Subjective or not, I simply think headphone sound as it is is completely wrong and doesn't make sense, because it's spatiality for speakers, and speakers reproduce spatiality TOTALLY differently to headphones. From my perspective this FACT is ignored by others here. Subjective or not, I have hard time believing large ILD values at low frequencies can be natural to anyone. How is that possible? Our brain learns spatial cue based on what we hear in every day life, and large ILD values at low frequencies isn't something we hear a lot. Anyone can make binaural recordings mics in their ears and record sounds in their life and analyse the ITD. This should not be something I have to fight. I totally get that people are different, but how different can people be? It does make sense that someone has elephant ot cat hearing, because we are humans. We should have somewhat similar hearing. Our spatial hearing is based on learning the connection between the spatial cues and the visual information about the sound source. How can such process develop totally different spatial hearing for people? Makes no sense! This must be about personal prefences rather than science of spatial hearing: I stll believe crossfeed is a step toward spatial information that makes more sense scientifically (because headphone sound as it is often makes very little sense spatially), but people have their preferences and expectations which are not for everybody met using crossfeed.
I have been saying many times after switching crossfeed ON, the sound image seems to narrow a bit (because spatial hearing reacts to the sudden change of ILD scaling), but after a minute it goes back. That's spatial hearing adapting. In fact I believe that's when spatial hearing is adapted to spatial cues that make sense while normal headphone listening means adaptation to spatial cues that don't make sense. To me the differense is not in the width, but in how natural the sound image sound. However, this is what crossfeed does for me.
Good enough is one thing, improvement is another thing. Nothing is good enough. People want perfection and can never have it. I'm not after perfection. I am a realist. I'm happy about improvement, small or big. That's why I can enjoy the improvements crossfeed gives to my ears.
In other topics I don't have the problem I have here. People who have studied digital audio for example share facts with me and it's a clear division between people who understand digital audio and those who don't. In this topic it seems different. Somehow crossfeed seems difficult to understand even for those who know a lot about spatial hearing. I look crossfeed from the angle of what it does and achieves while other people look at it from the angle of what it doesn't do or achieve. I believe this is because my opinion is that headphone spatiality is completely wrong and a mess so that almost anything is better than nothing. From my point of view people don't take serioustly enough the problem of headphone spatiality and even I was simply used to it as it is before having my "heureka" moment in 2012. Speakers in a room can't produce nonsensical spatial cues to listeners, but headphones can! Do we want nonsensical spatiality? If we want and it is artistic intention, then clearly speakers (without crosstalk canceling) are no good. If we don't want nonsensical spatial cues, then headphones are no good unless we use something that turns nonsensical spatial cues into something that makes sense. I think this reasoning is called for even if a lot of subjectivity is part of the equation.
I am totally cool with crossfeed not meeting someone's personal preferences, but the way my reasoning and factual background has been questioned is unfair. Maybe there has been excuses on both side? I have excuses to "ignore" some facts that don't support crossfeed, but other people have excuses to ignore those facts that do support crossfeed.
that's clearly your perception of the system and also of the situation. can't say it is mine. I'm fresh out of analogies, masturbation was probably the more fitting one as it did involve some fair share of mental image and impressions. your initial view for speaker vs headphone is one I happen to share. because that's how I feel and because with most albums ever released done on and for speakers, speakers seem the logical reference of desirable playback. even then I wouldn't go as far as calling it correct because many rooms, many speakers and we rarely know the actual reference used. but I happen to agree on the decision to pick speaker playback as reference for whatever we want to get in the end.
and that's pretty much where I stop agreeing with with you because the model you keep explaining as your so called objective demonstration is not speaker playback. don't know how many times we have to say it, you just don't care about that "detail". a human head is going to move, a human is going to know he has a headphone on his head, those habits/expectations are not magically going away for your convenience. you assume that if you mix the channels maybe kind of like a listener would get on speakers with his head stuck in an anechoic chamber, then magically he's feel a more natural experience. but
you do not know that!!!!!!!!!! you only assume it because that's your subjective experience. for starters, let's talk about the odds that your crossfeed settings will actually come close enough to what a listener would experience. have you seen the effective variations from listener to listener? can you claim to know that your changes are going to trigger the desire type of impression anyway, and not something else? let's assume that step turns out ok, then what? the guy will still be missing reverb and any tiny head movement will still reveal to his brain that it's all BS. so now instead of the possibly comfy experience of headphone playback(not because it's natural but because the listener may have been using them for decades and just got used to that different experience), the listener ends up with directly conflicting localization cues. one cue telling him it's over there in front, another cue telling him the source is clearly stuck on his head and the only position that agrees with head movement is on top or inside the head(depending on how we move). you see that as an improvement, but how do you know that for someone else it doesn't end up feeling even more artificial and unnatural than default headphone playback that doesn't bother at all with localization beyond "this is more on the left"? at every turn you make your own assumptions that the entire world will feel like you do, enjoy what you enjoy, and prefer what you prefer. but take any song, any food, and you'll always find people who do not agree with you and do not think as you do when experiencing them. and that's the problem made obvious on the subjective side, but it should have been just as obvious on the objective side the moment you took a complete multivariable systems working under a clear set of conditions, and started to cut a piece of it to make your own "objective" model where you removed head movement, room reverb, headphone signature, specific HRTF, etc. what remained was not speaker playback, what remained was your explanation of what crossfeed does and why. from a scientific approach you can't just take a system and cut out the pieces and variables until it's simple enough, then declare that made up model to have the qualities and behaviors of the original real system. no scientist would accept that unless you demonstrate to them that most results and conclusions do indeed apply to the made up model. something you have never done and as I said probably cannot do. instead what you did is try for yourself, feel that it was correct and decided that it was apparently conclusive for the rest of humanity.
