What is "Sound Stage?"

[NorthStar]

There are several type of microphones, and with different recording patterns attributes.
...And from several quality ranges.

And you can apply microphone technics, by using the right number of them, the right combination, the right directivity (in the horizontal, vertical, forward, rearward field planes), to correctly record the dimensional omnipolar soundfield, with height information.

And a good quality pair of loudspeakers will reproduce the overall results.

* Music/Movies recording is an ART, and art is all about discoveries through experimentations and passions. Even accidents are part of that art.

 

[fas42]

The argument here has become quite remarkable. Even Tim has acknowledged that he has heard the acoustic information from recordings which signal to his brain that there is height information encoded in the source material, but he refuses to accept it because he has convinced himself that technically it can't happen, therefore it must be a "trick" or imagination.

I'm going to do the hole in the wall analogy again: musical performance happening in one room, lots of acoustic height information because of echoes off ceiling, etc. In an adjacent room a person stands next to the separating wall. Drill a hole in the wall just big enough for a person to place one ear against and couple to it, and also to insert a single high quality microphone. A person sticks his ear against this hole: does he or doesn't he hear height?

If he hears height, then replace his ear with the high quality mic and record the performance. Then listen to the playback on a top notch system, over a single speaker. Do you or do you not hear height information? And if not , why not?

Frank

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

There are several type of microphones, and with different recording patterns attributes.
...And from several quality ranges.

And you can apply microphone technics, by using the right number of them, the right combination, the right directivity (in the horizontal, vertical, forward, rearward field planes), to correctly record the dimensional omnipolar soundfield, with height information.

There are. And none of them have the ability to know, when a change in their response is triggered by the position of a sound source, what that position is. And even if they did have that remarkable ability, there is nothing in a stereophonic recording or playback system to interpret and process that information. This is like hearing stereo from a single speaker. It really doesn't matter how good the speaker is; the information is not there to produce a stereo image. It may be able to produce a very broad one, but that's something different.

Let's imagine another scenario: The Beatles are in the studio, recording Please, Please Me, in mono. This takes a bit of suspension of disbelief, but you guys have a remarkable skill for that so it shouldn't be much of a challenge. The studio is short on mics today, so rather than using separate mics for John and Paul, when the harmony part comes along, Paul leans over and sings into the side of John's mic. Let's imagine that creates a pretty strong variation in the mic's response; that's your audible "clue" of Paul's position.

Does the mic know if Paul is on John's left or right? Or even if he was standing on a stool singing down into John's mic, or sitting on a chair singing up? If only your one mono speaker is good enough, will it know what the mic itself did not know? Will it somehow be able to project a stereo image of John and Paul singing, with Paul to John's right, just like they were on the Ed Sullivan show? Or is it more likely that, listening to your glorious, high-quality mono, and having seen the Ed Sullivan show, you are able to imagine him there?

Tim

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

The argument here has become quite remarkable. Even Tim has acknowledged that he has heard the acoustic information from recordings which signal to his brain that there is height information encoded in the source material, but he refuses to accept it because he has convinced himself that technically it can't happen, therefore it must be a "trick" or imagination.

Tim has acknowledged that his system projects a soundstage that is higher than the tops of the speakers (good off-axis response). Tim has acknowledged that recording with a microphone from off its axis can result in a change in response that might be audible. Tim has certainly not acknowledged that there is "height information encoded in the source material." Tim cannot acknowledge this, because, as he has stated in other posts, Tim understands that the microphone is not sentient and has no idea what has triggered that change in response.

Tim has had some really head-bangingly dumb conversations on this board, but this one takes the cake.

As to the rest of it, Frank, a microphone is not an ear and cannot hear directional cues the way an ear does for a very broad and nuanced variety of physical differences between a microphone and an ear. And no one records music through holes in walls.

Tim

 

[Soundproof]

Thanks for spotting my mistake in Linkwitz name.

However I have a different reading from yours - it is clear stated the mind creates the height perception because of the clues in some recordings. These clues then became the height information - you will not feel it listening with headphones or in all systems and are specific to some recordings.

I am not debating the origin of the clues - but if they trigger this sensation systematically they must exist.

Yes, and Jack and myself, both having spent untold hours mixing soundtracks, have tried to indicate why this is so, repeatedly throughout the thread. Many have referred to how the trickery is achieved, but people remain obdurate in their conviction that it must be the system that is revealing height, independently of the listener - when, in fact, no height information is recorded in conventional stereo.

