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therealrydan t1_iy9f5ew wrote

Reply to comment by simurg3 in Headphone wizardry by SupOrSalad

> For orchestral sound like classic music, jazz music, the challenge is higher as the goal to reproduce original sound

I think this is incorrect. It's not any more difficult to correctly reproduce a recording of an orchestra than of pop/rock or even entirely DSP-generated sound. The challenge is probably rather in recording the music in the first place.

If you would record an orchestra with a high quality binaural rig, run some 3d-scanning + DSP to correct for the shape of your head and ears, and listen through high quality headphones, you would probably not be able to tell the difference (atleast not if we assume we could achieve a truly blind comparison, that is, you would not see whether it was the orchestra playing or not, and that you wouldn't feel if you had headphones on or not...).

You only have two ears after all, and they just react to sound pressure level changes in a very small volume of air.

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simurg3 t1_iyaxlxz wrote

I agree that the bigger challenge with reproduction could be at recording. We must still recognize the challenges associated at the speakers to perfectly reproduce the sound.

I don't agree with orchestral music and rock/pop/digital music having the same challenge.

I was actually going to ask what prevents recording companies to produce binaural records. It cannot be technical as production costs for such music cannot be too high. Music consumption is more and more through headphones or Iems, especially for critical audience. Yet there is almost no records coming with binaural recordings. What ama I missing?

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therealrydan t1_iyc1sbv wrote

Binaural doesn’t translate well to speakers. (And it’s slightly flawed in that it still doesn’t model your specific head/ears so without significant wizzardry it won’t be 100%)

But yes, as more and more music is listened to through headphones, I’m kind of wondering this as well…

There are a lot going on with stuff like Atmos though, and virtual studio simulations for mixing in headphones, so we might see interesting things in the future.

Re repriduction of different kinds of music I think the challenge is exactly the same. The challenge is to reproduce a signal with flat frequency response, correct transient and phase response, with low distorsion. As long as you do that, you reproduce every kind of music well. There may be tradeoffs that ate more important in some kinds of music. Soundstage/positioning perhaps being more important than sub bass in jazz/chamber music but (perhaps) not in EDM for instance. But I still think the challenge is the same. Have a good enough system and everything will sound good on it. Or be correctly reproduced atleast, which may not be what sounds the best, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

That can of worms may also be part of it, because, we might for the most part not actually want the recorded music to sound like the real thing, we want larger than life. Have an anecdote from a former colleague who's worked a lot on recording classical music for radio and TV. He had this story where he worked on an audiophile symphonic recording. They used a small set of really high quality microphones, set up as a blumlein pair as main source + some more microphones to capture and be able to adjust tonal balance, width and room in the final result. Apart from slight corrective EQ, they weren't supposed to process the sound at all, it should be all natural. Compression or artificial reverb were strictly prohibited. They did several different mixes with different mic balances, but the producer weren't satisfied and still thought it sounded unnatural. So, without telling anyone, they sent the mix through a Manley VariMU compressor, just compressing a few dB:s at most. That's the version that got released...

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simurg3 t1_iydgqp5 wrote

I was hoping that recording companies sell both versions of the same album. One for speakers and one for headphones.

Your anecdote resonates with my understanding. The music we listened is enginereed to sound good and optimal. For pop/rock music, engineering is part of the creative process. As you mentioned that classical music recordings are supposed to adhere to source but they also get edited. Thanks for shari

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