Home Theater Geeks 462 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I chat with Brent Butterworth about his new project, the Headphone Evaluation and Spatial Audio Test Album so stay tuned this is.

00:21
TWIT. Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here, the home theater geek. In this episode I'm going to be talking with Brent Butterworth, a longtime audio journalist, who recently completed a project that I found very interesting called the Headphone Evaluation and Spatial Audio Test, and it consists of a bunch of WAV files audio files that we're going to talk a lot about. But first let me welcome Brent to the show. Hey, brent, welcome to the show. Hey, Scott, happy to be on. Thanks, yeah, thank you for being here. So this album which I guess we could call it an album, even though it's not in physical form, right, can't buy a CD, right?

01:18 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Oh, there was a lot of discussion about that too.

01:21 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, about that too. Yeah, I mean, you know, I myself am still a believer in physical media, but I also recognize the fact that not a lot of people are anymore. I mean, I go to concerts and they still, and they still have cds.

01:38 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
In some cases they're giving them away yeah, well, as you know, I I'm also a jazz artist, and it's true, you are it's a decision to print to, you know, press cds, and it's it's only about, I think we just paid uh 300 something bucks to get 200 press with really nice covers and everything but uh, but then you got to mail them out and then you and you got to have an operation to do that and that's that's fine on my level. But on on the level of a real record company like uh, like david chesky's project here, the audio file society is what it's actually called um. On that kind of level it's. You know that's that's logistics, and with downloads there's no logistics, you just get it.

02:22
So we talked a lot about you feel like you want to call it a test disc, right, because we're so used to test discs right right right, but uh, and we kept calling it that, but then someone kept uh saying no, it's don't, it's not a disc, we're not pressing discs, and so so you called it an album right now.

02:42 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, I don't know what else we call it. Yeah, okay, well, you mentioned david chesky and the audiophile society, and let's start there. So you called it an album. We don't know what else to call it. Yeah, okay, well, you mentioned David Chesky and the Audiophile Society, and let's start there. David Chesky is a very well-known, an audiophile legend. I would say. Yeah, he's also a musician and a composer and he has produced a ton of audiophile recordings, and recently, I guess, he started this new company called the Audiophile Society. Right, it used to be Chesky Records. Maybe that's still in existence as well. It?

03:15 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
still is, but I don't think he's moving forward with that.

03:18 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
You can still buy the records, sure, but as I understand it, this is a whole new enterprise because you know, david changes what he wants to do about every five years or so Well, he is kind of a mad genius, I would say, and this one, the Audiophile Society, if I'm not mistaken, is geared specifically toward music meant to be heard or listened to on headphones.

03:48 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Right, although you can listen to it on speakers. Sure, he's always been trying to kind of strike a balance between that to where, because traditionally binaural recordings sound pretty weird on speakers, but he's always been trying to reach kind of a bit of a happy medium, but they really are better on headphones. I have to say, been trying to reach kind of a bit of a happy medium, but they really are better on headphones, I have to say Right, his recordings yeah, the new ones, because you know he's doing these. This actually kind of arose out of the pandemic because he couldn't go to the fabulous venues that he normally records in, so he had to do everything in digital audio workstations, the same way that Billy Eilish would record an album. Right, and he developed techniques to do that with the digital audio workstations that are not Atmos or DTS-X or anything like that. But he developed techniques that let him get a really big, immersive sound with headphones without using those proprietary formats.

04:44 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, which we're going to talk about because it's one of the things that's on this album. So how did this project come to be the Headphone Evaluation and Spatial Audio Test album which we see the quote unquote cover here? If it were a CD, this is what the cover would look like.

05:04 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, you still have to have a cover, even though what the cover would look like. Yeah, you still have to have a cover even though you don't have a physical product, right? So it came about when you know David. I've known David for probably something like 30 years and I've worked on projects with him in the past. When I worked for Dolby, we did a test disc together for DVD audio and SACD together for DVD audio and SACD.

05:28
When I worked for Home Entertainment Magazine, we had like a Home Entertainment slash Chesky demo disc of some sort. And I've just known the guy forever and I really love his work and I've written about it for ages. So he called me out of the blue on January, early in January, right after the new year, and he said, hey, I wanted I'm thinking about doing like an immersive audio test album just for headphones. And you know we started talking. But he's like, could you do something like that? I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty confident I can figure out how to do that, cause I hadn't. I had kind of just messed around with that most slightly. I had seen other people do it, so I knew how the software worked. I kind of knew the general procedure, but it ended up being about a oh gosh, seven or eight-month project of figuring out how to do it, figuring out what would work.

