Subject: Re: convolvotrons

From: Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng <dstamp@watserv1>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 92 16:43:49 -0500

> From [email-masked] Thu Mar 19 13:11:51 1992
> From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
> To: Chris Hand <[email-masked]>, rend386@sunee
> Subject: Re: convolvotrons
> 
> Now, if you put one speaker above the ear and one below,
> THAT would make it easier to do vertical effects.
> 

Well, actually, the front-to-back and up-and-down speakers IN NO WAY
work as well as the left-to-right balancing for positioning sound.
This is because of the way they're combined at the ear: left-to-right
does vector phase addition between the ears (you need some crossover
for this to work with phones, and most modern recordings have it).

But the up-down and front-back rely on pinna transforms, which are 
pretty radically different for these directions.  The sound source
you sense will be pretty smeared out and may be hard to pin down.
You'd probably need about a 4x4 grid of drivers... MUCH easier to
do it electronically!

Of course we're not looking for pinpoint sound localization anyway
since this is a cheapie...

- Dave Stampe