Legacy V System Owner's Operating Manual page 30

The Engineer's Perspective
 The listening room greatly diminishes left/right separation as frequency decreases, reducing or destroying spatial cues
at each ear.
 Reflections superimpose an additional room environment onto the listening experience, masking the original recording
venue which we strongly desire to preserve.
 Resonances introduce tonal colorations at low frequencies, hindering transient response.
 Pre-ringing in digital codecs have previously prevented even high resolution recordings from sounding truly analog in
nature.
We have two receptors (ears) which enable us to differentiate the position of sound sources (Haas). The two ears and the
brain work together to determine the relative distance and angular position of the source in the free-field. Much has been
written about the head-related transfer function and interaural crosstalk. Some applications have been developed for
headphone playback (Bauer, Smythe). Some have argued that we need to eliminate the crosstalk from each loudspeaker to
the far ear, even to the point of building a dividing wall that meets the face separating the two ears (Glasgal). This would
imply a purely binaural recording process as a standard, which is certainly not the norm. Others have suggested an
electronic crosstalk cancellation signal (Polk, Carver), and even a higher order cancellation that even reduces residual
information introduced by the crosstalk cancellation itself (Griesinger). None of these methods specifically address the errors
that room boundaries introduce to stereo loudspeaker playback. They also ignore the fact that stereo playback and the HRTF
is actually dependent on the proper crosstalk for spatial impression (Blumlein, Lipshitz)
Spatial Impression (SI, Barron) is primarily a low-frequency phenomenon, depending mostly on the lateral sound energy below
400Hz arriving at the listener's head between 10 and 100ms after the direct sound. This frequency dependence of SI is a
significant addition to the work of Schroeder and Ando on the importance of minimizing inter-aural cross correlation for the
thoughts from Legacy Chief Designer, Bill Dudleston
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