06:21
We did at least a dozen runs of this thing in various forms with different kinds of tones. I went and did a bunch of live recordings with my handy mouth simulator. What is that? It's a mouth simulator. It's like a little speaker that simulates the acoustics of the human mouth. So I put this up on a stand and went to my local Everett Public Library here in Everett Washington which has a nice big performance room that you can just go use, and I did a really complex series of recordings with using this thing all over the place on stands and marked everything out.

07:02
And oh boy, it just took forever and I did that. And then I did a bunch of test tones to kind of compare to out. And oh boy, it just took forever and I did that. And then I did a bunch of test tones to kind of compare to that. And the whole time, you know, david and I were going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and we had some other people, you know I had a couple of reviewer friends of mine who were kind of into immersive sound, check it out and try different things and give me what their reaction was to it. And then David had some pro audio guys in New York who checked it out and it was a really long process but I'm really happy with the final product has 47 tracks, all in 48 kilohertz 24-bit resolution WAV files which are uncompressed digital audio.

07:57 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Why did you choose that resolution?

07:59 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Well, 2448 is sort of a standard resolution for professional production these days and there was no discussion. David said that, and if David says that's what he wants, then that's what I'm going to do. If it had been something really wacky like 32, 780, whatever, yeah, right, Right right right.

08:21 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
That would have taken up so much data so much yeah.

08:24 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I mean I do a lot. I mean I just did a new jazz album and we did that in 2448 as well, and it's just such a common thing. If you get on things like Qobuz, you'll find there's just tons of material in 2448. So we did that Also because it wouldn't be as you suggested, it wouldn't be a giant download compared to some crazy resolution and you know, for the purposes of this it is completely uh, it is.

08:51
I mean actually, I, you know, I've converted some of this stuff to mp3s and it works in mp3 as well um you you?

09:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
here's a question from the chat room. Uh, you mentioned the album you just did. Loquacious is is asking what instrument do you play?

09:08 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I play double bass, I play guitar, I play ukulele, I play percussion. I can only really get a gig on double bass, maybe ukulele a little bit. But I've done tons of gigs on double bass. But um I'm basically I'm a bass player who does other stuff because he has to right right, I think you played the stick at one point too right I played the chapman stick for 20 years.

09:34
And then I realized, if you get a double bass, people know what that is. Oh, you could come play in my band. You could come play that in my band, whereas you have a chapman, no one understands what it is.

09:45 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, too bad, because a Chapman stick is an awesome instrument.

09:47 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
But we're getting off track here.

09:53 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, so you have 47 tracks, some of which are David Chesky, I believe, sort of giving instructions about what you're about to hear, right?

10:03 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so of not half, maybe a third are you know for each one, this is what Chesky's done for cause? Chesky's been doing test albums for decades, 30 years at least. And so usually there'll be an announcement that says, okay, here is what this test is and here's what you're going to hear. And so we'll say, okay, look, you're going to hear test tones, like, in a lot of cases, we have them at, like, you know, zero degrees, straight ahead, 15 degrees right, 30 degrees right. And then we'll have them, like, since it's immersive, we'll have them going up, right, we'll have it at 45 degrees above Some of the things we have, you know, 90 degrees directly over, directly over. So we have overpasses, you know, right to left, we have overpasses front and back, we have passes all around you. And he announces all these things. He announces all and he tells you what results to expect.

10:56
And you may be thinking right away well, if you know, it's the old stereo salesman's trick, right, it's what we're going to hear, and then they'll hear it Right. So we, actually, knowing this, we put two blind tests on there. To where you can, you know? It'll just say you know, position one, position two, position three. We tell you which positions we use, but we don't tell you which one is which right. So we tell you, okay, we did, you know, 15 degrees right or 30 degrees right or whatever, and 45 degrees up. So we tell you what all the different possibilities are, but we don't tell you which is which.

