3-Dimensional sound?

ezietsman

I see this buzzword being thrown around a LOT on the interwebs. What does it refer to exactly? I've seen everything incl amps, pups, caps, speakers, cabs, cables etc being described as having a 3D sound. Can someone elaborate?

evolucian

Maybe it has a spatializer or something... hard to imagine coming from a mono speaker though.

Cables and pups? holy crap... waits for Alan's response.

Bob-Dubery

Two things come to my mind.

One is that recordings get compressed a lot these days, which tends to make them loud, but also kind of flat and unnatural sounding. I think that in the good old days when studios were different you used to get a different kind of ambience in the sound (or you got ambience).

Two is that guitars, sound different these days and probably are recorded differently as well. There used to be an "airier" sound to electrics, a quality that got lost as pickups hotted up - almost an acoustic sound. You can hear it in Hendrix's strat or in Jimmy Page's telecaster. I have a bitsocaster at home with hottish 80s Ibanez pickups in it. A friend of mine left his 70s strat with Tonerider vintage-style pickups with me. The difference was quite startling - my axe was louder, but his had this great airy sound to it. I'll go for that "almost acoustic" sound any day.

As regards acoustic guitars, I think they often sound not very natural and interesting these days - even on record. For me records from the early 70s have seriously good acoustic sounds - less dry, less brittle, more of a ring to them.

Norman86

Honestly, a 3d sound can ONLY come from stereo.
you cannot see 3dimensionality from a mono source!

AlanRatcliffe

Difficult to quantify in many quoted mono sources, and not helped by the fact that it has become a marketing buzzword, so most claims of "3D sound" are often to be taken with a pillar of salt.

Basically, think of how reverb can add another dimension to a mono guitar sound, making it sound like it is further back in a mix. Similarly the phase shifts from modulation (whether the wow and flutter of a tape or phaser/flanger phasing) trick the ear into hearing an added depth to the sound, making it sound bigger and more space filling.

In something like an amplifier, it can be very difficult to quantify exactly, but it is down to phase relationships between frequency bands and how changes in those relationships fool the brain into hearing positional anomalies that do not exist. It can be very subtle, but our hearing is very finely attuned to positional shifts (part of the danger warning mechanism, so it's pretty much hardwired in), so we are aware of the changes on a subconscious level and can learn to identify them consciously too.

While it's difficult to measure (obviously, because it's not in the sound itself, but in the way our brain interprets that sound), the effects are pretty obvious to anyone who has plugged in a good amp and gone "Wow!" as it fills the room with a full, rich sound. ?

Norman86 wrote: Honestly, a 3d sound can ONLY come from stereo.

Most sounds come from mono sources. But we hear them in surround. The brain is a wonderful thing...