To crossfeed or not to crossfeed? That is the question...

[housekrl]

If it's the usual Meier's crossfeed implementation, it's not so subtle that it could be missed when switching it ON and OFF. So maybe you did get a lemon.

That's what I'm thinking.

 

[sonitus mirus]

Here are the specifications about the crossfeed options with my DAC.

https://www.rme-audio.de/downloads/adi2dac_e.pdf

8.6 Crossfeed

While headphones open the sound stage and make everything easier to hear and to locate by spreading the narrow sound field of stereo speakers to the left/right extreme, some people would like to have a listening situation that is more comparable to a standard speaker setup. The ADI-2 DAC includes Crossfeed to address this wish. Crossfeed reduces the artificial surround ambience that some productions have to make them sound better on speakers, but which sounds unnatural on a headphone.

The Bauer Binaural method is used, with five selectable strengths of narrowing the upper frequencies. This advanced method, which also includes a small delay and correction of the frequency response, works quite well, and is another useful addition as well as a unique feature on a device like the ADI-2 DAC. Details on internal settings The Crossfeed effect is mainly defined by the filter frequency and the amount of crossfeed, here given as damping factor:

1: 650 Hz, -13 dB (just a touch)
2: 650 Hz, -9.5 dB (Jan Meier emulation)
3: 700 Hz, -6 dB (Chu Moy emulation)
4: 700 Hz, -4.5 dB (30° 3 meter emulation)
5: 700 Hz, -3 dB (example how even stronger would sound)

 

[71 dB]

This is my first post on Head-Fi after over 10 years as a member. The only reason I'm posting now is to thank 71 dB for all his contributions to this thread.

I felt compelled to make this post since I've just finished reading the entire thread from the beginning over a period of days. Based on this, I'd say 71 dB deserves a lot of credit for the way he handled himself over the life of this thread. Maybe not perfectly, but he was a saint compared to the other vocal majority. I can honestly say he's the only one I learned anything useful from, despite the barrage of posts from most of the other "noise" contributors. I don't know why he put up with the abuse he did, but for me at least, I'm grateful that he did. I got the distinct impression, just my own opinion here, that the majority of the noise posts were made by people that were much more interested in defending some perceived position of authority they seemed to feel they had or deserved for some reason, instead of actually addressing the OP's original premise. This was my first experience in the Sound Science side of Head-Fi and it wasn't a pretty picture to say the least. The level of personal attacks, pedantic posts and responses, ridiculously long responses from people with nothing to contribute beyond their original premise and obvious need to be right while contributing zero to the thread's intent. People posting page after page to say nothing other than basically they don't even use headphones! And the mod(s) saw fit to attack dB 71 for his posts? It definitely makes me wonder what these people really do for a living when they're able to spend so much time over a period of years making useless posts. I'd say there's a lot of people that participated in this thread that should, but I'm sure won't, feel embarrassed if they would take an honest look back at their "contributions" to this thread. That goes from the mod(s) on down. As I stated, this was my first experience in the Sound Science side of this forum and this is only my opinion. Maybe this is just normal over here. It's sure different from any other threads I've read over the years here on Head-Fi and not in a good way.

I had previously tried crossfeed (Roon with Sennheiser HD600) and had always gone back to no crossfeed. Thanks to 71 dB and some others, I realized what crossfeed actually does and what to listen for. I now also understand what and why the different settings do. Since this thread started I've been using crossfeed and very happy with it. It has definitely added to my headphone listening experience in a major way. I'm currently using Roon custom setting of 700 Hz Cut Frequency and 5 dB Feed Level.

In response to Op's original "To crossfeed or not to crossfeed? That is the question... ", i'm now a big YES for crossfeed. This is completely based on the incredible input and contributions from 71 dB. Thanks 71 dB.

Wow! I haven't been active on this forum lately and I just dropped by to see what's going on here and I see this! I am speechless! Someone who was registered a decade ago makes the first post and it's this! I am humbled! All the work on this forum wasn't total waste of time after all! Somebody got something from my posts. Wow.

I am glad if my posts helped you found the benefits of crossfeed and your headphone listening is improved because of it. You are welcome. Thank you for the honour to be the reason for your first post on this forum! It really makes my day (night actually, but I must respond immediately!) Thanks also for your kind words of me, perhaps too kind as I wasn't always so nice to others.

While I am at this, I want to apologize everyone here for saying nasty things occationally. I was STUNNED by the opposition to my posts and I didn't know how to handle it correctly. Also, I wasn't always 100 % clear about what I mean, but I tried to correct those mistakes toward the end. For example when I said that crossfeed makes headphones sound like speakers I didn't expect people to interpret it to mean you can't tell headphones from speakers. So I hopefully learned to express myself better to avoid misunderstandings. Especially I learned that spatial hearing is very subjective. I can't generalize my own experiences to other people. I have learned to respect the preferencies of other people regarding spatiality. That's why I kind of lost my interest for being here, but all the hours I spend here seems to have achieved something...

 

[bigshot]

Welcome back again 71dB

 

[71 dB]

Welcome back again 71dB

Thanks pal!

