Dear Reader,

Last Month has a number of mistakes. Beyond the Baffle listed as Part 4 was actually Part 6 when Part 5 was the next scheduled part. We were too excited to publish the BAACH system by Professor Edgar Choueiri, Director of Princeton’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (EPPDyL) and the 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Lab, Princeton University. And This Month is 2 days late appearing in Sept.
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So this month we will take the middle ground and fill in Part 5 in case you were lost.

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In this issue

• Blue Note Award for ELEMENT 116MX
  ​by Merrill Wettasinghe
• Beyond the Baffle Part 5: The Celestial Sphere
  ​By Mark Block

Cheers, Merrill Wettasinghe/Chief Music Officer 𝄞𝄞

Blue Note Award for ELEMENT 116MX
​Reviewed by Merrill Wettasinghe

We are honored to received the Blue Note Award for the ELEMENT 116 from EnjoyTheMusic.com, Steven R. Rochlin. Read more at the link below.

The ELEMENT 116MX provides one the the worlds bests sounds, and for the 2nd system, the ELEMENT 110 will get you there still providing the worlds 2nd best sound. Take a listen.
​https://www.enjoythemusic.com/superioraudio/equipment/0726/Merrill_Audio_Element_116MX_Review.htm​

Beyond the Baffle Part 4: The Celestial Sphere

By 🍄Mark Block 🍄

Beyond the Baffle Part 5: Digital Deception

By Mark Block

In 1992, my brother-in-law, a successful stockbroker and real-estate wheeler-dealer, called me with an investment question. Moi? I’m someone who wouldn’t know a good deal if it sat in his lap and licked his face. After confirming he hadn’t hit the wrong button on his speed dialer, we got to a topic I had experience with: nerdy audio. “What do you know about QSound?”

Uh, easy answer: Madonna’s Immaculate Collection was one of my go-to demo CDs; I loved QSound’s crazy ability to throw sounds off to the sides of the room. “It’s amazing technology! Why do you ask?” I was told the stock was going crazy, falling quickly from its lofty highs. Intrigued by the investment opportunity, thinking I could make money on the dip, I fired up my 2.4 kbps modem and got a cup of coffee while my computer (and whatever was on the other end of the “series of tubes”) went through the familiar but excruciatingly unpleasant dialogue and virtual handshaking. Twenty minutes later, suitably caffeinated, I checked CompuServe, the BBS TAN forum (The Audiophile Network), and the Usenet group rec.audio.high-end for QSound scuttlebutt. Ah, those were the days.

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What the QSound guys were selling—three-dimensional “surround” sound from stereo speakers—was a cool trick based on breakthrough science. As discussed in Part 1 of this series, the tracks that managed this with “flanging and phasing” back in the late ’60s and early ’70s were the wildest things since sex on a rollercoaster. OK, that’s not a real thing (is it?), but still … what if every stereo track could have a “Whole Lotta Love” going on? I was eager for more QSound releases. Roger Waters’ Amused to Death came out a short time later, and I was convinced the technology would be the “next big thing.”

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Wrong. The technology in other forms did turn out to be hugely successful and almost ubiquitous, but it didn’t make anyone rich. As investors go, I was pretty much like a virgin, and thankfully I did not pop my cherry on QSound. What did pop was the QSound stock bubble. It went from $26/share to $2, forcing CEO Larry Ryckman to resign. He was later found by the Alberta Securities Commission to have engaged in market manipulation. Again, those were the days! Nowadays, stock manipulation and insider trading are how most politicians get rich.

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I digress, but here comes another digression: The famed Jimmy Iovine was key to the inflation of the stock price. As the engineer on Born to Run and the producer for Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2 and many other big names, he was considered a valuable salesman for QSound, so he was brought on board as “VP of Music” to legitimize the company with recording industry executives. Around this time, he also formed Interscope Records. Interestingly, he didn’t actually use QSound on any of his own Interscope albums, but instead helped sell the concept to some of the world's biggest artists.

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Here’s a little more on Iovine—because he’s fascinating—but I’ll try to be brief. A scandal broke out in 1998 when Seagram, owner of the Universal Music Group, bought PolyGram (which owned A&M Records, Island, and Def Jam) for $10.4 billion. To consolidate their new empire and slash costs, Universal proceeded with a corporate bloodbath, forcibly merging Geffen Records and A&M Records into Interscope, creating a massive umbrella label group called Interscope Geffen A&M (IGA), with Jimmy Iovine as co-chairman.

