TRUE BLUE BINAURAL
Let us now take the quotation marks off "binaural" as used in my recent explorations into a memorable era of audio history, the early '50s. "Binaural" then was no more than an early and joyously misguided name for the brand-new two-channel sound that we now call stereo.
It has been a royal snafu of terminology ever since! Back at that time both loudspeaker two-channel reproduction and two-channel reproduction through
'phones were indiscriminately called "binaural." Now it's the other way around. Today we call everything stereo whether it's speakers or 'phones. It is stereo, of course, 99.9% of the time, that is, recording intended for loudspeakers. Only a very mild resurgence of real binaural recordings, specifically designed for headphone listening, is the present exception.
But to further confuse things, we have widely discovered that loudspeaker stereo sounds very good through 'phones, whether that was the idea or no! Almost as many people now listen to stereo through 'phones as through speakers, what with all the pocket-size portables around. Our present stereo serves nicely for both of these purposes.
Is there any room, then, for what is best called true binaural, as a separate listening experience from recordings made specifically for 'phones? Will we ever get the differences straight: The very different recording techniques, a fundamentally different sort of "programming"? A real question, which deserves a spate of background. Will people ever untangle 'phone stereo and 'phone binaural from each other? I wonder.
Blame the indefatigable PR folks, if you will, for a lot of this genial mix-up.
These people are not famous for scientific precision. Nor do consumers care very much for what might seem to them to be hair-splitting. Stereo is a nice, comfortable word so let's call everything stereo. And so we do! After all, even a boom box with speakers a foot apart is a stereo.
But there are always clear heads around and in surprising places. I know of no more concise account of the difference between loudspeaker stereo and headphone binaural than a short paragraph printed more than 30 years ago with the very first RCA Victor stereophonic tape release, reel-to-reel.
It was ECS 1, and alternatively ECSD 1 for staggered or offset heads (Magnecord), Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss with the Chicago Symphony and Fritz Reiner: Stereophonic recording differs from binaural (a term sometimes incorrectly applied to stereophonic records) in that the microphone placements are selected for loudspeaker [sic] reproduction.
Binaural properly applies to a two-channel system designed for headphone reproduction. It thus requires the use of two channels fed by microphones spaced about 7 inches apart (normal ear separation). There you have it. And note that there is no mention of an intervening "dummy" head. From an entertainment point of view, a product for listening, that is absolutely right, the way I see it.
Binaural recording is not necessarily literal, any more than stereo for loudspeakers. Headless binaural is really quite reasonable.
Out of the same RCA account, take a look at this admirable description of the impact of stereo for loudspeakers.
Remember, this was one of the very first available stereo recordings: Stereophonic recording and reproduction results in a spatial, "3-D" effect, tends to localize the instruments of the orchestra, and thus produces a higher degree of realism than can be obtained with a single-channel system.
So much in so few words! I particularly like "a higher degree of realism," which is soberly accurate. In spite of bushels of claims during at least 80 years of this century, no released recording has ever been literal by any intention. Not even today's so-called "live" recordings (they couldn't very well record if they were dead, wrote an exasperated correspondent to me recently), made indeed at concert performances and rehearsals but more often than not at a number of them edited together.
Not literalism but realism is our aim in any of our media, as RCA says. An impression of reality, of presence and immediacy, produced by the arts and artifices of recording technique! We are literal, as of the living original, only in the purity of the signal. Not anywhere else.
Oddly, the nearest we have ever come to literal recording for the great public was embodied in the old acoustic system, an enormous commercial success for long years. The voice of a Caruso was taken down, insofar as the acoustic horn could do it, in a total sonic vacuum akin to that of an an-echoic chamber, just the voice, no acoustic trimmings. Discounted, of course, are both the extraneous noise and distortion and the very limited frequency range. You will find a lot about this in the recent and admirable two-part article in Audio on the restoration of older recordings (June, July 1991). An acoustic "surround" sound was not possible but, curiously, even when it became so with the advent of the microphone and electronic amplification, we continued to record in a sonic semi-vacuum well into the early '30s.
The realism we could achieve with added room sound was only gradually understood, as microphone techniques were developed in practice.
One other and very different sort of literal recording occurred much later with the spate of "live versus recorded" demonstrations put on at various hi-fi shows and press sessions, supposedly to prove that our hi-fi was perfect, i.e., literal. But these were not ever commercial recordings. They were specially made, deliberately without spatial surround in Caruso fashion, for a very strange effect. The musicians played either in an anechoic chamber (a terrible chore for the players!) or, as in Edgar Villchur's first AR demos, in the middle of a large open meadow on a windless day. Definitely literal. All you heard was the actual music, entirely spaceless. (If you have been inside an anechoic chamber, you'll know the almost scary effect of disorientation when the spatial sense is missing.) What? You don't understand? For a convincing and literal "live versus recorded" demonstration, the reproduced sound must take on the spatial qualities of the room in which both it and the comparative live musicians perform. No normal recording, made with "built-in" space, can ever resemble the living performance. There is always the double liveness, that of the recording and that of the playback acoustic, to make the recording "sound like a recording." The Villchur comparisons proved the point. I was present at the outdoor recording (spraying noisy insects), and I attended the formal "live versus recorded" demos. When the canny musicians, a string quartet, "faked" one passage, bowing their instruments silently while the recording produced the music, I was completely taken in, though I thought I knew the cues. And when the players put down their instruments and stretched their muscles as the music went right on playing, there were oohs and ahs. It worked! We had dispensed with realism, for the moment, in favor of a truly literal reproduction. Interesting but wholly impractical for general use.
