Why on earth do speaker wires sound different?

[jayne lee wilson]

I'm aware of the importance of cone material, but then everyone and his brother has been aware of this aspect of design for an age. Briggs touches on this in 1948; Leak had their sandwich material cones; we even had a university second-year lab experiment on aspects of cone design, so I would have thought it had been done to death by now. Harwood/Harbeth - any connection?

Following on from post 132...In going on about the low-distortion magnets in ATC Speakers you've over-looked how much effort they put into THEIR drivers, the famous soft-dome midrange... this was a sandwich (and nothing like a Leak!) - a damping layer with a lightweight fabric dome either side. ATC are as proud of them as Harbeth are of their Radials. Again the Harbeth Radial cones have very unusual materials in them... oh, I've sworn myself to secrecy, but if you have HiFiNews for 6/1999 (IIRC) you'll get a few clues. But have you ever lived with ATC soft-domes or Harbeth radials, A-I-C? Ah, then you'd know...

A "Gentleman Caller" looked at my Harbeths shortly after their arrival, saying... huh, a few planks of wood and a couple of drive units, disgraceful price...etc. Utterly ignorant of the reason for the the thin-walled, variable-layer cabinets, the screwed-on backs, and those weird drivers, never mind the classic BBC cabinet proportions...

....dismissive attitudes promote ignorance as surely as pretentious ones...
And never forget - 'it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it..."

[An_Inspector_Calls]

We're something of an ATC house: hi fi drives a pair of SCM100asl, kitchen is a pair of second-hand SCM7s, study a pair of 'homemade' SCM50s (courtesy Wilmslow Audio) which recycle replaced drivers from the SCM100s. The 100s are now 20 years old, but have been through two ATC improvements. The music department of the local university is awash with ATC - as well as both Bosendorfer and Steinway grands!

Re cone materials: are there ANY loudspeaker manufacturers out there who do not claim that their drive units incorporate some miracle cone material?

I do wish another Briggs would bring the Loudspeakers book up to the 21st century - it would be an interesting tale to tell.

[Nevalti]

The dummy head is effectively the same as the in ear microphones that many people involved in Phonography and field recording use
i've never met anyone before who is unable to perceive the binaural cues in binaural recordings

This evening I went to hear Mahler 3, I was in the third row , dead centre. The spatialisation of the orchestral sound was, to my ears, much less than in Aquapump even though I was in a relatively dry acoustic (a huge tent on the side of a mountain) ..... sure the offstage trumpet was over to the left but most of the sound was a homogenous entity. I also noticed that the front/rear image was much much less than in other musical contexts. The folk who really know this stuff are IMV the folks like the Acousmonium, BEAST, Denis Smalley , Trevor Wishart and so on.
Trevor's On Sonic Art has much to say about spatial perception in an electroacoustic context.

A 'dummy head' recording does not necessarily involve the use of an ear lobe nor an ear canal (real or simulated). There are many ways of creating 'dummy head' recordings. My best success was simply using a dense nylon bread-board as a non resonant baffle to create a time delay and mounting the microphones 8.5" apart each side of the breadboard. No attempt to 'improve' on that set-up made any difference, other than negative differences, to me so I gave up.

I still find the different things you can hear truly intriguing but the BBC web-site and the Wikipedia article did explain why in-ear recordings may not provide a 3D illusion for other people. As indicated earlier, I have heard, and made, more spacious, 'out of the head' recordings via headphones (to me) so it is obviously a complicated matter. The vast majority of recordings, for me, on headphones, make all of the sound appear to emanate from within my head, between my ears. There is the occasional, 'far to one side' sound illusion but it is quite rare. It is a shame that no one else who listened to 'Aquapump' gave their view so that we could make some attempt to identify any correlational differences.

Because of the lack of ANY realism via headphones I never use them for pleasure but only as tools. It amazes me how much some people spend on headphones for what is, to me, such a poor illusion. Would the illusion suddenly work for me with 'better' headphones? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does the 3D speaker illusion suddenly work with better hifi? Yes, that was certainly the case in my experience. 1D separation between speakers is pretty easy, outside the speakers and 2D depth portrayal is more difficult and the magical 3D height illusion is only available by careful selection of the equipment. I have no idea how that works, only that it does, for me, on some recordings.

Reproduced music (etc) via speakers can, for me, produce an extremely good illusion of reality - depending upon the recording of course. Could it be that someone who has specific 'characteristics' to their hearing, which allow them to locate sound fairly accurately, cannot locate sounds via headphones because the cues they provide are completely different? A simple example of different ways of hearing are my two dogs - a GSD and a Dalmation. When an indistinct noise is heard, the GSD will face where he thought the noise came from and swivel both ears or just one ear - presumably to locate the sound and to hear it better. The Dalmation, with floppy ears, alternately swivels his whole head and raises and lowers his chin - presumably for similar reasons. I think it is fair to assume that putting headphones on either dog would not fool them for a moment - but loudspeakers can. I don't have noticeably moveable ears but it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that some of us do need to move our heads to better identify the source of a noise - that is something I am aware of doing instinctively for faint sounds.

It is a mystery to me how anyone could sit in row '3'(!) in front of an orchestra and not be dramatically aware of the 'spatialisation' (your word) of the sounds. Not only would I find it too loud sitting there I would be constantly distracted by sounds appearing from widely different locations. I have often wondered why on earth some people choose to sit that close and perhaps the reasons are becoming a little more clear. You are clearly hearing something very different from what I hear. Row '13', or thereabouts is my preference for full orchestral works, as central as possible to avoid eccentric first reflections which 'ruin' the sound if I am too far off centre.