I write conventional stereo, because standard two-channel stereo is a poor substitute for what the inventors, particularly Blumlein, wished to create. But because we had two-track tape and the possibility of creating two tracks on LPs, we got two channel stereo.
There's a famous early stereo experiment where they used 84 speakers, to create an enormous wall of sound, each speaker corresponding to a miked position in an orchestra. Stravinsky listened to that, and was much amazed. We can probably safely assume that there was height information in that reproduction (which was direct - an orchestra in one studio, and the speaker array in another).

Myles likes to throw about words such as "smartypants", which I feel reflects badly on him.

What kind of vertical information can we supply to recordings?

1. The expectations and experience of the supposed audience. What they've seen in real life, they'll apply through their mind's eye and ear.
2. Suggestions - such as Culshaw's when he wrote the article about the Rhine maidens coming from below, and everyone being much amazed by the effect - which was impossible, according to Culshaw ...
3. Manipulation of how we expect sources to be placed, by adding Low Frequency and High Frequency components. Now we are talking about what Linkwitz is touching upon.
4. Phase manipulations - fun to do when you're bored in the mixing room and waiting for something to be completed. Create a mono source, give it to two tracks, twiddle the phase and hear the source fly about.
5. Let's imagine we want to hear Tinkerbell appearing to move about in a 3D field. We know there's no point in capturing any vertical data, because there is no speaker configuration that is standard that will render it properly. So we are forced to manipulate the perception of flight. How do we do that? We subtract and add bass and treble components, subtract and add reverb to indicate her being near and far (and moving between opposites), and we add someone shouting "Come down, Tinkerbell!"
6. We utilize the fact that most full-frequency audiophile grade speakers tower a bit, and have the bass at the bottom, the midtone in the middle, and the treble at the top.

 

[Soundproof]

I am not so sure its all in the head .
When i watch Heat for example , and the helicopter comes flying over LA (2/3 of the film ) the helisound leads a live of its own, coming in from the left up corner and slowly descending through the middle , i think it is what is mentioned earlier a feature what can be picked up by the recordingmike /editing.

As I spent 15 years working on film and being in the mixing room for the final mix, I can tell you how that is done.
Have a look at a good home theatre and a good cinema. Where are the side and rear surround speakers placed? Above the audience, directed down.
Why? For two reasons - it's the best position to have them if you want to add supporting ambience and SFX, and they reach all listeners in a cinema without the people on the sides absorbing the sound before it reaches the people in the middle.

What do we do in mix? We tweak phase, take out bass, or add bass if we want a rumble to start from the back, we add reverb to expand the space, we pan sounds from speaker to speaker.

Want to have fun? Disconnect your front and center speakers (the C contains the dialogue, btw - think about how that always jumps up to the actors' mouths, even though they are often at floor level in home theatres. The mind is a good juggler).

Now that your front and center speakers are disconnected, listen to what actually comes through your surrounds. In action movies in particular, you will be surprised at the amount of phase trickery that is going on, in order to open up the Auditory Space - and it's audible.

 

[microstrip]

Draw a circle on a piece of paper in front of you. That is the pick up pattern of your microphone. Stand above it and sing down into it from a 45 degree angle. It may change the frequency response of the mic, depending on its off-axis response. Sing into it from 45 degrees to the left. From 45 degrees to the right. From 45 degrees below. If it is of good quality, it will exhibit exactly the same change in response with the same degree off axis.

This, the microphone, is the origin of the sound; the origin of your "clues." This is the only place real, physical, spacial clues in the recording can happen, because this is the only place in the entire recording and playback chain that real, physical spacial clues exist. And the mic has no sense of direction, all it has is a change in response.

Tim

Your example admits an environment without boundaries, something that does not exist and is not the real situation. The microphone will receive a very different sound if you move the singer.

The microphone will get a different sound depending on the height of the source of the sound, as the reflected versus direct sound will change a lot. If the ear has been trained to distinguish the position of the source from the sound difference we can consider that the sound has height information, although it will depend on user training. But is not life a permanent training?

Just speculating, nothing else.

Also, please remember that after the recording session, the sound engineers still have the mastering phase.

