To crossfeed or not to crossfeed? That is the question...
Jan 30, 2020 at 8:30 AM Post #1,666 of 2,121
Take a bus! Go to the movies to listen to sound! Listen to better music!

: Joon-ho Bong's Parasite Gisaengchung is coming to theatres in Finland tomorrow and I am planning to see it at some point. For that, I need to take the Metro, not a bus. By the way, Helsinki Metro is the most Northern Metro in the World.

Those CDs I mentioned aren't the best music I listen* to and it's not your business what is better music for me. You have your taste. I have my taste. Sometimes I want to listen to silly bubblegum pop. Sometimes I want to listen to Weinberg's String Quartets. Sometimes I want to listen to Clifford Brown/Max Roach. Sometimes I want to listen to some New Age music. To me it's meaningless to ask if the music is "good" or "bad" to other people. All that matters is if the music works in the moment for me. If it works, it's in that sense good music, no matter what some besserwisser music scholars say and I'm not telling other people what to listen to. That's their business.

* The Logh did work in my state of mind thou...
 
Jan 30, 2020 at 11:35 AM Post #1,667 of 2,121
Just to let you know in case you weren't aware of it... you're pretty much drifted to the point where you're just talking to yourself now.
 
Jan 30, 2020 at 1:52 PM Post #1,668 of 2,121
Just to let you know in case you weren't aware of it... you're pretty much drifted to the point where you're just talking to yourself now.

Funny, I have a feeling you have drifted to the point where you're just talking to me. :confused: Thanks anyway…

I wonder what people here (including you) want me to say? Whether I try to justify crossfeed using science or I talk about public transportation in Helsinki people don't seem to like it. I don't even understand why I need the approval of other people...
 
Jan 30, 2020 at 4:20 PM Post #1,669 of 2,121
Science helps demonstrate facts. When do those facts matter to a given listener, is for him to decide. Because at the end of the day, listening to music is a personal activity and a subjective matter.

To be very clear, having a rational explanation for why you want to use crossfeed, does not make that explanation into a scientific fact about why everybody should want crossfeed, or why it's an objective improvement. It's easy to have a perfectly rational and objective reasoning leading to false conclusions. Almost everybody wrong about something(so all of us several times per day), followed some reasoning that made sense to them based on what they knew(including their biases), and what conclusions they were hoping for. Start with a false axiom, ignore relevant variables, or jump to conclusion(you've done all 3 for crossfeed), and chances are that you'll end up with something erroneous no matter how seriously you do everything else.
In this topic you have avoided a scientific approach as often as necessary to keep your claims alive. Always looking for what agrees with you, always ignoring or finding reasons to downplay the influence of the missing variables of crossfeed(based on a speaker model). Always finding excuses not to mind the errors between crossfeed EQ and a listener's own Head Related EQ(again, speaker model). Often copy pasting knowledge and conclusions from speakers, rooms and listeners in them, right onto crossfeed as if crossfeed was objectively the same system. And that despite how you completely agree that crossfeed is its own thing and not the same as speaker playback. And of course all the times when you're making arbitrary decisions about what matters objectively, based on your own subjective impressions. If all that is science, I'm the singer from Iron Maiden.


If I had to bet on why all this is happening here and nowhere else with you, I'd go with the sunk cost fallacy. You've invested yourself so much into crossfeed that you've lost all objectivity about it and instead you just hold on to that completely unnecessary need to justify it. Why does it have to be more than something you enjoy using?

This criticism itself seems to be steeped in the nirvana fallacy. A solution doesn't have to be perfect for it to be advocated, just better than the status quo.
 
Jan 30, 2020 at 7:33 PM Post #1,670 of 2,121
This criticism itself seems to be steeped in the nirvana fallacy. A solution doesn't have to be perfect for it to be advocated, just better than the status quo.
I don't think it is a nirvana fallacy. Unless you consider that false is almost right. I'm not asking for perfection but saying that false assumptions, cherry picking and jumping to conclusions are not part of the scientific method.

You do bring up the true matter of this thread though. Has it been determined anywhere that crossfeed is better than the status quo? If you ask @71 dB, it sure has been. But what about the rest of the planet? If you go ask a hundred audiophiles who tried some, do you have confidence that a majority would consider crossfeed to be an improvement? AFAIK only a minority of people who try crossfeed will keep using it in the long run. And out of that minority, several only use Xfeed on a few select tracks/albums. If someone has data showing differently, I welcome the correction. Otherwise I'll stick to my assumption that crossfeed is a niche subjective tool for the few people who happen to enjoy it.
 