11:38
And then we did the interesting thing, and I think the most shocking thing to me by a thousand miles on this thing was, you know, halfway through the project, david said hey, have you tried the Apple encoder? And because you know Dolby has their own encoder to convert multi-channel Atmos files into just two channels for headphones, right, binaural encoder, apple has their own. And I said no because I kind of assumed they'd be kind of the same right. And Apple just did their own and I said no because I kind of assumed they'd be kind of the same right and apple just did their own for whatever.

12:10
Uh, he's like you. Really better check it out. So I learned, I learned how to use apple logic, which has that option in it, right and um, because I was using reaper and then I used pre-sonus, whatever the PreSonus audio.

12:24
Yeah, and so I did it and I was just like, oh my God, it was just shocking how different the two sounded and I can't say one or the other is better, they're just different. They're just different. They do different things better, and some of them I was as an ex-Dolby employee. You're kind of, I was as an ex dolby employee you're kind of.

12:47
I was a little shocked that in my opinion the dolby one was actually more transparent, because dolby doesn't get too usually too whacked out on all the audiophile stuff. Right, they're kind of into making consumer stuff. Yeah, yeah, consumers trade ahead. You know low-priced consumer stuff.

13:06 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, but they're also involved in the high-end professional market as well, true, true.

13:12 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
They're two different divisions, sort of. Yeah, oh, definitely, but they have on the album. You can actually compare the two different encoders.

13:23 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I found this very interesting that you have several tracks that compare something made in the Dolby binaural and the Apple binaural and in fact they do sound different. I was astonished by that. One question I had for you about the Dolby one. One question I had for you about the Dolby one. Dolby used to have a 3d headphone system called Dolby headphone Yep. Is this an outgrowth of that?

13:55 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
No, completely different there there may be some, I can't say for sure. You know there this is way beyond Dolby headphone. You know this is way beyond Dolby Headphone. You know Dolby Headphone basically took oh, it took up to like 5.1 or 7.1. Correct, and then folded that down into two channels to give you sort of a surround sound effect.

14:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right. I always thought it was pretty good. I always thought it sounded quite good.

14:20 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
It was okay. It worked kind of okay for me, which was interesting because I had to go sell it. But it was based on a technology from a company called Lake in Australia that Dolby bought and it was a good for the time. It was a really good binaural encoder, or headphone virtualizer if you want to call it that, and however, that was done around the year 2000. And you know, obviously we have 20 some odd years of advancement in computing power. So now even you know little tiny earbuds will have pretty awesome computing power.

15:01 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And of course we have.

15:02 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
We have phones which we didn't have back then. Yeah, true enough, we're all on soap bar phones and stuff back then, Right? So there's all kinds of things that you can do that you were impossible at the time. And there's, you know, there's been advances in in psychoacoustics. There's been advances in computing power. So there of the key principles in any headphone virtualizer are similar. There are always a lot of commonality, even going back to the old ones that, like Headroom, used to do with their crosstalk canceler. Remember that.

15:38
Yeah yeah, kyle Hurtsons did them way back in the day, I remember. So the fundamental principles are the same. This is just a lot more advanced and I think when you hear the difference in the Dolby and the Apple once you go like, oh, this is not a linear progression to better and better, this is more like a bifurcation.

16:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
shall we say yeah, it's really cool.

16:05 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I wanted to say, though, that you know, like one of the, I hope you weren't going to ask this question and I'm stomping on you here, but no, no, no, go right ahead, okay. Well, I think the the the fascinating thing to me was, you know, since I had to keep, I wasn't. I knew that different people's ears have different you know, so-called, you know, have haverelated transfer functions, which is how your ears figure out that a sound coming from there I am right there is coming from right there.

16:32
Based upon how the sound goes around your head and refracts and reflects around you Exactly and the shape of your ear canals and your panna and all this sort of stuff. So I knew it would be different, but I was shocked by how different it is. And we say a lot of times you know your results may differ in audio, your results will differ on this. You will give it to, like you know, dennis Berger. Yeah, sure, dennis was one of my testers because I knew dennis's ear canals are actually like really straight and so he's he has a different perception of earphones than I do a lot of times really, oh yeah, that I didn't know yeah and um.

17:12
so I was sending him stuff you know, just sending him the files and you know he was drawing out diagrams of where he thinks everything set, where everything sounded to him like a spatial diagram and it was just way off of what I heard and and what David you know. Cause David was saying you cannot virtualize headphone sound like right in the back. I'm kind of like it's working for me but the front doesn't work for me.

