Dear Reader,

A name from the past, Davy Jones. The Shel Talmy review. Read on to find out who Davy Jones is.
In this issue

• Making Time - A Shel Talmy Production
  ​by Merrill Wettasinghe
• Beyond the Baffle Part 4: The Celestial Sphere
  ​By Mark Block
• ELEMENT 116 MX world premier Review by Enjoy the Music

Cheers, Merrill Wettasinghe/Chief Music Officer 𝄞𝄞

Making Time
​Reviewed by Merrill Wettasinghe

A Shel Talmy Production

Davy Jones is David Bowie.

Since the name was similar to the Monkees Davy Jones, David Bowie change his name to David Bowie. The first single David Bowie produced was under Davy Jones with his band The Lower 3rd, song titled, "you've got a habit of leaving". See if you can find it. Davy Jones is now David Bowie, and the Monkees Davy Jones is still Davy Jones from the Monkees - no confusion. Thanks goodness.

The "Making Time" CD produced in 2017 is a compilation of of Shel Talmy's recordings and includes Davy Jones (David Bowie), "You've got a habit of leaving" and a host of Shel Talmy's earlier recordings that includes some very young talented musicians like Yardbirds, Jimmy Page.

Now Parlophone is releasing all his unheard recordings on 1 album.

Unheard David Bowie songs from 1965 to be released, Sept 18th.

​https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/15/david-bowie-unheard-songs-1965-jimmy-page-the-shel-talmy-recordings​

You can buy it here.

​https://shop.davidbowie.com/products/the-shel-talmy-recordings-vinyl-lp​

If you can find or have the original 1965 Parlophone Davy Jones single, let us know how that sounds and send us a picture. The 1979 Mannish boys/Davy Jones has Davy Jones and the original Lower 3rd but it was reissued as a EP and compilation shown below. It would be very interesting to compare this reissue to the original 1965 release album and then to the new album coming out.

Beyond the Baffle Part 4: The Celestial Sphere

By 🍄Mark Block 🍄

Beyond the Baffle Part 6: BACCH, Blumlein and Heisenberg

By Mark Block.

Reviewed 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.

We left off last time discussing David Chesky’s Mega-Dimensional Sound™. In this final installment of our exploration of the stereo soundstage, we boldly go where—OK, fine, where several very smart people have gone before. Still, for our purposes, this is the final frontier. Yay! We are entering another dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Cue the Twilight Zone theme: “doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo.”

While David’s DSP is great at adding “immersive” dimensionality, it doesn’t quite “boldly go” where no one has gone before. Like QSound and many DAW plugins, Chesky’s processing works on the production side: it changes what gets put into the recording you play. But here’s where it gets interesting. Chesky’s software was developed with the help of Dr. Edgar Choueiri, a plasma physicist at Princeton—and Choueiri’s own BACCH 3D system takes the idea in a different direction. His system of software and hardware, sold by Theoretica Applied Physics, attempts to fix something more fundamental than the size of the soundstage. It attacks—at the playback stage—the way two-speaker stereo reaches our ears in the first place.

Choueiri’s bio is pretty impressive: Chief Scientist at the University’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Lab; Director of Princeton University’s 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Lab. So besides being an audiophile and music lover—aren’t we all?—Prof. Choueiri is a legit “rocket scientist,” and BACCH was the result of his audiophile obsession colliding with his academic toolkit.

It almost didn’t happen. He became fascinated by 3D audio in 2003 while traveling in Europe for a spacecraft propulsion conference in Toulouse, France. On a whim, he decided to make an excursion to Amsterdam for the 114th Audio Engineering Society Convention. That little detour was destined to become the biggest detour of his academic life. The AES 114 program included “Spatial Perception and Processing” sessions, papers on wave-field synthesis, high-order Ambisonics, Ambiophonics, spatial attributes, sound-source wideness, and related topics. Choueiri was hooked.

Now allow me to take another little detour in our story. One of the presenters in Amsterdam was Robert E. “Robin” Miller III, who was Ralph Glasgal’s friend and collaborator on Ambiophonics and RACE DSP. Ralph was a friend of mine and fellow member of The Audiophile Society. I heard his demos at least a dozen times in the mid-’90s and early aughts. I thought his Ambiophonics system did an amazing job with 2-channel sound effects recordings: birds in an Amazon rainforest, a marching band in a parade, a jet taking off or a train roaring by. But with music, it was hit-or-miss—mostly a miss. Some recordings were reproduced with a realistic 3D soundstage, while others became a bizarre mess of instruments placed where they didn’t belong. The process also messed with the timbre of instruments, making them less realistic, despite Ralph’s correct assessment that pinnae effects alter the frequency response of the mono component of stereo recordings. My feeling—and I told him this—was that he was right in theory but wrong in the practical implementation.

