[1] Spatial deafness is simply a subgenre of Auditory Adaptation.
Please cite a reference (other than your own).
[2] I really don't get this. To me recordings that work best without crossfeed are few and far between.
You are one opinion, and you have never once referenced anything that shows your opinion is widely held, or even held by anyone but you. If crossfeed were so good, so essential, such a key function, then why hasn't it been standard on even 1% of all music players since the original Sony Soundabout (Walkman) of 1979? It certainly could have been done and very low cost. But it wasn't, hasn't, and isn't still. "Loudness Compensation" had a far better market penetration, and that didn't work well either!
[3] I don't underestimate room modes! I have done research work how to pre-filter signal before it's fed to the speakers to reduce room modes. In pathological cases I suppose it's possible to have ILD bigger than 3 dB, at a certain frequency and place in the room and at reduced SPL level masked by other frequencies.
You can't reduce room modes with pre-filter, and I'm sure you know that. You can only reduce the results of room modes. Room modes can only be reduced with physical means.
[4] Wasn't rare at all in 1958! Even the newest compressed "headphone-friendly" pop has ILD > 3 dB bass.
And exactly how many stereo recordings were released in 1958? What percentage of the total releases ever does that make up? Wouldn't be reasonable to expect early stereo mixes to have a few issues until we learned how to handle the new medium? You've "cherry-picked" an example, which is thus meaningless.
[5] You are clearly a person, who knows a lot and has done a lot for decades, but for some reason you have these strange fights against me. The science is behind me.
We have these "strange fights" because your science doesn't apply to reality, it's specifically targeting contrived conditions.
However, my objects are, and have been:
1. Promoting headphone cross-feed as if it were a "compensation" for some form of distortion, and as if it were a universal solution. Such is not the case. The application of cross-feed is highly generalized at best, inappropriate at least, and never compensates properly for any speaker-mix condition because you have no idea what the intentions were in the first place, nor the precise monitoring conditions used in the mix. You advance it as if it were a complimentary equalizer (like RIAA) when it is at very best a coarse approximation based on uneducated assumptions.
2. You authenticate your "science" with your own passionate opinion, but offer no other statistical listener preference for crossfeed.
3. Your opinions are (still!) stated as immutable fact. And when others express their opinions you view them as personal attacks.
4. Your "science" is tightly targeted at a narrow set of conditions, and ignores the facts that actual mixes are as much art as science. There's no "correcting" for "art".
Larger ILD means the sound source is close to the other ear. It's not only self-evident, but measured HRTFs show it clearly. I really don't know what's wrong with you.
No it does not. ILD is not the sole proximity cue! Your HRTF model may work in an anechoic space, but doesn't account for a real room of any size or reflective nature. In other words, your HRTF alone doesn't model spatial hearing in real life.
[6]
1. Yes. However, a few decibels of ILD sounds more lively imo so I don't always go for mono bass.
Everyone please note the emphasized text. It is exactly what it says: opinion. That means there will be other conflicting opinions! You want fact? Collect statistics, don't quote your own opinion! The bulk of modern music producers and engineers disagree with you.
2. Room modes create typically 10-15 dB peaks and even deeper dimples. However, most of the time this doesn't affect much ILD and if it does, at low level, masked and possibly below the hearing threshold anyway. Usually the modes become dense enough to transform into reverberation below 200 Hz where the wavelength is about 2 m. You are splitting hairs.
No, not splitting hairs at all. In fact, you are correct that modes create 10-15dB peaks, and dips as deep as 30dB or more. You are incorrect in that reverberation below 200Hz causes modes to become denser. Simply not true, and if you'd measure a few small rooms, you'd know that. Those deep dips are not correctable because room EQ systems must limit gain to only a few dB (Audyssey's gain limit is 9dB, for example) because of what that kind of gain does to amplifier power requirements and speaker power handling. If you'd bother to do a few real-room measurements you'd see radical dips that are very, very location specific. In fact, that's why room EQ can only be properly done by averaging many measurement points. However, ears sit in single positions, and therefore are subject to some rather deep frequency specific notches.
Yes, what I said doesn't work in every possible pathological situation, but in general it does and those pathological situations are called "very bad acoustics." People tend to fix them, at least those who care about fidelity. Often all it takes is to move your speakers or chair a feet to make a diffence.
You really should get out and measure like two dozen rooms and see what reality is like. No, those are not pathological situations, they are typical of single-sub rooms. Yes, we do try to fix them with treatment and multiple subs, but if you're working with two-speaker stereo, you cannot move your chair much! Sub-200Hz dips occupy real estate, and your chair can only be moved along the center-line. If you move a speaker, you'll also move the center line, but you can't move a speaker enough to mitigate room mode dips at the optimum LP! Sorry, expericence shows the grim reality. And that's just another reason why multiple-sub, multichannel audio wins hands down.
3. Yes, when we talk about the quality of bass. I was talking about ILD only. The quality aspect does indeed support monophonic or near-monophonic bass. Reducing the ILD at bass in a recording say from 10 dB to 3 dB is a big step toward that.
But most bass is mixed 0dB channel difference (center), and with good reason. There is absolutely no performance or perspective advantage to mixing bass 3dB off center in stereo.
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Crossfeeders don't serve coffee. They don't fix everything in the sound. They fix things related to excessive stereo separation and that's it. Why do I even need to say this?
Cross-feed
changes stereo separation, that's it. Whether or not that's an improvement (a "fix") is
entirely subjective, and varies with every recording from improvement all the way to detriment.
You have presented
no data to support the premise that cross-feed is either universally desired, or perceived as an improvement at all, much less that it is over the (claimed) majority of recordings. None. Only one person (your) opinion.
Why do I need to say
that?