[Nevalti]

...........dismissive attitudes promote ignorance as surely as pretentious ones....."

That goes straight into my book of quotations.

[MrGongGong]

Have you ever experienced multichannel diffusion ?
like this

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/BEAST/index.aspx

or the Acousmonium ? etc .......

[Nevalti]

Have you ever experienced multichannel diffusion ?
like this

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/BEAST/index.aspx

or the Acousmonium ? etc .......

I have no experience of using this but my guess is that many recordings use this to varying degrees, deliberately or accidentally during mixing. My guess is that it would degrade the sonic 'image' rather than help create it but I would need to do a direct comparison to be sure.

[MrGongGong]

I have no experience of using this but my guess is that many recordings use this to varying degrees, deliberately or accidentally during mixing. My guess is that it would degrade the sonic 'image' rather than help create it but I would need to do a direct comparison to be sure.

you misunderstand
these systems are made for the diffusion of acousmatic music
NOT for trying to synthetically create "reality" but sometimes play between different realities

[clive heath]

In my post #121, I said that it was suggested that no-one apart from the "dummy" would be able to have the "out-of-the-head" experience. However others apart from myself have agreed that you do get such an effect from my modest effort.
Nevalti in #134 says that he can get no spatial information from dummy head recordings and in #138 that "The vast majority of recordings, for me, on headphones, make all of the sound appear to emanate from within my head, between my ears." I am quite happy to be told that my effort is among the majority for this distinguished contributor and accept that due to a senior moment I have the tracks reversed and that you need to reverse your headphones!!! mea culpa!

[Nevalti]

In my post #121, I said that it was suggested that no-one apart from the "dummy" would be able to have the "out-of-the-head" experience. However others apart from myself have agreed that you do get such an effect from my modest effort.
Nevalti in #134 says that he can get no spatial information from dummy head recordings and in #138 that "The vast majority of recordings, for me, on headphones, make all of the sound appear to emanate from within my head, between my ears." I am quite happy to be told that my effort is among the majority for this distinguished contributor and accept that due to a senior moment I have the tracks reversed and that you need to reverse your headphones!!! mea culpa!

Sorry Clive but I still can't hear anything outside my skull when reversing the headphones. I thought for a while that it did sound better reversed but on repeating the check I found I was fooling myself.

What about other people here on this forum? Have any of them confirmed that they can hear things outside their skull? Mr GG may be a good test subject as he can hear 3D on the Dallas recordings whereas I cannot.

[MrGongGong]

What do you mean by "outside their skull" ?
Do you really hear things on headphones as if they are ALL inside your head ?

[clive heath]

re #144, I appreciate the extra effort and hope that I and friends and family have not fooled ourselves!! It is certainly the case that all the monitoring that I do of you-tube etc. on headphones produce results that appear to be almost uniformly claustrophobic in the between-the-ears sense to the extent that I worry about people paying big-bucks for headphones unless their circumstances prevent them listening in a room for any reasonable length of time.

[Nevalti]

.....It is certainly the case that all the monitoring that I do of you-tube etc. on headphones produce results that appear to be almost uniformly claustrophobic in the between-the-ears sense to the extent that I worry about people paying big-bucks for headphones unless their circumstances prevent them listening in a room for any reasonable length of time.

Yes, I agree entirely, that is exactly my experience on headphones with virtually all sources. I get an occasional impression of a distant sound but if I repeat that passage, whilst concentrating, that distant sound is no longer outside my skull. I presume from this that it is a brain function rather than an ear function. My conscious brain is presumably over-riding the 3D illusion, much the way that some animals are said not to be able to see TV pictures because all they see is a flashing dot zooming across the screen in hundreds of lines.

I vaguely recall listening to a Radio 4 play a few years ago which was produced specifically for headphones. I think that it did provide me with some illusion of space but sadly my memory of the play has faded too much to be sure. I have no idea what technique they used, nor what the play was called or even what it was about.



Mr GG. Yes, all sounds, when using headphones, appear to emanate from within my skull. The word 'claustrophobic' used by Clive is quite apt; the sound does seem very much to be shut in. The sound is normally perceived precisely between my ears but I did find, with one pair of headphones, on the 'Aquapump' recording, that the sound retreated to the back of my skull, behind my ears. I have no idea why.

It is a shame no-one tried to tell us whether Dallas turned round clockwise or anti-clockwise. Have you worked it out yet? If the illusion is effective you should be able to tell with certainty. How confident are you?

[Nevalti]

you misunderstand
these systems are made for the diffusion of acousmatic music
NOT for trying to synthetically create "reality" but sometimes play between different realities

I'm sorry to confuse you, I was talking about some wider aspects of multi channel diffusion like deliberate (or accidental) addition of a particular acoustic to make one instrument (one track) stand out. I had not realised that you were trying to discuss 'Acousmatic Music' only. I'm afraid I treat that the same way I treat Stockhausen and the like. 'I wiped some off my shoe once'.

[clive heath]

Sounds like what the Radiophonic Workshop (prop. BBC ltd.) were doing in the 1950s and onward! Who would dare to disagree?

[Dave2002]

I've never been to Venice but 'I know' it's rubbish , I just do

Do go - it's an amazing place. I think it's easiest to do the last bit by train, even if you don't go all the way, and then walking out of the railway station is just so weird, seeing the absence of roads. Travelling around on the vaporetti is fun too. Of course, there's not much else to do or see there