 

[mep]

This, the microphone, is the origin of the sound; the origin of your "clues." This is the only place real, physical, spacial clues in the recording can happen, because this is the only place in the entire recording and playback chain that real, physical spacial clues exist. And the mic has no sense of direction, all it has is a change in response.

Depending on the microphone, they can be very directional. Ever heard of a shotgun microphone? What happens if you point a microphone upward? What happens when a guitarist is miked so that one mike is near the sound hole of the guitar and another mike is placed at the height of the singer’s mouth? When you hear a recording of someone playing a guitar and singing, do you hear the sound of the guitar coming from the same vertical plane as the guitar player’s voice if it was recorded with two different microphones as I just described?

.... if the vertical images have been shifted around due to jigger-pookey on the part of the mastering engineer, but the fact remains that we hear vertical height differences in our recordings and that some gear is capable of destroying all sense of vertical height in a recording. I never hear a kick drum sound like it is floating 6’ above the soundstage. No, it always sounds like it’s where it would be in real life-low to the ground relative to the height of the soundstage.

The bottom line is that depending on the type of microphones used, how many, where they are located, and what heights each are adjusted to, they will capture sounds in a different vertical plane.

Mod Edit: Personal remarks removed. Stay on the topic, not the person.

 

[Soundproof]

If people have the opportunity, I suggest they get hold of the two recordings of the Kreutzer I referenced earlier - either using the Spotify links or checking whether the CDs are in your archives or on your harddisk.
Same piece of music, recorded in two different ways - one revealing the "spatiality" of the violin, the other not. Worth reflecting over how that was done.

 

[JackD201]

Height isn't "real"? It's just trickery? Yes! Of course it is! So what?

What part of stereo itself being an invention to trick all of us into thinking something that physically isn't there is right there don't you guys get? That's why they are called phantom images!

So tell me this. Are images of your vocalists a razor thin horizontal line? No. It's got width, depth and height, it's got volume. Not a line, not area on a horizontal plane, volume.

A good loudspeaker and room interface will allow the manipulations Soundproof and I mentioned to be reproduced in the home. For those that believe the signal is sacred, those "tricks" are part the signal. By not configuring your systems to decode and reproduce this not only are you robbing yourself of the potential enjoyment of the artistic intent, you are as guilty of signal sabotage as the most audio relativist, self deluding, touchy feely subjectivist on the planet.

 

[fas42]

As to the rest of it, Frank, a microphone is not an ear and cannot hear directional cues the way an ear does for a very broad and nuanced variety of physical differences between a microphone and an ear. And no one records music through holes in walls.

Tim, you're missing the point! Of course the ear and microphone are very, very different, the ear as a microphone is the most appalling bit of junk out; total rubbish in terms of what it physically picks up: you wouldn't use a person's ear as a toy microphone, it's that bad. But what it does is interpret what acoustic information it receives as a aural picture, an image, an illusion. Aided enormously by the brain: in fact, without the latter you would be effectively deaf.

So, in my analogy above, the microphone and playback system above are a transfer system, like Kirk's transporter beam: it moves the acoustic information received at one point to another point, ready to be interpreted by that mess of physical bit and pieces which is your ear/brain, back into a realistic illusion of what occurred in front of the microphones. Both in space and time terms. If the ear can make sense of what it hears through a hole in the hole, then it can make sense of what emerges from a speaker cone.

Frank

 

[microstrip]

(...) As Jack has stated, we can do things to the sound that supports this illusion of verticality, but conventional stereo is not set up to record vertical data, quite simply.

I am coming to your post, after reading your following excellent posts on ways of vertically fooling us.

When you write conventional stereo is not set up to record vertical data I think we all agree. But we find that using psychoacoustics based schemes you manage to "encode height information" in recordings that is correctly perceived by most consumers. As a consequence our listening can be closer to real. Excellent job!

BTW, I prefer enjoying the height sensation and forget about the tricks you used to fool me when listening to music. But I really appreciate knowing how you do it!

 

[fas42]

Also the point of "what is in the sound?" is meaningless unless you have a listener; same thing as whether the tree falling over in the forest makes a sound! If someone is in a room listening to plenty of physical height, he doesn't hear that phenomenon because he has a whole lot of extra little bits of ear stuck all over the place, all connected back by strings of flesh to his skull. No, he hears a whole lot of acoustic information coming into one tiny place in his skull. And if we want to make it more difficult, let's make this chap deaf in one ear. Totally deaf. Is he then incapable of registering any sense of height?

