I dont understand anyone that would get upset at trying new things in audio. This seems really cool to me and I am curious what it sounds like in person. Thanks!
Yes if we really wanna put an end to this we have to go back and kill Les Paul. Is there anybody interested I have a Time Machine I just need to find an IBM 5100 To fix the future.
I sincerely applaud you for taking the time to show people these differences. Alot don't take the time, I'm sure your busy enough without doing these video's, but yet you take the time too show people these live demo's. Your a man with a real passion for audio. Thanks again !!
Thank you Steve and I'm excited to do more. I have a friend making a drum recording for me and one of the CZcams subscribers is sending me a recording of flute and possibly another sending me a double bass recording. It's fun seeing where this heads
Been an audio guy my whole life. Would tinker with everything, broke a lot of things. Really enjoy all your videos. I got to believe you are reaching a bunch of the young folk out there. Thanks for the mentorship from an old guy on behalf of the young dudes. I went the studio route but enjoy some live challenges. Is it a coincident that your 4 way somewhat emulates the position of your mics. Now just make a speaker for each person in the band and I can set a show in my den and wait for the police.
Always get excited when you put out a new vid... I love the fact that you challenge your viewers and listeners. I listen to your vids on studio monitors... I hope that most people listen to these on decent speakers and not phone speakers... They miss out on a lot.
It's a really interesting experiment. It seems more like an art installation than a potential large scale product, but I'd love to be wrong. And I'd personally really want to hear it in action.
Yep exceptionally valid point regarding "Point Souce" on instuments, Im a drummer and no speaker thats exists can sound exactly like a drum kit , I understand that grand piano's are similarly hard to microphone up to get a realistic balance of the entire sound of that instrument. ANd I can tell you that sitting behind other players is nothing like being in front of thier sound sources.
This is why I love your work, you experiment and open it up to us. I love being an sound engineer for this reason. I would love a 5.1 copy or the indepedent 4 tracks, so I could hear as close as possible what you are hearing.
I'm so impressed with how realistic it sounds on the zoom. The box speakers just sound so fake compared to the pvc version as you walk around them. You should definable try the 4 piece band next! If you did this as a demo on the floor, it would for sure fool me.
This is a great experiment. You are speaking of the single most difficult solution in all of recording. The answer is usually a big surprise, often involving a single distant mono or coincident microphone. The cues our ear/brain takes are far from obvious. Of the thousands of records I’ve recorded, maybe none of them sought actual realism. The only realism I’ve ever succeeded in printing was a natural sound heard by a single distant mic. Just one of the many virtually impossible to duplicate tricks our mind plays with the input it receives from the ears is the ability to zoom in. It is beyond belief how efficiently we can do that.
@@DaveRat Yes, the real and the created are almost entirely unrelated. A tiny bit OT. My first post-production in 5.1 was The Doors of 21st Century show I had recorded in Houston. The most stunning, game-changing experience I’d ever had mixing was the ability to put the crowd BEHIND me, where they’ve always belonged! That was realism I had never been able to achieve in a stereo mix and it utterly transformed the sound of the finished product. Just that one thing made the show ‘real’ to me.
absolutely brilliant. that was my open and naive sort of idea what i was 12 y old.. 42 y later and esoteric hi end, or fancy PA systems ... and here you are prooving the truth about sonic realism. congrats and thank you very much sir.
It's as fun to laugh at the absurdity as I feel sad about their gullibility. Oh wait. Perhaps it's a symbiotic relationship of mystic and believer, each gaining something they desire
Every speaker / playback / sound reinforcement system (even surround systems) is like projecting a 2D video of a 3D scene onto a screen for several eyes to see and create a decently accurate idea of that 3D scene in the minds of the viewers. There is one theoretical optimal view point from which it may seem as if a viewer would perceive a scene with their own eyes, but 99% of all viewers need to subconciously do the mental legwork to interpret their weird viewing angle and the FOV distortion of the picture on screen. They know it's not real, but can and will be able to perceive the 3D scene quite accurately the way it was intended to be represented. But what you are trying to do is like actually creating a hologram that seems real to the eye for every viewer from every angle because it actually looks as if it was really THERE. No additional mental work needed to interpret and extrapolate what the scene might have really looked like. THAT, except with audio for our ears instead of visuals for our eyes.
Another thought provoking video. I think your approach is indeed similar to Dolby Atmos. My understanding of the Atmos technology is that it is not a "point source" recording. Mulltiple microphones are used to record the sound and then encode it into separate sound objects. When the playback occurs the Atmos processing directs those distinct sound objects to separate amplifiers and separate speakers for reproduction. Some of these speakers point to the ceiling and others point downward. Also box speakers are far from decent enough to have sound radiating only from the speaker cones. All speaker enclosures resonant and color the sound. Bass reflex speakers have passive radiators or ports making their own sound colorations too. Your video leads to the discussion of how critical the recording engineer and equipment, microphone placement, etc is in making a good recording. Even the best sound reproduction equipment can't save a bad recording. Great stuff keep it coming!
Very cool and thank you. As far as Atmos. It tries to recreate an envirinment of somewhere else in your living room by shooting sound inward This is is about putting an instrument into your environment by shooting sound outward.
"Grab it and repeat it" That is at least a worthwhile and potentially valuable experiment. We started with a steel stylus on a wax cylinder into a conical horn and look where that led! It's a pleasure to observe you experiment . (I listened on closed-back stereophones) I'm tempted to record a Taylor guitar or a Dobro resonator guitar into a pair of Crown PCC160 floor mics and submit it as experimental source material.
Even listening on a super basic stereo output here in the studio, the four speaker tube system you made has a richness and intonational value whereas all the other speakers sounded "flat" in comparison. Fantastic follow up video, hopefully you will continue this series as well as develop some best practices. Excited to share with you but also to simply experiment and try new configurations on my own... So true that on a "macro level" sound is single source but that same sound on a microlevel is producing different tonalities with different resonance and phasing. And in the case of a guitar and other instruments completely different sounds form different parts of the instrument. Like when I play the piano, I enjoy the hammer action, and other instrument noise as much as the actual notes which each come at me from different places... you are a true resource Dave, thank you for sharing and making the "inter-web" a better place peace
Yes. I was surprised by the richness exhibited by the tube speaker setup as opposed to the traditional speaker. I truly would like to hear it live and in person to see if the speaker coloration of each element in the array still makes it sound "recorded." I have often wondered whether hugh quality transducers, attached to real instruments, would sound realistic. They do for violins, but I have not heard other setups. This reminds me a bit of that concept. I would think, though, for optimal realism, the recordings would have to be made in a dead flat space. I think, if the speaker elements were sensitive enough for this application, that even the room spaciality recorded on his couch would color the playback.
@@DaveRat Perhaps not yet. But, as things progress, but why not eventually strive for identical, or a close as you can get? I rather think you'll come up with something given what you've already got.
Yes, agreed and also I feel it's important that people realize the mics I chose and positions of mics and speakers and amp type and recording bit rate are all of little importance. I purposely used random mics in non perfect positions with 44.1 recording into cheap Chinese amps and reasonably good but not amazing speakers in plumbing tubes stuffed with cotton, to compete against well thought out famous designs. I want people to know it's the concept not the specifics that make this work
Thanks Dave. Good stuff. I used to work at the old ESS (Electro Static Sound) factory in Sacramento back in the early 80’s. Those Heil air motion transformers sound pretty cool. They disperse from the front and rear. The cabinets also use a passive radiator for rear dispersion. They also made a monitor version with two 12’s. They were beasts and way ahead of their time.
@@DaveRat I still have a pair of the Heil transformers and some diaphragms. I tried them on top of some JBL Cabaret 4699b’s for my home stereo. They sounded pretty good. They have an amazing frequency response and are able to cover a lot of the upper mids. Thanks Dave. Love your attempts to create realism.
It was Thursday night band practice at a church I was at. We just recently got a pre-Sonos 24 channel mixer when it first came out. This was a major needed upgrade considering the stuff that we had before that. We went from a 16 channel analog Mackie that sounded great to a Yamaha 32 pulled out of a TV stations dumpster. Then somebody bought us a used PV 34? Ch ( it was an odd number because they counted 3 channels per stereo L+R+Mic ) off of eBay without telling us. Two speakers hanging and 1 subwoofer or 2 probably 1 at that point. Don't remember exactly what they were I could probably look but they were 15 or 18 inch JBL something squares, and I could not stand the subwoofer they never sounded right. We had three or four monitor mixes. After the band left I was playing with the multi track capability and tweaking the preset save for Sunday. There was somebody else in the building who came in and was like the band sounds really really good. Then they left and I realized they couldn't have been listening to the band at that point and they thought the band was still there an hour after they left. I believe they came back into the sanctuary and found the band not there when I pointed it out they were quite surprised if I'm remembering correctly. Granted they were a few rooms down the hall but they were still believing it when they came into the sanctuary and didn't look at the stage. Can't remember if I had any of the monitors routed as well but I probably did as I was playing back each individual channel it would've remixed the monitor bus. That was a decent system I put in it's really too bad "I didn't know what I was doing", I went back a few years later with another band I was working with and the only things they changed was going for better speakers and a center channel. Which was on the target roadmap for system upgrades. and considering I came in there before Easter Sunday for band practice to find the main speakers weren't sounding right oh yeah sure enough the voice coils are blown how'd that happen? I threw some sticks up and we got through Sunday Until I could order replacement parts. I might as well say why I don't like the PV mixer As well. It had a built-in digital processing section for only the main mix and effects. Worked fine until one Sunday during service the mains cut out after a thumper or reboot it come back then they will go out again it was almost like a cold solder joint but it but I highly suspect it was with the processor chip. One of these days I will investigate it since I have both Yamaha and PV sitting in my basement.
I ones made a recording of a string Quartet standing in a circle around 4 mics. Played back with 4 speakers in surround setup with each of the mics send to a different speaker made it sound pretty cool.
Thank you for the limitless information it seems you have to provide. You have certainly helped my career as an engineer, and on many occasion changed my perceptions entirely through well executed experiments.
Correct. Going to the place to hear vs tying to simulate the place coming to you vs having the musicians come to you. All are interesting and of value in my opinion but only the first 2 are currently options with available products
I was sceptical watching the first video about your realistic speaker, but this really adds context to that earlier video.This is a very interesting approach, and at the same time just stupidly simple.
That other video got me thinking about how an old-school orchestra was arranged. How the old colosseums were stair cased and such to deliver all the various sounds optimally. They were all acoustic instruments and no mixing board was involved. The arrangement was the mixing board and the conductor was the fader. I mean it's no wonder operas had singers with such powerful voices or how many chairs a violin section has to effectively, mix the sounds evenly. The physical space truly was an equation to the music itself as they were bound together. I feel like people of that day would dominate the comment section with interesting arguments and contributions. Imagine having these conversations somehow before electricity existed. People would be like "be sure to spill whiskey on that mandolin tube-man because these jesters are always drunk, you know for realism", LOL. Another variation on your concept is to recreate a drum kit. Each drum has two speakers firing the appropriate directions sat in the typical configuration of a drum kit. The sound coming off of it would sound and feel very different than the same drum buss played back through a traditional set up. It would be super interesting to see where people could take this basic concept you are introducing. Definitely liked the sound out of "tube Man" the best, I feel the recording was optimized for it best but just my opinion. :) Too cool Dave! :)
I had a thought after you said 'sound like a jazz trio in a restaurant': maybe it's good that sound reproduction is a flawed version of its live counterpart, for that is then still a reason go to support live musicians? :-) If there was a way to make speakers sound like human beings playing instruments in the same space as you, maybe you might not feel like going to that restaurant and tipping that trio of enthusiasts, or buying that concert ticket, or what have you..... ? Or at least the price of everything, from hiring said musicians through recording process along with sale of the album, would have to be really expensive to compensate for all of it, I think. Thanks for all the fun and effort you bring us with your hands on research! :)
That goes both ways. The Jazz trio gets more exposure and people then say, wow. We really need to go see them. I don't think CZcams hurt concert attendances anymore than real speakers would. And thank you!