be it objective or subjective, your views are the views of someone who looks to validate his idea, not someone who looks to test if they're correct. you look for what agrees with you when science would systematically look to disprove an idea and see how sturdy that idea really is. as a fully subjective tool, you can only validate crossfeed as something that happens to be nice to you, and nothing else. if you want to declare any more than that yo have to run trials or at least ask for opinions, but without controlled trials, you'll never know that they set their crossfeed correctly, so... not very meaningful unless even then they all declare that it's really good and a subjective improvement(which as we know doesn't happen very often).
and all this time, while I juggle from objective to subjective, I try to keep them somewhat apart, but of course in practice it's a giant pudding and our subjective interpretation is going to be the sum of X variables, objective and subjective, and yet again, unless you test those on many people under those specific conditions instead of declaring that you can just apply speaker playback knowledge, you'll really know nothing.
if you want validation for remembering how to handle a matrix, how to calculate a delay based on distance and speed of sound, how to get some notions of acoustic about how an obstacle will have a frequency dependent impact, then here I am to give you that. I struggled more on matrix than on anything else. mostly due to the teacher I had, as once he changed I got over it in a week somehow, but still all in all I struggled for almost 6 months, applying rules for reasons I did not understand(which for a guy who loved math was a torture). it then took me a little less than 10 years to completely forget all about them and most math I ever learned. nowadays I have to think for a sec about how to do a division by myself... so I'm sincerely jealous of anybody who still has enough math in him to go look up all the cool stuff I struggle with, as in audio there is an endless amount of things that interest me deeply but require more math than I remember. but if you're looking for someone to tell you how right you are about the clear benefits of crossfeed based on your "demonstration", then I'm not the guy, and I doubt anybody informed on the subject will ever do because you take enough liberties to declare what you say false. be it the method or your conclusions, both take way too many shortcuts.
and here is the thing, I think I've explained all that many times already. so while I'm still typing, I'm fairly sure that once more you won't care and that once more you'll soon be back explaining how your little toy model of acoustic works and calling a one band EQ ILD. you clearly have all the cards to understand the situation and see your own errors, but clearly we can't just see them for you. when you change some variables in a complex system, you can usually predict some of the consequences, but not necessarily all of them. when you go and just create a model for the workings of crossfeed, given the many differences compared to actual speaker playback, pretending that you can predict results based on speaker playback is so wrong that we shouldn't have the need to explain it in 25 different ways for over 2 years. I don't know what else to tell you.
some people enjoy vinyl playback despite how it objectively does everything wrong. some people enjoy super colored kind of grainy tube amps, some people enjoy crossfeed. all those people are happy with what they've got and that's really great. if they're happy, all is good. and among those guys you always have a handful who wants their preferences to be justified as factual superiority. and most of them pass as loonies because they keep on trying to defend something that can't be with reasons that seem to make sense only in their own heads. I'm sure every single one of those thinks he's fighting the good fight for his beloved technology, but the effective result is the opposite. it slowly becomes weird to be associated with them, even just through a personal preference. if you really care about crossfeed and wish to promote it, stop this nonsense of trying to make it be something it is not, and stop behaving like you're crossfeed itself and it's a cult thing. that's my sincere advice to you. unlike gregorio who fights for facts until he cannot, I'm still coming back and posting that crap because somewhere I still want to have a rational conversation with you, and I still hope it's possible. you've proved to me that it was on many other topics, and you've strongly worked on demonstrating to me that it wasn't on the crossfeed topic. only you can figure out why you're so amazingly different and utterly biased about this. remember, I'm actually a guy who likes crossfeed. that should put things in perspective a little when even I cannot get behind what you say.
