From Line Arrays to Mid/Side and Ambience

Over the past decade I have been exploring a question that many audio enthusiasts eventually ask themselves:

How realistic can stereo reproduction become in an ordinary living room if the loudspeaker, the room and the signal processing are treated as one system?

The document below is an attempt to put that journey into words.

It started with loudspeaker design and line arrays, then gradually expanded into room treatment, phase behaviour, Mid/Side processing and ambience support. Along the way I discovered that every improvement seemed to reveal another limitation, and that many of the things I had been hearing could be better understood through the work of researchers such as David Griesinger, Earl Geddes, Floyd Toole, Edgar Choueiri and others.

This paper is not presented as a recipe, nor as a claim of having found “the answer” to stereo reproduction. It is simply an honest account of one person’s attempt to make reproduced music behave a little more like a real acoustic event.

Some readers may recognise ideas they have experimented with themselves. Others may disagree with some of the choices. Both reactions are perfectly fine. If the paper encourages a few people to look at loudspeakers, rooms and stereo reproduction a little differently, then it has already achieved more than I expected.

Download: From Line Arrays to Mid/Side and Ambience – Version 1.1 (June 2026)

“A look inside the head of a self-proclaimed madman, after ten years of chasing a more believable stereo illusion.”