[gregorio]

[1] It's a process and I am not 100 % done giving up.
[1a] People are told they should try in life and keep trying even when it seems hard.
[2] Bass level can be whatever depending the acoustics and other things. Room doesn't "regulate" bass level. On the contrary room acoustics make the bass level even more random!
[2a] ILD at low frequencies can be large only when the sound source is near one ear.

1. But you stated "Frankly I have given up trying to justify crossfeed based on science."
1a. Obviously that only applies in certain circumstances. Should flat-earthers, climate deniers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, etc., keep trying even though it seems hard?

2. No, bass level CANNOT be "whatever"! Sure, there are variables that define what the bass level is, for example; how the instrument is designed, how it's played, resonances, room acoustics, distance from source, etc., but of course there are limits with any given set of acoustic variables and we routinely exceed those limits with processing, often massively so, according to artistic intention. In fact, without an exception I can think of, all rock and every other popular music genre for the last 60 odd years absolutely relies on this fact!
2a. And again, you are applying the science of what occurs in the real/natural world to an art-form that is neither defined nor constrained by that science and if it were, the vast majority of music recordings for the last 60 years or so could not exist.

[1] We can't use science 100 % accurately, can we?
[1a] So, we are doomed to cherry-pick and mis-apply the science.
[1b] What level of scientific accuracy is needed to have gains? That's were we disagree.
[2] To me simple crossfeeder improves things despite of ignoring a lot of what science says. To you crossfeed doesn't do things well enough and ignores too much.
[2a] Crossfeed doesn't make headphones sound like speakers (in other words what the artists intented),
[2b] but to me it takes the headphone sound a step or to toward speaker sound while removing aspects or the sound that annoys me

1. Why not?
1a. No, that's nonsense! Certainly we have to cherry-pick, as it's virtually always impractical to cite ALL the relevant scientific evidence but the whole point of this subforum is to cherry-pick the science WITHOUT mis-applying it. If we didn't, this forum would be no different to any other forum here and even no different to the majority of audiophile marketing material!
1b. That is indeed where we disagree, because you (inadvertently or not) seem to effectively be arguing that because we cannot be 100% accurate, it's OK to be 100% inaccurate! Again, you CANNOT apply the science of the real/natural world to an art-form, that's largely what differentiates an art-form from science in the first place!!

2. No, that is NOT what I've stated, you are again misrepresenting what's being stated to justify your agenda! It is NOT a case of crossfeed not "doing things well enough", it's a case of crossfeed actually making the situation worse.
2a. Again, NO, you're just making up "facts" to justify your agenda, without any science at all! What evidence do you have that artists never listen to the mix or master with headphones and never intend it to sound how it does on HPs? So the "level of scientific accuracy needed to have gains" is 0% is it?
2b. Which is your personal perception and your personal preference, not an objective fact! To me, crossfeed does NOT "take a step towards speaker sound", it takes a step sideways that is NOT closer to speaker sound and is also obviously not a step towards un-crossfed HP sound, the two sound presentations the artists/engineers are likely to have tested! The difference between us is that I'm stating this as purely my personal perception/preference. I'm not stating it as an objective fact because that would be a lie/perversion of the science, because the science indicates that it does indeed vary according to personal perception!

The answer to my question at the start of this latest discourse ("Are you really going to go round and round this same circle yet again?"), is unfortunately "Yes"!!

G

 

[pinnahertz]

The reality of "crossfeed" is that is its not a universally preferred or accepted remedy because the problem it tries to fix is not universally perceived as a problem in the first place. Listeners have varying conditioned preferences. Each recording varies, many have their own baked-in crossfeed, intentional or otherwise. Then there's the problem of degree, each individual recording requires a customized and optimum degree of crossfeed, an amount which cannot be calculated, but can only be arrived at through listener preference. The degree runs from none to a lot. Then there's the question of type or style of the crossfed signal, which adds another vector to "degree".

