Who turns center off when listening to music

I totally understand why they don’t use a center channel. I’ve been to audio shows and listened to plenty of high-end 2 channel systems. I know what they can do. A center channel used the way I use it does something they can’t do.

@asctim Uh, so what you’re saying is these high-end speaker manufacturers spend a ton of $$$ to hump their gear to various audio shows and choose to set them up in a way that’s sub optimal? If they thought their very expensive speakers sounded better with a center speaker, along with the added prospect of being able to sell more of their center speakers, don’t you think they’d do so? Or are you just smarter and know more than they do about their own products?

The only ways I’ve found that work for me to my satisfaction are to either use a divider wall between two speakers that comes all the way up to my face to keep the speakers from playing into the wrong ear, or use an array of 3 speakers that are fairly close together and employ channel summing in the center and differencing on the side speakers.

I’ll just repeat, I can’t even.  Let me ask you this — when you’re at a live concert how do you prevent the strings on the left from bleeding over into the woodwinds on the right?  Do you bring your own personal divider with you to make it sound more “right” to you?  To each his own I guess.

@soix

Please see "Two Track, 3 Channel Stereo" by Paul W. Klipsch. PWK was a proponent of the stereo three-speaker frontal array.

https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Audio/Archive-Audiocraft-IDX/IDX/Audiocraft-1957-11-OCR-Page-0026.pdf

@soix 

Let me ask you this — when you’re at a live concert how do you prevent the strings on the left from bleeding over into the woodwinds on the right?

That's the wrong question, the right question is how do you reproduce a live concert experience in your home. The studies have been done, the answer is clear, but it won't matter "to you". You already have the benefit of having two sound cannons pointed at (or toward) your head while it sits locked in a vice. Whatever turns your crank is fine by me.

For those of you with the popcorn following along, if you want to see how the studies done at the USC Immesrsive Audio Lab reveal how to reproduce a live concert experience in your home here is an article from 2009. I am using pretty much the same setup they have at their lab at USC, right down to the room treatments (see the pics in my virtual system):

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/playback-visits-audyssey-and-the-usc-immersive-audio-lab/

More details can be found here:

https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/audyssey-dsx-10.2

@soix

when you’re at a live concert how do you prevent the strings on the left from bleeding over into the woodwinds on the right? Do you bring your own personal divider with you to make it sound more “right” to you? To each his own I guess.

No, at an orchestral concert there is no crosstalk. Each instrument is producing sound from it’s actual location, each producing a single stream of sound that crosses my head once. If the instrument is straight in front of me, the stream of sound from that instrument will hit each ear simultaneously with one pass.

With a stereo 2 speaker setup, if the instrument or singer is phantom imaged straight ahead of me, that means that each speaker is playing the same thing, which causes the sound stream to hit my head from two different angles at the same time. This causes two identical streams to have different arrival times at each ear, creating comb filtering that changes the tone. Never in the natural world would you hear two identical sounds hit your head from two different directions at the same time, which is why the phantom center illusion works. Our brain doesn’t know what to think of it so it positions it solidly in the center, but not without tonal compromise. There’s also a problem with the HRTF not matching a source coming from straight ahead. Sound that hits the head from an angle produces a different tonal response at the ear drum than sound coming from straight ahead. Since our brain thinks it’s coming from straight ahead, the tonality is confusing. I think for a lot of people this gets interpreted as a depth effect, and they like it. I read complaints that when center vocals are played through a center speaker they sound too forward to a lot of people.

Why do most high-end manufacturers ignore these issues with 2 speaker playback? There are many reasons, but I’ve read a lot of people complaining about the sound when these issues are corrected, so it seems there are generations that have adapted to the effect of crosstalk and expect it. With a lot of up-mixing algorithms there are settings such as "stereo wide" which allow the user to turn down the strength of the center channel or even turn it off when listening to music. When I listen to Dolby Atmos mixed music I often hear that the center channel is weak or completely turned off, with a phantom center being used from the two front left/right channels instead. Why do they do this? I think it’s listener preference from years of conditioning, as well as the fact that a lot of people are using a different kind of center channel that’s not optimized for music, and also because in a setup where the side channels are closer to the corners of the room, the center channel is in position in the room that is acoustically un-similar enough to the side channels that it creates a noticeable incongruity in the sound.