Ralph’s larger Ambiophonics ambitions could involve multiple loudspeakers surrounding the listener, but the front-end trick—the part most relevant here—was the Ambiodipole: two closely spaced front speakers, originally aided by a physical baffle and later by RACE DSP to reduce acoustic crosstalk. Using RACE, Ralph enjoyed freaking people out with a boombox that sounded like a big stereo rig. I installed RACE on my Mac laptop more than two decades ago and enjoyed it—as long as I was using the computer’s little built-in speakers. That makes sense: a laptop or boombox already puts the speakers close together, much closer to Ambiophonics’ preferred geometry than a normal 60º stereo triangle. As an aside, my current MacBook Pro and iPhone also seem to use plenty of spatial-processing trickery through their built-in speakers. But that is a different animal from RACE or BACCH, which are specifically trying to cancel acoustic crosstalk rather than merely make tiny speakers sound bigger and wider.

The breakthrough of Choueiri’s BACCH system is not simply that it replaces Ralph’s physical baffle with DSP. More precisely, BACCH is designed to perform crosstalk cancellation over loudspeakers while minimizing the tonal damage and center-image coloration that plagued earlier crosstalk-cancellation schemes. It also does not require Ambiophonics’ closely spaced front speakers; BACCH can work over a wide range of speaker angles, including—but not limited to—the familiar 60º equilateral triangle.

In 2008, with support from Princeton Engineering’s Project X/Shostack funding for unconventional faculty ideas, Choueiri founded Princeton’s 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics Laboratory. The lab became operational in early 2009 and, by the end of that year, had its own anechoic chamber.

BACCH stands for Band-Assembled Crosstalk Cancellation Hierarchy. Clever name! As an obsessive audiophile—presumably like most people reading this—Choueiri tried to address the same problem with stereo reproduction that we’ve been circling around for the entirety of this series: With normal two-speaker stereo, each ear hears both speakers. The sound from the left speaker reaches the left ear first, as intended, but it also wraps around your head and reaches the right ear a fraction of a millisecond later, with its frequency response radically changed by your head and outer ear. Ditto from the other speaker. This mangling of the frequency response and timing is a feature, not a bug, in human hearing. It’s how our brain locates where the lion is not sleeping tonight. But sadly, it’s a major limitation of stereo playback.

Choueiri attempts to solve the problem using digital filters to make the right speaker help cancel the left speaker’s unwanted arrival at the right ear, and vice versa, without creating the tonal weirdness, hollow-center images, or frequency-response ripples that plagued earlier crosstalk-cancellation schemes. BACCH is still crosstalk cancellation, but not the old kind. And it is not merely EQ correction, although its filters inevitably shape frequency and phase. The trick is that the filters are supposed to reduce acoustic crosstalk without imposing tonal coloration of their own. In the measured versions, in-ear microphones capture the actual speaker/room/listener response, and BACCH uses that information to build individualized filters. BACCH4Mac Intro uses more generalized filters, so it is more dependent on ideal speaker matching, symmetry, and minimal interference from early reflections.

The goal is not to add fake ambience, stretch the image, or sprinkle soundstage pixie dust over ordinary stereo; the goal is to reduce an unavoidable limitation baked into Blumlein’s two-speaker innovation. With BACCH, each ear should receive more of the signal it was meant to receive and less of the signal meant for the other ear—ideally, without the cure becoming worse than the disease.

Many stereo recordings already contain useful spatial cues—binaural information, phase-rich ambience, precise microphone timing, or carefully mixed lateral effects. Crosstalk processing with BACCH software should let those cues get processed by the brain’s wetware without the confusing interference of our big fat heads. In theory, the soundstage should not become bigger because BACCH made it bigger; it should become bigger, deeper, more specific, or more enveloping because the recording was already telling your brain to hear it that way, while ordinary stereo playback was getting in the way.

In addition to expanding a system’s beyond-the-baffle soundstage, BACCH can also improve the imaging between the baffles. When a centered, mono component of a stereo signal reaches each ear from both speakers at slightly different times, the direct sound and the crosstalk arrival partially reinforce and cancel each other at different frequencies. In a 1986 AES paper, Don Keele and Timothy Bock showed that crosstalk-induced comb filtering is especially severe for center images. Reducing crosstalk with BACCH can make a phantom center sound more solid, less colored, and more like a real singer or instrument occupying the space between the speakers.

Theoretica Applied Physics, Choueiri’s company, now sells BACCH in several forms, and this is where things can get confusing. The full measured versions, such as BACCH4Mac Audiophile and the standalone BACCH-SP processors, use calibrated in-ear microphone measurements to create custom filters for the listener, speakers, room, setup, and playback chain. Some versions also use head tracking to widen the usable 3D sweet spot as the listener moves. BACCH4Mac Intro, by contrast, is a simpler, lower-cost version that relies on measured speaker/listener geometry and more idealized assumptions about the room, speakers, and listener. Same family, same basic goal—but not the same level of correction.

When it works, it can be spooky. Binaural recordings can move outside the speakers, around the head, and sometimes behind the listener. Naturally recorded stereo can open up with startling depth and specificity.

