagation. Ugh. The more processing and complexity, the further away we get. People are so confused they can't even discern synthetic from real anymore. I can put music in real tone and dimension in my home with 2 channels.

Many audiophiles today want nothing to do with the actual sound of real instruments and voices. They don't want the true sound of horns with their sometime harshness, output from their hifi. They think a cello or violin are exclusively silky and have never really heard or cared for the full experience of bow-on-string in a close-up performance. Do you think sibilance is never produced by human lips? You'd be wrong. Some rooms are honky and if eq'd flatter sound fake.

Tone is the marker for what's missing in MC. Tone isn't just a matter of frequency response, transient behavior, time or phase coherence, crossovers or not. It's a holistic characteristic wherein all of a note, a sound, a burst accompanies the leading edge. A voice is produced by a body and not just a throat. You hear an entire piano, not just the soundboard and strings. If you don't hear it, I can't point it out to you in an email or a post. If you don't care about it I can't make it important to you by describing it. I can only say that if you think you are hearing it in MC, you most likely aren't, and your references for convincing yourself that you are, are likely insufficient. I won't even judge your hearing -- let's assume it's excellent! Your references for how your mind infers suggestion of fidelity are what's in question when you advocate MC for music as a means for attaining greater fidelity. And I am sure that it goes both ways. What is convincing to you in your current state of mind leads you to believe I don't know real sound either.

That's an impasse and I don't know how to resolve it online. But you asked the original question, and you have my answer!

Phil