An interesting insight into colour perception.

Is not the perception vs deception merely an issue of viewpoint? If I do something to fool you (lie, cheat, even play my stereo or show you coloured pictures), that is deception. Your ability to „analyse“ or enjoy what I did is perception. I cannot perceive for you but can deceive you.

It is the job of a good playback system to deceive. It is our job to „analyse“ and enjoy!

René Descartes , Discourse on the Method,[Ad # ad-5]
"I will suppose, then, that a certain evil genius, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, has used all his industry to deceive me; I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, the colors, the figures, the sounds, and all the other external things are nothing but illusions and reverie which he has used to set traps for my credulity. ; I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood; as having no meaning, but falsely believing to have all these things; I will remain stubbornly attached to this thought; and if, by this means, it is not in my power to come to the knowledge of any truth, at least it is in my power to suspend my judgement: that is why I will be careful not to receive in my belief no falsity,"

Illusions, as seen in this thread, demonstrate certain aspects of how a particular sense operates - like scumbag, I don't consider it deception, it's our perception that has been honed to be fit for purpose. 

What you notice about this is that context is the determining factor in almost all illusions
These type of errors are mostly of little consequence regarding our interpretation of the world - in fact the rules of analysis that are being followed by our perception are learned from how objects behave in the world either visually or in the audio domain so it's not surprising that the interpretation that perception arrives at is usually how objects normally behave in a real-world context.

What this again reveals is that perceptions work by analysis/interpretation of the mix of incoming signals - an analysis model which is learned from the real world behaviour (visual or audio) of objects.

Two channel stereo cannot produce the same soundfield as in the real world - two point sources trying to recreate a many point sources so 'tricks' that appeal to auditory perception have to be used.

The illusion of 'realism' in our playback systems is determined by how closely the soundfield created matches the above factors used by auditory perception to analyse sound. This gets complicated when a recording is not a straight 2 mic stereo recording of a performance & probably 99% of commercial recordings are not done in this way.

So the recording itself is an art form - close-micing, the configuration of the mics used, the multiple recordings done at different times which are mixed into the one track with the use of techniques at the mixing stage. The closer these techniques follow auditory perception rules/analysis, the more realistic, better illusion should result.

The final fly in the ointment is the playback system itself & how well this reproduces all the cues on the recording, without introducing any of it's own factors which dilute/confuse the cues & therefore the illusion.

I agree that we familiarize our self with different sound source and equating them to the real acoustic events but if we desire to reproduce the actual event as close as the original event than a mere two speakers reproduction will not work.


A recording can be one that intend to recreate the original sound and the other is to recreate the sound heard by us. For the latter, we only need two channels and the reproduction of those will be identical (almost) as the original event. This is the best method. However, this method works with headphones only. If you were to use loudspeakers to reproduce them the localization cues are no longer identical to the original event that we heard and a overly bright sound due to pinna filtering.

Using stereo reproduction to recreate the original sound can never be accurate nor natural. Firstly, the original sound that was captured do not represent the sound at the listener's position. For the sake of the argument, let's say the microphones are located at the conductor platform. Can this now be considered to be the exact replica of the original event? No. what the microphone is recording at the spot consists of the direct sound and ambiance. Again for the sake of the argument, let's say a violin is located at 30 degrees to the left. A stereo recording should able to reproduce the location of violin accurately when played with a equilateral triangle loudspeakers setup. This is only correct as far as the violin location (ignoring interaural crosstalk for now) but  what about the ambiance direction of the ambiance.

Ambiance in human hearing plays a very important role to the determine the space. This sound reaches our ears from omni direction. From the information of the ambiance we sense the depth and room size. This information although correctly captured in the recording, they are reproduced from a fixed direction of the two loudspeakers. They all come to you from only one direction and therefor it can never be natural nor accurate.

Lately, you may get a chance to listen to good 5.1 or even ATMOS musical recordings. Here the ambiance cue a little better than stereo because we are now having the ambiance coming from more than one fixed position.  Are they perfect? No but better than stereo. Just spend less than $100 to buy a binaural microphones and record a performance. Make another one with ORTF microphones technique. The binauaral will be the closest to live performance as heard by you.