To those who got the message, this was a great moment of truth.
Does all this apply to binaural sound, specially recorded for headphones? Isn't that supposed to be a more literal approximation of real hearing experience? Be wary! Yes, in some respects, binaural can be startlingly literal. But still it is a realistic reproduction, not a literal reproduction.
As you may see, I am working ever so carefully towards the details of this binaural experience via the background picture, for it is all too easy to catch one's self in just another trap of literalness. Yes, there has been a lot of talk, experiment, and R & D in the binaural era of late, after years of semi-somnolence. And a major background survey has been offered in the recent and thorough technical articles printed in Audio. To these I can add nothing in the technical way, unless a bit of proportion and practicality. "What's in it for me?" That's the old question, though it can be put more delicately, I admit. Is all this incredibly complex and expensive scientific research likely to produce a viable true-binaural product, distinct from stereo? And is the "gear" that is being developed, not exactly low in cost, of a sort that can be used by those who want this kind of recording for their own interest? We do seem to be working towards something, whatever it may be. A surprising number of big corporations have set up expensive binaural R & D on the scale of a professional science lab, delving into the innermost intricacies of binaural hearing. But to what end? There are ,really three separate groups involved in this. All of them have their one-track minds, intent on their own priorities. Are they ours? First, naturally, come the profit boys, looking for a nice simple new product that will pay, preferably in volume.
Oddly, they are not much in evidence.
Instead, the big binaural PR we get is dominated by the second group, the big-time research operations, ever more complex. Just read our articles and you will see what I mean. This may be PR of a sort but it's on a very high level of abstruseness-for PR, anyhow.
This is strange, but perhaps canny.
One is led to think that binaural has to be expensive, very expensive, if it is to be, er, hi-fi. Perhaps that is the message aid the belief too. We say the same concerning speakers and amps.
High-end gear is very much of a reality today and not exactly unprofitable.
Binaural R & D would seem to be aiming at a market and distribution, both consumer and professional, that is not unlike other gear already familiar to us.
Good but expensive! Okay, if it does not try to be too literal. There is decidedly that danger.
Take the dummy binaural head. You can sense the telltale literal approach that it implies. Do we all need such heads between our mikes? They cost a lot. We are given the feeling that they are absolutely necessary. Are they? That is, for a satisfactory realism, not necessarily literal. Who needs to be literal? Who needs heads? At risk of my life I have to say it! Is the binaural dummy head like the well-known Emperor's clothes? I have worked with four heads, counting my own (an excellent dummy-and free). I have also worked with two mikes and NO head between.
These heads somehow move me to irresistible humor. I returned one with big eyebrows and false hair attached to the German staff in New York, much to the horror of the entire personnel.
JVC's head of some years ago, foam-type, had a sculptured look and inset spaces for 'phones that included built-in mikes, a very useful idea, like the three-head (magnetic) tape recorder.
That head still stands in my living room, complete with a big, black charcoal mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a gaucho hat on top. Sorry, but I just can't help it.
Seriously, I have made many dozens of binaural recordings with no head at all between the mikes and have always found them effective, in fact not really very different from those made with dummy heads. It's a matter of aesthetic priority, how important the differences are for the listener.
There are indeed curious distortions in the binaural space, within those headphones. The biggest is the lack of front. Everything is heard to the sides, overhead, inside the 'phones, out back, but things that were in fact out front simply are not there where they belong. The dummy head, and a lot of special shaping of "ears" for the mikes, of canals and textures and much, much more, may indeed get some of that sound in front, where it ought to be. I have yet to hear it. Even big corporate research can do wishful thinking.
The third group, after the profit boys and the research labs, has been involved in personal binaural recording ever since it was possible, beginning some 40 years ago (when I began). These are the binaural lone wolves. Or semi-lone wolves. Small-time independents, often recording like myself for the sheer pleasure of it, sometimes even producing published binuaral material. I hate to say so but theirs are the best-perceptive recordings by people who listen for themselves and learn how to get the most for the least.
I'll have a good deal more to say on this score at another time, with the kind indulgence of the leaders of the big binaural operations.
Meanwhile, try it out for yourself. It's really quite easy with any little handful of stereo recording machinery and two mikes 7 inches apart. Or even pinned to your hat. Play back ONLY through headphones, not loudspeakers. That's true binaural.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, nov. 1991)
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