WARNING: Before going any further, let me first clarify something: this is NOT a review about the superiority or inferiority of an algorithm over another.
CONTEXT: For many months now, I have been playing a lot with the following three (not L7, unfortunately!) multichannel algorithms: PLIIx Music, Neo:6 Music and Neural THX 7.1. I was changing from one to the other, sometimes happily (at least for a while) and sometimes unhappily (for a while) and without settling on any one officially (although more frequently on PLIIx). This post is about the results of those many months of experiments. I did not post this earlier, because I wanted to try it out on a few visitors first, which happened a lot last week as my neighbors were on vacation for a week (yippee!).
ISSUE AND GOAL: My problem was that I sometimes felt one was better than the others (or that something was slightly wrong). But it was not consistent. The obious solution of trying them all everytime I wanted to listen to something to find the "most appropriate to my taste" was not flying with me as I much prefer listening to music than messing about. Therefore I was looking for a mean to "predict" which program to use in advance. Several hundreads (no kidding) of CDs later (and a whole month using the rules below with success so far), here is my little "Guide to select between PLIIx, Neo:6 and Neural 7.1 for Classical Music".
PRECISIONS: 1) I only tried the 3 mentioned and not the tons of THX variations. 2) It is also important that this only applies to classical music. 3) It is also important to note that room accoustic may change results for various people and their setups.
METHOD: I used two different methods (spread over a long period of time). NB: to avoid extra posts, I prefer to say right away that, NO, this was not done with blind testing as I was (am) not trying to prove anything but rather trying to derive a guideline that I could use for my own benefits. That being said, the first method was using CDs (streamed from lossless rips) and switching between all 3 methods with or without restarting the tracks. I litterally did this for hundreads of tracks since December.
The second method was comparing between the ambiance of a multi-channel SACD and the re-created ambiance of the CD-layer of the same SACD (this is NOT a comparison of sound quality between the two formats, just of multi-channel recreation for the 3 algos). So, I would play bits of the SACD while the ripped CD-layer was availble through my Soundbrige. I would then try to match which of the 3 algo was re-creating the most accurately the native "ambiance" of the SACD. I did that for about 25 SACDs, once the table below was already partially formed (so it helped me having a more representative sample).
RESULTS: The results are stated both in styles and also in what I think (with hindsight) is the cause. The "winners" below are not declared with borderline 60-40 type-of-results, but more like 95%+. I really needed a CLEAR way to anticipate which program to use for my needs.
A) For anything with one or two instruments (pipe organ is excluded here), Neo:6 is the clear winner (again, for MY ears at least), providing an intimacy that is really nice and without the impression of facing a 20-foot wide piano! This includes solo piano, solo violon, solo cello... And also duos (2 pianos, piano-violon, and so on) and lieders (singer + piano).
B) For small ensemble (trio, quartets...), PLIIx is the winner, providing a soundstage that is more realist (physically). I have put small ensemble apart orchestra, because I have a hunch that the distance between the speakers and the listeners (wide in my case) may influence this group more. It is not impossible that, for example, trios would be better with Neo:6 if my speakers were less apart. But, this is pure speculation right now.
C) For orchestral work, PLIIx is the clear winner, providing a sturdy presence that makes you feel in a concert hall (not a church or a opera house) with an appropriately distributed orchestra. This includes anything from 8 to 120 musicians, symphonies and stuff.
D) Opera, Sacred Music + Pipe Organ, Neural 7.1 is the clear winner, providing a lot of surround presence. This includes live recordings of opera, anything recorded inside a church. Concert arias are a harder one to determine between Neural and PLII
CONCLUSION: For a good month now, I am following the guidelines I just exposed and the more I go, the less I ever feel compelled to "try the other ones" because I feel something is not quite right. For some records, being played with the right algo increases its quality tremendously (and I could have chosen a stronger word) and I revisit many works with greater pleasure.
I hope I did not bore anyone. I wanted to post this as I would really have loved to have some guidance when I started to use these algos and never knew what to use and that often there was something not-quite-right with the recordings.