17:38 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh how weird.

17:40 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, and so it's all over the map, and but one of the really nice things is you can put on different headphones. As you may have done this, you put on different headphones and you get different results well, I haven't done that yet.

17:52 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I I wanted to tell you that I spent my time so far listening to this album, uh, on a pair of focal, clear, clear, mg, circum-oral, that is, over-ear headphones, big ones that are open back right, so they are not particularly isolating, but they are so clean and so clear and Focal, as you know, makes really really great headphones. Um, but I haven't yet done it on some closed back headphones or earbuds, which you know I expect to give different results don't you?

18:36 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
oh, totally, totally, and that was the. I think we kind of loosely agreed that Totally, and that was the. I think we kind of loosely agreed that, you know, like high-end open back, like planar magnetic headphones gave, by and large, gave the best results, but those are already kind of known for sounding more spacious than closed back headphones do. Right, exactly, that wasn't a super big surprise, but we definitely and we were trying it with everything we could dredge up. Big surprise, but we definitely and we were trying it with everything we could dredge up and you know, including really high end stuff, really really cheap stuff. Um, I mean some of the stuff. I worked on with a $19 pair of JBL, you know, wired earphones, and I did it in the Everett public library because it could, you know, and they have good coffee. They have way better coffee there than I have at home, wow.

19:27 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, so you did some of these tracks in Dolby binaural, in Apple binaural, which virtualize objects out there in the world coming from different angles and reaching your ears. You also did it in David Chesky's own virtualization system called Mega Dimensional Sound. You need a Darth Vader voice to say that? I think yeah, but that meant you had to learn yet another DAW right.

20:02 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Well, no, I didn't, because he had done those all himself and I still have. Not, I haven't bugged him too much, but I really want to find out what he's doing, because there's actually a thing on there where I took a track off of his graffiti jazz album right, which is really an extraordinary work of immersive sound. It's jazz, but it's a lot of electronica sort of stuff and, um, it's really, it's one of the best spatial audio recordings I've heard and it's not in atmos or dtsx or what's the other one.

20:35 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Uh, I can't remember, I can't remember. I can't remember it now either. That's bad, you know, with age comes blissful forgetting.

20:49 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
True. But so I listened to his stuff and then I said, david, how about if I try? You know we have a demonstration of like your thing because you're trying. I mean, ultimately he's trying to push his thing right, sure, sure. So why don't we try to take your thing and I will? You send me the, the actual tracks right, which I couldn't believe he did it. Yeah, really, I assumed he was going to refuse, but he did. He's like, oh, yeah, sure, and he sent me the tracks and I sat there for many hours. You actually them.

21:30
I mixed the tracks in atmos, yeah, going through the, the dolby encoder and the apple encoder, and tried to get as close as I could to david's results and I assumed I actually I spent like two nights on this and just on one track, just experimenting with because there's some stuff that goes behind your head in there. It's really cool sounding, it is. I thought, like I really kind of figured like I'll be able to match what he does, but I couldn't. And, granted, it's David who's been doing this more than me. I'm an audio writer and also you know it's his own tune right, like I could maybe mix my own tune better than david, could, I don't know somebody else right yeah.

22:11
So he had some advantages. But for all my trying, you know, and he said you know, that's actually pretty close to what I intended. You know the stuff that I did. So he said he's like, yeah, let's put those in there, and we did. And there's also I can't. He said he's like, yeah, let's put those in there, and we did. And there's also I can't remember how many tracks, like eight or ten tracks that are, uh, audiophile society recordings, and he refused to pick them out. He just said here's everything we have you pick out. Uh, you know, whatever your 10 favorite recordings are, and I did, and that's the ones that we ran with.

22:46 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And that part of the album is quite good. I mean, I was listening to these tracks and there's a wide range of genres and styles and effects and ideas. I mean, david's a pretty amazing guy.

23:01 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and obviously he has artists.

