It's called a dance floor | Hacker News Reader

It's called a dance floor

seekhifi.com

176 pointswmeredith93 comments

QSound was magic at the time. We had a DSP class in my EE degree where we implemented a very minor transform that would shift position of audio and it was wild.

It's impossible to get 3D audio to be absolutely as flawless as the real world because human ears all vary slightly and your 3D spacial perception of sound is literally tuned on your own ears, but QSound's transfer functions come as close as you can get.

The algorithm also falls apart a bit outside of the sweet spot, and is really only useful in headphones and specific cases where a human is known to be placed in a certain location relative to speakers.

The original model was developed using a simulated human head and lots of hand-tuning. I am curious if we've advanced far enough with tech that a more modern set of transfer function parameters could be developed.

Nothing beats N speakers for positional audio, but this is a pretty decent replacement if the conditions are ideal.

OpenAL was designed as an open-source library to bring 3D audio to the masses in the same way that OpenGL did (basically exposing QSound/equivalent hardware on sound cards to an API), but I'm not sure what happened to it [1].

[1] https://www.openal.org/documentation/openal-1.1-specificatio...

Isn’t this the same fundamental technique as Spatial Audio and binaural Atmos rendering? AirPods can even measure your personal ear transfer functions.

Looks like it is. The Apple HRTF should be much more accurate than QSound -- QSound was designed to work without any analysis.

Yes and no. Contemporary spatial audio render images in real-time. Older systems rendered the image during mixing.

On the other hand psychoacoustic techniques have not changed.

While Apple’s spatial audio engine renders in real-time, Apple Music’s spatial audio tracks are rendered binaurally during mixing.

Whereas Sony’s 360 Reality Audio is object-based and rendered in real-time.

I experimented with OpenAL when Apple developed an implementation and it was unfortunately quite buggy. There were obvious threading hazards visible in the code. It was fine for toy/demo usage but it wasn't fit for production.

It looks like OpenAL on other platforms was used in various games though.

Well, the OpenAL API is now part of WebAudio. Listener position, buffers, sources... You name it, WebAudio API has it.

It's much easier to replace OpenAudio with other engines—fmod, notably, is better in almost every way.

If you like this kind of stereophonic sound, I recommend Art of Noise. Here are some songs from them:

Moments in Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNkcZ8QoNuI

Paranoimia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F8BD6gNOag

Dragnet '88: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6JQO0KnUZY

I recommend to set the videos to the highest quality and to listen using headphones

Also, Yello.

They're pretty much only known for "Oh Yeah" which was used in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", but their albums are full of fabulous stereophonic productions.

For example "The Race" from 1988:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C62NSn-3hU

This entire album called "Flag" kicks ass. It's a weird ride of thrilling electro and comedic bathos. Every song is different.

Hmm, I have Flag, should give it another listen. I liked Stella better.

”Stella” is the more historically important album for sure, and has more of an avant-garde edge. But I really enjoy the excessive late ‘80s production on “Flag”.

Chk-cah Chk-cahhhhhh

The whole The Seduction of Claude Debussy album by Art Of Noise is _sublime_. (For the art, I don't even recall if it does anything interesting stereophonically...)

Moments in Love is strongly reminiscent of O Superman by Laurie Anderson.

I remember being shown Virtual Barbershop on 2000s YouTube as a teenager. I was absolutely blown away by the experience, it did for my ears like what 2024 VR does for my eyes. Total magic.

https://www.qsound.com/demos/virtualbarbershop_long.htm

Very cool to see it’s from the same company!

I'd never actually looked into who made it. I guess that makes complete sense.

I believe they turned that into an attraction at Disney-MGM Studios. I certainly remember it from circa 1990.

As a young Gen Xer it's fun to go back and listen to radio hits I heard growing up (on mostly terrible sound systems playing radio or cassette tapes) using modern audio hardware. There's a lot of depth in many tracks that I couldn't really appreciate at the time, because even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on.

Reminds me of listening to all the OG wave dubstep on YouTube in the late 00s and not getting it, until I plugged in a bass amp I was borrowing and vibrated my walls.

It is amazing that there are entire genres of music like space bass that rely on sub bass for the whole experience, and it's pretty much impossible to get the same experience without a good subwoofer. Good headphones can get close but lose the visceral feeling of the sub in your body.

