In recent times I have been playing with advanced digital components like
the SigTech room equalizer. I've also witnessed the arrival of DVD and
high-quality multi-channel sound, including interesing demos of surround
classical and rock music. This all makes we wonder where we are heading
with high-end music reproduction...
© Copyright 1998 Werner Ogiers / TNT-Audio
Do you remember the aim of a music system? Isn't it to bring the
illusion of attending a life performance to the living room? Do we
attain that aim? We don't. Listen to one single piano note in real life,
even from a crappy piano and pushed though a rock PA, and then compare to
a piano replayed on your stereo music system. It doesn't even come close.
Maybe there's something missing in stereo...
Suppose we went back to 1960, before man set foot on the moon, before
the lads of U2 were born (though, if I'm not mistaken, Wolfgang
was already dead), and before the record companies and movie
producers bulged with greed. 1960: the beginning of the stereo era. Suppose we
assembled then a good hifi system, e.g. a Garrard 401 with SME 3012 arm and
Ortofon SPU cartridge, Marantz 7 and 8 amplification, and a pair of original
Quad ESLs. What would be hear? We would hear, to our present
tastes, excellent reproduction
of music. In fact, this system would sound better than many a more expensive
system does nowadays.
So what has happened since those illustrious days? Evolution. Only the
stepwise refinement of things that already existed. Even digital recording, and
later playback, was not a revolution. It was the simple one-for-one replacement
of only a few aspects of the signal chain with something else, with its own new
set of problems. But basically, nothing changed. And basically, the aim of
domestic sound reproduction remained as unreachable as ever. Regardless of the noble
efforts of tweakers and cable manufacturers who went at great lengths selling
audiophiles $3000/m wiring, and regardless of the advancements made by geniuses
who first standardized a crappy interface for digital signal transport, and
who subsequently invented expensive black boxes to aleviate some of
that interface's problems. Stereos stuck to producing just a wall of sound,
as if Phil Spector invented the whole idea. But really realistic
sound? Forget it.
And if our systems don't sound like the real thing, then they can't be
accurate, can they? The limited amount of accuracy present in today's
best high-end stereo systems is accuracy concentrated (wasted?) in point
optimisations,
accuracy dedicated to a few details of stereo, rather than applied to the
whole concept of sound
Maybe it is time for a serious paradigm shift, time to employ modern
technologies where they matter the most. Time to look at the whole process,
identify major weak spots, and cure them once and for all. That's accuracy.
Now which problems are there? We have to capture a whole soundfield of
a musical performance. Then we have to replay it in a living room,
without influence from the room's acoustics. And we have to
do this in an economically and ergonomically acceptable way.
Capturing the sound field is easy (well, not really). Multichannel does this,
and multichannel Ambisonics - yes, that old and wrongly maligned technology -
does it even better. But what will it do to the music?
At the Ramada '97 I heard Bowie's Catpeople replayed over Andrea von
Salin's AVS 4-channel system. Of course the resulting soundstage was artificial,
but it did sound exciting and even suited this particular track:
while I did not get the idea I was attending a performance, I got the weird
and surrealistic feeling that I was within the song. And yet, I wonder if
we really would want to hear the likes of Jimi or Iggy periphonically in
our living rooms. Or is this just the nagging of a youngster growing
old without he himself knowing it?
Who knows? Even more, who cares? For it is easy to comprehend that in the
early days of multi-channel music gratuitous ping-pong effects will indeed abound (as
Glenn Zelniker already said in his interview), but it is also to be expected that
after a short while, surround music will create its own aesthetic values in the pop
world, while it is obvious already that surround in 'real' music, i.e. acoustically
recorder music performed in a real hall, like classic, jazz, and perhaps
small-scale folk (remember "The Trinity Sessions"?) will benefit
immediately from the new scale of fidelity. Sure, the whole music industry
wil have to convert, but after all progress is what makes the world spin
around and around. Or did you expect to stick to plain vanilla two channel stereo
until the year 3000?
No, the real problems of surround music are elsewhere:
Do we really want to fill our living rooms with loudspeakers? Is there any
market future for a high-end multichannel system?
These are harder questions. Speaking for myself, the prospect of having to
catter for five up to eight speakers of Quad ESL calibre in our
small (3.5 x 8m) living room is daunting. Without doubt, a great many
people will agree with me here. After all, not everyone is wealthy and
lucky enough to be able to afford a dedicated listening hall like
Alastair Robertson Aikman's!
Moreover, placing eight speakers is one thing,
placing eight speakers at the correct position relative to the listening
chair is another one!
So if high-end multichannel is to be embraced by more than a few
people, the paradigm should provide realistic solutions for the above real
problems.
Luckily there's always the future, and even the near future looks promising:
we won't have to wait that long for our cures.
The advent of cheap raw computer processing and of totally new speaker
technologies like NXT's wall-hung flat panels carries in it the solution
to all of our problems. For starters, signal processing can be used to
adapt the sound signals to the actual layout of living room and the positions
of speakers and listener in it. So instead of the system dictating you and
your environment, you now tell the system about the place it is in.
Further, room acoustics can be almost completely eliminated by DSP
filtering (expect a test of the SigTech digital room equalizer real soon
in TNT!), and less-than-ideal speakers - we are thinking now again of
cheap panel speakers - can be compensated nicely just as well. Our hifi
now starts to look like a prop of Lawnmower Man (not that I ever saw
that film), but it can sound like the real thing. Hell, maybe it
will evolve beyond speakers (now that's a solution), we all wearing
wireless headsets that pump the soundfield into our ears.
Whatever the future will bring,
aural virtual reality in the living room can be. And
for sure it will be a far
cry from current conservative high-end practice. Yet, why is it then
that a good two-channel vinyl-based system will always
have its own kind of charm...