The 4 piece band Idea is awesome. The whole time I was watching, I was thinking this. As a listener in my environment, though, I will sadly not experience this with you as you are. I will be listening to it from my environment and my stereo-only speakers. Even with nothing else, having the Mics in all those locations picking up the sounds in different directions made the sound so much fuller in my over-ear headphones. Without having heard the original recording in person, I can't validate the realistic of it, though. The speaker you created did do a great job of sounding the same, though!
It's a very cool concept! I'm wondering if the source needs to be recorded in an anechoic chamber to avoid room acoustics in the recording for the most realistic effect 🤔 It's also interesting how it differs from binaural audio in that way, since for binaural, the thing that makes it fool the brain is exactly the intricacies of the room acoustics captured in the recording.
I don't think anechoic recording would hurt. And don't really want the room recorded but don't think it's critical to do as having a bit of room sound recorded does not seem to mess things up much
Binaural is just the interaural delay passed through a filter to represent the head. You could record it in a totally flat open area and it would still work.
@@JZStudiosonline If you did, then the recording would sound as if you yourself were standing in an anechoic chamber. That's not what most binaural audio applications aim for, but yes, It's certainly possible :D
@@grafzhl Sure, but as a fan of surround sound I've spent time looking into binaural, vss, and ambisonics. Binaural by definition is just 2 mics, real or simulated, with an interaural delay. If its simulated its passed through an hrtf. I've gotten in a lot of arguments with people claiming that ambisonics, binaural, vss, and hrtf are all the same.
I think walking around your speaker contraption with the Tascam is pretty effective in showing that it does not sound like any of the other speakers you experimented with, but the only way I could truly begin to understand is to build my own speaker and ask you to send me your microphone track out. Maybe I'll join your channel and do that soon. I'm envisioning now an atmos room with a few of these placed inside of it as well to represent independent objects. I guess one thought I have about why live music sounds so clearly different than a recording is that most of the time, when I mix, and even when I mix live bands, I'm not going for the realest representation of the band. I'm going for the best sounding one.
@8:42 the change to two channel stereo was dramatic, really captures the directional tonality variations quite well. Really a great example, revealing body ... that dimensionality, in textbook fashion. The additional mics, I'm interested, very cool. My immediate impression was the high and low messed up a good thing ... but this is interesting. I appreciate your thought process. Also, @10:41 the Heil AMT ESS, by Oskar Heil. Nelson Pass designed the crossover and his future wife soldered and built the crossovers! ADS, ESS, ... love those two. Solid content.
When i first started using in ear monitors as a drummer, i got a small berringer mixer and a ribbon microphone and putvthe mic on stage in a place where i could pick up the best sound. Just like how they used to record with a u87. Works brilliant. More because you can turn down the sound of the room.
Just when I thought the recording samples of ancient instruments (like the Stradivarius collection in Cremona, Italy) were all that we needed to preserve their sound, now I have to ask, “But did they record it from behind the performer too?”
Thanks for this. I appreciate the mic's and speaker locations being at least loosely correlated this time. Also, after thinking about my comb filtering question I realized that it is the playback of multiple mic's through a single speaker that locks them in, so in your single speaker per mic setup it wouldn't exist. Thank you for your patience. Clashing room coloration still seems like it would be an issue, and you would get some unusual nodes/ anti-nodes from the multi- speaker setup that wouldn't exist with the physical instrument. I'm picturing the classic ripples on a pond analogy where you are trying to replicate tossing a log in by throwing strategically placed stones into a rectangular pool. It might be closer to the real thing in some ways, but everything is always a trade-off. Very interesting to think about and try to hear via the stereo walk around. Rear firing speakers like the Bose would have the same comb filtering issue in reverse since they are multiple speakers playing the same source. Having listened to DCM Timewindows and Infinity RS II's I do find the rear tweeter more helpful than distracting, so I may have to cobble together something if you end up releasing the 5.1 version. One more thing: seeing the ADC relaxing on the couch made me laugh... could be the setup for a New Yorker cartoon where the speaker is trying to figure out what the humans are so obsessed with, or sitting in the therapist's office bemoaning our unrealistic expectations. Thanks for the video, and I've been enjoying catching up on your other videos as well.
Very cool and thank you,. Yeah I don't worry about the room coloration too much or if it's exactly the same sound as the recording. Same thing as mixing a live show I don't try and make it sound just like the album and no two live shows sound the same so some variations are not really a problem as long as it sounds realistic
This is something I always wondered about. Producers and engineers always talked about "sound stage," yet I always thought the pinnacle of sound reproduction would be to sound realistically live...but live in the listening environment. Same with vocals. My favorite tracks have nearly dry, proximate vocals that even ata low listening volume sound as if they are live in my room. I am fascinated with the applications of this type of recording and playback. I can see applications in live theatre and experiential performance (escape rooms, museums and most especially VR suites). I can imagine that it will put new and different requirements on speaker elements with true, strict realism being the goal.
The next experiment that I'm curious to see (or may attempt myself) is if there's an exact number of microphones to where if you go beyond, would it make negligible difference in the output and if does, does that scales infinitely? This also provokes the thought of overall compatibility with different future systems. Maybe experiment with methods of summing 8 microphones down to the 4 channels for your speaker and seeing if there's a perceived increase of realism or if it's even compatible/useful at all. I want to build my own similar enclosure and do a bunch of test recordings with it. I might start with as few channels as possible and work my way up. I'll be certain to try to maintain compatibility with the current configuration of what you have now! Just gotta find free time to do this haha.
Awesome as always. Please don't put too much energy into overanalyzing negative comments. One thing that comes to mind is to maybe keep the very low end coming from one speaker just because of phase.
I find this so interesting. I really like the distributed mode speakers, like a driver that wakes a piece of wood as a sound producer. The treble doesn’t come from a single point but various points on the surface. I had an experimental stage a few years back with a speaker with a tin lid on top and water droplets. I think what you’re saying is that the mic positions could be inverted with speakers to recreate the presence and specific location. Forgetting about phasing for now, i do wonder about small Bmr speakers that don’t produce a single point source, but points on the surface, put together as the same shape of say the violin, and the mics being the inverse or using contact mics on the same position points as the bmrs, would be closer but realistically what you want is a mic that produces sound the way the speaker reproduces it so a bmr type contact mics on the surface of the instrument in the same positions the bmr speakers resonate sound out. the heil transformer ribbon… i had some cheaper heils my dad left over from the stereo I gre up with in the 80s, cheaper ones that where crossed with an 18inch woofer, known for getting lower than a traditional ribbon speaker, so i figured with a wider range they would make great microphones and omg they sound amazing on electric guitar. Any speaker really. The cheap versions though where a bad idea with the large slow woofer compared to the fast acting ribbon. So bad, just a cheaper visual similarity to the (real) heil. Should of been two 10ich woofers maybe that together have more mass than the 18 but respond faster as individual drivers. Fuck that Neumann sounded great!!! Wish I could afford em, maybe later. Cheers for the great content
Oh and i really want a small bmr (been trying to get one in new zealand for two years) to replay and rerecord vocals through a mic in a echo space because i reckon with a tube attached or realistically a head box and bass tube would be the closest to sound leaving a humans mouth. To create reverb to blend. Fanks dave
This is the second time you make me go test something :) its an amazing feeling trying something new conceptually with what you have already. I love creating music with this setup and playing it with your self-made speaker model! This one will take some time I guess, but I will report back.
I would’ve assumed that the tour grade stage monitor that many famous artists have on stage would be far better than a plastic pipe with speakers on the ends. However, I definitely get the idea of recording something near where the actual speakers playing the recording back would be, and it’s an interesting concept and a cool outcome! It sounded the most like the actual guitar, by far.
Agreed and also it's kind of unfair in that all of the speakers are designed for different things. The tube speaker is designed to sound realistic and even though very little design theory and testing went into it the concept is capable of reproducing realistic sound. All of the other speakers are designed to reproduce sound recordings that have already been mixed. Or for the monitor to make it loud and cover a certain area. What is amazing is that I can throw together some random speakers into some tubes and have it sound even remotely more realistic than well thought out high-priced well designed products
Do a spaced x/y+z (but fairly tight) and then put an open baffle speaker firing axially reversed in the exact location for each mic. Build the baffles so the backside is as absorptive as possible - so each speaker is trying to reproduce *what sound was happening where it's mic was*. Match the volume as close as possible, then walk around it. Omni speakers fail because the mics are decorrelated. Further decorrelating with a "Rat Confuse a Cat Array" diffuses the comb filtering into 3d space, but it's still decorrelated. I think what you're going for is a 3d space equivalent to binaural headphone recording. Effectively, what I'm suggesting is to do "Inside Out Atmos"; instead of X number of speakers reproducing decorrelated sound inwards to a *single* point, you should try to have a single point (not a single speaker...) reproduce *correlated* sound outward. Essentially an "encoding" process by matching the reproduction source to the recording points. The beauty of this is that you could have recordings made with a mic array of a specific dimensional relationship, and people could have the exact dimensional point source in their room (*not a single "point source" speaker). Additions would be maybe add a "rear" mic facing away for a sub, maybe another in the front array pointed down going to a small sub that would be maybe on the floor (so as not to interfere/diffract the xyz speaker array). I've done a wide spaced array and then put a pair of speakers there, very "headphones binaural" realistic, but of course walking around disturbs the illusion. But I believe ultimately you have to recreate where mic was. It would be interesting to hear a 16+track "mix" of a band done this way I've thought. Sort of like the Dead discrete array, but with speakers in the locations of where the mics were.
Open baffles radiate in polarity and out of polarity sound, this creates a null off axis that is unrelated to the sound of the instrument or recording. Adding and creation of the out of polarity sound is non beneficial You can hear some of that issue with the ESS and DML off axis.
Agreed yet reproducing an out of polarity sound that does not exist in the instrument sound is highly improbable to benefit realism due to the unnatural nulls that will occur
This is so interesting. I'm a musician and I would like to send you a recording of me playing the flute, which I think would be another good test on an acoustic instrument. Let me know if that is of interest to you Dave. Thanks, Paul.
Fun stuff is right. You simply have a terrific way of thinking about things. Borderline genius. I love having you kick my brain into directions I would never go. I see that 'realism' is certainly almost unachievable, and I'm not sure if I even care - ha. But I absolutely understand your approach and am delighted to have invested a small amount of my small brain into this idea. Thanks for all you do.
Hey dave , super vid u r truly visionary, i know u got alot on your plate but u could seriously put all the 2 channel speaker companys outa business w/ this design serious kung fu my friend!!!!!!.
I love that you are experimenting in this way. If I may make a suggestion, instead of the tascam have you thought about doing a binaural recording? If you have some omni lav mics you can clip them onto a hat or a beanie on the sides of your head and it might show off the differences a between the speakers a bit better.
Binaural recordings are awesome for binaural playback I want the recreate the actual instrument sound. Not the sound of being in the room with the instrument, as binaural does.
BRILLIANT AND DAMN RIGHT take a grand piano that’s why what I went for with my hifi is considered wrong by many purists. However when the speaker itself is similar to design of a guitar or bass amp atleast I’m trying to create that part atleast. I mean the key thing here is people who accept the unified speaker approach from your JBL APPLE UE BOOM all in one speakers. I’ll stick with my Hi-Fi because it works for me. Your real world application from FOH applies more to creating my ultimate sound more than Paul from PS AUDIO trying to create a sound stage. A triangle is an instrument that as far as I’m concerned has never been captured and recreated as good as it is in real life. A rock band with guitar bass drums and maybe keyboard is where I would be the pelican that would simply put what x4 speakers each one designed to create each instrument and then mix down myself. Still the marvelous world of sound. Always entertaining stay safe.
I'm so happy to see Bob Heil get a mention. I love his microphones and I feel like they are a hidden gem in the audio industry, Every time I see someone using a Shure SM7 because they look cool and because other content creators use them I feel sad because the large diaphragm dynamic mics Heil builds are so superior and are assembled in the US AND they are competitively priced.
@@joostkok8939 I never said there is anything wrong with the SM7B - they are a good mic - great in the right application. What I get sick of is people using them because they look cool when a less expensive mic would work just as well. I mentioned Heil mics (a) because they are assembled in the US, and (b) because Bob Heil is an audio legend and deserves credit for his great products. Most podcasters and CZcams content producers would be just fine with s $20 ES58. There is no magic involved when you are close to the mic.