To me if the word “bass” is in the name of the genre, then having subs seems like an obvious thing that would miss a lot without subs. That’s up there with judging a book by its cover

And even then you weren’t getting the full live experience. Some of the tracks from that time are an incredible physical experience.

Deep bass sounds in live music are just awesome, in the original sense of the word. Those big dubstep "wubs" or deep downtuned sludge metal riffs vibrate through your whole chest. Reproducing something like that at home is certainly possible, but you're going to have to piss off the neighbors to get there.

Loefah - Goat Stare even on my middling salvaged HiFi made me feel like I was experiencing a sonic weapon

Every so often when I was younger, I’d do the same with movies, buying and setting up a nice surround sound system to get the spacial effects just right. Every time I would thoroughly enjoy it until rearranging/relocating and not making it a priority to acquire and set up a new system.

My dad was into music, so we had a decent set up with turntable, cassette, 8-track, and even reel to reel. I’m very thankful that crappy Bluetooth speakers were not a thing growing up. I had full speaker cabinets with sub, mid, tweeter for rich full sound. I also had lots of time where I was the only one at home and could push those speakers to release the full potential of songs.

Volume makes a difference to be sure, but full wall of sound vs loud earbuds are totally different experiences.

I went to a record store a few months ago, with a full speakers, connected with actual wires.

I hadn't realized how much I missed that sound quality over the laptop and headset sound I've been listening to for years.

I feel like a good set of headphones on that laptop will get you there for far less than the cost of a full speaker system. But emphasis on good headphones (i.e. intended for audio reproduction, and not a gamer-focussed headset).

Even a cheap pair of something like the ATH-M40x will give you a drastically better soundscape than the average headset.

I've got a Jabra Evolve 75 headset, so a business headset, and you are right, not really meant for music audio reproduction.

Get a good pair of analog headphones, plug them into your Mac and you won’t regret it.

There's no shortage of crappy modern audio hardware, but compared to like a bedside clock-radio, or an 80s economy car, a decent bluetooth speaker is actually an upgrade, and something like a HomePod (that costs around $115 in 1988 dollars) is revolutionary.

Which is not to say you couldn't find a Hi-Fi system from that era that would put a HomePod to shame, but it was the sort of thing only rich people and music geeks would have access to.

Yep. On that note I'd like to remind younger readers that CDs were still very new at the time of this album - many people had still never heard a digital recording so listening to this album in particular on a decent CD system was magical.

I actually had an original Discman and partially credit listening to this album on that as part of what led me to spend (probably too large) a chunk of my adult life DJing clubs and raves.

As a millennial with auditory speech processing difficulties, going back to old tracks on modern gear is always a treat. There’s entire instruments I just could not pick up on when I first heard the tracks years or decades ago, that my modern headphones or BAS (Big-Ass Speakers) bring out so clearly and cleanly, all from the exact same lossless file from the exact same CD I ripped at the time.

Now I need to go back and listen to Vogue again, it sounds like. Totally not complaining!

Jethro Tull was good on my old shitty radio as a kid. But today with a decent set up, that music is transcendent.

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was that for me. There was always a worn out cassette of it kicking around somewhere and even that played on a shitty little boom box was good.

When I finally got a really good setup at home and gave it another listen, it was almost as if previously I had read about the record and now I'm hearing it.

What recording artists managed with the technology of the 70's is pretty impressive.

That was the first album I put on my record player when I finally got a decent set up. There's a reason that is so popular. It's so so good. You really miss out when you listen to it in any other format; it plays like one continuous song. It's so good.

even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on

It's not just the sound system that is the issue, in fact, it's usually the least of the problems. Speaker placement + listening room are the main problem. Quarter decent would do as well. Anything which isn't complete crap and has separate speakers, which could easily be found 2nd hand for cheap when we were young, is sufficient to bring out most of what is in songs like Vogue (it was after all also produced to be played on average systems). But that requires that instead of the "let's just place 2 speakers next to the amp and we're done" some basic care is taken wrt speaker placement in relation to room shape.