Unlike corrective equalization which has a specific measurable result as its target, the application of crossfeed is entirely subjective, and highly variable. While the differences between headphone and speaker-in-room reproduction are well known (and neither usually represents an artists original intent fully or accurately) to suggest it is a scientific correction of a specific problem that can or should be universally applied is more a form of fanaticism than applied science, and is fully unsupported by research.

And if there's an echo in here, it's because this circle has gone around again, and includes several threads. I typed out a response similar to the above back in 2018, and this thread goes back to 2010. Pummeling a demised equine never causes it to get up and trot.

 

[71 dB]

1. But you stated "Frankly I have given up trying to justify crossfeed based on science."

G

The fact that I still post here doesn't mean I'm still trying to justify crossfeed based on science. This is me dealing with my total failure. This is devastating for me, a very painful thing mentally. Science doesn't justify crossfeed? Some people like crossfeed just because they don't respect artistic intent? That's devastating for me.

 

[pinnahertz]

The fact that I still post here doesn't mean I'm still trying to justify crossfeed based on science. This is me dealing with my total failure. This is devastating for me, a very painful thing mentally. Science doesn't justify crossfeed? Some people like crossfeed just because they don't respect artistic intent? That's devastating for me.

The fact that others do or do not accept one's personal preferences is not an indication of failure...or success, unless the goal was to garner a following of disciples. If the goal is to enjoy music on headphones more fully, it would seem you have experienced 100% success in your world.

 

[pinnahertz]

You should have studied marketing. No product ever marketed has achieved 100% acceptance, most products achieve a very low acceptance across the total market, even the successful ones. Accurate marketing presents the product accurately and produces reasonable expectations. False marketing presents the product at a level beyond reality and produces elevated expectations which won't often be met. Most products are marketed between the two. Market analysis requires the dispassionate consideration of all data, and applying iit to some form of marketing course correction.

 

[71 dB]

The fact that others do or do not accept one's personal preferences is not an indication of failure...or success, unless the goal was to garner a following of disciples. If the goal is to enjoy music on headphones more fully, it would seem you have experienced 100% success in your world.

Yes, crossfeed has been a very nice success in my world enjoying music and that's why the failure here is not only bitter, but also unexpected. Garnering a following of disciples as you put it was the motivation to join this discussion board, but now retrospectively it was a doomed effort. I think I have given everything I have here and it just didn't work. Whether science simply can't be used to justify crossfeed or my intellectual capasity is not up to the task. Had I not joined this board I would perhaps be a happier person living with my delusions that the reason I find crossfeed beneficial is backed up by science of human spatial hearing. Ironically it was thinking about the science of spatial hearing together with headphone audio that made me discover crossfeed, but strange things happen...

 

[FlavioWolff]

The reality of "crossfeed" is that is its not a universally preferred or accepted remedy because the problem it tries to fix is not universally perceived as a problem in the first place.

I was thinking just that.

In my case, I stumbled upon the term crossfeed about a month ago, reading an article about plugins for headphone mixers (specifically the CanOpener crossfeed). The topic grabbed my attention and made me abandon my faithful Spotify and start using Roon, just so I could experience it's crossfeed DSP. I thought it was nice, but there was not a "problem" for me before that. I listen to headphones since my pre-teens (I'm 28 now), so maybe I'm just used to sounds near my ears. I even enjoy the hard panning from old classic rock recordings on headphones. Zero fatigue or dizziness or anything weird about moving my head and the sounds not changing.

Headphone listening was never a problem to me, until I read that it is not what the "artist intended", because most mixes, specially old ones, were made only for speakers (even if it's not true, it makes intuitive sense and I can't stop thinking about it). Now my obsessive me is telling me that I am listening the wrong way. My enjoyment of music is suffering because of this "knowledge". Ignorance sure is bliss!

What conforts me is reading this thread and aknowledging that no crossfeed implementation is 100% right for every recording. That makes the obsessive me question if the current crossfeed implementation is right for what I'm listening to, which makes me turn it off more often than not. One "wrong" is smaller than the other.

I should actually rewire my brain and "forget" I ever read about this thing.

Or go back to therapy.

 

[bigshot]

The only time I've heard people in my circle use it is to take the curse off of the early Beatles records where the stereo mix was pretty thoughtless.