Reproducing music through speakers adds colour, compression, texture, etc that changes the sound. Neil young had a cave in sf that he played tracks through where he could place a micrphone to change the lenghth of the signal. Mushroom studios in vancouver had a ceiling they could raise and lowe4 to do the same. These are extreme measures to go to to find perfect audio greatness. Im glad you recognize this because it seems there are no real pioneers in sound anymore.
This is awesome have you looked into using ultrasonic carrier waves basically embedding your audio within an ultrasonic wave and when it hits a hard surface like your ear it demodulates therefore you wind up with a sound source that works as a laser I think there's a lot of really cool opportunities with this new technology keep up the great work
Would love to have a 5.1 audio file with the raw mic tracks. I have a 7.4 home theatre and can play around with the channel panning and time alignment to see how the realism of the recording technique translates to a more conventional multi-channel array. Cheers for the content, it has opened my eyes to the possibility of multi-mic recording for instruments other than drums.
Fascinating topic! Your's is infinitely more realistic and dynamic for a variable listening position, as opposed to being locked into a sweet spot, with the normal paradigm speakers, which obviously sound flat.
It's a different way to listen to music. But some would prefer just sitting in a comfortable listening position and enjoy a high quality playback system. You know you're listening to a great system when you want to hear more and more music and see how it sounds.
@@marcnotyou3191 Of course, this is obviously a different use case, for a different mode of listening experience, as opposed to passively occupying the sweetspot of an inward facing perimeter array of emitters/drivers. Imagine, if you will, a dynamic environment of moving people, maybe a small to midsize nightclub or similar venue, or an art installation, with this concept serving to reproduce the acoustical soundstage, and positional cues, of an actual jazz 3-piece, for every listening position. The configuration and calibration would be tailored to the outfit and genre being reproduced, one would assume.
Yeah, rather than sit in a sound listen spot, like having to put on cardboard red blue glasses to watch a 3d movie. This drops instruments into a room that sound real regardless of whether you get up and wander and chat. More like going to club vs watching a movie
Sound holograms. But let's go a step beyond and cut human hearing right out of the picture. Wire directly to the brain. Not so far fetch as it has already been done with cochlear implants.
an interesting one would be a 360 degree timed mono-mic walk around of the live player/instrument through the right ear here on youtube, with a similar/later timed walk around of the various speakers under test individually sync'ed up to be simultaneous in the left ear at the same time highlighting the difference for each of the speakers. Your brain should perceive the similarities in the middle & any differences at the sides so give an easier comparison across the speakers/directions rather than having to try and "remember" what the original sounded like at that point.
Hmmm, my goal is that someone walks into a room and it's sounds real. It can have flaws, it does not need to be identical to the original, it just needs to sound realistic. The listener won't know what the original sounded like but they will know if it sounds like a normal speaker
I’m afraid a speaker never mimics a sound source, but rather an ear. And if you sit at sweet spot, you likely hear what “heard” a mic recorded a sound (mics and a mastering). Sound engineers never used an idea of a sound source, but rather an idea of a listener. Instead we need a multitrack recorder, and a sophisticated speakers system to recreate the sources. A simple stereo does not allow us to make this theoreticaly
When you start your band I would luv too sit in on Conga's. It seemed to me like the stereo pair of pencil type condenser microphones really exaggerated the attack on the stings when compared to your microphones placed lower that sounded more realistic too me, or maybe just more pleasing to my ear. Just my personal opinion not saying any one mic is right or wrong. I'm listening on some bookshelf speakers with small ribbon tweeters with low frequency speaker reproducing 70Hz and above.
Very cool and this is yet another aspect of the way mics alter the original sound. Typically speakers soften that. The mics are closer than we typically are familiar with listening and reproduce that more dynamic unfamiliar sound. This is actually a big challenge with live sound reinforcement and why we try and use compression to make realistic sounds sound natural through PA systems. When the natural sound does not need compression
I'd love that and would love to partner with someone or a company on that. Develop a recording spec, and speaker build spec and people upload and play back Love that
Very cool! I reminds me of something I saw Curtis Bahn doing in his "R!g" album; it was a dodecahedron speaker that took a bunch of processed channels from his electronic bass instrument to send out slightly different sound in all directions to bring an electronic instrument more richly into a performance space. I think you're on to something cool here.
cool idea Dave! wondering about some of the physics - if you have any damping inside, and if the out of phase internal pressure from each speaker is affecting the other speakers or if they are blocked off from each other. thanks!
Good question. The speakers don't really know what the other speakers are doing they just radiate sound and if there's no sound then sound is radiated in various directions. If there is sound the sound they radiate interacts with the existing sound in whatever way physics dictates. In this situation the inner ring cancels out almost all the sound headed to the back of the outer ring. But also the inner radiate sound outward that adds to the inner ring at certain frequencies and cancels at others
My microphone knowledge is greatly limited to SM prefixes, but does a microphone exist with such a design where it can capture Omni directional information from its environment for something like instrument recording, maybe something with a diaphragm similar looking to the omnidirectional onion shaped speaker examples you gave earlier in the video? Would there just be too much "noise" from outside stimuli to recreate the detail you have achieved with your current setup? I love the set up and love the hypothesis. I just ask these questions to try and better grasp the limits of sound, thanks for your time and videos!
There are mics that capture one or more signals coming from different directions from a single point in space. These are useful for recreating the environment and sounds that the mic is located in. Conversely what I'm trying to do is capture the instrument and not the environment and then drop that instrument into the listening environment so a different micing method would be desirable
The first issue is sound capture. How microphone capsules work only give us 1/2 of the actual signal, during the rebound movement of the capsule (180 to 90 degrees) the 2nd 1/2 of the signal is not really a transduction of any wave moving FROM the source. Now, in dual capsule configurations there certainly is a rebound transduction in the 2nd capsule (that is facing away from the source) but it is based upon a reflect which depends upon the distance to whatever surface or open air space with a different compression characteristic there is on the 2nd capsule's side. The second issue is reproduction. Coil based speakers are similar to microphone capsules in that the rebound from a wave is not really a representation of anything except for the peak of wave 1 to the return peak difference of peak 2, in any one ''cycle''. An acoustic sound source, as you stated, gives off energy in all directions constantly and is externally 100% in-phase with itself throughout 0 to 180 degrees (albeit, possibly not internally), it never has to drop 1/2 of any wave in order to satisfy any peak writing or reading. Resonance is a strange beast when compared to sound capture or reproduction. The motion of an A-4 tuning fork, for instance, will produce 440hz in open air but 880hz when touching a surface due to the two arms of the fork both crossing 0 twice per cycle. A close stereo pzm mic setup, when set out of phase and crossed over between the peaks of any given octave, can open your mind as to just how much we really are missing in our push/pull audio universe - which is really only push, the pull is just a free-associated mechanical return (a necessary evil of the mechanics). A capture or reproduction system, that relies upon a 0 to 180 cycle, simply can not truly represent 90 through 180 if it does truly represent 0 through 90. That's just a fact. It might be a tough pill to swallow, but we've only ever heard an accurate 71% (at best) representation of any audio source through any push pull broadcast or recording. During the time it takes for a capsule or speaker to rebound at ANY frequency it is simply not capturing anything but a difference between 2 separate points in time for that frequency and both of those points begin at 0. Think about pushing a kid on a swing, sometimes you get in perfect rhythm and other times you're just a little off but EVERY time they come back to you that backward motion was dictated by your last push's interaction with the laws of physics.
@@DaveRat If by real you mean the closest reproduction of your room mics' capture through a speaker back into a field recorder, I'd have to say the Heil. At 0 it's a little thick in the mids but around 45 degrees off it's just about dead on response-wise. Volume is a non-issue to me in a situation like you have there, it's more about tonal balance. Also, if I were to answer which reproduction is my personal favorite my choice might vary from which I feel is the closest to the initial capture but that would be a stylistic preference, artistic bias, me projecting how I would LIKE it to sound. I'm willing to bet that the Heil rig is pretty uniform 45-60 degrees off axis from 300hz-3khz, regardless of source material, but it's about 2-3db more sensitive straight on at 0. It's totally a directional thing, relative to the beam strength of the cabinet/monitor. I get the feeling that you're sniffing around, or hinting toward, finding for a way to do with mid to upper frequencies what can be done, in a directional sense, with bass - which, to be blunt, is Fuh king fascinating 😍 It's about time for somebody to brave that rabbit hole who isn't nailed to a 6 or 12 month product release schedule at Bose or Sony. You would think Neumann or Genelec would have already done it, but hey, they got mouths to feed in a timely manner, too, right?
Interesting, the Heil sounds good but the huge phase cancellatin null off axis made it beyond unrealistic. None sound even close to real behind except the storm trooper. All the normal speakers sound like they are trying to be forward facing point sources which no real instrument sounds like.
@@DaveRat Oh, I didn't say any of them sounded real just that the Heil had the closest frequency response and even that was when off axis by around 45 degrees. But, isn't it interesting that even though you had multiple mics on the source, with quite good phase coherence, the recording still came out flat as a pancake nearly regardless of the speaker used to reproduce it? Mono is mono is mono but even a mono recording has 0 to 180 phase. In this case it's clear that no matter how many microphones you stack up their diaphragms are only going to give you a totally accurate capture of maybe the 1st 1/2 of the wave forms (ie travel from 0 to 180), the lion's share of travel back from 180 to 0 is just electro-mechanical rebound. In the case of all other speakers other than the Heil, even the storm trooper, what you are likely perceiving as ''more real'' are transients which are more coherent due to their being A) more time aligned than lower frequencies and B) the mechanical properties of the reproducing drivers (ie mass, sensitivity, etc). Louder is not more lifelike, even when it comes to efficiency at given frequencies. Your having BEEN THERE within the circle of the mics at the time of creation I would say has skewed your perception of what ''real'' is toward what you experienced: a human ear sitting within the bubble of transients that, by the laws of physics, couldn't discern much below 600hz but increasingly could above that.
Hmmm, mono is not 180 behind. The concept that ported or sealed enclosures radiate different polarity behind is incorrect and I have actually done videos on this helping people understand the radiating patterns of loud speaker cabs. If there is a 180 degree polarity shift behind, it is a result of open back designs. Sealed and ported enclosures are in-polarity all the way around.
I think based on what I can hear on my krk system I prefer the storm trooper the most, for 3d spatial feel when you walk around, funny since it's the hand made cheap one
Interesting, I could do a comparison between sound shooting from the outside to recreate an instrument vs sound radiating outwards . But I think the result woil be predictable
@@DaveRat If I understand what you're doing here correctly, the only way you would be able to do it in a "consumer" system would be with a Trinnov Altitude with 32 channels and some sort of custom processing which would get pretty expensive. Never the less the results could be pretty incredible.
Forgive me if this has already been covered by you or in a comment, but is there a reason for the directions of the speakers or is that just arbitrary based on the material you had? Would it make most sense to record your source instrument from say directly in front, behind, left and right and the have the speaker have a driver & channel for front, behind, left and right? Or is matching the direction and orientation not as integral to the concept as I'm thinking? I'd be really interested to hear a for example; a performance of acoustic guitar and vocal recorded from all around the performer on eight channels and then reproduced on an eight driver speaker like this- and see how much it can sound like a performer in the room with you. It could take intimacy in music to a new level!
Part of this is that it does not really matter that much. Having 4 sounds radiated in 4 directions is so much better than 1 sound radiated in one or more directions, that it's a huge improvement. Yes, fine tuning would be great but most of the disadvantage is the concept, not the details
Hey, Dave! I love your thought processes and overall approach to audio. However, I'm having trouble thinking about how these concepts apply at scale. Would you be able to address this in a future video? In other words, how would you apply this to medium- and large-scale settings?
