Hi Spiff, chess, sushi and all,
I've liked 2-channel and surround for years. The 2-channel purists forget that stereo is intrinsically flawed: it throws the direct sounds from the instruments AND the ambient reflections from the sides and rear at you from two stereo speakers at the front. That is not the way we hear music in real life.
And chess, DPLII isn't really "faked," because on lots of 2-channel recordings, the ambient information is there. It's picked up by the mikes and contained as out of phase info in the 2-channel recording. DPLII extracts the out-of-phase ambient info and redirects it to the side surrounds in an approximation of where the reflections may have originated. DPLII also adds digital delays which would also have been present in the original reflections from the sides, rear and ceiling.
It's true, spiff, what you say about the musicians on lots of pop recordings not being there at the same time, and the positioning is determined by pan pots in the mixdown, but some boutique audiophile labels don't work that way.
Last night, I was at a DVD-Audio recording session in New York for Chesky Records, done with a single Calrec Soundfield mike, which contains four capsules and derives left, center, right and surround channels by means of a matrix arrangement.
The all-acoustic session was a kind of Hot Club of Paris tribute to Django Rheinhart, with Bucky Pizarelli (rhythm and lead guitar) on the left, Johnny Frigo (jazz violin) in the center, Howard Alden (rhythm and lead guitar) on the right (he did all the playing on the Woody Allen film "Sweet and Lowdown" and taught Sean Penn how to fake jazz guitar playing. He told me he was on the set every day for 3 months).
Directly behind Johnny Frigo (fiddle) was bassist Michael Moore. It was a live session, with an audience and I sat in the front row in the center, perhaps 8 feet back from Johnny Frigo. It will be interesting to see if that arrangement will be preserved in the final DVD-Audio disc, with the extra channels used for ambience and room sound. Knowing the history of Chesky and some of the other sessions I've attended, I expect it will, although it may sound "bigger" than I experienced at the session because I sat up close. I'll let you know when Chesky issues the disk. It was recorded with 96-kHz/24-bit sampling.
Regards,
