Part 7

Speaking of not looking at where sound is coming from, let’s work a little more on defocusing eyes and defocusing our ears as well. It’s like staring, a vacant look.

When we stare with our eyes we don’t look at anything in particular, we kinda see everything at once but nothing special. We can also slightly close our eyes and not look at anything. When audiophiles are listening, they look like they are in a trance. They’re not in a trance; they’re just not looking at anything.

As well, we want to learn to stare with our ears. We already know how to do that. We learned it in class, when the teacher keeps on talking but the sound of the voice becomes just background sound. You’ve stopped paying attention to what the lecturer is saying, and the meaningless words just glide by, nothing sticks. Same with the music, don’t focus on the music, just let it glide by. Instead of the music, focus your ears only on where the sound seems to be coming from.

Why is this eye/ear trance thing important? If you are busy focusing on some big thing, you probably won’t notice some other little thing.  It’s even worse than that.  The ear and the eye compete for attention. When the eye is focused on one thing the ear is really not hearing other things much at all. When audiophiles are attentively listening, they dim the activity in their eyes so it doesn’t distract them from the music. It’s like how people look away when they are trying to hear something really important over the phone.

Part 8

Let’s remove the rubber band from the two speakers and hold one in each hand, as before in the #2 position, with both speakers held straight out to the sides and away from your head. This is the headphone position. Then we try to defocus both our eyes and ears at the same time.

We want to move the two speakers steadily forward together as before but very slowly this time. Keep your eyes and ears defocused as best you can. It’s like how we have to defocus our eyes to see the image hidden in a 3D Stereogram (Magic Eye). We are keeping our eyes defocused so they don’t distract the ears. We are keeping our ears defocused so they can see the image of the sound source, when it develops.

Part 9

With defocused eyes and ears, hold speakers held out to the side and the in-your-head image appears. Move the speakers slowly around towards the front. When the speakers are about half way towards the front we will begin to see a sound image developing right before our eyes/ears, in front of us, floating in the space between the speakers. Continue to move the speakers forward to front center and the stereophonic image will melt into one small image at the front.

Now reverse the motion, slowly spreading the speakers apart. Again, at about 45 degrees the stereophonic image appears. Slowly swing your arms, move the speakers slowly back and forth and watch the stereophonic image come and go. At some arm angle you will find the perfect ”sweet spot” position where the sound image is really well developed. The angle between your arms will be about 60 degrees.

Raise the speakers and lower them and watch the stereophonic image raise and lower. What height do you like the stereophonic image, straight ahead, raised a bit or lowered down?  Most people like it raised a bit.

What is fun to do at this moment is to defocus your eyes and just peek at one of the speakers. Guess what, you can’t see/hear that speaker playing as a sound source. It remains invisible as a sound source. The speakers disappear as sound sources when they have created the stereophonic image. All you can sonically see is the stereophonic sound stage floating in air, right in front of you, between the speakers.

Part 10

Finally it’s time to move the speakers back to arms out headphone position. Notice that as you continue to separate the speakers the sonic image tends to stay directly in front of you until you finally get them way out to the sides, into the headphone position, where once again, the stereophonic image collapses into the in-your-head (or slightly above) headphone image.

Repeat tuning or dialing in the stereophonic image a few times and get used to seeing the floating image center stage out there in front of you. This is the magic of stereo recording and stereo playback. We have Stereoscopic vision, and we have Stereophonic hearing. If things are set up just right we can actually enjoy 3D Stereoscopic vision overlaid with 3D Stereophonic sound.

Of course, for us now, we are truly distracted because we are holding up the weight of the speakers and keeping their direction pointing straight at us. If we could put the speakers down on some sort of speaker stand that holds the speakers at ear level, separated and out in front of us, Stereophonic listening to the soundstage that exists in every recording would be a lot easier.

Part 11

This eye/ear coordination is pretty interesting and mostly just a natural part of daily life. With stereophonic recordings and a stereophonic playback system we can stereophonic performances any time we want to. The early recordings, made before the 1950 were mostly mono recordings and they don’t make create stereophonic images. But once recording engineers had two sound tracks to record with and hifi systems had two channels for playback, essentially all commercial recordings have been stereophonic recordings.

Art Noxon, Sept 2016
Revised Feb, 2022