Jan 31, 2020 at 8:22 AM Post #1,672 of 2,121
Has it been determined anywhere that crossfeed is better than the status quo? If you ask @71 dB, it sure has been. But what about the rest of the planet? If you go ask a hundred audiophiles who tried some, do you have confidence that a majority would consider crossfeed to be an improvement? AFAIK only a minority of people who try crossfeed will keep using it in the long run. And out of that minority, several only use Xfeed on a few select tracks/albums. If someone has data showing differently, I welcome the correction. Otherwise I'll stick to my assumption that crossfeed is a niche subjective tool for the few people who happen to enjoy it.

I don't see this as a popularity contest. People learn to listen to headphone without crossfeed and think that's the way to do that. It takes efford to adjust your thinking and a lot people aren't willing to do that. I'm sure if all people started listening to headphones with crossfeed, even fewer would "learn" away from it if given the chance. That's because headphone spatiality doesn't really make sense unless it's made for headphones (binaural etc.)

To me it doesn't matter if 0 % or 100 % of people like crossfeed. To me it is an improvement, because it addresses the issue of excessive ILD, takes ILD closer to what I hear when I listen to speakers which should be somewhat close to what the artistic intention* was. Humans are complex psychological creatures. Just like people have very different taste of music or movies, the opinions of crossfeed differ.

* On headphones to me bass sounds "fake" without crossfeed. It doesn't have physicality. Crossfeed gives bass realness making it sound much better. It's difficult for me to believe the artistic intention was to have the bass sound crappy. Maybe ONE band on this planets wants as a joke to have their bass sound crappy, but King Crimson? I don't think so! Of course they want physical great sound! Speakers give it! Crossfeed help having something like that with headphones. That's just one reason why I consider crossfeed an improvement and use it.
 
Jan 31, 2020 at 8:35 AM Post #1,673 of 2,121
I use the minimal crossfeed on my Chord DAVE and Hugo 2 and can't go back to turning it off.

When I turn off the crossfeed with a recording that really needs it the result sounds to me shockingly bad. The sound just "explodes" into pieces and the natural feel is gone. Bass becomes "fake" and it all just feels annoying and wrong. That's why it is very difficult for me to understand how to some other people crossfeed is not an improvement, but it seems I simply have to accept how different people are. Thanks to people like you I feel I am not completely alone with my preferences.
 
Jan 31, 2020 at 9:14 AM Post #1,674 of 2,121
When I turn off the crossfeed with a recording that really needs it the result sounds to me shockingly bad. The sound just "explodes" into pieces and the natural feel is gone. Bass becomes "fake" and it all just feels annoying and wrong. That's why it is very difficult for me to understand how to some other people crossfeed is not an improvement, but it seems I simply have to accept how different people are. Thanks to people like you I feel I am not completely alone with my preferences.

We all have different tastes, but I do prefer some crossfeed regardless when listening through headphones. Just a more natural experience IMO. :)
 
Jan 31, 2020 at 12:12 PM Post #1,675 of 2,121
We all have different tastes, but I do prefer some crossfeed regardless when listening through headphones. Just a more natural experience IMO. :)

It's no wonder to me if you find some crossfeed more natural, because the sounds we hear around us are more mono than people think. Well, not that mono at high frequences, but low frequencies (below 1 kHz or so) we hear around us are not far from mono. A lot of music is produced so that bass (below 200 Hz or so) is actually mono and to my knowledge nobody complains about it. It just works, even with speakers! Brain expects spatial correlation in the sound heard by left and right ears and when that kind of correlation exists the sound appears more natural, at least to me. Crossfeeder forces this kind of correlation to the signal and even if crossfeeder is just a coarse approximation of the real spatial process, at least my spatial hearing gets fooled. For physical reasons HRTF describing these correlations are quite smooth under 1 kHz, the typically "operating" frequency limit of crossfeeders. Above 1 kHz HRTF becomes very chaotic and difficult to model using simple filters, but at these frequencies crossfeeders do hardly anything anyway. It is what it is. Scaling ILD to natural levels and having those natural correlations below 1 kHz is what counts for my ears.