Not really sure yet and not really thinking this is geared towards scaling up as much as trying to bring that amazing experience of sitting in the back of a tour bus with a famous musician playing acoustic guitar or sitting in the dressing room while a few guys in the band are rehearsing a new song, or sitting by the campfire with somebody singing and playing guitar. Having the ability to recreate those amazing Sonic situations in your living room or any room that you drop a speaker like this is kind of the concept
Very cool experiment Dave. One potential issue with your array is phase. With those distances. Double MidSide or 1OA arrays are great systems for these applications in my opinion. Great work!
@@DaveRat So, in this mindset to speaker and microphone arrays: Would these recordings translate to other speaker arrays, or is it a one position situation? Cheers?
Not really sure. I mean. People record using multiple mics so the mics can be mixed or reproduced however I am just trying to keep things simple, capture and reproduce with no EQ or processing though that could be added, the simplicity I think is important for sharing the concept
True. And just like with art and photography, somethings are about beauty, some about emotion, documentation, information, and loads more, including realism. The issue is we have speakers good at just a about everything except realism
Hi Sir, While Recording for playback on your designed Speakers. I guess is excellent for 24 tracks playback format for playing music. Listening Setup ( 6 Speakers of your design.) Playback comprising of 4 to 6 instruments, including vocals.Standard 4 mics and 4 tracks assigned dedicatedly per Instrument. Playback music with larger number of instruments, then one can switch to Types of Instruments rather than Individual Instruments, (Hi-pucs, Low-pucs, Strings, Wind, Vocals Main, Backup Vocals) playback on same 24 track format. Again Standard 4 mics and 4 tracks assigned dedicated per section. There has to be some standard guideline parameter set up for recording and playback within a minimum requirement of at least, 4 mics at time of recording per instrument or Group, at least 24 tracks format for recording and playback and has to be at least 6 speakers for playback. Very possible and awesome. What Speaker Placement would you recommend (Pattern and Distance)? Would you consider providing audio for a separate Low frequency channel in your setup? Sir Have you tried binaural recording techniques for the same? I mean Replacing single mics with Stereo mics in a Neumann KU100 Dummy head for achieving more spacial perception.
Yes, I love you are looking at structure. Let's start with one. One instrument, define a spec for the recording and a spec for the play back speaker . If it fits in 5.1 then recordings and playback can happen via CZcams Ch1 left Ch2 right Ch3 up Ch4 down rear Ch5 room Channel 6 (the .1 sub) Mic close, minimize room sound, use relatively flat non colored condenser mics. Room mic is not needed but if used put 6 feet away, centered in front For the sub, use any mic you feel will capture lows well for the instrument.
Okay, let's start with your conclusion about instruments not being a point source. While I will agree that instruments do interact with the environment immediately surrounding them (I'll talk about how that affects what you are doing shortly), instruments become a point source because the listener does not get up and walk around the instrument to listen to it. In all but extreme environments a listener can turn and point directly to the particular instrument being played or the source of the sound, such as an amplifier. This would occur even in situations where there are multiple instruments being played at the same time depending on the volume of each instrument. Now, as you correctly pointed out, the instrument interacts with the environment surrounding it, In your process of recording an instrument from multiple directions, the environment will be recorded as well. A good example of this is overhead mics and room mics along with close mics used to record drums. Typically specially built rooms are used to record drums specifically for the purpose of recording the environment, but not all rooms built for recording drums yield good results. It would be foolish to use room mics to record a live performance of drums in a club because the surrounding environment would not be conducive to a good-sounding recording of the drums. Another problem with capturing the "environment" is that there is no control over the playback environment and the two environments will not reproduce the original sound. Because no two clubs, restaurants, or performance halls are built the same so the playback from the speakers will sound different in each different environment and not necessarily natural. This is why sound technicians of engineers, and the equipment they use "adjust" the sound to suit the music and the venue. If you record your guitar in a neutral or dead environment and I place your multi-dimensional speaker(s) in the corner of my living room with hardwood floors I am not going to reproduce the same sound you recorded and the "naturalness" of the source recording won't be accurately reproduced. I also noted that you are using a variety of microphones to record your guitar, Is the frequency response of these various microphones affecting the tonality of what you are recording? Good luck with your project.
Not sure what people walking around has to do with point source. With a true real sounding instrument you are able to walk around and have it sound real. Having to stay still to hear is like having to wear those coardod read blue glasses to see 3d movies. As far as the sound of the room, I don't want to recreate or deal with that. I want to drop a real sounding instrument in your living room and have the musician there with you in your space. Not bring a space to you or transform your space
@@DaveRat How many people walk around an instrument to listen to it. Most real people sit or stand in clubs or restaurants or concert halls or even their living rooms and listen primarily from a very limited area, but they don't walk around the instrument or the performer to listen to the music. You aren't dropping a real-sounding instrument into any space because you are ignoring that you have no control over the space in which your playback array will be used in. The recording you make will not be faithfully reproduced in any environment except the one in which you record it in.
@@JonAnderhub i understand your points, high fidelity reproduction is so complex that it takes all sort of controlled parameters just to come close... BUT the distinction made with this approach/project is not high fidelity but realism -or so i understand it. the box guitar recording will not sound in your listening room as the guitar sounded in the room it was recorded in but it will sound closer/more convincing to a box guitar playing live in your listening room.... hope this helps, i'm not schooled in this area so i might just imagine i understand these things :)
Yes, I think we are on the same page. I want it to sound real in your living room, don't want your living room to sound like where it was recorded. Just that it's real for you. And since the listener does not have the original source to compare to, real matters, identical does mot
I wanted to start researching specific frequencies and how they effect the world around us. What would be the best budget speaker to set up control and variable environments to study the effects?
These types of tests are overdue by about a century. Funny how it seems obvious when you see it. This is probably the basis for some breakthrough tech in audio. I am thinking clever, minimally informed simulations into multichannel will do it for existing recordings. Or, new recording formats.
Well, I guess the next step can be to make two more stormtroopers and record a trio. Then, place the speakers where the trio played and make comparisons of that. Your brain is a serious thing. Cheers.
Cool to see a follow up here, and the concept is growing on me. Not as a replacement for stereo but something that stands in it's own right as a truly different format, but still within the realm of stereo's cost. I've given a listen on IEMs and will try a few more systems later. The most interesting part to me about the sound coming from this system is how even the sound is tonally as you move around, even before the extremes like behind the "source". I really think you've hit on something subtle and important here with the difference between this and an omni or dipole. Far more natural than either (and certainly more natural than a point source) I also think this could be interesting when it comes to synthesizers. Why not program a multi-timbral patch and feed it through a system like this? There aren't really any rules as to how a digital sound... should sound but we generally either pass them through reverbs of spaces (again starting as a single point source!) Neither of these creates an acoustic image of what the sound really could be. I have the same thoughts regarding electric guitar amps. Why not feed multiple pickups (different spacing/voicing/filtering) out into multiple speakers? The idea of an electric guitar being a single point source also feels like a similar lack of acoustic imagination to me. So many of the best sounding stereo recordings are made with... multiple amps, with different cones and different mics in different places summed together, multi-tracked in different levels across the stereo field. Why not have this not just be for reproduction of recorded acoustic parts in the format but a bit of a renaissance in new ways of approaching instrument playback itself (at the recording and performance level) Get closer to a multi-tracked sound but per part. I think everything you've touched on is a great demonstration of why quad and 5.1 never really caught on. Not a real capture of what an acoustic field is from an instrument. Thanks for sharing! This channel has been a constant source of interesting things to think about, sorry if this has been a bit of a ramble! Exciting to hear some new thoughts and really creative ideas on recording and playback =) Ps. Have you heard of wavefield synthesis? It's completely impractical, possibly too ambitious, but it's the one format I've seen that I think also understands the gap you see between how we reproduce sound and how it's actually heard in a space. More analogous to an audio hologram than the multi-channel/ambisonic/atmos audio photograph. It's something I've been fascinated by but have never had the chance to experience (again, not a practical format but cool to think about)
Friends of mine at 4ms Pedals built a thing called Audio Bend Matrix where they could dynamically route any oscillator or other sources to 8 speakers arranged in whatever configuration you want, and used it with modular synths.
I'm imagining that the non exact nature of the mic/speaker placement would lead to some loss of realism. If the goal is maximal realism, I would cage the mics so they scale in 3 dimensions to the speaker layout. The only reason is that the movement of the performer within the microphone field causes noticeable phase differences. At least thats how it sounded when you summed 2 signals to mono. I know the position of the listener is an uncontrolled factor and this problem only occurs when the player moves around within the field, I just think when the performer shifts around it will create weird phase differences that would not sound like a real movement when listening back. I imagine it could sound like the frequencies are changing in a weird way. I guess I have to try this myself and see!
I think realism and identical are separate Real is somewhat random so tight structure is not necessary. If you strive for identical, then, yes. But identical Is not that important to me. Just like a live show sounds real but is not identical to the studio recording.
I dont understand anyone that would get upset at trying new things in audio. This seems really cool to me and I am curious what it sounds like in person. Thanks!
Agree and thank you!!
It’s often a fear of running out of time that kills innovation. Dave’s taking the time for us.
Yes if we really wanna put an end to this we have to go back and kill Les Paul.
Is there anybody interested I have a Time Machine I just need to find an IBM 5100 To fix the future.
Curiosity rules!
Financial interests can cause some people to get very defensive
I sincerely applaud you for taking the time to show people these differences. Alot don't take the time, I'm sure your busy enough without doing these video's, but yet you take the time too show people these live demo's. Your a man with a real passion for audio. Thanks again !!
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This is so rad. Watching the evolution of this innovation is the coolest. Thanks Dave. Also, yeah the Storm Trooper sounds insanely realistic.
Thank you Steve and I'm excited to do more. I have a friend making a drum recording for me and one of the CZcams subscribers is sending me a recording of flute and possibly another sending me a double bass recording.
It's fun seeing where this heads
Been an audio guy my whole life. Would tinker with everything, broke a lot of things. Really enjoy all your videos. I got to believe you are reaching a bunch of the young folk out there. Thanks for the mentorship from an old guy on behalf of the young dudes. I went the studio route but enjoy some live challenges. Is it a coincident that your 4 way somewhat emulates the position of your mics. Now just make a speaker for each person in the band and I can set a show in my den and wait for the police.
Yeah, I will try and build more and thank you
Always get excited when you put out a new vid... I love the fact that you challenge your viewers and listeners. I listen to your vids on studio monitors... I hope that most people listen to these on decent speakers and not phone speakers... They miss out on a lot.
🤙👍🤙 awesome!!
Loving this series, just a great innovation. I wanna give this a try myself. Thanks!
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It's a really interesting experiment. It seems more like an art installation than a potential large scale product, but I'd love to be wrong. And I'd personally really want to hear it in action.
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Yep exceptionally valid point regarding "Point Souce" on instuments, Im a drummer and no speaker thats exists can sound exactly like a drum kit , I understand that grand piano's are similarly hard to microphone up to get a realistic balance of the entire sound of that instrument. ANd I can tell you that sitting behind other players is nothing like being in front of thier sound sources.
Exactly and I think I can build one of these that sounds closer to a drum kit than anything else out there. I did a mini version and it worked well
This is why I love your work, you experiment and open it up to us. I love being an sound engineer for this reason. I would love a 5.1 copy or the indepedent 4 tracks, so I could hear as close as possible what you are hearing.
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Same here. Should we just send you our email address?
Hang tight, will try and post a CZcams version with 5.1
I'm so impressed with how realistic it sounds on the zoom. The box speakers just sound so fake compared to the pvc version as you walk around them. You should definable try the 4 piece band next! If you did this as a demo on the floor, it would for sure fool me.
Will do more soon
This is a great experiment. You are speaking of the single most difficult solution in all of recording. The answer is usually a big surprise, often involving a single distant mono or coincident microphone. The cues our ear/brain takes are far from obvious. Of the thousands of records I’ve recorded, maybe none of them sought actual realism. The only realism I’ve ever succeeded in printing was a natural sound heard by a single distant mic.
Just one of the many virtually impossible to duplicate tricks our mind plays with the input it receives from the ears is the ability to zoom in. It is beyond belief how efficiently we can do that.
And once realism is separated from identical. Like a live show is different from and album, it opens many doors
@@DaveRat Yes, the real and the created are almost entirely unrelated.
