I have tried to convince myself that I know this stuff in order to uphold my self-confidence, but it seems I have to AGAIN admit defeat and failure in life.
IMHO, that’s a very shortsighted, absolute and self destructive way of looking at it. No one knows everything so is everyone a failure in life? No, of course not. The other side to this coin is that you clearly know a lot about the issues but have mis-interpreted and dismissed some of what you learnt because you thought it irrelevant. You’re starting to realise that view was incorrect and so you now know more than you did a few days ago. That’s an achievement, not a failure!
Speaker spatiality may have problems because for example ITD is omitted.
I’m not sure what you mean, obviously with speakers you have ITD of the direct sound and of the directional room reflections, so ITD is not omitted.
Nothing guarantees that the listener perceives ITD the same way the mixer perceived it in the studio while mixing.
Absolutely and in fact there’s no guarantee this will be perceived the same way by the SAME mixer in a different studio, even between two top class studios and it’s not just ITD but almost every factor! I was shocked at the difference when I took a mix done in one world class studio to another world class studio. That’s the reason we have the mastering process, mastering engineers check the phase information of the mix, adjust according to their experience and test the master on different equipment. Even recording studios use both near and far field systems and the purpose of mastering isn’t to get the mix to sound great in the mastering studio but to sound as good as possible on a wide range of playback scenarios. This virtually always means some level of compromise.
This might create phasing issues.
Yes it might but it seems the brain is quite good at compensating for such issues in an acoustic environment. For example, it was thought that comb-filter effects were particularly problematic in listening environments but research by Floyd Toole indicated they’re not as bad as previously thought because listeners and engineers can learn/train to compensate, even with quite noticeable comb-filtering.
I think I trained my brain to somehow correct for the imperfections of the PRIR.
That sounds very plausible. There’s limited research on this training/plasticity issue with HRTFs and I should imagine there are difficulties with experiment design. For example, when do you know you’ve fixed improved something or if the subjects have just subconsciously learned to compensate?
G
