AES Journal Forum

My apologies to author Bob Stuart.  It seems my supportive comments on what I regard as an intriguing new angle on an important, if well-explored topic, provoked some negative reaction.  I don't believe you asked for a specific end user resolution but suggested the jury is still out for production resolutions upstream of the release format. Neither you nor I conflated visual cues with aural.  And I believe we both know a little bit about stereo.

Your piece struck a chord with me in your comments on the sound of a piano up close (I have no interest at all in the visual image thereof).  The signal from a mono microphone placed very close to the soundboard of a piano — and I would extend that concept to the very near field of any sound source -- can have a finely etched timbre that pop engineers so often exploit when concocting artistically valid, but rather unrealistically hyped production styles.  Close microphone craft exploits this phenomenon constantly.  Pulling the mono microphone back as little as a foot or more, even in an acoustically dry recording space, can diminish that detail.  I've always felt it wasn't completely explained by the slight magnitude response changes (irregular but slight high frequency roll-off) due to air absorption for these distances, at these temperatures/pressures/humidities.  Time smearing seems worth exploring to me.  The cascading accumulation of time smearing seems worth exploring to me.

Defining and learning to hear the qualities described as 'added distance' for microphone placement, never bothering with what it looks like, seems a worthy path of research. I've got to think other practicing audio engineers have had similar aural observations.  I'd love to hear your observations if you have.

[full dislosure:  I've been sticking my head under the piano since I was a wee one.  So the concept may have irrational appeal for me.]