Why isn’t it feasible to achieve good imaging by having a pair of speakers on your sides, pointing at your ears? It it due to the ear’s shape and how we pick sound from the front with high acuity?
Maybe they’d have to be designed for the purpose of being “huge headphones” but I can imagine some revelatory imaging emerging from this approach, simply due to how binaurally intimate headphooes can be. And, well, this would be closer to headphones. Kind of.
Let’s assume we’re dealing with some sort of very low distortion near-field speaker…
Seriously!
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Half.
Then why do you start these threads at all. Are you that bored?
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It’s a serious question but I’m not particularly expecting it to work. It might, though?
It might also bring up interesting concepts that aren’t directly related to achieving what was asked.
…is that one topic about air-gap capacitors bugging you? What is?
Just to clarify, I’m not talking about lining up box speakers next to your head, this would have to be something that’s one step towards speakers from the RAAL Requisites and one step farther from headphones.
How about seating the listener in a dentist’s chair and carefully positioning an array of (fairly small) open-baffle-equipped broadband drivers in optimized angles and distances around the head, the drivers being mounted on unipivotal mounts? Not just any broadband drivers but very specific ones, hand-picked in small batches.
It could be the ultimate spatial experience!
On my desktop system I have the speakers at a distance of about a metre and angled in towards my normal head position. The imaging is better if I move them closer together and to me and have them only slightly angled in, but then I cannot see my monitors! It is all about compromise.
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Wouldn’t it require a recording made, mixed and reproduced just for a system like that? Otherwise, which channel goes to which speaker(s), and how would that be controlled?
I’d think a binaural recording would generally be best suited.
Binaural is still just two channels. What comes out of all the other speakers?
The stereo channels need to be mixed to according left-right bias depending on the speakers’ positions.
What about enveloping the head with a sphere whose surface is an electrostatic speaker, divided in two of course.
Very unpractical, I know.
Just listen underwater, hmmm? 