 

[pinnahertz]

Yes, crossfeed has been a very nice success in my world enjoying music and that's why the failure here is not only bitter, but also unexpected. Garnering a following of disciples as you put it was the motivation to join this discussion board, but now retrospectively it was a doomed effort. I think I have given everything I have here and it just didn't work. Whether science simply can't be used to justify crossfeed or my intellectual capasity is not up to the task. Had I not joined this board I would perhaps be a happier person living with my delusions that the reason I find crossfeed beneficial is backed up by science of human spatial hearing. Ironically it was thinking about the science of spatial hearing together with headphone audio that made me discover crossfeed, but strange things happen...

If you think you have not converted a few, you’d be mistaken. If you think your efforts didn’t get even more to try crossfeed, you be even more mistaken. But if you wanted to convince the vast majority that your method is the only or best way, you’d need to manage expectations better.

 

[pinnahertz]

I was thinking just that.

In my case, I stumbled upon the term crossfeed about a month ago, reading an article about plugins for headphone mixers (specifically the CanOpener crossfeed). The topic grabbed my attention and made me abandon my faithful Spotify and start using Roon, just so I could experience it's crossfeed DSP. I thought it was nice, but there was not a "problem" for me before that. I listen to headphones since my pre-teens (I'm 28 now), so maybe I'm just used to sounds near my ears. I even enjoy the hard panning from old classic rock recordings on headphones. Zero fatigue or dizziness or anything weird about moving my head and the sounds not changing.

Headphone listening was never a problem to me, until I read that it is not what the "artist intended", because most mixes, specially old ones, were made only for speakers (even if it's not true, it makes intuitive sense and I can't stop thinking about it). Now my obsessive me is telling me that I am listening the wrong way. My enjoyment of music is suffering because of this "knowledge". Ignorance sure is bliss!

What conforts me is reading this thread and aknowledging that no crossfeed implementation is 100% right for every recording. That makes the obsessive me question if the current crossfeed implementation is right for what I'm listening to, which makes me turn it off more often than not. One "wrong" is smaller than the other.

I should actually rewire my brain and "forget" I ever read about this thing.

Or go back to therapy.

One comment...those hard-panned classic rock mixes were known by another name in their youth: great headphone music. There were even “headphone hours” on the early prog rock radio stations that featured those mixes. Stereo headphones were new, heck, stereo itself was still new. And I wouldn’t be so hasty to decide what the artist actually intended either. Just listen to some of those mixes with tracks whip-panning back and forth between channels, and don’t think that headphone listening night never be a thought.

 

[71 dB]

But if you wanted to convince the vast majority that your method is the only or best way, you’d need to manage expectations better.

That's not what I tried to convince, but I still need to manage expectations better...

 

[gregorio]

Headphone listening was never a problem to me, until I read that it is not what the "artist intended", because most mixes, specially old ones, were made only for speakers (even if it's not true, it makes intuitive sense and I can't stop thinking about it).

This is a big and common problem with some/many audiophiles. They make some assumption/conclusion which appears logical (or actually is logical) and repeat it as an assertion of fact. The whole audiophile world is built on these assumptions but especially when it comes to the creation of music recordings: The composition, arrangement, recording, editing, mixing and mastering, the vast majority of audiophiles appear particularly ignorant, not even understanding on a basic level what each of these processes actually are, let alone what the goals and artistic intents may be. So we see a bunch of assertions, nearly all of which are incorrect! Either these assertions are just plain wrong or they're incorrect on the basis that they're only partially or sometimes true rather than always (or nearly always) true. What you've read "that it is not what the artist intended" is INCORRECT. Yes, virtually all music mixes were and are made on speakers, and primarily for speakers but extrapolating "artist intent" from this fact is simply a FALLACY, a correlation (cause and effect) fallacy based on ignorance of what "artistic intent" actually means.

