ABSTRACT
We now have the basic “tool kit” that will help us understand the factors at play in the directional and spatial perceptions of sound reproduction. We saw in Chapter 4 that sound fi elds in small rooms are not diffuse and that reverberation and critical distance are not useful metrics in any of the traditional senses. However, there is an active refl ected sound fi eld, although it is subservient to the precedence effect in terms of localization. However, localization is not perfect; there can be localization “blur,” a region of uncertainty, the size of which depends strongly on direction (Blauert, 1996). In live performances, there is visual information to substantiate localization (the ventriloquism effect), and generations of audiences have voted in favor not of pinpoint localizations of musicians but of spatially embellished sound images, called apparent source width (ASW). Stating this again, we know where the sound is coming from, and we derive pleasure from having the auditory directional information corrupted! Think about that for a moment, and you may begin to anticipate some of the results of investigations of listener preferences in sound reproduction. As a clue, Dougharty (1973) reports that musicians feel that stereo places “too much emphasis on directional information, which is allowed to thrust itself forward and to demand too great a share of the listener’s attention.”