A tiny bit OT. My first post-production in 5.1 was The Doors of 21st Century show I had recorded in Houston. The most stunning, game-changing experience I’d ever had mixing was the ability to put the crowd BEHIND me, where they’ve always belonged! That was realism I had never been able to achieve in a stereo mix and it utterly transformed the sound of the finished product. Just that one thing made the show ‘real’ to me.
So cool and good stuff Peter!!
absolutely brilliant. that was my open and naive sort of idea what i was 12 y old.. 42 y later and esoteric hi end, or fancy PA systems ... and here you are prooving the truth about sonic realism. congrats and thank you very much sir.
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If you said it cost $25000 all the audiophiles would love it. Thanks mate very interesting . Can't wait to hear more
That and made it look like art.
Audio files are not sound aficionados. They are art aficionados that love art that makes sound
😂 Don't forget the $5,000 speaker isolation feet and cable suspenders.
It's as fun to laugh at the absurdity as I feel sad about their gullibility.
Oh wait. Perhaps it's a symbiotic relationship of mystic and believer, each gaining something they desire
Dave is the Bob Ross of audio.
Huge honor and very cool and also funny
Every speaker / playback / sound reinforcement system (even surround systems) is like projecting a 2D video of a 3D scene onto a screen for several eyes to see and create a decently accurate idea of that 3D scene in the minds of the viewers. There is one theoretical optimal view point from which it may seem as if a viewer would perceive a scene with their own eyes, but 99% of all viewers need to subconciously do the mental legwork to interpret their weird viewing angle and the FOV distortion of the picture on screen. They know it's not real, but can and will be able to perceive the 3D scene quite accurately the way it was intended to be represented.
But what you are trying to do is like actually creating a hologram that seems real to the eye for every viewer from every angle because it actually looks as if it was really THERE. No additional mental work needed to interpret and extrapolate what the scene might have really looked like.
THAT, except with audio for our ears instead of visuals for our eyes.
Correct and yes!
Another thought provoking video. I think your approach is indeed similar to Dolby Atmos. My understanding of the Atmos technology is that it is not a "point source" recording. Mulltiple microphones are used to record the sound and then encode it into separate sound objects. When the playback occurs the Atmos processing directs those distinct sound objects to separate amplifiers and separate speakers for reproduction. Some of these speakers point to the ceiling and others point downward.
Also box speakers are far from decent enough to have sound radiating only from the speaker cones. All speaker enclosures resonant and color the sound. Bass reflex speakers have passive radiators or ports making their own sound colorations too.
Your video leads to the discussion of how critical the recording engineer and equipment, microphone placement, etc is in making a good recording. Even the best sound reproduction equipment can't save a bad recording.
Great stuff keep it coming!
Very cool and thank you.
As far as Atmos. It tries to recreate an envirinment of somewhere else in your living room by shooting sound inward
This is is about putting an instrument into your environment by shooting sound outward.
I've always wanted to test this. Wild. Well done Dave. Would love to experience it in person.
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it's crazy how well it works
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"Grab it and repeat it" That is at least a worthwhile and potentially valuable experiment. We started with a steel stylus on a wax cylinder into a conical horn and look where that led! It's a pleasure to observe you experiment . (I listened on closed-back stereophones) I'm tempted to record a Taylor guitar or a Dobro resonator guitar into a pair of Crown PCC160 floor mics and submit it as experimental source material.
I will release a recording spec and place to upload soon, if you are up for it
Even listening on a super basic stereo output here in the studio, the four speaker tube system you made has a richness and intonational value whereas all the other speakers sounded "flat" in comparison. Fantastic follow up video, hopefully you will continue this series as well as develop some best practices. Excited to share with you but also to simply experiment and try new configurations on my own...
So true that on a "macro level" sound is single source but that same sound on a microlevel is producing different tonalities with different resonance and phasing. And in the case of a guitar and other instruments completely different sounds form different parts of the instrument. Like when I play the piano, I enjoy the hammer action, and other instrument noise as much as the actual notes which each come at me from different places...
you are a true resource Dave, thank you for sharing and making the "inter-web" a better place
peace
Yes. I was surprised by the richness exhibited by the tube speaker setup as opposed to the traditional speaker. I truly would like to hear it live and in person to see if the speaker coloration of each element in the array still makes it sound "recorded."
I have often wondered whether hugh quality transducers, attached to real instruments, would sound realistic. They do for violins, but I have not heard other setups. This reminds me a bit of that concept. I would think, though, for optimal realism, the recordings would have to be made in a dead flat space. I think, if the speaker elements were sensitive enough for this application, that even the room spaciality recorded on his couch would color the playback.
Heck yeah thank you!
It is important to note that I am trying to make something that sounds "real" but not that worried about sounding "identical"
@@DaveRat Perhaps not yet. But, as things progress, but why not eventually strive for identical, or a close as you can get? I rather think you'll come up with something given what you've already got.
Yes, agreed and also I feel it's important that people realize the mics I chose and positions of mics and speakers and amp type and recording bit rate are all of little importance. I purposely used random mics in non perfect positions with 44.1 recording into cheap Chinese amps and reasonably good but not amazing speakers in plumbing tubes stuffed with cotton, to compete against well thought out famous designs. I want people to know it's the concept not the specifics that make this work
Very interesting Dave 🤔.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
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Thanks Dave. Good stuff. I used to work at the old ESS (Electro Static Sound) factory in Sacramento back in the early 80’s. Those Heil air motion transformers sound pretty cool. They disperse from the front and rear. The cabinets also use a passive radiator for rear dispersion. They also made a monitor version with two 12’s. They were beasts and way ahead of their time.
I love and cherish that speaker and it is the center channel of my home hifi
@@DaveRat I still have a pair of the Heil transformers and some diaphragms. I tried them on top of some JBL Cabaret 4699b’s for my home stereo. They sounded pretty good. They have an amazing frequency response and are able to cover a lot of the upper mids. Thanks Dave. Love your attempts to create realism.
The clear crisp sound and also the figure 8 dispersion combine to give a wonderful sound
Great to meet you!
It was Thursday night band practice at a church I was at. We just recently got a pre-Sonos 24 channel mixer when it first came out. This was a major needed upgrade considering the stuff that we had before that. We went from a 16 channel analog Mackie that sounded great to a Yamaha 32 pulled out of a TV stations dumpster. Then somebody bought us a used PV 34? Ch ( it was an odd number because they counted 3 channels per stereo L+R+Mic ) off of eBay without telling us. Two speakers hanging and 1 subwoofer or 2 probably 1 at that point. Don't remember exactly what they were I could probably look but they were 15 or 18 inch JBL something squares, and I could not stand the subwoofer they never sounded right. We had three or four monitor mixes. After the band left I was playing with the multi track capability and tweaking the preset save for Sunday.
There was somebody else in the building who came in and was like the band sounds really really good. Then they left and I realized they couldn't have been listening to the band at that point and they thought the band was still there an hour after they left. I believe they came back into the sanctuary and found the band not there when I pointed it out they were quite surprised if I'm remembering correctly.
Granted they were a few rooms down the hall but they were still believing it when they came into the sanctuary and didn't look at the stage.
Can't remember if I had any of the monitors routed as well but I probably did as I was playing back each individual channel it would've remixed the monitor bus.
That was a decent system I put in it's really too bad "I didn't know what I was doing", I went back a few years later with another band I was working with and the only things they changed was going for better speakers and a center channel. Which was on the target roadmap for system upgrades.
and considering I came in there before Easter Sunday for band practice to find the main speakers weren't sounding right oh yeah sure enough the voice coils are blown how'd that happen? I threw some sticks up and we got through Sunday Until I could order replacement parts.
I might as well say why I don't like the PV mixer As well. It had a built-in digital processing section for only the main mix and effects. Worked fine until one Sunday during service the mains cut out after a thumper or reboot it come back then they will go out again it was almost like a cold solder joint but it but I highly suspect it was with the processor chip. One of these days I will investigate it since I have both Yamaha and PV sitting in my basement.
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the four piece band idea sounds fascinating! loved the vid. thought provoking as usual!
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I ones made a recording of a string Quartet standing in a circle around 4 mics. Played back with 4 speakers in surround setup with each of the mics send to a different speaker made it sound pretty cool.
That's Cool
You speak plainly. Directly. And with a smooth pace. Thank you.
Thank you Douglas!!
Thank you for the limitless information it seems you have to provide. You have certainly helped my career as an engineer, and on many occasion changed my perceptions entirely through well executed experiments.
Cool cool and thank you!
I love it ... might build one for the kids at the college then have it in my garden after, be fantastic when teaching sound design thanks Dave
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There is always the cases of listening as it would have been heard someplace vs hearing it in your room.
Correct. Going to the place to hear vs tying to simulate the place coming to you vs having the musicians come to you.
All are interesting and of value in my opinion but only the first 2 are currently options with available products
I was sceptical watching the first video about your realistic speaker, but this really adds context to that earlier video.This is a very interesting approach, and at the same time just stupidly simple.
Right!?
The things you talk about and demo make a lot of sense. Thank you.
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That other video got me thinking about how an old-school orchestra was arranged. How the old colosseums were stair cased and such to deliver all the various sounds optimally. They were all acoustic instruments and no mixing board was involved. The arrangement was the mixing board and the conductor was the fader. I mean it's no wonder operas had singers with such powerful voices or how many chairs a violin section has to effectively, mix the sounds evenly.
The physical space truly was an equation to the music itself as they were bound together. I feel like people of that day would dominate the comment section with interesting arguments and contributions. Imagine having these conversations somehow before electricity existed. People would be like "be sure to spill whiskey on that mandolin tube-man because these jesters are always drunk, you know for realism", LOL.
Another variation on your concept is to recreate a drum kit. Each drum has two speakers firing the appropriate directions sat in the typical configuration of a drum kit. The sound coming off of it would sound and feel very different than the same drum buss played back through a traditional set up. It would be super interesting to see where people could take this basic concept you are introducing.
Definitely liked the sound out of "tube Man" the best, I feel the recording was optimized for it best but just my opinion. :) Too cool Dave! :)
Perhaps the most important aspect is the sound behind the speakers and whether the sound remains good as you walk around
@@DaveRat Absolutely, unlike in a colosseum this is more of a moving experience. :)
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I had a thought after you said 'sound like a jazz trio in a restaurant': maybe it's good that sound reproduction is a flawed version of its live counterpart, for that is then still a reason go to support live musicians? :-) If there was a way to make speakers sound like human beings playing instruments in the same space as you, maybe you might not feel like going to that restaurant and tipping that trio of enthusiasts, or buying that concert ticket, or what have you..... ? Or at least the price of everything, from hiring said musicians through recording process along with sale of the album, would have to be really expensive to compensate for all of it, I think. Thanks for all the fun and effort you bring us with your hands on research! :)
That goes both ways. The Jazz trio gets more exposure and people then say, wow. We really need to go see them.
I don't think CZcams hurt concert attendances anymore than real speakers would. And thank you!
The 4 piece band Idea is awesome. The whole time I was watching, I was thinking this. As a listener in my environment, though, I will sadly not experience this with you as you are. I will be listening to it from my environment and my stereo-only speakers. Even with nothing else, having the Mics in all those locations picking up the sounds in different directions made the sound so much fuller in my over-ear headphones. Without having heard the original recording in person, I can't validate the realistic of it, though. The speaker you created did do a great job of sounding the same, though!
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It's a very cool concept! I'm wondering if the source needs to be recorded in an anechoic chamber to avoid room acoustics in the recording for the most realistic effect 🤔 It's also interesting how it differs from binaural audio in that way, since for binaural, the thing that makes it fool the brain is exactly the intricacies of the room acoustics captured in the recording.
I don't think anechoic recording would hurt. And don't really want the room recorded but don't think it's critical to do as having a bit of room sound recorded does not seem to mess things up much
Binaural is just the interaural delay passed through a filter to represent the head. You could record it in a totally flat open area and it would still work.
@@JZStudiosonline If you did, then the recording would sound as if you yourself were standing in an anechoic chamber. That's not what most binaural audio applications aim for, but yes, It's certainly possible :D
@@grafzhl Sure, but as a fan of surround sound I've spent time looking into binaural, vss, and ambisonics. Binaural by definition is just 2 mics, real or simulated, with an interaural delay. If its simulated its passed through an hrtf.