To my ears recordings have different amount of excessive spatiality and that's why I use variable crossfeed level. Some recordings don't need crossfeed at all: They have proper ILD-levels as they are. Some recording need just a little "finetuning". Modern pop tends to be like that. Bass is perhaps mono, but between 200 Hz and 1000 Hz ILD can be just a little too much. Some recordings such as early stereophonic records and downmixed multichannel recordings may need pretty strong crossfeed to be "tamed" natural to my ears. Selecting the proper crossfeed level is easy for me: It's the lowest level of crossfeed that gives sound free of excessive spatiality. Using too much crossfeed just makes the sound unnecessorily mono-like and dull for me. The sweetpot is pretty easy to find unless the recording has very strange spatial properties.
 
Feb 5, 2020 at 8:16 PM Post #1,676 of 2,121
This criticism itself seems to be steeped in the nirvana fallacy. A solution doesn't have to be perfect for it to be advocated, just better than the status quo.

There are much more comprehensive solutions available right now. I can think four: Sony 360 Reality Audio, Bacch for headphones, Realiser A16 and Impulsifier.
 
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Feb 6, 2020 at 8:28 AM Post #1,677 of 2,121
There are much more comprehensive solutions available right now. I can think four: Sony 360 Reality Audio, Bacch for headphones, Realiser A16 and Impulsifier.

I haven't tried any of those, but in theory they can be superior to "default" crossfeed. Actually these are crossfeeders (portion of left channel is send to right ear and vice versa), just more sophisticated than "default" crossfeed.
 
Feb 6, 2020 at 8:04 PM Post #1,678 of 2,121
I haven't tried any of those, but in theory they can be superior to "default" crossfeed. Actually these are crossfeeders (portion of left channel is send to right ear and vice versa), just more sophisticated than "default" crossfeed.

I chose the word “comprehensive” meaning that they incorporate a greater quantity of filters related to the listening room and listener head and torso. It is controversial to valuate them using the words “standard” or “superior” since music reproduction is not pretended to replicate reality.

Following the lessons from @gregorio and @pinnahertz, I’ve decided to read some book about music under a producer focus. So I‘ve chosen David Byrne’s “How Music Works“ and from the very beginning he states that the acoustical characteristics of the place where musicians perform shape or at least frame how the music culture evolves. For instance, the height of the ceiling of the concert hall at the city where I live is adjustable to change its volume and ensures that the intensity of any composition has its acoustic concept respected.

David Byrne also writes that, for instance, before the advent of the gramophone, the vibrato was rarely used in live performances of string instruments. But it became frequently used in this type of recording to circumvent some of its limitations. Soon after people got so used to it by listening such recordings and they started to expect its frequent use in live music also!

Even those more comprehensive solutions don't replicate reality so its use is more a matter of preference than superiority.

It took me a while to understand that rationale reading the threads here and, as Byrne’s book shows, more professional producers confirm that.

But I didn’t develop any of those solutions. If I had developed any, maybe I would be arguing its superiority until now.

Having said that, I believe some of those solutions may be perceived as really useful for those that want to produce music reliably outside of professional studios.

Cheers!
 
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Feb 11, 2020 at 4:46 PM Post #1,679 of 2,121
David Byrne also writes that, for instance, before the advent of the gramophone, the vibrato was rarely used in live performances of string instruments. But it became frequently used in this type of recording to circumvent some of its limitations. Soon after people got so used to it by listening such recordings and they started to expect its frequent use in live music also!

That seems too simplistic to me. Vibrato was a tonal style with stringed instruments long before the gramophone. Mozart said he thought many string players during his era used too much vibrato: that it should be reserved for long sustains and the ends of phrases. During the baroque period, it was thought that subtle use of vibrato should be more ornamental.

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1105&context=ppr

I suspect sensibilities about vibrato also depends on music venue: IE, a 4 piece string quartet (where you can hear any individual's intonation) vs full symphony. Recording techniques might have influenced the use of vibrato, but I don't think it was the only factor for its preponderance by the 20th century.

I do agree that it's interesting to see how engineers might change the acoustics of a concert hall for recording vs a live event. Here in Atlanta, the Atlanta symphony produces recordings with Telarc. Perhaps partly because of the venue being empty during recording, they'll lay boards on top of all the seating.
 
Feb 11, 2020 at 9:22 PM Post #1,680 of 2,121
That seems too simplistic to me.

Yes, it seems simplistic now that I read your comment and the article you linked. I don't know that much about the subject to affirm what really happened when recordings appeared.

I've been obsesively thinking in recent years which effect new advancements in immersive audio would have in music if they became mainstream.
 

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