 

[71 dB]

I owned a Meier Concerto with crossfeed for several years. I think it is possible that the crossfeed switch was not even connected to anything. Myself as well as others could not tell a difference even on old jazz recordings. I should have taken it apart to inspect while I had it. Oh well

I believe those Meier headphone amps had jumper settings inside that could be changed to have milder or stronger crossfeed effect. I believe the default setting was something like -11.5 dB which is pretty weak crossfeed (some recordings benefit in my opinion from a weak crossfeed like this) and the nature (circuit topology) of Meier crossfeed make it even more difficult to hear the difference, but it's clear when you know what to listen to. At a low level such as -11 dB crossfeed merely makes the sound calmer and reduces listening fatique for some listeners such as myself. Meier kind of tries to be "invisible" crossfeed in a sense that it keeps the sound wide unlike the "Cmoy" type topology that makes the sound narrower and is perhaps easier to hear for this reason. The best way to hear what crossfeed does to the signal is to feed only one channel to it, left or right and the switch it on and off.

 

[71 dB]

Crossfeed does in effect "take the detail away", because some of the left channel signal is superimposed on the right channel (and vice versa), which can blur or obscure "the detail". However, it seems that some people are either not able to perceive this loss of detail in the first place or, do perceive it but don't care/mind, because the other benefits they perceive from using crossfeed outweigh this loss of detail. So, it's not just you but neither is it applicable to everyone else.

G

The way I see the "detail" thing is as long as the recording is primarily produced for speakers, the detail I get with headphones without crossfeed is a little bit false detail and crossfeed makes the detail closer to what they are "supposed" to be. That's because in speaker listening the sound is heavily blurred and obscured due to room acoustics. Tons of reflections are superimposed to the direct sound and even the direct sound gets acoustically crossfed. In this context headphone crossfeed is quite mild obscuring compared to what a room does to the sound. Why doesn't room acoustics completely destroy the sound? I believe it's because our ears EXPECT it to happen. In real life we don't really hear "pure" sound. It's almost always blurred, obscured and what not and all of that is part of the spatial information that tells us in what kind of acoustic environment we are listening to the music. If the music is produced for headphones (say a binaural recording) the blurring has already happened in the recording and there is not reason to blur things further. I even believe the "blurring" happens only on signal level and that my spatial hearing is able to decode the "unblurred" information (that's what spatial hearing does) because the superimposed signals contain time delays so spatial hearing can figure out how the superimposing happened. This also explanes why room acoustics doesn't blur the sound completely for the hearing system. Spatial hearing is able to calculate what happened to the sound. So, I feel that sound without any "blurring" and "obscurring" is kind of unnatural, sound that happened nowhere. So I never feel like losing detail due to crossfeed. Whatever is lost was never supposed to be there, false detail due to incorrect reproduction of loudspeaker sound on headphones. So, for me crossfeed reducing this false detail is a plus, but that's me. Certainly this is not the only way one can think about detail, but this is how I think about it.

 

[bigshot]

Here we go again. I'll leave it to the folks who enjoy this stuff.

 

[housekrl]

I believe those Meier headphone amps had jumper settings inside that could be changed to have milder or stronger crossfeed effect. I believe the default setting was something like -11.5 dB which is pretty weak crossfeed (some recordings benefit in my opinion from a weak crossfeed like this) and the nature (circuit topology) of Meier crossfeed make it even more difficult to hear the difference, but it's clear when you know what to listen to. At a low level such as -11 dB crossfeed merely makes the sound calmer and reduces listening fatique for some listeners such as myself. Meier kind of tries to be "invisible" crossfeed in a sense that it keeps the sound wide unlike the "Cmoy" type topology that makes the sound narrower and is perhaps easier to hear for this reason. The best way to hear what crossfeed does to the signal is to feed only one channel to it, left or right and the switch it on and off.

Interesting. I bought my Meier Concerto when it first hit the market. I think it was in 2010 or so. Directly from there website. It said nothing about jumpers on the site or on the head fi thread that I remember anyways. Who knows, I just could never hear any change whatsoever. Oh well, I don't own it anymore so I guess it doesn't matter. The Concerto was a very short lived product, not sure why.

 

[bigshot]

Maybe it was short lived because they didn't provide enough documentation!

 

[housekrl]

Maybe it was short lived because they didn't provide enough documentation!

Also, seamed kind of like a cash grab. Way overpriced.

 

[71 dB]

Interesting. I bought my Meier Concerto when it first hit the market. I think it was in 2010 or so. Directly from there website. It said nothing about jumpers on the site or on the head fi thread that I remember anyways. Who knows, I just could never hear any change whatsoever. Oh well, I don't own it anymore so I guess it doesn't matter. The Concerto was a very short lived product, not sure why.

I believe the end user was never supposed to tinker with those jumper settings and they were there as a "vestige" of the product development phase.

 

[Blackwoof]

Meier crossfeed at 15 sound more normal/natural to me.

 

[gumisb]

I made crossfeed for use with Eqalizer APO
If someone is interested and want to try. Delay is in samples for 44.1kHz

 

[Rob the Comic]

Early cross-feed was called FM Stereo radio.
You missed the point. How do you know what the artist intent is? Everything else is subjective and opinion:

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?

Well said, and you make very compelling points. New member here awaiting the arrival of an SPL Phonitor XE and came across this thread and am a little intrigued to hear what peoples thoughts are on crossfeed / matrix.. I agree about 'artists intentions'; when I was a boy here in Sydney raising a kid brother with no parents, I heard Bowie's track 'Station to Station' only once the the way it was apparently recorded and supposed to be heard, at a record store on a new fangled quadraphonic sound system. Sure, it was a novelty to hear the train apparently travel from speaker to speaker - but do you think tor a minute the fact that me and a million other poor kids that didn't have the 'correct' set-up stopped saving up to buy it and play it on a crappy all-in-one affair? I have been a professional Comedian for over 40 years and worked with many, many artists and many, many of them couldn't spell the word intention.