I've gotten in a lot of arguments with people claiming that ambisonics, binaural, vss, and hrtf are all the same.
@@JZStudiosonline Those are a whole bunch of terms that can't even all be qualitatively compared with one another 😅
I think walking around your speaker contraption with the Tascam is pretty effective in showing that it does not sound like any of the other speakers you experimented with, but the only way I could truly begin to understand is to build my own speaker and ask you to send me your microphone track out. Maybe I'll join your channel and do that soon. I'm envisioning now an atmos room with a few of these placed inside of it as well to represent independent objects.
I guess one thought I have about why live music sounds so clearly different than a recording is that most of the time, when I mix, and even when I mix live bands, I'm not going for the realest representation of the band. I'm going for the best sounding one.
Realistic reproduction and reinforcement are different adventures
@8:42 the change to two channel stereo was dramatic, really captures the directional tonality variations quite well.
Really a great example, revealing body ... that dimensionality, in textbook fashion.
The additional mics, I'm interested, very cool.
My immediate impression was the high and low messed up a good thing ... but this is interesting.
I appreciate your thought process.
Also, @10:41 the Heil AMT ESS, by Oskar Heil.
Nelson Pass designed the crossover and his future wife soldered and built the crossovers!
ADS, ESS, ... love those two.
Solid content.
Awesome and it was fun to bust out some of my speakers for a vid
When i first started using in ear monitors as a drummer, i got a small berringer mixer and a ribbon microphone and putvthe mic on stage in a place where i could pick up the best sound. Just like how they used to record with a u87. Works brilliant. More because you can turn down the sound of the room.
Just when I thought the recording samples of ancient instruments (like the Stradivarius collection in Cremona, Italy) were all that we needed to preserve their sound, now I have to ask, “But did they record it from behind the performer too?”
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Thanks for this. I appreciate the mic's and speaker locations being at least loosely correlated this time. Also, after thinking about my comb filtering question I realized that it is the playback of multiple mic's through a single speaker that locks them in, so in your single speaker per mic setup it wouldn't exist. Thank you for your patience. Clashing room coloration still seems like it would be an issue, and you would get some unusual nodes/ anti-nodes from the multi- speaker setup that wouldn't exist with the physical instrument. I'm picturing the classic ripples on a pond analogy where you are trying to replicate tossing a log in by throwing strategically placed stones into a rectangular pool. It might be closer to the real thing in some ways, but everything is always a trade-off. Very interesting to think about and try to hear via the stereo walk around.
Rear firing speakers like the Bose would have the same comb filtering issue in reverse since they are multiple speakers playing the same source. Having listened to DCM Timewindows and Infinity RS II's I do find the rear tweeter more helpful than distracting, so I may have to cobble together something if you end up releasing the 5.1 version.
One more thing: seeing the ADC relaxing on the couch made me laugh... could be the setup for a New Yorker cartoon where the speaker is trying to figure out what the humans are so obsessed with, or sitting in the therapist's office bemoaning our unrealistic expectations.
Thanks for the video, and I've been enjoying catching up on your other videos as well.
Very cool and thank you,. Yeah I don't worry about the room coloration too much or if it's exactly the same sound as the recording.
Same thing as mixing a live show I don't try and make it sound just like the album and no two live shows sound the same so some variations are not really a problem as long as it sounds realistic
This is something I always wondered about. Producers and engineers always talked about "sound stage," yet I always thought the pinnacle of sound reproduction would be to sound realistically live...but live in the listening environment.
Same with vocals. My favorite tracks have nearly dry, proximate vocals that even ata low listening volume sound as if they are live in my room.
I am fascinated with the applications of this type of recording and playback. I can see applications in live theatre and experiential performance (escape rooms, museums and most especially VR suites). I can imagine that it will put new and different requirements on speaker elements with true, strict realism being the goal.
I love it when people get it!
I'm a live sound guy for 4 decades and I am trying to bring a bit of live closer to home.
@@DaveRat I can't wait to see what you develop!
Me as well!
The next experiment that I'm curious to see (or may attempt myself) is if there's an exact number of microphones to where if you go beyond, would it make negligible difference in the output
and if does, does that scales infinitely?
This also provokes the thought of overall compatibility with different future systems. Maybe experiment with methods of summing 8 microphones down to the 4 channels for your speaker and seeing if there's a perceived increase of realism or if it's even compatible/useful at all.
I want to build my own similar enclosure and do a bunch of test recordings with it. I might start with as few channels as possible and work my way up. I'll be certain to try to maintain compatibility with the current configuration of what you have now! Just gotta find free time to do this haha.
What I have found is 2 is too few, 3 is pretty good, 4 and 5 work well and over that it does not change much
Love the guitar playing. Sounds like it’s lifted from Sebadoh’s III.
Wow and thank you. Pretty self conscience about it so hearing it does not annoy at least someone, makes me happy
Awesome as always. Please don't put too much energy into overanalyzing negative comments. One thing that comes to mind is to maybe keep the very low end coming from one speaker just because of phase.
Thank you and the lows of say 80hz have a 14 ft wavelength so the distances between these speakers won't matter, they work together
@@DaveRat yeah, god point!
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I find this so interesting. I really like the distributed mode speakers, like a driver that wakes a piece of wood as a sound producer. The treble doesn’t come from a single point but various points on the surface. I had an experimental stage a few years back with a speaker with a tin lid on top and water droplets. I think what you’re saying is that the mic positions could be inverted with speakers to recreate the presence and specific location. Forgetting about phasing for now, i do wonder about small Bmr speakers that don’t produce a single point source, but points on the surface, put together as the same shape of say the violin, and the mics being the inverse or using contact mics on the same position points as the bmrs, would be closer but realistically what you want is a mic that produces sound the way the speaker reproduces it so a bmr type contact mics on the surface of the instrument in the same positions the bmr speakers resonate sound out. the heil transformer ribbon… i had some cheaper heils my dad left over from the stereo I gre up with in the 80s, cheaper ones that where crossed with an 18inch woofer, known for getting lower than a traditional ribbon speaker, so i figured with a wider range they would make great microphones and omg they sound amazing on electric guitar. Any speaker really. The cheap versions though where a bad idea with the large slow woofer compared to the fast acting ribbon. So bad, just a cheaper visual similarity to the (real) heil. Should of been two 10ich woofers maybe that together have more mass than the 18 but respond faster as individual drivers. Fuck that Neumann sounded great!!! Wish I could afford em, maybe later. Cheers for the great content
Oh and i really want a small bmr (been trying to get one in new zealand for two years) to replay and rerecord vocals through a mic in a echo space because i reckon with a tube attached or realistically a head box and bass tube would be the closest to sound leaving a humans mouth. To create reverb to blend. Fanks dave
as usual, nice demonstration, and great conclusion again....
and well done!
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Thank you 🙌
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This is the second time you make me go test something :) its an amazing feeling trying something new conceptually with what you have already. I love creating music with this setup and playing it with your self-made speaker model!
This one will take some time I guess, but I will report back.
Awesome and yes please do!
KEEP IT UP DAVE!!!!!!
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I would’ve assumed that the tour grade stage monitor that many famous artists have on stage would be far better than a plastic pipe with speakers on the ends. However, I definitely get the idea of recording something near where the actual speakers playing the recording back would be, and it’s an interesting concept and a cool outcome! It sounded the most like the actual guitar, by far.
Agreed and also it's kind of unfair in that all of the speakers are designed for different things. The tube speaker is designed to sound realistic and even though very little design theory and testing went into it the concept is capable of reproducing realistic sound.
All of the other speakers are designed to reproduce sound recordings that have already been mixed. Or for the monitor to make it loud and cover a certain area.
What is amazing is that I can throw together some random speakers into some tubes and have it sound even remotely more realistic than well thought out high-priced well designed products
Definitely a fun experiment. It definitely would take a major shift in how media is recorded. And then there's that whole adoption thing.
I will ponder a 9.1 compatible setup
Mr. Dave your innovation is out of boundery amezing hope you r Idea comes out well & continue doing more & more to reach all music lovers....
Thank you!
Do a spaced x/y+z (but fairly tight) and then put an open baffle speaker firing axially reversed in the exact location for each mic. Build the baffles so the backside is as absorptive as possible - so each speaker is trying to reproduce *what sound was happening where it's mic was*. Match the volume as close as possible, then walk around it.
Omni speakers fail because the mics are decorrelated. Further decorrelating with a "Rat Confuse a Cat Array" diffuses the comb filtering into 3d space, but it's still decorrelated. I think what you're going for is a 3d space equivalent to binaural headphone recording.
Effectively, what I'm suggesting is to do "Inside Out Atmos"; instead of X number of speakers reproducing decorrelated sound inwards to a *single* point, you should try to have a single point (not a single speaker...) reproduce *correlated* sound outward. Essentially an "encoding" process by matching the reproduction source to the recording points.
The beauty of this is that you could have recordings made with a mic array of a specific dimensional relationship, and people could have the exact dimensional point source in their room (*not a single "point source" speaker). Additions would be maybe add a "rear" mic facing away for a sub, maybe another in the front array pointed down going to a small sub that would be maybe on the floor (so as not to interfere/diffract the xyz speaker array).
I've done a wide spaced array and then put a pair of speakers there, very "headphones binaural" realistic, but of course walking around disturbs the illusion. But I believe ultimately you have to recreate where mic was.
It would be interesting to hear a 16+track "mix" of a band done this way I've thought. Sort of like the Dead discrete array, but with speakers in the locations of where the mics were.
Open baffles radiate in polarity and out of polarity sound, this creates a null off axis that is unrelated to the sound of the instrument or recording. Adding and creation of the out of polarity sound is non beneficial
You can hear some of that issue with the ESS and DML off axis.
@@DaveRat They do create a null off axis. So does a directional mic. Not all dipoles/baffles are the same.
Agreed yet reproducing an out of polarity sound that does not exist in the instrument sound is highly improbable to benefit realism due to the unnatural nulls that will occur
This is so cool and fascinating Dave!
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Cant possibly judge without hearing your actual speaker . Very interesting 👍👌
Wow!! Cool Stuff Thank You "Sir Dave of the Real" Highly Compelling, God Bless
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This is so interesting. I'm a musician and I would like to send you a recording of me playing the flute, which I think would be another good test on an acoustic instrument. Let me know if that is of interest to you Dave. Thanks, Paul.
I love this idea and will take you up on it. Can you contact me through the soundtools.com support page?
Fun!
Fun stuff is right. You simply have a terrific way of thinking about things. Borderline genius. I love having you kick my brain into directions I would never go. I see that 'realism' is certainly almost unachievable, and I'm not sure if I even care - ha. But I absolutely understand your approach and am delighted to have invested a small amount of my small brain into this idea. Thanks for all you do.
Thank you and fun!
This is pretty cool. It's more similar to a binaural recording and playback system than omni point source.
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Would like to hear one of these stormtrooper speakers driving a real reverb chamber.
That would be cool
Hey dave , super vid u r truly visionary, i know u got alot on your plate but u could seriously put all the 2 channel speaker companys outa business w/ this design serious kung fu my friend!!!!!!.
This is not a replacement, just another fun way to enjoy sound. And thank you!
I love that you are experimenting in this way. If I may make a suggestion, instead of the tascam have you thought about doing a binaural recording? If you have some omni lav mics you can clip them onto a hat or a beanie on the sides of your head and it might show off the differences a between the speakers a bit better.
Binaural recordings are awesome for binaural playback
I want the recreate the actual instrument sound. Not the sound of being in the room with the instrument, as binaural does.
@@DaveRat sorry, I meant of your speaker! So we can hear the comparisons more accurately on headphones as you walk around.
