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I also thought the same, then I went to listen some orchestral performance at the Rome Auditorium.

During an interval I was sitting in a shitty corner up on some balcony, pretty far; but I could hear the voice and discern the words of a girl chatting down in the platea next to an entrance.

A single mouth, chatting, among hundreds other voices.

During the concert you could hear the individual performers’ instruments, the strings rubbing, the valves clicking. I was blown away

A critical factor in this experience was the actual room. Anyone dealing with audio and hifi will confirm how much great acoustics depend on a well treated room.

While most of us can't live in such a purpose-optimized room I think OP's point was that a bunch of high quality speakers in that very same auditorium might have yielded very similar results to your experience.

> That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why?

Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile.

The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.

> but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.

Yes, but we're talking about 5 digit and up audio equipment and listening to the top operas of the world, which definitely do have guys that know how to record. Your 10$ (or 250$) headphones combined with a CD from a smaller producer will not get you all the way there, I agree, but once you're in the insane high-price audiophile world, this becomes possible.

To start replicating the sound of an orchestra, you'll at a minimum need one speaker at each location where a player is, playing a single channel (the instrument).

But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you from different directions. At the end it is probably cheaper and easier to pay a ticket to have this live experience.

Of course not, what you need is model the way your ear handles sound coming from various locations then model this and reproduce it. It's like VR, but for your ears. That's how ASMR effectively works. If you want full immersion you can add head tracking so that the sound "rotates" around you when you move your head. I know that Apple offers that with their latest headphones.

Admittedly in order to do this you need to have post-processing specific for every person since we don't process sound exactly the same depending on our physiology. I know that Sony attempted something like that with its "3D audio". I think it's a bit of a gimmick myself, but it's technically doable.

> Of course not [you just need individual head related transfer functions for everyone and a fast DSP]

I agree that it is probably possible in theory, but aren't we talking about actual equipment and recordings that people can buy?

You can buy it; the keyword is 'binaural' recording/headphones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

Except this is a long way yet from what the GP was describing, although it is an attempt in that direction.

What if you only want to replicate the sound of an orchestra as heard by an observer at a specified point? Why wouldn't two microphones be sufficient? That's how it's perceived, after all.

You can get really nice sound that way, but to get the full effect you need to take into account the shape of the head and ears of the listener. After all, these are important factors that help us place sound in space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

Your ears are highly directional devices and an orchestra in a concert hall creates a highly complex soundscape that is impossible to replicate with 2 channels. Location awareness (i.e. 2 mics where your ears are) is just a small part of the problem.

So it sounds like the experience can be fully captured with two microphones mounted in the ears of an acoustic dummy head, as long as you're willing to accept a single position and orientation for the observer. Personally, that would be more than good enough fidelity.

I suppose then you would need to have the transfer function of that specific observer's head and ears at that specific point. Perhaps some time in the future there will be personalization of the transfer function so that you can hear the sounds as you would hear it at that spot.

> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?

An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the individual shape of our ears and how sounds bounce around and down into the ear canal.

Now I'm sure you'd agree that sitting in front of two speakers X metres apart, or with headphones on, no matter how good those speakers / headphones are is a different set of sound waves.

Some people are absolutely able to determine the difference between those sound sources. They're likely to have listened to a lot of music. I think these discussions get derailed by the blanket "people can" or "people can't" statements rather than thinking about who might be able to make those distinctions. It might be that the majority of people can't make that distinction. But that doesn't mean that no-one can.

It's like folks are talking past each other here. There appear to be a substantial number of (I assume younger)posters that have never been to something like a symphony orchestra and don't see the point when they can geek out with FLAC at home. Maybe the orchestras should advertise "Come see our array of 120 separate high end speakers" and the kidz would respond.

"Why go to a museum when I can look it up on Google?"

> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears

tongue in cheek answer: nothing. It's your ears that are special.

Less tongue in cheek, while we have got pretty good at making microphones, they don't behave anything like human audio system; this makes it really difficult to reproduce what we experience when generated a different way (e.g. multichannel playback).

There is nothing "special" about classical music here either, it's just got a lot of complexity (from multiple instruments, and room dynamics) and dynamic range.

I see your point: if we could a) design microphones that capture everything going by them in a neutral way and b) design speakers that precisely reproduce everything they are sent in a neutral way, and c) set up a room to reproduce things in a neutral way for your particular position ... then this would work. We can't actually do any of those things.

If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.

Maybe if you move your head just a little bit with a live orchestra, the change is different from what happens with a few speakers (and often in a different room)

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