This is not a review of BACCH as a whole. I’ve heard the full, measured approach sound excellent. In my friend Tom Perazella’s system, it works as advertised. He has BACCH4Mac Audiophile, with custom filters created from in-ear microphone measurements and head tracking available. Our mutual friend Marvin and I paid him a visit recently to hear it. Tom turned off the head tracking, and we used his in-ear measurements—nothing was recalibrated for our ears—but we A/B’ed a bunch of reference tracks with and without BACCH. Verdict: Every single track we played sounded more transparent, more realistic, more focused, and had better soundstage width. Nothing dramatic or stunning, but always a meaningful improvement.

I was impressed enough to buy BACCH4Mac Intro, the simplified version that uses speaker/listener measurements rather than custom in-ear measurements. Theoretica provides personal setup help and offers free support for one year. In my case, Dr. Choueiri himself spent over an hour taking over my Mac Mini and setting up all the parameters correctly. In my room, Intro expanded the soundstage nicely, but in other respects it was a step backward. That does not mean BACCH failed. It means the simplified Intro version—in my particular room and system—did not give me what Tom’s full BACCH4Mac Audiophile setup gave us in his room. I should add that BACCH4Mac Intro can be upgraded to the more full-featured versions with in-ear calibration, and Theoretica offers a trial/return policy for customers who want to evaluate the software in their own systems.

Tom and I have discussed my subjective observations at length. It must be said that Tom’s room gives BACCH a very fair shot. It is heavily—and carefully—treated with bass traps, absorbers, and diffusers, and Tom is an experienced measurement guy whose system is meticulously configured. That does not make my room a casual listening space—in fact, people who hear my system generally find it notably spacious and three-dimensional—but it does mean his setup is closer to the kind of controlled environment where crosstalk cancellation has fewer room-reflection gremlins fighting back.

As Tom pointed out to me, this is where the room becomes very much a part of the equation. Floyd Toole has even suggested that early reflections in a “normal” room can make crosstalk comb filtering less audibly destructive. Every room is different. My reasonably large room has a 13-foot cathedral ceiling; I’ve made modest efforts at room treatment with a couple of ASC bass traps, some large yucca plants, and a bunch of fabric-covered panels sprinkled where aesthetics dictated the placement; I have a very large rug, almost wall-to-wall; my standmount speakers are over 5 feet from all walls, and I sit in an 8-foot equilateral triangle, measured to better than ¼-inch accuracy. Sadly, additional room treatments have been nixed by my wife, who made threats of bodily harm that I can’t repeat here. In any case, room reflections can affect transient clarity, image focus, and low-level detail. I admit that my system lacks the last degree of transparency and detail that I heard in Tom’s system. I would expect to have had better results with BACCH4Mac Audiophile, but there is a daunting price difference: $980 vs. $4,980.

Let’s move on to a more philosophical question, one that’s at the heart of why anyone would care about all this: What are our reference tracks supposed to sound like? No one knows—not the listener, not the reviewer, and not even the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers. Floyd Toole famously called this the “circle of confusion.” Back in 1989, around the time Toole was developing and explaining his ideas, I wrote a letter to Stereophile describing the same problem less elegantly. I had never read anything by Toole; if I had, maybe I wouldn’t have written anything to Stereophile. I likened the problem to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, so I called it the Audio Uncertainty Principle. Here’s my explanation from that letter:

“Do you see the epistemological problem here? We can never really know what’s on the recording, because we have to monitor it through electronics and speakers, which necessarily alter it, unless they’re perfect. How can we know if they’re perfect? Only by knowing what the recording is like without them. Catch-22.”

So if my system reveals a track to have a soundstage “beyond the baffle” but yours doesn’t, which is correct? I don’t know for sure, but I think this is true: The phase relationships of spatial cues in recordings must be maintained from source to speaker to ear for our brains to decode them into a three-dimensional sonic image in our rooms. The more convincing the imaging, the better the system—in that one respect.

A wider, more immersive soundstage helps the speakers disappear as sound sources, making the system a better approximation of reality, all else equal. It gets us closer to a “you are there” or “they are here” experience. Isn’t that what we’re all striving for with our high-performance audio gear? It’s also simply more fun to listen to.

That’s why I have a collection of “beyond the baffle” reference tracks on Qobuz that I like to play when evaluating a new component or someone else’s system. I don’t know what these tracks are supposed to sound like on a “perfect” system, but if they aren’t reproduced with glorious, baffle-defying width, depth and height, then the system isn’t doing its job.

Qobuz link: https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/60738136 ​

Link to the Atlantic Magazine article on Dr. Choueiri: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/what-perfection-sounds-like/308377/​

ELEMENT 116 MX world premier Review by Enjoy the Music

Tom Lyle, senior editor, reviews the Monoblocks in his esteemed system. Read the review here.

Using Gallium Nitrite(GaN) Transistors , with precision controlled clocking of the GaN Transistors, the ELEMENT amplifiers standapart from regular Class D implementations with far greater detail and nuance. The ELEMENT 116MX bring the 116 closer to the ELEMENT 118 sound with benefits in an improved input stage, and power supply transition capability.

"I give the Merrill Audio Element 116MX my highest recommendation.", Tom Lyle, Senior Editor​

​Read the review - click here.

Send us your comments, pictures of your systems. ​
​NewsletterEditor@MerrillAudio.net​
With your permission I will print your comments in a future edition.