Room reflection effects are masked by spatial information already in recordings

Evidence

Figure 4.11 shows the spatial quality ratings for each of the music selections. They are all different, but there is a lot of judgment variation that reduces confidence in some of the differences. The choral selection used multiple microphones and the chamber piece employed a Blumlein coincident pair. The listening room reflections are likely to be heavily diluted or masked by the spatial information incorporated into the stereo classical recordings. Nevertheless, there are hints of preferential biases in the distributions, but they are different for the two recordings. The jazz selection revealed lower ratings for the Rega. No explanation for this was found, but there is clearly an interaction with aspects of this specific multi-microphone recording. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 452

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to choice of recording technique (Blumlein pair vs. multimic) and how much of perceived spatial quality comes from the recording vs. the room.