Hmmm. That's an interesting idea. Will see what I can do
BRILLIANT AND DAMN RIGHT take a grand piano that’s why what I went for with my hifi is considered wrong by many purists. However when the speaker itself is similar to design of a guitar or bass amp atleast I’m trying to create that part atleast. I mean the key thing here is people who accept the unified speaker approach from your JBL APPLE UE BOOM all in one speakers. I’ll stick with my Hi-Fi because it works for me. Your real world application from FOH applies more to creating my ultimate sound more than Paul from
PS AUDIO trying to create a sound stage. A triangle is an instrument that as far as I’m concerned has never been captured and recreated as good as it is in real life. A rock band with guitar bass drums and maybe keyboard is where I would be the pelican that would simply put what x4 speakers each one designed to create each instrument and then mix down myself. Still the marvelous world of sound. Always entertaining stay safe.
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I'm so happy to see Bob Heil get a mention. I love his microphones and I feel like they are a hidden gem in the audio industry, Every time I see someone using a Shure SM7 because they look cool and because other content creators use them I feel sad because the large diaphragm dynamic mics Heil builds are so superior and are assembled in the US AND they are competitively priced.
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Nothing wrong with a sm7B.
Heill mics are nice but no secret or an hidden gem. See ppl use them all the time. Mainly live shows tho.
@@joostkok8939 I never said there is anything wrong with the SM7B - they are a good mic - great in the right application. What I get sick of is people using them because they look cool when a less expensive mic would work just as well. I mentioned Heil mics (a) because they are assembled in the US, and (b) because Bob Heil is an audio legend and deserves credit for his great products. Most podcasters and CZcams content producers would be just fine with s $20 ES58. There is no magic involved when you are close to the mic.
Reproducing music through speakers adds colour, compression, texture, etc that changes the sound. Neil young had a cave in sf that he played tracks through where he could place a micrphone to change the lenghth of the signal. Mushroom studios in vancouver had a ceiling they could raise and lowe4 to do the same. These are extreme measures to go to to find perfect audio greatness. Im glad you recognize this because it seems there are no real pioneers in sound anymore.
This is awesome have you looked into using ultrasonic carrier waves basically embedding your audio within an ultrasonic wave and when it hits a hard surface like your ear it demodulates therefore you wind up with a sound source that works as a laser I think there's a lot of really cool opportunities with this new technology keep up the great work
Maybe watch the video is with my daughter ":can we hear above 20k" I think it's called.
The Stormtrooper speaker is me more realistic. The sound coming out is more rounded than the rest. I'd like to build one.
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Would love to have a 5.1 audio file with the raw mic tracks. I have a 7.4 home theatre and can play around with the channel panning and time alignment to see how the realism of the recording technique translates to a more conventional multi-channel array. Cheers for the content, it has opened my eyes to the possibility of multi-mic recording for instruments other than drums.
👍🤙👍, will see what I can do
Fascinating topic! Your's is infinitely more realistic and dynamic for a variable listening position, as opposed to being locked into a sweet spot, with the normal paradigm speakers, which obviously sound flat.
Yeah!
It's a different way to listen to music. But some would prefer just sitting in a comfortable listening position and enjoy a high quality playback system. You know you're listening to a great system when you want to hear more and more music and see how it sounds.
@@marcnotyou3191 Of course, this is obviously a different use case, for a different mode of listening experience, as opposed to passively occupying the sweetspot of an inward facing perimeter array of emitters/drivers. Imagine, if you will, a dynamic environment of moving people, maybe a small to midsize nightclub or similar venue, or an art installation, with this concept serving to reproduce the acoustical soundstage, and positional cues, of an actual jazz 3-piece, for every listening position. The configuration and calibration would be tailored to the outfit and genre being reproduced, one would assume.
Yeah, rather than sit in a sound listen spot, like having to put on cardboard red blue glasses to watch a 3d movie. This drops instruments into a room that sound real regardless of whether you get up and wander and chat.
More like going to club vs watching a movie
Sound holograms.
But let's go a step beyond and cut human hearing right out of the picture. Wire directly to the brain. Not so far fetch as it has already been done with cochlear implants.
Great video! I hope Dave would share the Storm Trooper Speaker plan and the drivers that have been used :)
I will share more info. Maybe a long version of the build or a new build
@@DaveRat Thanks brother!
Sound fields that requires a fixed listening position to me are far from natural sounding. Still interesting as always.
Exactly and that is why I am designing a speaker that is not dependant on fixed listening positions!
an interesting one would be a 360 degree timed mono-mic walk around of the live player/instrument through the right ear here on youtube, with a similar/later timed walk around of the various speakers under test individually sync'ed up to be simultaneous in the left ear at the same time highlighting the difference for each of the speakers. Your brain should perceive the similarities in the middle & any differences at the sides so give an easier comparison across the speakers/directions rather than having to try and "remember" what the original sounded like at that point.
Hmmm, my goal is that someone walks into a room and it's sounds real. It can have flaws, it does not need to be identical to the original, it just needs to sound realistic.
The listener won't know what the original sounded like but they will know if it sounds like a normal speaker
I’m afraid a speaker never mimics a sound source, but rather an ear. And if you sit at sweet spot, you likely hear what “heard” a mic recorded a sound (mics and a mastering). Sound engineers never used an idea of a sound source, but rather an idea of a listener. Instead we need a multitrack recorder, and a sophisticated speakers system to recreate the sources. A simple stereo does not allow us to make this theoreticaly
Correct and this speaker does mimic a sound source
When you start your band I would luv too sit in on Conga's. It seemed to me like the stereo pair of pencil type condenser microphones really exaggerated the attack on the stings when compared to your microphones placed lower that sounded more realistic too me, or maybe just more pleasing to my ear. Just my personal opinion not saying any one mic is right or wrong. I'm listening on some bookshelf speakers with small ribbon tweeters with low frequency speaker reproducing 70Hz and above.
Very cool and this is yet another aspect of the way mics alter the original sound.
Typically speakers soften that. The mics are closer than we typically are familiar with listening and reproduce that more dynamic unfamiliar sound.
This is actually a big challenge with live sound reinforcement and why we try and use compression to make realistic sounds sound natural through PA systems. When the natural sound does not need compression
Any thoughts about forming an "open source" type group for this experiment? If so, I'm in. I like your style, Dave! This is exciting!
I'd love that and would love to partner with someone or a company on that.
Develop a recording spec, and speaker build spec and people upload and play back
Love that
that nervous strumming is mighty pleasing 😅
Thank you Haze. Am very self conscience being a sound eng doing guitar player things.
Simple and effective! Love it
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Very cool! I reminds me of something I saw Curtis Bahn doing in his "R!g" album; it was a dodecahedron speaker that took a bunch of processed channels from his electronic bass instrument to send out slightly different sound in all directions to bring an electronic instrument more richly into a performance space. I think you're on to something cool here.
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cool idea Dave! wondering about some of the physics - if you have any damping inside, and if the out of phase internal pressure from each speaker is affecting the other speakers or if they are blocked off from each other. thanks!
Good question. The speakers don't really know what the other speakers are doing they just radiate sound and if there's no sound then sound is radiated in various directions. If there is sound the sound they radiate interacts with the existing sound in whatever way physics dictates.
In this situation the inner ring cancels out almost all the sound headed to the back of the outer ring.
But also the inner radiate sound outward that adds to the inner ring at certain frequencies and cancels at others
My microphone knowledge is greatly limited to SM prefixes, but does a microphone exist with such a design where it can capture Omni directional information from its environment for something like instrument recording, maybe something with a diaphragm similar looking to the omnidirectional onion shaped speaker examples you gave earlier in the video? Would there just be too much "noise" from outside stimuli to recreate the detail you have achieved with your current setup? I love the set up and love the hypothesis. I just ask these questions to try and better grasp the limits of sound, thanks for your time and videos!
There are mics that capture one or more signals coming from different directions from a single point in space.
These are useful for recreating the environment and sounds that the mic is located in.
Conversely what I'm trying to do is capture the instrument and not the environment and then drop that instrument into the listening environment so a different micing method would be desirable
The first issue is sound capture. How microphone capsules work only give us 1/2 of the actual signal, during the rebound movement of the capsule (180 to 90 degrees) the 2nd 1/2 of the signal is not really a transduction of any wave moving FROM the source. Now, in dual capsule configurations there certainly is a rebound transduction in the 2nd capsule (that is facing away from the source) but it is based upon a reflect which depends upon the distance to whatever surface or open air space with a different compression characteristic there is on the 2nd capsule's side. The second issue is reproduction. Coil based speakers are similar to microphone capsules in that the rebound from a wave is not really a representation of anything except for the peak of wave 1 to the return peak difference of peak 2, in any one ''cycle''. An acoustic sound source, as you stated, gives off energy in all directions constantly and is externally 100% in-phase with itself throughout 0 to 180 degrees (albeit, possibly not internally), it never has to drop 1/2 of any wave in order to satisfy any peak writing or reading.
Resonance is a strange beast when compared to sound capture or reproduction. The motion of an A-4 tuning fork, for instance, will produce 440hz in open air but 880hz when touching a surface due to the two arms of the fork both crossing 0 twice per cycle. A close stereo pzm mic setup, when set out of phase and crossed over between the peaks of any given octave, can open your mind as to just how much we really are missing in our push/pull audio universe - which is really only push, the pull is just a free-associated mechanical return (a necessary evil of the mechanics). A capture or reproduction system, that relies upon a 0 to 180 cycle, simply can not truly represent 90 through 180 if it does truly represent 0 through 90. That's just a fact. It might be a tough pill to swallow, but we've only ever heard an accurate 71% (at best) representation of any audio source through any push pull broadcast or recording. During the time it takes for a capsule or speaker to rebound at ANY frequency it is simply not capturing anything but a difference between 2 separate points in time for that frequency and both of those points begin at 0. Think about pushing a kid on a swing, sometimes you get in perfect rhythm and other times you're just a little off but EVERY time they come back to you that backward motion was dictated by your last push's interaction with the laws of physics.
And which sounded more real?
@@DaveRat If by real you mean the closest reproduction of your room mics' capture through a speaker back into a field recorder, I'd have to say the Heil. At 0 it's a little thick in the mids but around 45 degrees off it's just about dead on response-wise. Volume is a non-issue to me in a situation like you have there, it's more about tonal balance. Also, if I were to answer which reproduction is my personal favorite my choice might vary from which I feel is the closest to the initial capture but that would be a stylistic preference, artistic bias, me projecting how I would LIKE it to sound. I'm willing to bet that the Heil rig is pretty uniform 45-60 degrees off axis from 300hz-3khz, regardless of source material, but it's about 2-3db more sensitive straight on at 0. It's totally a directional thing, relative to the beam strength of the cabinet/monitor. I get the feeling that you're sniffing around, or hinting toward, finding for a way to do with mid to upper frequencies what can be done, in a directional sense, with bass - which, to be blunt, is Fuh king fascinating 😍 It's about time for somebody to brave that rabbit hole who isn't nailed to a 6 or 12 month product release schedule at Bose or Sony. You would think Neumann or Genelec would have already done it, but hey, they got mouths to feed in a timely manner, too, right?
Interesting, the Heil sounds good but the huge phase cancellatin null off axis made it beyond unrealistic. None sound even close to real behind except the storm trooper. All the normal speakers sound like they are trying to be forward facing point sources which no real instrument sounds like.
@@DaveRat Oh, I didn't say any of them sounded real just that the Heil had the closest frequency response and even that was when off axis by around 45 degrees. But, isn't it interesting that even though you had multiple mics on the source, with quite good phase coherence, the recording still came out flat as a pancake nearly regardless of the speaker used to reproduce it? Mono is mono is mono but even a mono recording has 0 to 180 phase. In this case it's clear that no matter how many microphones you stack up their diaphragms are only going to give you a totally accurate capture of maybe the 1st 1/2 of the wave forms (ie travel from 0 to 180), the lion's share of travel back from 180 to 0 is just electro-mechanical rebound. In the case of all other speakers other than the Heil, even the storm trooper, what you are likely perceiving as ''more real'' are transients which are more coherent due to their being A) more time aligned than lower frequencies and B) the mechanical properties of the reproducing drivers (ie mass, sensitivity, etc). Louder is not more lifelike, even when it comes to efficiency at given frequencies. Your having BEEN THERE within the circle of the mics at the time of creation I would say has skewed your perception of what ''real'' is toward what you experienced: a human ear sitting within the bubble of transients that, by the laws of physics, couldn't discern much below 600hz but increasingly could above that.
