Immersive Audio and How to Achieve It
100% of music listeners prefer live music to recorded playback, why? A live performance "immerses" you and frees you up to move around the room, the dance floor and still be immersed. The goal posts have moved away from two speakers to an array of speakers all around as well as above you to reproduce the illusion of a LIVE performance. Why, in 2023, would anyone voluntarily use only two speakers to recreate this illusion of a live performance in a large room?
Even the artists themselves are using immersive audio in concert to WOW their audience, why not do it at home:
https://www.mixonline.com/live-sound/venues/on-the-cover-las-vegas-takes-immersive-live-part-1
I really do enjoy my Innuos server & it’s so fun dialing up virtually anything I want on Qobuz. Fantastic technology! +1, agreed, I’m not stuck in my old ways but also not on highly processed, multi channel sound for home music listening. But ALL studio recordings are HIGHLY processed: https://www.avid.com/pro-tools Would you like sauce with that? It is a question of WHAT type of processing you prefer, please see:
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Someday soon AI will fill in the acoustics, but then there will still be many variables in the original recording that the listener will have to understand. Will the listener be put in the position of a listener in the audience, will the listener be put in the position of hearing direct and acoustic sound that is in the mind of the musician and producer, will the listener hear something totally apart from the experience in reality like sounds coming from every direction. I played in orchestras and jazz bands and sometimes it was wonderful hearing the instruments around me but that is a unique position that no one records for. Ultimately immersive sound is a moving target.
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I watched the video. Is the difference between us that I view immersion more in terms of the capacity of the listener while you seem to view the listener more as a passive factor, with technology facilitating immersion? Or perhaps we define immersion differently. I don’t need to have my walls "painted with sound" in order to experience what I describe as immersion. This sounds like a remedy for people’s senses having become dulled. If one is esthetically sensitive by nature, as I am, and has experienced making music, as I have, there is no need for any "added stimulation". I’m reminded of a current local Van Gogh exhibit I read about, which incorporates blowing up and projecting his paintings onto museum walls, so people can "walk through them". As a life-long art lover and someone who's been involved in drawing, printmaking and photography, this strikes me as very odd -- that people can only perceive and appreciate art when it’s turned into an IMAX experience.
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