That Bod Seger song sounds a bit crazy with crossfeed and without crossfeed it's the craziest thing I have ever heard and not in a good way at all.
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Music reproduction is an illusion, it is a form of staged magic.
There is no band in front of you, you are not in a concert hall or bar, if you open your eyes you will not see musicians.
It is the task of the recording folks and processes is to affect your mind with with visions or imaginary perceptions. By definition that is to make you hallucinate.
The EARGASM is when the magic trick works well bringing pleasure to our soul. We audio guys have become addicted to that pleasure and it's a cool addiction.
Somewhere along the line this thread forgot that. It became engaged in the thousands of variables that the magicians can use to get the desired effect.
Habituation is a physiological propensity of humans to adapt to sensual data coming in, that is usual, to in an effort to detect and be sensitive to what is new and not usual. Aural habituation seems to the experiential process that let out ancestors stand in tall blowing grass taller and pick out that twig breaking under the foot of a nasty predator seeking a meal. This is part of being human.
The effect of this is that a given illusion changes for any given individual at any given time.
To fool your mind into imagining a soundscape without the support of a equal visual landscape is very difficult to pull off, and unique to each individual.
All the arguments I am seeing in this thread are about the 'tricks' used to pull off the illusion. If this were about paintings we would be arguing about paints and brush strokes. There is a strong desire to make the 'science' absolute, cast in granite it were. In fact it is cast in Jello at best.
None of these tricks are absolute or work alone. The illusion is a gestalt, a 'whole greater than the parts" in this case, the effect of many things all happening at the same time.
I will concede that you are compelled to take the knowledge you have and make the world fit it as suggested in you texts.
I don't know, but I can find out - for me. I have the resources and equipment to do that. A couple of weeks ago I did a deep dive into the literature on this.
Over the last week I designed a unit that embodies all the features you have talked about in such a way that I can change the signal paths easily. I did a BOM. schematic, and simulation in SPICE to verify all the academics.
As I build high-end audio products anyway I have an inventory of premium parts, the wherewithal to assemble and test it.
So let me take all this 'science' you are running and reduce it to a pure high-quality analog manifestation, listen to it, pass it around to my audio critics.
I call it "The Active Speaker Simulator for Headphones" or ASSH processor and will report back in a while.
Barry Thornton
AustinAudioWorks.com
512-266-7142