Hmmm, mono is not 180 behind. The concept that ported or sealed enclosures radiate different polarity behind is incorrect and I have actually done videos on this helping people understand the radiating patterns of loud speaker cabs. If there is a 180 degree polarity shift behind, it is a result of open back designs. Sealed and ported enclosures are in-polarity all the way around.
Exactly 👏 so 4 ch mono is the answer
Is that a dancing pole setup in ur lounge room ? thats awesome
Doesn't everyone have one?
I think based on what I can hear on my krk system I prefer the storm trooper the most, for 3d spatial feel when you walk around, funny since it's the hand made cheap one
Awesome!!
I'd like to see an "atmos" style surround sound set up with this system.
Interesting, I could do a comparison between sound shooting from the outside to recreate an instrument vs sound radiating outwards .
But I think the result woil be predictable
@@DaveRat If I understand what you're doing here correctly, the only way you would be able to do it in a "consumer" system would be with a Trinnov Altitude with 32 channels and some sort of custom processing which would get pretty expensive. Never the less the results could be pretty incredible.
Or a single instrument via CZcams 5.1
Yo What?!? did I just watch......Fun stuff🤟
Down with this. Goingg to have to watch this again *thumbsup*
Awesome!
Forgive me if this has already been covered by you or in a comment, but is there a reason for the directions of the speakers or is that just arbitrary based on the material you had? Would it make most sense to record your source instrument from say directly in front, behind, left and right and the have the speaker have a driver & channel for front, behind, left and right? Or is matching the direction and orientation not as integral to the concept as I'm thinking?
I'd be really interested to hear a for example; a performance of acoustic guitar and vocal recorded from all around the performer on eight channels and then reproduced on an eight driver speaker like this- and see how much it can sound like a performer in the room with you. It could take intimacy in music to a new level!
Part of this is that it does not really matter that much.
Having 4 sounds radiated in 4 directions is so much better than 1 sound radiated in one or more directions, that it's a huge improvement.
Yes, fine tuning would be great but most of the disadvantage is the concept, not the details
Hey, Dave! I love your thought processes and overall approach to audio. However, I'm having trouble thinking about how these concepts apply at scale. Would you be able to address this in a future video? In other words, how would you apply this to medium- and large-scale settings?
Not really sure yet and not really thinking this is geared towards scaling up as much as trying to bring that amazing experience of sitting in the back of a tour bus with a famous musician playing acoustic guitar or sitting in the dressing room while a few guys in the band are rehearsing a new song, or sitting by the campfire with somebody singing and playing guitar.
Having the ability to recreate those amazing Sonic situations in your living room or any room that you drop a speaker like this is kind of the concept
Very cool experiment Dave.
One potential issue with your array is phase. With those distances. Double MidSide or 1OA arrays are great systems for these applications in my opinion.
Great work!
Trying to recreate the stuff molar phase issues of an actual; instrument. Not fix them
@@DaveRat ahhh. Your mindset is not the standard! Very well done!
👍🤙👍 hopefully true
@@DaveRat So, in this mindset to speaker and microphone arrays: Would these recordings translate to other speaker arrays, or is it a one position situation?
Cheers?
Not really sure. I mean. People record using multiple mics so the mics can be mixed or reproduced however
I am just trying to keep things simple, capture and reproduce with no EQ or processing though that could be added, the simplicity I think is important for sharing the concept
I will also add, for some things the point is not to sound REALISTIC but to sound balanced, clear, and LOUD.
True. And just like with art and photography, somethings are about beauty, some about emotion, documentation, information, and loads more, including realism.
The issue is we have speakers good at just a about everything except realism
Love me some experimental audio.
Hi Sir,
While Recording for playback on your designed Speakers. I guess is excellent for 24 tracks playback format for playing music.
Listening Setup ( 6 Speakers of your design.)
Playback comprising of 4 to 6 instruments, including vocals.Standard 4 mics and 4 tracks assigned dedicatedly per Instrument.
Playback music with larger number of instruments, then one can switch to Types of Instruments rather than Individual Instruments, (Hi-pucs, Low-pucs, Strings, Wind, Vocals Main, Backup Vocals) playback on same 24 track format. Again Standard 4 mics and 4 tracks assigned dedicated per section.
There has to be some standard guideline parameter set up for recording and playback within a minimum requirement of at least, 4 mics at time of recording per instrument or Group, at least 24 tracks format for recording and playback and has to be at least 6 speakers for playback.
Very possible and awesome.
What Speaker Placement would you recommend (Pattern and Distance)?
Would you consider providing audio for a separate Low frequency channel in your setup?
Sir Have you tried binaural recording techniques for the same?
I mean Replacing single mics with Stereo mics in a Neumann KU100 Dummy head for achieving more spacial perception.
Yes, I love you are looking at structure. Let's start with one.
One instrument, define a spec for the recording and a spec for the play back speaker .
If it fits in 5.1 then recordings and playback can happen via CZcams
Ch1 left
Ch2 right
Ch3 up
Ch4 down rear
Ch5 room
Channel 6 (the .1 sub)
Mic close, minimize room sound, use relatively flat non colored condenser mics.
Room mic is not needed but if used put 6 feet away, centered in front
For the sub, use any mic you feel will capture lows well for the instrument.
Okay, let's start with your conclusion about instruments not being a point source.
While I will agree that instruments do interact with the environment immediately surrounding them (I'll talk about how that affects what you are doing shortly), instruments become a point source because the listener does not get up and walk around the instrument to listen to it.
In all but extreme environments a listener can turn and point directly to the particular instrument being played or the source of the sound, such as an amplifier.
This would occur even in situations where there are multiple instruments being played at the same time depending on the volume of each instrument.
Now, as you correctly pointed out, the instrument interacts with the environment surrounding it,
In your process of recording an instrument from multiple directions, the environment will be recorded as well.
A good example of this is overhead mics and room mics along with close mics used to record drums.
Typically specially built rooms are used to record drums specifically for the purpose of recording the environment, but not all rooms built for recording drums yield good results.
It would be foolish to use room mics to record a live performance of drums in a club because the surrounding environment would not be conducive to a good-sounding recording of the drums.
Another problem with capturing the "environment" is that there is no control over the playback environment and the two environments will not reproduce the original sound.
Because no two clubs, restaurants, or performance halls are built the same so the playback from the speakers will sound different in each different environment and not necessarily natural.
This is why sound technicians of engineers, and the equipment they use "adjust" the sound to suit the music and the venue.
If you record your guitar in a neutral or dead environment and I place your multi-dimensional speaker(s) in the corner of my living room with hardwood floors I am not going to reproduce the same sound you recorded and the "naturalness" of the source recording won't be accurately reproduced.
I also noted that you are using a variety of microphones to record your guitar,
Is the frequency response of these various microphones affecting the tonality of what you are recording?
Good luck with your project.
Not sure what people walking around has to do with point source.
With a true real sounding instrument you are able to walk around and have it sound real.
Having to stay still to hear is like having to wear those coardod read blue glasses to see 3d movies.
As far as the sound of the room, I don't want to recreate or deal with that. I want to drop a real sounding instrument in your living room and have the musician there with you in your space. Not bring a space to you or transform your space
@@DaveRat How many people walk around an instrument to listen to it.
Most real people sit or stand in clubs or restaurants or concert halls or even their living rooms and listen primarily from a very limited area, but they don't walk around the instrument or the performer to listen to the music.
You aren't dropping a real-sounding instrument into any space because you are ignoring that you have no control over the space in which your playback array will be used in.
The recording you make will not be faithfully reproduced in any environment except the one in which you record it in.
@@JonAnderhub i understand your points, high fidelity reproduction is so complex that it takes all sort of controlled parameters just to come close... BUT the distinction made with this approach/project is not high fidelity but realism -or so i understand it.
the box guitar recording will not sound in your listening room as the guitar sounded in the room it was recorded in but it will sound closer/more convincing to a box guitar playing live in your listening room....
hope this helps, i'm not schooled in this area so i might just imagine i understand these things :)
Yes, I think we are on the same page. I want it to sound real in your living room, don't want your living room to sound like where it was recorded. Just that it's real for you. And since the listener does not have the original source to compare to, real matters, identical does mot
I wanted to start researching specific frequencies and how they effect the world around us. What would be the best budget speaker to set up control and variable environments to study the effects?
Getting a bunch of powered speakers maybe a good way to go they don't need to be very expensive for testing even stuff by behringer will work for you
I would love to hear a stripped down recording like Muddy Waters - Folk Singer using this method.
Me as well
These types of tests are overdue by about a century. Funny how it seems obvious when you see it. This is probably the basis for some breakthrough tech in audio. I am thinking clever, minimally informed simulations into multichannel will do it for existing recordings. Or, new recording formats.
Thank you and hopefully!
Well, I guess the next step can be to make two more stormtroopers and record a trio. Then, place the speakers where the trio played and make comparisons of that. Your brain is a serious thing. Cheers.
Ha! Will ponder and thank you
Cool to see a follow up here, and the concept is growing on me. Not as a replacement for stereo but something that stands in it's own right as a truly different format, but still within the realm of stereo's cost. I've given a listen on IEMs and will try a few more systems later. The most interesting part to me about the sound coming from this system is how even the sound is tonally as you move around, even before the extremes like behind the "source". I really think you've hit on something subtle and important here with the difference between this and an omni or dipole. Far more natural than either (and certainly more natural than a point source)
I also think this could be interesting when it comes to synthesizers. Why not program a multi-timbral patch and feed it through a system like this? There aren't really any rules as to how a digital sound... should sound but we generally either pass them through reverbs of spaces (again starting as a single point source!) Neither of these creates an acoustic image of what the sound really could be.
I have the same thoughts regarding electric guitar amps. Why not feed multiple pickups (different spacing/voicing/filtering) out into multiple speakers? The idea of an electric guitar being a single point source also feels like a similar lack of acoustic imagination to me. So many of the best sounding stereo recordings are made with... multiple amps, with different cones and different mics in different places summed together, multi-tracked in different levels across the stereo field. Why not have this not just be for reproduction of recorded acoustic parts in the format but a bit of a renaissance in new ways of approaching instrument playback itself (at the recording and performance level)
Get closer to a multi-tracked sound but per part.
I think everything you've touched on is a great demonstration of why quad and 5.1 never really caught on. Not a real capture of what an acoustic field is from an instrument.
Thanks for sharing! This channel has been a constant source of interesting things to think about, sorry if this has been a bit of a ramble! Exciting to hear some new thoughts and really creative ideas on recording and playback =)
Ps. Have you heard of wavefield synthesis? It's completely impractical, possibly too ambitious, but it's the one format I've seen that I think also understands the gap you see between how we reproduce sound and how it's actually heard in a space. More analogous to an audio hologram than the multi-channel/ambisonic/atmos audio photograph. It's something I've been fascinated by but have never had the chance to experience (again, not a practical format but cool to think about)
Excellent points and thoughts!
Super cool and thank you! Yes WFS is fascinating and complex and does not sound real as you walk around but is super cool
Friends of mine at 4ms Pedals built a thing called Audio Bend Matrix where they could dynamically route any oscillator or other sources to 8 speakers arranged in whatever configuration you want, and used it with modular synths.
👍🤙👍
I'm imagining that the non exact nature of the mic/speaker placement would lead to some loss of realism. If the goal is maximal realism, I would cage the mics so they scale in 3 dimensions to the speaker layout. The only reason is that the movement of the performer within the microphone field causes noticeable phase differences. At least thats how it sounded when you summed 2 signals to mono. I know the position of the listener is an uncontrolled factor and this problem only occurs when the player moves around within the field, I just think when the performer shifts around it will create weird phase differences that would not sound like a real movement when listening back. I imagine it could sound like the frequencies are changing in a weird way. I guess I have to try this myself and see!
I think realism and identical are separate
Real is somewhat random so tight structure is not necessary.
If you strive for identical, then, yes.
But identical Is not that important to me. Just like a live show sounds real but is not identical to the studio recording.
Curiosity is such a wonderful thing
🤙👍🤙