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Re: Perspective......

Forget about "you are there" sound reproduction of live concerts in concert halls, that is well beyond the current state of the art.

"I agree, a mic should be able to pick up more or less anything our ears can hear in a room, including wall reflections and other room cues, so I don't understand the argument that mics don't get that info"

Not so. First of all, for virtually all stereophonic recordings, microphones are placed fairly close to the musicians, even those highly touted Mercury Living Presence and Telarc recordings, not in the audience dozens of feet away. The only type of recording made where the microphone is placed where the listener sits in the audience is a binaural recording, not a stereophonic one. If a binaural recording is played through a stereophonic sound system, it will sound as though the musicians are in a tunnel, all of the reverberation coming from the same direction as the musicians themselves. Placing mikes close to the source results in far less reverberation than for binaural recordings. But even binaural recordings are fatally flawed because they record two scalar fields, not the vector field of the reverberant sound in a hall. BTW this reverberant sound comprises more than 90% of the total sound field the listener hears. The result of this flaw is that when a binaural recording is played back through headphones as intended, the slightest movement of the listener's head leads his brain to conclude that the sound source and everything else is in inside his head becuase the field rotates with his head unlike in the real performance where the field is externally fixed. There were several proposed multichannel quasi binaural schemes to overcome this but I've never heard of one successfully tried or demonstrated.

"In either case, by hurling full-range sound directly at every wall, I would think that you'd be creating a situation where the huge amounts of reflected sound would give your ear-brain so much room cue info that EVERYTHING is going to sound like it was performed in a room the size of your listening room"

At the current state of the art that is the best that can be hoped for but even this goal is beyond virtually all commercially available sound systems. This is because regardless of what is on the recording, the speaker doesn't propagate sound into the listening room spatially in the same way musical instruments do. Therefore their spatial flux distribution doesn't arrive in same way at the listener as it does for real instruments. If you think your current speaker is not omnidirectional, you are partly wrong. At low frequencies, it launches its sound in virtually all directions uniformly. But as frequency increases, it becomes increasingly directional until by the time it is much above 10 khz, it beams virtually all of its energy straight forward unless it has additional tweeters specifically designed to overcome this flaw.

"...hurling full-range sound directly at every wall..."

That's not far from how many if not most real musical instruments work. That's one major reason why reproduced sound rarely if ever sounds even like the instruments are in the same room with you. Next time you see a piano, take a good hard look at it and examine where the sound comes out of. Then think about what happens to it before it reaches your ears. Even reed and brass instruments, among the most directional are rarely pointed directly at the listener but instead pointed at the floor where their sound is reflected one or more times before reaching your ears. Examples are clarinets, oboes, english horns, trumpets, trombones. Tubas bells are pointed straight up. Bassoons sounds emerge from both ends, one pointed at the floor, one at the ceiling. Next time you see people playing these instruments or photographs of them, look at how the musicians hold them and how they point them. Only the human voice generally projects most of its sound directly at the listener.


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