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During this merger, Universal dropped an estimated 250 to 300 artists across the three labels. If you survived the purge at Geffen or A&M, you suddenly found yourself answering to Jimmy Iovine and the Interscope executive team. Some artists, like Aimee Mann, had newly completed albums that Iovine refused to release. Happily for Mann, some of the songs from the unreleased album became the soundtrack to Magnolia, earning her an Oscar nomination and making her successful enough to buy back the album from Iovine. Needless to say, she is not an Iovine fan. He later partnered with Dr. Dre on the iconic Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, initially manufactured by Monster Cable. Because of a cleverly worded contract with Monster, he was eventually able to kick “head monster” Noel Lee out of the Beats business.

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End of digression. This article is not about headphones; it’s about 3D sound from two speakers. How did QSound do it? It took many years of painstaking, even obsessive research by a successful Calgary, Alberta musician, Danny Lowe, and a brilliant studio engineer he worked with, John Lees.

In addition to his career as a musician, Danny Lowe had his own music production company and, in the early ’80s, began experimenting with placing multiple microphones at various distances around performers, trying to capture the natural room delay and phase shifts that tell the brain where a sound is coming from. He understood that by manipulating the phase and timing of a signal, he could make sounds appear to float in thin air outside the speakers. As discussed in Part 1, Eddie Kramer did this with flanging and panning, but it was hit-or-miss and required laborious manual manipulation of tape decks and mixing boards. Lowe wanted to figure out the math behind this effect, and brought in John Lees to help him, and then to design electronics to control it.

The original experiments were funded out of Lowe's own pocket, utilizing his studio time when he wasn't producing other bands. They used a Hewlett-Packard signal generator and an Eventide Clockworks Precision Delay to tweak phase and timing cues manually. They surmised that the only way to build a reliable spatial audio system was to map out which electronic manipulations would fool the human ear/brain into locating sounds beyond the baffles. Over the course of several years, Lowe and Lees conducted an estimated 550,000 individual listening tests with human subjects.

Previously, many researchers, like those at Bell Labs, used anechoic chambers and dummy heads to measure binaural audio. But Lowe and Lees believed that if their system was going to work in the real world, it had to be optimized for a standard pair of stereo speakers in a typical room. They placed a single chair precisely in the sweet spot of an equilateral triangle, facing two high-quality studio monitors. An anechoic chamber wouldn’t work because they needed acoustic crosstalk—the sound of the left speaker bleeding into the right ear—to happen naturally, like it would in a home environment.

As Lowe changed the timing, phase, and frequency of the test tones, the listener would use a specially designed keypad to indicate exactly where they perceived the sound to be coming from. They meticulously logged the data and empirically derived an averaged mathematical model of a human Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) for stereo speakers in a room.

But to make the system work in practice, they had to transform the data into algorithms running on custom-built DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chips. In the mid-1980s, DSP architecture was incredibly expensive and required serious capital. Enter the aforementioned Larry Ryckman, a wealthy Calgary entrepreneur who saw a billion-dollar idea in the work of Lowe and Lees. Ryckman financed the transition from a studio experiment into a tech company. In 1986, he took over a cheap shell company trading on the speculative Vancouver Stock Exchange, renamed it Archer Communications (later QSound), and aggressively sold shares to investors. The millions of dollars raised by Ryckman's initial stock promotion paid for more listening tests, the complex software engineering, and the manufacturing of QSystem hardware.

QSound aggressively targeted the biggest names in the industry through our friend Jimmy Iovine. Artists as diverse as Sting, Roger Waters, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul and Luther Vandross were early adopters. The QSystem II processing hardware couldn't be bought; like the closed-loop Dolby processing system, it had to be leased and installed in high-end studios. QSound’s initial pitch to Wall Street was that it would be more appealing to consumers than Dolby because QSound didn’t require the end user to buy a Dolby-authorized receiver and surround speakers; the 3D effect worked with any standard pair of stereo speakers. I would imagine that the QSound sales pitch neglected to mention that it only worked for one person sitting in the sweet spot. In any case, Ryckman argued that adoption would be immediate and explosive. Wall Street believed the hype.

But Ryckman may have been too greedy. Instead of just charging studios a flat fee to lease the QSystem hardware processor, Ryckman and his high-powered music attorney, Allen Grubman, played hardball, demanding a per-unit royalty whereby QSound would receive a few cents for every single CD that used QSound processing. This sounded like a license to print money. If The Immaculate Collection sells 10 million copies, and QSound gets a few cents per copy, the recurring revenue would be astronomical. That pie-in-the-sky royalty projection is what drove the stock up to $26 a share.

And then the harder they come, the harder they fall. Record labels and artists hate sharing royalties. They will pay royalties to songwriters and producers, but the idea of paying a continuous mechanical royalty just to use a freaking mixing effect was oppressive. Mixing an album in QSound was already expensive because it required leasing the proprietary hardware and took hours of extra studio time to get the phase alignments perfectly right. Adding a permanent royalty tax on top of that? That was a battle not to be won.