I figured this out by accident when I was about 10, having spent all my savings (like 50$ or so) on a 2nd hand old (think 70's) amp + speakers: I couldn't wait to play something on my system so unloaded it from my dad's car, outside in the garden, soldered a cable to go from my walkman to whatever input the thing had, turned the thing on and was blown away. Like listening to new songs. Simply because I happened to place them roughly the way I saw on pics in magazines, and eleminated any reflections because I was in the garden. So even though by todays' standards the raw reproduction capabilities i.e. frequency response of the system was very subpar, simply making the stereo work roughly correctly and having some bass with it, makes a huge difference. Hence after moving the system into my bedroom there was again disappointment because it was not quite as good anymore. Though after some experimenting it was still waaaaaay better and more resolving than anything I heard before (except headphones maybe, but that's a different thing wrt stereo imaging and bass), including my more wealthy family's rather expensive systems simply because they were all just dumped in a room.

Pound-for-pound, Vogue by Madonna is one of the most remarkable examples of artificial stereophonic sound ever produced.

As a lover of hi-fi, Madonna wasn't really on my radar until someone steered me toward this gem. After about 50 listens and some really interesting research on QSound (the tech used to produce it), I ended up featuring it in my hi-fi music recommendation newsletter.

Thanks for submitting this here, very cool article — I hadn't heard of QSound before.

I don't know, I always thought it sounded simplistic, cheap and dated, even at the time. Placing stuff in the stereo field has been bog standard music production since the 70s. Q sound adds a _little_ bit to it, but somewhat importantly if you are actually listening to this song in a dance club it's all completely lost, a lot of clubs don't have any kind of stereo separation.

Just compare it to stuff that was coming out of the acid house scene at the same time (yes i know this song isn't really acid house -- but it does have a lot of fun stereo effects):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexS5hBB1C0

A lot of stereo/3d stuff translates differently to each listener. Q sound might not work for you the way it does for others (none of the 3d sound stuff seems to work for me).

You can't just throw out Orb and expect me not to get extremely excited. Now I have to listen to this entire youtube performance. THANKS.

IMHO Orbital - The Box (part 2) works even better[1].

Some of the sounds are clearly behind me, to my sides, or surrounding me. And things move around.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGvFObnwKNc

Really nice track

Yeah I agree as an electronic music fan the idea that this track is particularly special in terms of digital stereo even at that time seems weird to me.

Some cool stereo effects, but not something I'd ever want to listen to. I don't see anything interesting about putting nature sounds and a Pink Floyd sample over a very repetitive electronic loop. Maybe I didn't get far enough, since it's 20 goddamn minutes long. To me, Vogue is ear candy. De gustibus!

Sustained synth chords gently surround, laying the foundation for sharp snaps in front and to the right. A Roland TR-909 drum machine starts far in the distance on the left

I thought I'd "follow along" by listening to the song myself, and oddly all the directions were the very opposite of those stated in the article on both my phone and desktop with both Spotify and Apple Music (and on both the remaster and original version of the album). I have it on vinyl and CD somewhere, I'll try that later, maybe they are more authentic.

Same for google music. I wonder if the author meant stage right, or if they had something swapped. (It matches my memory of the CD version but I don't feel like pulling the CD pile out of the basement for this.)

Yeah, the claps are coming from the left side.

Same exact experience on headphones and Spotify

Sting’s solo album The Soul Cages was another early QSound adopter. I can remember popping it in the CD player and having a “What the…” moment.

And Roger Waters' Amused to Death.

And Nine Inch Nails broken.

Capcom's CPS 2 arcade system also used Q Sound. Street Fighter Alpha 3, which ran on that hardware, has some iconic chiptunes. An arcade game was a great use of the technology as well, since the algorithm building the 3D soundscape would work best when you can reasonably assume where the listeners will be relative to the speakers.

This is an example bgm from the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huA5sKl7K-U

and the Q sound "demo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYIy6lavsd4

Just listened to Vogue on my headphones, and I'm unable to notice anything unique about the soundscape of this song. What do you folks hear and when do you hear it? At what point in the song?

I agree. The article mentions bits going around their head, or in the front-right. I hear things on the left, and things on the right. And stuff that appears on the opposite side of where the article mentions them. I’m listening on Spotify, maybe all that stuff is stripped out?

Are you sure you don't have your left/right channels swapped? You don't know how many PCs I've run into with their speakers wired up backwards...