I'm not going to get too far into "artist intent" because it's a large, complex subject area that in western music has been built-up over the course of 600 years (and some aspects, over 2,000 years) but contrary to audiophile belief, there is rarely (if ever) AN artistic intent. In any given track there are likely to be hundreds of artistic intents; some overt, some subliminal, some are very specific, some are not (they cover a "range") and some artistic intentions aren't even intentional, as contradictory as that might appear (in fact there's a sub-genre of "modern" classical music that's entirely reliant on this fact!). Let me give you an example pertinent to this specific discussion: I've been directly responsible or involved in the creation of numerous commercial music tracks (well over 1,000) over the course of nearly 30 years and with a percentage of them, it was appropriate to check the mix and master with headphones. Pretty much without exception, certain aspects of the headphone presentation was preferable to the speaker presentation, while other aspects were not. Sometimes the mix/master would be adjusted to bring the speaker presentation more in line with the headphone presentation (and/or vice versa) and sometimes the mix would not be adjusted, because although the HP and speaker presentations were quite different, BOTH fell within the "range" of artistic intention. Many artists and engineers do the same but some don't because they feel the different presentations aren't materially important to their artistic intention. From a consumer's point of view there's simply no way to know what the situation is (unless it's explicitly stated on the album cover), whether applying crossfeed conflicts with the artistic intentions or makes no material difference. This is further complicated by false assumptions of what constitutes "good" and "better", plus the false assumption that what they personally perceive as "better" is by definition automatically "better".

Not sure if I've helped with all this or just caused more confusion. As a general rule of thumb though, if you read on an audiophile forum; "that it is not [or is] what the artist intended", take it with a pinch of salt unless they've got an actual relevant quote from the artist/s!

G

 

[71 dB]

personally I don't think crossfeed is attacking artistic intent, on the contrary I think it is protecting the artistic intent. When I compare the original sound to sound crossfed at proper level it's hard for me to understand why the original sound represents the artistic intent more closely than the crossfed version. I could understand if there was a couple of artists in the World WANTING to make high ILD music, but I don't believe pretty much ALL of them are after that. Much more plausible for me is the assumption of music production culture of mixing on speakers and creating speaker spatiality which allows wild ILD as acoustic crossfeed regulates it down to levels expected by spatial hearing. Headphones don't give such freedom without problems of sound that some listeners find annoying and tiring.

I discovered crossfeed in 2012 at age 41. Before that I just thought headphones sound how they sound because they are sound sources near ears. I preferred speakers and considered headphone sound a bit annoying. I didn't even thought about headphone sound, because what can you do to improve headphone sound (apart from buying better ones)? You can improve speaker sound in so many ways. Acoustics of the room, placement, etc. In 2012 I finally thought about headphone sound and what the science of spatial hearing says about it and suddenly realised NOTHING prevents high ILD entering ears with headphones! Then I remembered how I listened to portable radio as a teenager with headphones using mono mode to reduce noise and finding the mono headphone sound somehow comfortable.

It took me two decades after studying the science of spatial hearing to realize how it reveals a potential problem in headphone sound so it's not surprising for me if the whole thing has always been more or less overlooked in music production. That's why I feel like I am protecting the artist using crossfeed: "Hey you artist X, you overlooked large ILD when producing your music, but don't worry! I use crossfeed to fix it to enjoy your music fully."

 

[pinnahertz]

Early cross-feed was called FM Stereo radio.

personally I don't think crossfeed is attacking artistic intent, on the contrary I think it is protecting the artistic intent.

You missed the point. How do you know what the artist intent is? Everything else is subjective and opinion:

When I compare the original sound to sound crossfed at proper level it's hard for me to understand why the original sound represents the artistic intent more closely than the crossfed version. I could understand if there was a couple of artists in the World WANTING to make high ILD music, but I don't believe pretty much ALL of them are after that. Much more plausible for me is the assumption of music production culture of mixing on speakers and creating speaker spatiality which allows wild ILD as acoustic crossfeed regulates it down to levels expected by spatial hearing. Headphones don't give such freedom without problems of sound that some listeners find annoying and tiring.

