@mikelavigne , My post was not aimed at dissing anyone’s gear. As you may have noted, i am dissing all my higher end stereo gear as well because i experience all the limitations of stereo gear in execution. When you deploy the BACCH, it is no longer considered purist stereo. imo. But, I haven’t seen anyone going BACCH-less after they have experienced it. On the same note, who gets to draw the line on what is purist stereo or otherwise? Even any stereo DAC (high end or not), and especially if FPGA based makes the rig ’impurist stereo’ at that point. Hence, I’ll go as impure as it needs to be in pursuit of audio nirvana.
There are many brilliant guys who got together at Dolby, DTS, Auro and more recently Sony ( w/ 360 reality audio), Yamaha, etc to deliver immersive/3d object based audio. Their efforts were not in vain, they are not all a bunch of dummies and the 90 year old stereo is still not the looming overlord for high fidelity. The issue is that the same ethos that a hifi enthusiast applies to a hifi stereo rig never gets applied to a multichannel rig (for music listening) and then it gets dismissed as some lame technology for movies. It sure isn’t. Even with a larger room like mine, I can only optimally place the bare minimum for 3D object based audio, i.e., 5 bed layer and 4 heights. I even drop that to 2 heights many times. Sure, I could stuff 6 crappy in-ceiling speakers for heights and keep adding bedlayer speakers if i wanted to (would be good enough for movies!). But, the sound degrades in a hifi multichannel application when optimal placement is compromised (no matter what compensation is done with dsp) and the sweet count for #of bed layer speakers, etc is exceeded. Further, there is such a thing as specific directivity requirements for height channels in 3D object based sound, not to mention that they need to be very closely matched in frequency, powerhandling, etc with the bed layer. When one applies the same ethos for physical room treatments in a multichannel application (as they would for analog stereo), the heavy handedness of these processors (RSC filters, etc can be nullified). Further, one shouldn’t be accepting results of any auto-cal as is, at all (no matter how great the processor, it is still dumb). The latter is for movie usage by the entry level user.
I live about 30 minutes from one of the best acoustic halls in the US Midwest where I experience many an orchestra, wind ensemble, string quartet etc on a fairly regular basis (no lousy PA involved). When I am seated at the nirvana spot (booked well in advance), it sounds nothing like stereo, I repeat, ’nothing like stereo’ and sounds a whole lot like 3d object based audio w.r.t how the soundfield is produced (very much akin to sound objects materializing inside a 3d dome). In fact, at the last wind ensemble i experienced, I was constantly looking behind me for the first 10 minutes to see if there were surrounds and back heights somewhere. This is all a bit hard to articulate, unnecessarily wordy on a thread like this and must be experienced instead.