After the hype died down, the music industry essentially boycotted the royalty model; QSound’s projected revenues vanished, the stock collapsed, and Ryckman was booted. QSound stayed alive by changing course, licensing the software algorithms and DSP chips to electronics manufacturers for a flat fee. Video games used it; PC sound cards came with QSound built in; the chips became part of A/V receivers and TVs. However, by 2008, the company started running out of money. In 2015, the SEC officially revoked its corporate registration because QSound hadn't filed a financial report since 2007. Around that same time, the last of their 40 original patents officially expired.

With the patents expiring and DSP becoming cheap, the ideas behind QSound took on a new life. They became part of a much larger family of psychoacoustic spatial-audio tools—wideners, binaural panners, game-audio engines, TV processing, and modern “immersive” plugins. In mixing studios all over the world—from the Record Plant to Billie Eilish’s bedroom—spatial-processing plugins turn up all over pop, rock, hip-hop, film, TV, and gaming audio.

This makes me very happy. So much of modern mixing and mastering revolves around dynamic range compression, and most of it sounds disappointing on a high-end system. A revealing system capable of prodigious dynamic range is reduced to sounding like a giant boombox. The one modern trend I love is the manipulation of soundstage to make music fill a room from wall to wall and sometimes floor to ceiling. In contrast to compression, the better the system (and the setup), the better the spatial effects can sound.

These days, the complicated hardware processors Lowe and Lees built have been replaced by software plugins running inside Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Pro Tools, Logic, or Ableton. The torch has been passed to psychoacoustic wideners such as Polyverse Wider, NUGEN Audio Stereoizer, Leapwing Audio StageOne, and Goodhertz Panpot. Polyverse Wider uses all-pass and comb-filtering algorithms to create width while remaining 100% mono-compatible (solving one of QSound's biggest flaws). Leapwing Audio StageOne uses advanced decorrelation algorithms to independently alter the perceived width and depth of a mix. And Goodhertz Panpot allows engineers to pan instruments using Interaural Time Difference (delay) and Interaural Level Difference (spectral frequency shadowing), drawing on the same HRTF/psychoacoustic territory that QSound helped bring into commercial music production.

Binaural panners, such as Dear Reality's dearVR, are another interesting category. Many DAWs now feature built-in 3D pucks, so instead of a standard Left/Right pan knob, the DAW applies HRTF, EQ, timing delays, and level differences to trick our ears into hearing sounds behind or above them. While this is particularly effective on headphones, even through speakers some of the effects remain.

Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell famously mixed her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, in his childhood bedroom. Using a combination of iZotope Ozone Imager and Logic’s native binaural panner, he created an audiophile demo classic with amazing imaging and, on some tracks, spooky voices seeming to come from all over the room.

While these modern plugins draw on the same HRTF and psychoacoustic territory that QSound helped bring to commercial music production, there are other ways to get a wide soundstage by carefully using Mid/Side plugins, which mimic M/S mics. Push the sides too much, and the imaging starts to smear, but a subtle touch will widen the soundstage. Just a little dab will do ya.

Around the same time, and even before QSound became a music-business craze, there were hardware units that took analog signals, converted them to digital for processing, and sent analog back out to the mixing board. Lexicon digital reverb devices created reverb that tended to expand the soundstage with out-of-phase information. The undisputed king was the Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer, released in 1988. The Eventide Harmonizer had lots of tricks up its sleeve and became immensely popular in the ’90s, but it did not create the holographic imaging of QSound. However, there are many examples of tracks from the ’80s and ’90s that have impressively beyond-the-baffle imaging.

These days, if you’re looking for QSound-style immersive imaging tastefully applied, look no further than David Chesky’s latest venture, The Audiophile Society—not to be confused with the old New York audio club of the same name, or my own Audiophile Society Facebook group, which were around long before David’s new company. After experimenting with dummy-head binaural recordings on the Chesky label, David developed his own proprietary DSP processing protocol, which he calls Mega-Dimensional Sound™. Check it out. If you buy one of his albums, you can download it in several formats and versions, including a binaural-style headphone mix and a dedicated speaker mix designed to completely break the 60-degree stereo triangle with “mega” width, depth and height. Note that David recommends an equilateral triangle listening setup, which I agree with.

And that brings us to the final article in this series, where we’ll stop talking about spatial effects added to recordings and address the deeper problem of Blumlein's stereo playback. Dr. Edgar Choueiri’s crosstalk-cancellation system, BACCH, attempts to remove one of the fundamental errors baked into two-speaker listening, thereby letting the spatial cues already on the recording reach our ears more cleanly. When it works, the results can be impressive. When it doesn’t, well… that’s why there has to be one more article. Until then, don’t forget to check out my “Beyond the Baffle” Qobuz playlist: https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/60738136​

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​NewsletterEditor@MerrillAudio.net​
With your permission I will print your comments in a future edition.