Think Pieces

If you had the singers and the various mics and gear standing up and ready to record, but you had a room with solid walls that you could nonetheless shrink and grow dynamically by pushing a button or lever, how much of the difference between the three recorded versions could you approximate with the variable room size, from any one given set of mics? I'm guessing if the mics are close enough to the performers, that closeness might mitigate most of the room reverberation etc.

..Valin was a no show. Heh heh.

I was raised acoustically and have only heard a phantom center on a few occasions, with exceptional high end gear and tuned rooms - not the kind of acoustic treatments you can buy in a store and bring home, but expertly architected and adjusted rooms.  I have been working with conservatory trained musicians for the last year because they likewise do not hear the stereo illusion from pan pots and have never been confused between live and recorded nor between acoustic and amplified.  In fact, they view all audio as inferior including seven figure systems.

At a previous Heyser lecture by Manfred Schroeder I had an epiphany that the pinnae are directional phase encoders.  I asked Dr. Schroeder if this was valid and he replied "of course".  You can get a sense of this by use of a plug in one ear, a blindfold and an accomplice who walks around the room talking.  You can hear direction and depth and map room dimensions crudely WITH ONE EAR!  This information is completely ignored by the orthodox stereo which only accounts for inter-aural differences in recording.  

Natural spatial hearing determines the location of a source by triangulating all the specular reflections and comparing the waveforms through the directional phase encoding.  This also requires de-convolution of the source polar pattern with the acoustical signature of the room path from source to listener.  This perceptual facility has been ignored in audio because all audiological data since the 1930's has used subjects acclimated to the temporal and spatial distortions of loudspeakers which mangle this directional phase information.

Necessary criteria for "absolute sound" require not only that a separate speaker be located at the virtual source position of every instrument and voice in the recording, but also that the speaker match precisely the polar radiation pattern of the original instruments.  A compromise for fixed speaker locations in playback still requires the reproduction speakers have flat frequency and phase response at all angles both horizontal and vertical to emulate a portal into the original event.  I have been reading Stereophile sidebars for 15 years and not found ANY speakers that match this criterion - so I built some.

The ideal, as been stated in the literature, is to have a string quartet represented by a 'cello speaker, a viola speaker and two violin speakers.  My contribution is to construct a consort of speakers that mimic the acoustics of the violin family, replicating the temporality and spatiality as well as the timbre.  I have produced and recorded amplified concerts of solo violin, viola, cello and contrabass for audiences comprised of post-graduate string players with 99% reporting transparency.  They were completely unaware of the amplification.  It is unprecedented to fool people who play an acoustic instrument daily to this level with an audio artifice.  Therefore I am announcing the first occurrence of "Absolute Sound".

Athough my residency is offcially over, I am still producing occasional concerts in the Manahattan loft where I did my experiments including this Sunday at 3PM and 7:30PM, and next Wednesday 5/1 at 7PM: http://spectrumnyc.com/blog/spectrum-the-venue/