Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site
In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Be careful: Imaging vs. Compression
Post Subject: Re: Phantom pain, not missing a thing.Posted by Hugh on: 2/13/2006
The rewards of ideal speaker placement is something I've experienced as
well and perhaps is related to DPLOS or possbily audio-moronism.
While not easy to find or predictable between speaker brands the result
is consistant. As it turns out my first experience with this
result was actually a complete fluke. After a night of
positioning my speakers I, through a measurement mistake, returned my
speakers to what I thought was their original position but to my
suprise was something far better. Not long after finding this
position the speakers were boxed up to make way for some renovations
and I subsequently lost the paper I wrote the speaker locations on and
it took me about 1.5 years of diligent trial and error to locate this
position(s) again.
The best advice I can give to those willing to seek out the location is
to put away your calculators and measuring tapes. Also, I'm
convinced this ideal location tends to float around a little over time
requiring slight speaker re-positioning from time to time.
For testing I prefer to use a recording of a female singer, when
speaker location is optimized sound just seems to come to life and
float around the room. The central singer seemingly reaches out
envelopes me and at times I can sense "phantom" breath blow across my
face or during the parting of lips feel I've been kissed. This
experience probably sounds a little strange for some but "phantom"
sensations are real and to occur my brain has accepted the re-creation
of voice and breath as natural and has interpreted the intimacy of the
re-creation as a familiar real intimate experience and then bridges the
gap and creates the "phantom" physical sensation, in essence turning
the experience into something organic. My speakers require to be
postioned just so before I can experience this nature of reaction and
also when in this location terms such as imaging, sounstaging,
extension.....etc. become quite foreign and completely irrelevent to
the music.
In general the music is more inclined to take on a
profound quality and at times of epiphanic proportions which really has
to be experienced to be understood. Attempting to explain the
experience to those not familiar would more than likely be as
successfull as explaining smell and taste to someone without the
ability to taste or smell.
I generally keep these thoughts of speaker postioning to myself.
Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site