I don't know about Madonna, but the experience I had listening to this song for the first time with headphones on is what I would guess to be a similar experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeTVvhuco4g

Sure, it's christian rock, but from South Africa so it has a different vibe from what you may have previously experienced.

They got the intro synth to swirl around your head and it's a vibe, and the song itself is decent.

I don't get swirls, it feels like they just swap channels quickly (10Hz+) and that is annoying, tbh.

This is the first time I've ever really noticed a difference between the upload and the CD. The CD Audio glides around your head like a halo, on the YT vid it jitters.

Listened to it on a recent 16" macbook - sounds incredible. Better than most music I would typically introduce to it.

> Just listened to Vogue on my headphones ...

There's been plenty of discussion, throughout the decades, on that subject.

My take: Qsound is something very specific and it is meant to work with actual speakers, not headphones.

Your anecdotical experience supports my take on the subject.

That makes sense, given the description of how it works, but the article distinctly mentions getting this effect from gaming headphones so...

Anyway, I went and tried again with just my laptop (based on the person above effusing about it). Again, for me, I'm not hearing anything special, and nothing "3D" about the sounds, other than some left-right shifts. And I guess the music is in front of me, since that's where my laptop is ;)

I can hear it distinctly from most of the tracks in the song, especially the voice tracks and some of the sporadic synths. Listening wired on decent headphones if it makes any difference. There's a clear spacial separation that isn't just this thing panned slightly left and that thing panned slightly right.

The spatial audio tricks that Q-Sound does are intended to be used with one stereo pair of speakers, and do not work with headphones at all.

I remember a contemporary technology, Aureal's A3D, experiencing the magic of having one of their sound-cards and playing Counter Strike 1.x. Enemy footsteps felt almost as good as seeing them. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I never quite recaptured that sense with other hardware/games.

Another search-able term to drop in here is "Head-Related Transfer Functions" (HRTF), where the inputs are a sound and a given relative location, and the problem is how to subtly adjust that sound for each "ear", giving your brain the kinds of cues normally imparted by the shape of your ears and the different materials in your skull, etc.

Aureal suffered from a set of legal battles with a then-not-so-huge company named Creative, which eventually bought out the bankrupt remains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor

I'm pretty sure Aureal A3D was featured on my family's Compaq Presario 5150[0] back in 1998. The speakers were decently sized units mounted on the side of the 17" CRT and powered straight from the soundcard via 3.5mm plug which apparently was designed to output way more power than a standard headphone jack because it could go pretty loud.

A couple nifty demos were included. One was simply a bee buzzing in a circle, and it totally sounded like it was doing loops behind your head.

[0] https://aaron.axvigs.com/node/438

Old PC sound cards commonly had op-amps on their outputs that could produce a reasonably-clean Watt or two into a pair of 8-Ohm speakers.

Which doesn't sound like much, but 100 Watts is only 20dB louder than that if all else is the same, and most casual music listening happens with peaks that are in the realm of tiny fractions of a Watt.

it's an interesting topic, but it's dumb to talk about how important this is, but at the same time conflate "stereo" with "binaural". It's not clear what is being measured here in terms of the result being "good"

(stereo is for creating a realistic sound field for a number of people in your living room; binaural is for creating a realistic sound field for 1 person with headphones. there are issues and compromises either way, for example one of the problems with binaural is that when you turn your head, the virtual "stage full of musicians" swings around along with your perspective)

there was no technical detail provided here

and why is there a ?ref=seekhifi.com on the wikipedia URL? is this some new SEO idea?

Downvote. Dislike sound or music? Please just ignore the topic.

I'm not aware that downvoting topics is a thing I can do.

and I'm intensely interested in audio/hi fi/music reproduction, so I read the article with interest to find out it was trash.

Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame) wrote that he got good results in the 60s helping people snoop on conversations (i.e. cocktail party problem) by playing mono audio as "stereo" with a slight phase shift in one ear.

I once heard Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On [1] through a $30000 HiFi and I could not believe the stereo information that was available on good vinyl and a valve amp. You could hear how far each of the backing singers were away from their microphone, it was unbelievable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApthDWoPMFQ&list=PLc60gkdW0b...

This is one of my favorite hits from the era. It's a masterpiece.