23:05
I mean, like two of the tracks were his, I think, um, but there's, you know, multiple artists on here and but very creative very inventive stuff he had I'm sure a lot of, but there's some like traditional classical stuff on here, um, but with the non-classical stuff I'm sure he had a giant influence on the sound of those, because a lot of those get that immersive sound that he's able to get. There's one from. I don't know if Cafe is the name of the album or the artist or whatever, but I think it's the best immersive recording I've ever heard, on any you know, through headphones, on any format, anything. Oh, you know, I forgot to mention you don't need anything special to listen to this.

23:51 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
This is important. This is important. Let's make a point of this.

23:56 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
So anything, that'll play 24-3-8.

23:57 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
All you have to do is listen on any pair of headphones connected to any sound system source. Doesn't have to be anything special at all. This is really important.

24:07 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, like a cheap little. You can put it on a cheap little dongle. Your computer or your phone may actually have the capacity to play these things on their own, but I used a lot of just like a cheap little DAC dongle. Used a lot of just like a cheap little DAC dongle. You know, fossey Audio and Shanling and people like that make them for $50, $75 or whatever, and those can all very easily do this and they can drive also most headphones too.

24:33 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, I was using a Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface, which is wonderful, and just playing it off the Mac, I found, by the way, that the cafe, I believe, is the name of the group Forsas de Natureza. Wonderful recording. Oh my God, the deep bass drum that's in there and the vocals, everything about it is just wonderful.

25:05 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, it's like you're in a giant space. Yes, yes, probably to a, to a greater degree than anything I've ever heard on headphones, and I've heard, you know a lot of binaural recordings and all sorts of a lot of, you know, traditional stereo recordings with, uh, you know, stereo mics and things, and it is really shocking. It really sounds like you're in some giant reverberant space.

25:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, it really is good. I wanted to ask you most of the tests are David saying zero degrees right in front of you and then you hear three drum hits and then you hear three shaker shakes and I'm curious why you chose those sounds. Drum hits I can sort of tell it's an impulse.

26:01 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
It's very immediate, very sharp attack, but the shakes are kind of more amorphous shall we say Well, I trusted David because he's done so many of these discs before and I originally did. You know, when we were doing the initial demos for this. I did them all and my voice is not particularly great, not that David's is either. But oh, were doing the initial demos for this, I did them all and my voice is not particularly great, not that David's is either. But oh, david hated the microphone I was using. He insisted on using some like Josephson audiophile microphone that was like a few thousand dollars and stuff.

26:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I'm kind of like all right whatever.

26:38 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
And so he has used the Shaker on, I think, the very first, uh, chesky test disc that came out in the early 90s. So it's a bit of a tradition for him. And, uh, I would agree with you, the drum really kind of lights up the immersive sound a lot more than the shaker does. But you know, my attitude was like you know what dav David's done? A bunch of these things, let's just go with whatever, david wants or whatever he wants to do, okay.

27:07
Yeah, I mean it's nice to work on a project with a guy who's really respected, who you know. It's almost like. It's almost like if you're doing headphone measurements with Sean Olive. It's like no one's going to argue, right and so with David it's like look, david has a colossal track record of doing all this stuff and so I'm just. You know, no one's going to, you're never going to get fired for just going with what David wants to do.

27:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, okay, all right. Well, I listened to most of the tracks pretty carefully and I found that with these headphones, in particular the Focal Clear MGs, open back, closed ear, I was able to get the horizontal angles pretty well. The vertical angles I was having a harder time with. But maybe that's just with, but maybe that's just me, and maybe that's just those headphones.

28:07 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Well, it's a combination of a lot of things. It could be you, it could be those headphones, it could be that these binaural encoders are not perfect. True enough, I would argue that the capabilities of Dolby Atmos over headphones have been oversold. You know you, especially when we do the blind test, it's like wait a minute. And there's so often where I was doing, I was going like zero to 180 and I'd edit, and you're editing, you're, you know, taking these little tiny snippets and putting them all in the and they are all individual tracks, so these track things going forever. And, um, and you're putting theirs and I'd be like, okay, zero, 180. And they'd be like and I go back to zero, zero degrees forward. I'm kind of like wait a minute, is that different? It sounds the same. And I have to keep going back and checking, which was really laborious. Oh my God, I checked so many times because I couldn't be sure. Just from listening, I mean, I could hear hard left and hard right. Sure, that was easy to do. Everything else was difficult to do.

29:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Elevation to me was difficult to do. Also, I found it very interesting in the comparisons you have tracks of the same thing done in the Dolby encoder and the Apple encoder, and I found the Apple encoder to have a lot more ambience to it. Yep, I thought so too. You know, almost like you were in a different kind of a room. There was more reverberance in the sound, it wasn't as dry. You found the same thing.

29:53 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I found exactly the same thing. I guess it's like Apple, since Apple has been so active in promoting immersive sound, more so than Dolby has even I just figured like Apple probably heard the Dolby encoder. They have a ton of great engineers there and they probably said you know, we could make it more immersive than this, and they did. But I think the Dolby encoder sounds more audiophily and pure. I agree.

30:24 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Exactly so. I wonder if Tom Holman was at Apple when they developed that, because he was head of audio for a long time.

30:33 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think he was more on the. I mean he's better known as, like a speaker guy, true, so I really don't know. Um, but you know that's a. Are they the biggest company? They're certainly the top three or four or five, um, so they're, the kind of resources they have are just immense, tremendous. Oh yeah, absolutely. So they could buy great coders and you know, and they did, they did their own thing. But you know, whether or not you like the Apple or the Dolby version is very much a matter of opinion, which I just love. I hate it when I have to as a reviewer.

31:14 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I love it when I can not make up my mind, right, right, well, I uh, as a reviewer, I have to tell you that I often refer people to you because I really trust your reviews. Oh thanks, thank you so much. And you know, when people ask me how come I can't go to a store and compare this and that I say well, because brick and mortar stores are on their way out. What you really need to do is rely on reviewers you trust, such as Brent Butterworth.

31:43 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
That's really nice of you. I wish could help more. But you know I work for wire cutter now and we are so mass market that I think the most expensive thing we've ever touched in audio is like a 600 pair of bookshelf speakers. So all these people are like, hey, what two thousand dollar tower speakers do I get? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know I don't listen to those anymore. Go look at Aaron Hardison's YouTube channel, or something like that. Okay Well there you go.

32:10
You know, there's a lot of guys out there who you know. I'm the old, you and I both are the old guard, because we started kind of around the same time, I'm afraid, so.

32:23 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I totally accept that there's a lot of young guys who have a lot more energy and feel like lugging speakers around.

32:28 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I remember those days. Yeah, I'm a little less eager to tote 100-pound subwoofers around nowadays.

32:33 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Damn straight. Yeah, one thing I wanted to mention about the overhead tests. Okay, so you have some tests that start in front of you and go up, I don't know, 15 degrees, 30 degrees, 45, 60, 90, 120, and 180 behind you, but they're discrete. I found it pretty difficult to deal or to perceive them as that front to back, but left to right. I had a much easier time for some reason. But the one thing I wanted to say, if I had been involved, I might have suggested was, instead of doing discrete places was to have a continuous sound move overhead, from left to right or front to back. You know what. You see what I mean. I don't know what kind of sound it would have been.

33:29 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I see what you mean and I kind of wish I had thought to do that because had I thought to do that.

33:33
I would have done it. But you know, you can see, there's a ton of tracks in this thing and this project you already, yeah, this took a significant chunk out of my life. I'm sure that it did and, uh, you know it was, and I, honestly, I wouldn't have done it except for david chesky. I just, I just have so much admiration for him and just any, you know, it's like you know you're a bass player. If I got to go play with, uh, you know, uh, uh, you know, ch Chris Potter or somebody like that, even though I suck way too bad to play with Chris Potter, you know I would go do it for nothing. I would fly to New York at my own expense and go do it just to do one gig with him. Just to say I did a gig with him. Right, right, maybe he watches this and he'll, you know, call me.

34:19 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And he'll call you and he'll say hey, go to New York.

34:23 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
You can play one tune with him. I'd do it for one tune, yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe you, but it's kind of like that. Yeah, so it was. But yeah, I was, and I was sitting there trying to think of what more could we put on here and I actually, I think I did think of a couple things towards the end. I'm kind of like no, david wants this thing out. If I start doing this, we're going to be going down a rabbit hole and it's going to just last forever and it's never going to get published. I know that feel, yeah, it might have been two more, since we're, since this is all experimental.

34:56
Nobody's ever done this before at least in a available recording. Yeah, um, it was all totally experimental. So we, there was no, uh, we had no guidelines, we had no guidelines, we had no nothing, we were just guessing at what to do Well.

