We hear acoustic sounds in rectangular rooms every day. If you have children, PLEASE expose them to acoustic music and let them play off-grid. This re-ordered the music budget priority as follows: (1) Concert tickets (2) Musical instruments and lessons (3) Recording gear including proprietary designs (4) SACDs and select well recorded CDs (5) Education and research (6) Playback gear (7) Tools and materials for acoustic furnishings. I have re-trained my ears to my acoustic childhood by listening to acoustic music more often than speakers for the last ten years. I have heard good imaging in demonstrations by Michael Gerzon, James Johnston and Ralph Glasgal, but they were far beyond stereo into megabuck research prototype systems. My reference 'box' speakers are SC-1's and I also have a pair of 'outside the box' Earthworks Sigma 6.2 which image somewhat better but I only hear imaging on recordings made by near coincident pairs including baffled arrays.

Some children escape it for a while, particuilarly if the live in a quiet background environment and practice an acoustic instrument. This technology is embedded in our culture so you have to find outsiders to avoid self-referential results. Likewise, seeing persons in photographs, movies and television is learned.

The Grand Stereo Illusion is learned (hearing sound originating from a place where the speaker is NOT). Therefore I am announcing the first occurrence of 'Absolute Sound'.Īthough 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: It is unprecedented to fool people who play an acoustic instrument daily to this level with an audio artifice. They were completely unaware of the amplification. 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.

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. 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. I have been reading Stereophile sidebars for 15 years and not found ANY speakers that match this criterion - so I built some. 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. 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. 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. This also requires de-convolution of the source polar pattern with the acoustical signature of the room path from source to listener. Natural spatial hearing determines the location of a source by triangulating all the specular reflections and comparing the waveforms through the directional phase encoding. 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. 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. Schroeder if this was valid and he replied 'of course'. In fact, they view all audio as inferior including seven figure systems.Īt a previous Heyser lecture by Manfred Schroeder I had an epiphany that the pinnae are directional phase encoders. 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. 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.

Absolute sound reference recordings cd