On Saturday, I felt probably as honored as I'm ever going to feel in my audio journey by being at Mark's demonstration of SOCS. A lot of us were trying to understand and explain what we were hearing. I'm one who didn't understand at all what they were trying to do until Saturday. So by way of compensation for the treat I feel I was given, here's my posting from the AV123 forum.
The phase correction problem they are fixing with SOCS is related to the reason we see rainbows. Have you looked at through a prism? It blurs the image, not because it's out of focus (that's a different problem), but because it bends the light at different amounts depending on the frequency. So you see an image thats blurred with different colors at the edges.
A speaker is like an audio prism. Instead of bending sound by different amounts, a speaker creates a "rainbow" of music in time. We know what sound the electrical signal sent to the speaker represents. But because of the necessary design of speaker's crossovers and the mass of the drivers, it takes a longer time to get some frequencies from electrical signal to sound wave. The image is spectrally smeared.
What they are doing with phase correction in SOCS is to delay sending the "faster" freqencies so the frequencies that take longer to produce can get a head start. Then the "faster" frequencies catch up in the speaker and the sounds all comes out at once. It's like giving your child a head start in a race so that you both reach the finish line at the same time.
Mark's explanation made it clear to me *why* this has been his Holy Grail. As he was going over it, I was imagining back in the early days of digital music when they realized that all this frequency information was there in bits and that it was a straightforward concept. But as always, the devil is in the details. For technical and real-world reasons, it has been a painfully slow birth, but its about here (for real!)
RCS does not add the room as a separate transformation, but measures the complete transformation from electrical signal to your sitting position and then makes that correction.
OK, if now one else cares about the technical side - how did it sound? IMHO....
WOW! I was in awe. Yes, this is expensive for a consumer solution, but if I understand it correctly, it will be impossible to call ANY audio system "reference" without this. I don't know what their patent situation is, but for their sake I hope they have it well-covered. I haven't quite processed where I'd put it in the world of money/sonic improvement, but it's at least a magnitude of improvement more than putting $1500 more into cables. (That is not to take a position in the cable wars - substitute other upgrades from mid-fi to hi-fi). This change will definitely make your system "revealing" and reveal any other problems.
Mark, congratulations once again on the completion of your "quest." You seem well focused on the next steps of marketing it and driving down the costs. This is just one person's opinion, but that was the most impressive audio thing I've had the pleasure of listening too since the first time I heard a CD. And I know that demos have been given of the concept and prototypes, but I'll keep a personal memory of having been among the first to hear the release software.
Any thud you heard during the demo was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor. I consider myself a mid-fi guy, but this weekend I had a hi-fi lust.
enjoy!
