This whole discussion is to my mind a living illustration of why no progress to speak of ever occurs in audio. Nothing is made precise, no one does any experiments on what happens to sound like what was there, everyone just talks about what sounds nice to them or what sounds like what they think music sounds like, no one has any standardized arrangments for speaker playback, it is all just anecdotes.
And of course the discussion almost entirely runs roughshod over the crucial point: that how far spaced apart the mikes are makes a huge difference. Way far apart like Mercury makes for three pools of light--anyone can hear this who listens on a playback set up that does not itself introduce a whole lot of slop. Closer together things change and in the limit one turns into coincident. But where are the basic tests: someone walking around on stage with a pink noise source so one can hear the tonal colorations of playback. Someone walking around with a clicker so one can hear how well the clicks are localized and so on. NOWHERE is where they are as far as being available to the public. Except for Boyk's recording from years ago which was good but not comprehensive. Call this science? It is more like religion. Each claims to he a prophet. the one who knows the truth and leads the way. But faith is all that is offered. And the arguments are silly. If the reverberant field makes the sound one big blob then a perfectly accurate recording will make it one big blob as well--if one records that far back./ No sensible person would see this as an argument for a mike technique that ADDS to the blobiness. AT MOST one could argue that stereo is not really what one wants anyway but just sort of spread out mono with vague ideas of where things are and that if one is going for that anyway one might as well used spaced omnis because they are tonally better or whatever. But all around, the thinking is just as fuzzy as spaced omni stereo. Embarrassing that after a century and more of recording. there are NO comprehensive demo discs of what really happens to controlled known acoustic sources. Really makes audio look like a silly subject. One hundred years--the scientific world in that time discovered quantum mechanics, relatively, nuclear energym lasers, the genetic code, the human genome--and audio is still uncertain which mike technique really reproduces the live sound. Embarrassing altogether. Robert _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