35:10 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I think what you did do is fabulous, really great. Um, you know, it gives people an opportunity to try different headphones and see which ones work best, especially in this spatial audio format one of three, and it behooves you absolutely to listen to the ten tracks from the Audiophile Society on headphones and listen to this very spacious, wonderful sound. Unlike many of our colleagues, I really like multichannel and immersive music mixes. You know when they're done well. I mean, I remember the very first 5.1 mix of a music track I heard was something from the Eagles and you know the cowbell came clanking at me from the surround speaker and it was just horrible. But since then people have really learned how to do it well and it can be just wonderful.

36:23 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I agree, a speaker that looks like this, that's the original Amazon tap to a full on 11, point, you know, 2.4, whatever system, right, right. And so in the studio, of course, they mix on all those speakers and unless you're in the very small number of people that have, uh, you know, an av receiver or something that will do that and actually have all those speakers mounted, and in my opinion, it only really works right with this, with the ceiling speakers mounted correct, rather than the the bounce off the ceiling.

37:02
Yeah, I mean those can be kind of nice, but the ceiling speakers are clearly better, clearly superior, yeah, so they kind of sell it as like this universal format. It kind of works on anything but it. That's the. That's the shame of it to me. For me is that, um, you can put a, you can do incredible things with this format, but then they, it all ends up being hurt through these things. I mean, you know, so many people, so few people are, are, you know, able to hear these mixes in the quality that they were supposed to be heard? So few, and it's really kind of it's very sad to me.

37:45 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
But hearing them in headphones opens the experience up to a much wider audience.

37:52 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Yeah, and I'm hoping I mean this is just one of we're kind of hoping to sort of make people aware of the limitations of this and so that they can overcome it In the same way, like David, has David heard the limitations and thought I can do better just messing around with my digital audio workstation and doing whatever he does. And he did it. But you know there's no David Chesky format or plug-in you can buy for your digital audio workstation.

38:24 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, he could make his mega-dimensional sound system a plug-in, couldn't he?

38:30 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
I'm sure he could. You know, in the same way that, like you know, people like Chris Lord Algy have their own. You know, famous mixer guy have their own. Like you know, plug ins for whatever with their own presets and all that, a lot of which I use for my own music. But he could. But you know, I don't think David wants to give away his secrets.

38:51 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, I'm not talking about giving it away.

38:53 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Well, I mean, you know, if he could charge a lot of money for it, but I actually I really wish he would because I'd use it. I'd absolutely use it, whereas for me, doing an immersive mix of my own music with like Atmos or something is, you know, at my level it's a jazz artist who nobody's ever heard of except for writing about speakers, and you know so, at my level it doesn't warrant the effort, since everything I do is going to get hurt on headphones and yeah, I can do some things in there. But if I could do like what David does and put out special immersive mixes of my music for headphones, I would absolutely do it. I just cannot achieve that level of quality, although my next project, I I think, is going to be a little more weird stuff, not like traditional jazz, so I might be able to do a little more sort of interesting things.

40:01 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
We'll see. Well, I'll look forward to hearing that, absolutely.

40:03 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Ukulele's flying around, yeah, man.

40:11 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, we have a link to this album on the audiophilesocietycom in the show notes so you can go and order it. I believe it's $25.

40:26 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Something like that yeah, $24.99. I can't remember. Yeah, it's something around, something like that. Yeah $24.99.

40:33 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I can't remember. Yeah, it's something around. I haven't bought one, right. Right, I'm pretty sure that's what it is and you know, that's certainly very reasonable for something of this quality and definitely I can highly recommend it, having listened to it, and I want to thank you so much for being here to tell us all about it.

40:51 - Brent Butterworth (Guest)
Thanks so much for having me on.

40:52 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
It's been a lot of fun, yeah, good, well, hope to have you on again sometime soon. I'd love to do it. Great, great Thanks, okay. So, those of you who are listening to this, if you have a question for me, please send it along to htg at twittv and I will answer as many as I can right here on the show. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the TWiT Network with your membership in Club TWiT, which gives you access to all the TWiT shows in their video form and lets you see a bunch of cool graphics in addition to hearing a bunch of great information. So thanks for that. Until next time, geek out.