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Ambiophonics
2nd Edition
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Figures
>Figure 1
>Figure 2
>Figure 3
>Figure 4
>Figure 5
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"My hat's off to Glasgal and Yates for boldly
going where no audiophile has gone before."
– Corey Greenberg, Stereo Review
"The Most
Realistic System I've ever heard."
– Clark Johnsen, Positive Feedback
"I'm
still incredulous"
– Ken Kessler, Hi-Fi News & Record Reviews (9/98)
The Ambiophonic method
is applicable to the achievement of exceptionally realistic reproduction of staged,
acoustically generated music especially from the existing library of unencoded,
two-channel sources such as CDs or LPs. Ambiophonic reproduction of most such
existing recordings will outperform any existing or proposed surround, multichannel
recording or reproduction system for music.
What
is Ambiophonics?
The Ambiophonics
method combines an exploitation of seldom applied, but well documented,
psychoacoustic principles with the basic rules of good musical performance space design to
create believable concert-hall sound fields in dedicated home listening rooms.
Ambiophonics moves the listener into the same space as the performers, by accommodating to
individual external ear and head characteristics, minimizing interaural correlation at the
listening positions, abandoning the traditional stereo loudspeaker equilateral triangle,
recreating early reflections and reverberant fields via computer, eliminating
front-loudspeaker crosstalk, and reducing the home music theater wideband reverberation
time to less than .2 seconds. The completion and testing of the first full-scale version
of the Ambiophonics Home Concert Hall has demonstrated that the Ambiophonic sound
reproducing technique is a worthy successor to both stereophonic or surround-sound
listening configurations, for staged music, in that it can consistently generate a
"You Are There" concert, opera or pop sound field even preferably from standard
LPs, DVDs or CDs that the ear-brain system will accept as real.
Introduction
While much
attention has been lavished on the design and construction of home theaters for
reproducing television and motion picture sound tracks, which need the surround imaging
appropriate to those media, the earlier audiophile goal of creating a realistic
concert-hall caliber sound field for staged acoustical musical events has been all but
forgotten. The purpose of the strictly educational Ambiophonics Institute and this web
site is to document the Ambiophonic method, expand on the psychoacoustic principles that
underlie the Ambiophonic reproduction method, and also to provide a central repository of
data and experience for those who would like to try their hand at configuring their own
domestic concert halls or who would like to make a contribution to the perfecting of the
Ambiophonic method.
The material below should lead to a better
understanding of some under-appreciated characteristics of the human ear and provide a
better sense of what concert-hall sound fields consist of, so that listening rooms can be
set up to reproduce acoustically instrumented musical events with consistent and
unprecedented realism luckily still using the vast library of unencoded, already
existing two-channel recordings. The authors anticipate that not every audiophile will
want or be able to implement all of the Ambiophonic paradigms but even employing one of
these suggestions will increase the perceived realism of the reproduced sound. It is hoped
that, over the years, audiophiles, equipment designers, sound recording engineers and
audio magazine editors will come to better understand the goals and acoustical principles
involved and apply them in the future to their own products, systems and reviews.
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