Direction and Space 1Sided.Indd
Direction and Space – the Final Frontiers Multichannel and binaural audio systems for movies, music and games by Floyd E. Toole, Ph.D. Vice President Acoustical Engineering, Harman International Industries, Inc. 8500 Balboa Boulevard, Northridge, CA 91329 www.harman.com The capture, storage and re- production of musical sounds are the missions of the professional and consumer audio industries, as we know them. Over the decades, we have struggled, artistically and technically, to improve the accuracy with which the sounds are recorded and reproduced. Accuracy of timbre ensures that the voices and instruments sound like the real thing. However, there is much more. Musical sounds do not exist in isolation, they exist in acoustical contexts, either real or synthesized: concert halls, jazz clubs, and so on. Ideally, listeners should be able to close their eyes and believe that they are “there”, with the performers. We are much closer to our goal than ever before. In the beginning, there was mono. Everything we heard was stored in and repro- duced from a single channel. In those early days, listeners enthused, and critics applaud- ed the efforts of Edison, Berliner, and others, as being the closest possible to reality. They were wrong, but clearly a revolution in home entertainment had taken place. With two-channel stereo came dramatic improvements in the impressions of direc- tion and space. Once we got past the exaggerated “ping-pong”, “hole-in-the-middle” problems of many early recordings, listeners enthused, and critics applauded the ef- forts of many artists and recording engineers as being the closest possible to reality.
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