So, whether the microphones were set up to deliberately to capture this information, effectively artificially enhancing it; or not, ultimately doesn't matter to the ear/brain. If it picks up the right clues then your mind says, We have height!, whether the recording engineer intended it to happen or not ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

Another analogy occurred to me following, in the visual arena that nicely throws some "light" on this argument.

In the early days of stage theatre, you only had natural lighting or lighting that cast a even balance of illumination over the whole scene. Then they discovered spotlights, they learned they could enhance the drama, and sense of tension and storytelling by lifting the intensity of light shining over some part of the action, and decreasing it elsewhere, in parts or wholly. So now the whole industry of stage work lighting works on the basis of constantly adjusting the intensity, and colouring of lighting, across parts of the stage during the performance, it's a key part of the event. So if you went to one of the technicians and said "For this next performance I don't want any spotlighting or other illumination 'tricks' whatsoever", he would look at you as if you were mad. He would probably say, "Well, you could do it, but you would undermine a great deal of what's going on!"

Now, in some strange world one lighting technician might say, "Well if you do that you won't make sense of what's going on stage, the performance will be invisible!".

But methinks in the acoustic world more than a few "technicians" think the same way as this last, imaginary chap ...

Frank

 

[microstrip]

H(...) you are as guilty of signal sabotage as (....)

Jack,

I am going to re-read your full post at the sound of the "Chant des partisans"

 

[treitz3]

So tell me this. Are images of your vocalists a razor thin horizontal line? No. It's got width, depth and height, it's got volume. Not a line, not area on a horizontal plane, volume.

Gotta love the simplicity of this statement.

I was thinking about this very interesting discussion today and I got to wondering...does anybody have the Chesky CD I linked? If so, what are your observations on the LEDR test? When I listen, there is clearly height. This height extends all of the way up to the top of my ceiling and to me, this is indisputable. Yet we are being told by some obviously intelligent folks that a stereo, or the recording, does not have the capability of producing height. Empirical evidence suggests that height can be achieved with a stereo system, my own observations say that height can be achieved with a stereo system, so what am I/we [the listener] supposed to believe if it's not possible?

I listened to Sarah McGlachlin today after work and her image was dead center, about a foot and a half above each speaker. I tried to critically listen in the sweet spot with both my eyes open and then again, shut. I did this multiple times. The image did not move up or down. It stayed at the same height.

I know what I hear and I trust my ears but.....and this is a big "but".....height isn't possible according to some. Even some that admit that they hear it. So where does that leave us? Personally to me, this topic should be exactly like the question of whether a woman is pregnant or not. She either is or she isn't. Pretty cut and dry there. Why so much grey area with this topic?

 

[Ron Party]

A few questions for thought.

Is this a semantic argument or is it something more? Members report hearing height information, yet other members state that the stereo recording has no encoded height information. Is this ultimately a discussion about the term "encode"?

Related to this, are there inferences to be drawn by examining music/video that indisputably is encoded for 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 playback?

What about DTS Neo X, which supposedly can take a 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 source material and then output 11.1, including height?

What about something like QLS?

 

[mep]

I have the Chesky CD and I haven't listened to it in many years. However, I do remember that you could clearly hear the sound as it moved from the floor to above the microphone.

 

[Gregadd]

planar speakers have height almost exact to there own physical dimensions. Yet the height of the individual instrument being played can mimic the real thing.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Is this a semantic argument or is it something more?

Yes.

I believe It's pretty much a semantic argument with Jack and his reasonable question about the thin horizontal line:

So tell me this. Are images of your vocalists a razor thin horizontal line?

Of course not. I'm not saying that speakers, even bad ones, don't disperse vertically. All I'm saying, all I've ever said in this maddening thread, is that there is no discrete height information in the recording, processing or playback, therefore there can't be any such information in your sound stage. Do you have a "tall" image? You probably do. But if you imagine that within that height, your system or your speakers are imaging elements like they do in the horizontal plane, that you hear a voice at 6 feet, the guitar a couple of feet below that, as it would be if the player were standing in front of you, you are imagining that. There seem to be a few people here who believe that's exactly what they're hearing, that there are "clues" on the recording that their remarkable systems are reading to reproduce that kind of vertical image. Unless I've misunderstood them, that is not a semantic argument.

Tim