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July 12th 2003. If listeners close their eyes, a beautiful
semblance turns into reality: towering above them is the 33 m high,
huge nave of the Cathedral of Saint Quen in Rouen. The toccata of
Symphony No 5 in F Minor by French composer Charles-Marie Widor
thunders through the gigantic edifice and the 15-metre-high organ
unfolds an acoustic power targeting your very soul. The size of the
instrument does not have to be imagined any longer - listeners can
virtually feel it build up in front of them, even special registers
such as the récit (swell organ) integrated at the top and far rear
can be pre-cisely located and the depth of the 135 m long religious
building lends almost heavenly dimensions to the sound.
It may be hard to believe but you do not have to travel to France
to experience this wonderful sound. We enjoyed it in a studio the
size of a middle-class living-room with standard, almost portable
loudspeakers - in a word: in the audio room of Detmold classics
producers Dabringhaus and Grimm. If you wish, you can experience
musical pleasures of this type within your own four walls - and
without any audacious electronics expenditure either.
The two sound engineers swear by the blessings of multichannel
recording that allows them, since suitable sound carriers have come
into existence, to transfer the spatial dimensions of musical events
true to life into your own living-room. They do not simply assume
5.1 channel schematics though and simply adapt them to the world of
the home cinema, for the centerspeakers, though one of the most
important achievements of cinema sound systems, creates more
problems for music reproduction than it solves: more often than not,
its seamless sound integration is mere theory because the
construction deviates from the stereo boxes and it is placed above
or below the screen. And a special subwoofer channel is simply
unnecessary for acoustically created music. Therefore, Dabringhaus
and Grimm used the six-channel arrangement of the new sound carriers
- the two placed their hopes, given the competition between the
various available digital formats, on DVD-Audio - for a special
channel arrangement: they use two sound branches, as usual, for the
stereo loudspeakers on the right and on the left, two additional
ones for the right and left surround loudspeakers and the remaining
two channels to feed two loudspeakers placed above the stereo boxes.
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This channel arrangement, Dabringhaus and Grimm call it 2+2+2,
for the first time overcomes the limits to which even five-channel
surround technology was subject. It opened up musical events in
their very depth, the way the two-channel stereo system never really
managed. Besides, the 2+2+2 arrangement complements this sound
impression by adding an impression of height: reflections from the
ceiling conveying the very volume of the concert hall, e.g. a choir
that is upright behind the rows of seated instrumentalists - all
this can not only be guessed at with the Detmold spatial-sound
configuration but actually heard.
The technical expenditure required for a 2+2+2 playback system is
limited: in addition to a DVD-Audio player and an amplifier or
receiver with six output transformers, you will need a good pair of
stereo boxes and four additional loudspeakers that may even be
compact - that's all. The installed set is even suitable to play
back 5.1 recordings: a small switch available from electronics shops
for a mere EUR 15 will relay the center signal to the two upper
frontal loudspeakers and delegate the subwoofer-channel, as is
proper after all, to an additional subwoofer. This type of playback
works amazingly well; the sound often gains additional airiness and
plasticity, even if the recording was not planned for this. The
2+2+2 playback also works - though only with a rather extensive loss
of the height dimension - on the 5.1 arrangement of loud-speakers
typical of a home cinema system. The upper frontal channels then end
up in the center and subwoofer channels, though this causes no
problems of compatibility.
Compatibility is a trump card of 2+2+2 productions anyway: in the
video section that belongs with the standard options of a DVD-Audio
format, Dabring-haus and Grimm add no pictures to their records but
additional sound tracks: one in 5.1 Dolby digital and even one
uncompressed 2+2+2 variant in a standard PCM resolution. These
alternative to a high-resolution six-channel sound can be played on
normal DVD-Video players and even on SACD combination players able
to play back DVD-Video. Even a two-channel stereo playback is
possible. To date, the two 2+2+2 pioneers have released ten
DVD-Audio titles recorded with the help of this technology, and
their sound archive is sufficiently large to allow for a short-term
release of another 100 records or so. From the point of view of
audiophiles, we can only hope that their example will be-come the
accepted thing.
Source:
http://www.faz.net
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