I discovered crossfeed in 2012 at age 41. Before that I just thought headphones sound how they sound because they are sound sources near ears. I preferred speakers and considered headphone sound a bit annoying. I didn't even thought about headphone sound, because what can you do to improve headphone sound (apart from buying better ones)? You can improve speaker sound in so many ways. Acoustics of the room, placement, etc. In 2012 I finally thought about headphone sound and what the science of spatial hearing says about it and suddenly realised NOTHING prevents high ILD entering ears with headphones! Then I remembered how I listened to portable radio as a teenager with headphones using mono mode to reduce noise and finding the mono headphone sound somehow comfortable.

It took me two decades after studying the science of spatial hearing to realize how it reveals a potential problem in headphone sound so it's not surprising for me if the whole thing has always been more or less overlooked in music production. That's why I feel like I am protecting the artist using crossfeed: "Hey you artist X, you overlooked large ILD when producing your music, but don't worry! I use crossfeed to fix it to enjoy your music fully."

Artists don't communicate their "intent" well, if at all. An example would be a track release in 1991 by Suzanne Ciani, "Rain" on her "Hotel Luna" CD. The booklet says something to the effect, "thanks to the Roland RSS-10, the raindrops are where they are supposed to be" (not an exact quote, but close). However, back in 1991 it was darn hard for the average listener to find out what the RSS-10 was supposed to do. If you did find out, you learned it was an inter-aural crosstalk cancellation system meant to expand a soundstage far beyond the confines of two speakers, and used a DSP do essentially do the inverse of cross-feed. That only worked properly on speakers, and not at all on headphones. And it didn't work on the average home speaker setup well at all, it had to have a well controlled and symmetric speaker and room layout with few random early reflections. Did Suzanne communicate all of that? Not a bit. Therefore, even though she did imply a special psychoacoustic process was in place on her "raindrops", she might as well have not said a word about it because it didn't help anyone understand how to play the track "as the artist intended", without doing some personal reasearch into a product that, today, has long been discontinued. So what now do you assume about what the artist intent was? And that example made at least an attempt at giving the listener at least a tiny peek into the artists production intent. Still failed, perhaps made things worse.

So what would be doing by expressing a firm conviction to what we think artist intent is?

 

[71 dB]

Early cross-feed was called FM Stereo radio.
1 --- You missed the point. How do you know what the artist intent is?

2 --- An example would be a track release in 1991 by Suzanne Ciani, "Rain" on her "Hotel Luna" CD. The booklet says something to the effect, "thanks to the Roland RSS-10, the raindrops are where they are supposed to be" (not an exact quote, but close). However, back in 1991 it was darn hard for the average listener to find out what the RSS-10 was supposed to do. If you did find out, you learned it was an inter-aural crosstalk cancellation system meant to expand a soundstage far beyond the confines of two speakers, and used a DSP do essentially do the inverse of cross-feed. That only worked properly on speakers, and not at all on headphones. And it didn't work on the average home speaker setup well at all, it had to have a well controlled and symmetric speaker and room layout with few random early reflections. Did Suzanne communicate all of that? Not a bit. Therefore, even though she did imply a special psychoacoustic process was in place on her "raindrops", she might as well have not said a word about it because it didn't help anyone understand how to play the track "as the artist intended", without doing some personal reasearch into a product that, today, has long been discontinued. So what now do you assume about what the artist intent was? And that example made at least an attempt at giving the listener at least a tiny peek into the artists production intent. Still failed, perhaps made things worse.

So what would be doing by expressing a firm conviction to what we think artist intent is?

1 --- I can use my own head to figure out the intentions of the artist. Good art encapsulates intent and meaning.

2 --- I don't think I am familiar with this artist, but I listened to the track "Rain" on Spotify which doesn't list any album named "Hotel Luna", but the "Rain" track is listed on album "Pianissimo" from 1990. Track named "Hotel Luna" is found on 1992 album "The Private Music of Suzanne Ciani". Anyway I don't hear any raindrops on the track "Rain". Maybe they are too quiet for my hearing? All I hear is piano and some high pitched synthetic sounds. I don't like how the track sounds on headphones without crossfeed, but crossfeed level -3 dB seems to work nicely for me. The track Hotel Luna is decent new age.