SDA response to studio mixing

Also wanted to add that you could consider converting your music on the computer to Flac files. It a lossless compression system for audio. It typically only reduces a standard .wav file by 20-25% but you get no loss of audio quality. A good Flac file player is Foobar, but it's not too fancy like a music jukebox player, etc...There maybe other Flac file players out there too. Just another option. It's still going to take a lot of hard drive space for the amount of music you have.

H9

heiney9 wrote:

Scott great explaination. I would just one more bit of impt. info. You are correct about the sounds from the left not reaching your right ear and so on. But technically it should be stated that those sounds reach the opposite ear and different times...

doh!, you're right. i was careless.

i attempted to get at the difference between crosstalk elimination (through treatments) and cancelation (through sda).

where, in theory elimination of crosstalk with normal speaks is simple. sound from left speak does not reach right ear and sound from right speak does not reach left ear. it's really not difficult or technically complex to do and get excellent results with. it just looks and feels cumbersome and silly.

and that, it just gets complicated when you try to achieve the same perceived ends through electronics. where sda does something more like erase info from left speak that does reach right ear and vise verse.

)

Back to the 360 degree issue for a moment. This will be an attempt to simplify what the recording engineer has to work with. The recording engineer can do several things to present the stereo imaging and the sound stage. We will assume that each instrument has its own track. Panning (just like the balance control on a reciever or pre-amp) is used to place the individual instruments across the left to right stereo image. Instruments can be placed in any of about 5 distincly different positions in a normal stereo mix. Instruments can also be moved from the front to the back or anywhere in between. Thsi is usually done by increasing or decreasing the gain on each track. The louder the track, the more to the front the track is. As a side note you can make an instrument seem to be on roller skates if you bring it up too much for solos and then cut it back too much after the solo is over. If you want a mono mess of a recording you pan all enstruments to the center and have each at the same relative gain. If you want to get that 360 type of feel you can obtain it by panning some of the instruments hard left and hard right and then bringing them up in the mix. You have to be careful with the phantom center though. You can also add some delay or reverb that can add an open feel to the sound if it is done well. This whole problem is taken care of very nicely in 5.1 MUSIC. The center channel solves the phantom center problems and the rears solve the 360 degree issues. As a side note to the MP3 Cd debate on this thread, the high resolution of both SACD and DVD-Audio is far superior to that of CD - in fact it sounds almost as good as analog.
I hope this helps, Phil

PS the SDA efect in surround can be really cool

5.1 Music rig:
SRS SDA front
2.3tls rear
2 cs400i center
Shure 12" sub
2 PSE mono blocks and 1 stereo amp front
2 PSE stereo amps rear
1 PSE stereo amp center
Mac 2100 bridged to mono sub
B&K ref 10 upgraded to ref 50 pre/pro
Harmon Kardon Citation tuner
Pioneer tuner for AM
Pioneer DA-45 universal player
Sony X7esD CD player
Technics 1200 TT
PSE pre amp for the analog stuff