This is the modern version that is all the rage on social media these days:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=8d+audio

Vogue is indeed a stereo fest. But I always felt sorry for the handclap/fingersnap that seems to have been forgotten, trying to get some attention on the left hand side of the mix. Dry and lonely without any shine or treatment. Maybe it's a symbol for the shy people doing their thing on the darker sides of the dance floor...

Anyone interested in more recent examples, look up the binaural versions of some of Jean-Michel Jarre's albums.

Most of his music is very experimental but I recommend "Zero Gravity" from "Live in Notre Dame - Binaural headphone mix". It is a straight forward EDM track.

Okay, I just listened to this on my 16" MacBook Pro from 2023.

Holy ** its incredible. The drums have a physical space, everything can be placed in a location. I've seen it in cars, but with my speakers on my laptop this is grade A.

Sting's "The Soul Cages" from the same year is also relying quite heavily on Q-Sound (or it could be RDS, the alternative competing technology from Roland, I don't remember exacly).

Is it just me or the way this is described creates visions of American Psycho.

As a dancer I had hoped from the title that the article would be a discussion of the death of dance in clubs.

It alludes to the record being popular on dancefloors but given that most these days are full of people waving their phones packed tight as sardines, or tiny spaces full of drunks and lechers none of whom can dance in either case, it seems a moot point that it's still popular...

Fellow (house) dancer here and couldn't agree with you more. Luckily, however, I recently relocated to London and though I rarely stay out late these days, I did go to a venue called Fabric and I bring this because there's a policy (moderately enforced) of "no phones" and in fact, prior to entering, they will place little stickers on camera lens. Of course, some individuals will inevitably whip out their phones to capture a video or photo, at which point an (disguised as civilian) employee will demand that they put their phone away. So again, moderately enforced.

All that is to say, dance in clubs still exists...just rare to find.

Clubs with policies like Fabric exist in other cities as well, to me they are usually a sign of a good club.

Berlin clubs, at least the ones worthy going to, have the same policy of no photos, and heavily enforce it.

I've seen quite a few people booted out from sticking their phone for a picture twice, it's one of the things that can really put a sour feeling on a dance floor. If I'm there to be free and dance my heart out the last thing I want is to be conscious of perhaps getting filmed while doing so. Personally I have politely asked many people to not even try that in those clubs.

I've seen the same policy in some clubs in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Brussels, Vienna, and the list goes on. If you can manage to go clubbing at places that enforce such policies I'd say you're 80-90% there on finding a good dance floor.

Regarding Fabric in particular, I just happened to see this today: https://old.reddit.com/r/Techno/comments/1giwz2l/dear_fabric...

> and yesterday was Halloween weekend so it opened up the possibility to come across a bunch of drunk clubbers just looking to get fucked up

I think they're understating this part, I thought it was universally understood that the Halloween weekend is absolutely the worst time to go clubbing.

Lots of new people that don't particularly care about the music + masks is just a bad combo for the regular clubbers, regardless of the venue. Whatever issues the venue is facing on regular nights are gonna reach new heights that weekend.

It’s weird to hear folks new to London talking about the scene being good when it’s been so heavily decimated in the last 15 or so years.

I just want to go back in time to the monthly Bangface nights at the ‘werks and the early DMZ shows at Mass.

That makes sense given you've been in the scene for some time. At the same time, I think both are true: scene is "good" compared to other geographic locations of where I am from (i.e. Seattle Washington).

I was a house dancer in NYC before COVID. The shuffle dancing scene was still alive. After covid I'm not sure - it's definitely less so. I've moved to other dances since then. Outside of the specific groups no one is interested in dancing. Clubs are just packed with high and drunk people who look like they barely care about life.

I have come to strongly prefer outdoor parties as a more congenial environment for actual dancing: when there's room to move and fresh cool air to breathe, you can really get into the flow in a way that's hard to find in a club.

Depends on where you live, in some very significant countries going outside is potentially deadly. sure I've been outside at -30 in just a light jacket, but that was only possible because I was exercising hard (ice skating) - while some dances are like that, dancers tend to want to have some slow dances as well and that means warmer temperatures.

In most Berlin clubs, phone cameras are strictly banned. This seemingly small technical detail creates a significant change in the social environment, which is interesting.

Unfortunately, I can't share the general enthusiasm for this song, neither musically nor in terms of how it sounds. The only thing that is quite good is the part of the video with her transparent sweater.

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