Smoke n mirrors magical music equipment

TAE

All you have is now
I love playing me some music but oh those evil members of NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) they're evil I tell ya!

Dangling all kinds of zippy zoomy shiny objects in front of us to extract the gold from our bank accounts...THAT's NOT RIGHT!

You poor guitar players and the plethora of pedal and effects possibilities...and then there's the amps OY!

Currently I am being mesmerized by the ASPEN PITTMAN Spacestation...Is it sorcery or is it science? God only knows. The founder of Groove Tubes developed this evil temptress and from all the discussions about it on the keyboard forums the takeaway is this guy has invented and patented an amp configuration that will take you to very loud and clear stereophonic amp heaven in a tiny little single box. The unit has 4 speakers ( a coaxial 8" speaker with a 1" mid driver, a tweeter and a 6" speaker turned 90 degrees) and 4 amps to power each speaker individually and a few magical knobs to take you to nirvana.

HERE's a link to a 181 page thread where people including Aspen his self discuss and drool over this witchcraft.

Below is Aspen's "new and improved!", "latest greatest!", "you won't believe your ears!" infomercial on the Center Point Sound Spacestation V3 magic




So I have been watching the used market for one of these babies cause I'm too cheap to pay the $800 new via Sweetwater. I've also considered trying to build my own beefed up version on steroids. So... in deeply thinking about how I would go about it ...I thought I'd try an experiment and see the results. I grabbed one of my pretty old n beat up but still great sounding Behringer B2031's monitors and took it to practice with me along with a Roland KC500 that I am really not a big fan of but it serves the purpose for practice. I stuck the KC500 in a corner to the right of me and placed the 8" monitor on top it at 90 degrees pointed to the wall. the KC500 has a 3 band eq, a master volume and a Stereo link with a volume pad. I screwed around "tuning this combo set up kind of how Aspen recommends tuning the V3. I've not played through a spacestation but I'll tell ya that KC500 has never screamed like it screamed last night with the help of that one silly 8" monitor pointing to a wall. And the clarity and dispersion of the sound image was very improved (Leslie effect on the Nord was very "wide")..It's not like having to K10's spread in stereo but it was compact, screaming loud and clear and best of scalable. I have a spare KC500 I may just Frankenstein after last nights experiment.
 
The science is so obvious when explained...L+R pointed at you, L-R completely out of phase will reach all points in the room with good (possibly perfect) stereo...
 
The science is so obvious when explained...L+R pointed at you, L-R completely out of phase will reach all points in the room with good (possibly perfect) stereo...

Beyond my pay grade I guess. I don't understand the science of it, I understand what he did but why did it take 80+ years from the advent of stereo to figure out a way ( patentable no less ) to pull this off with a single speaker cabinet location?

I am really intrigued by the phenomenon and understanding how sound and stereo , surround effects work. The Wiki on Stereo is an interesting read.

Having been a leslie fan for 45 years I dig the dopler effect and am truly amazed at how we have advanced digitally with things like the ventilator that fake our ears / brains into thinking we are experiencing the Dopler effect of a spinning speaker.

No doubt in my little experiment last night there was a BIG difference in the "feel" of the audio image...mind you I did not make the monitor out of phase I just turned the same signal 90 degrees into a wall...It was a very cool effect that you could "feel" as you tweeked the knobs..
 
Well I guess the technology has actually been around since 1998 according to this article from Mix magazine...further explaining the witchcraft involved

TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
Fender SFX
The Next Generation Comes to Instrument Amplifiers
by George Petersen - Mix Magazine


July 10, 1998, at the Summer NAMM show in Nashville, Fender will unveil SFX™ (Stereo Field eXpansion), arguably the most important breakthrough in instrument speaker technology since the introduction of the Leslie speaker. A bold statement, perhaps, but the SFX effect simply has to be heard to be believed. The system is also affordable, adaptable to existing amp rigs and based on acoustical principles so simple that once the word gets out, 100,000 audio engineers around the planet are going to kick themselves, wondering, "Why didn't I think of that first?"
Unfortunately, there's no way to create a usable stereo field from a standard combo guitar amp, whether the speakers are side by side or stacked atop each other. Move two cabinets to either side of the stage for maximum separation and the audience along the center aisle hears the spread, while listeners on either side hear mostly one side or the other. Essentially, SFX is a system for creating/playing back huge stereo effects from two speakers that are placed near each other, or within the same cabinet.

Licensed by Fender, the SFX system was developed and patented under the name CPS (Center Point Stereo) by Groove Tubes founder Aspen Pittman and Drew Daniels, who has served as AES Chairman in Los Angeles and is an electro-acoustic engineer who has worked for JBL, Tascam, Fender and Walt Disney Imagineering.

So how does it work? According to co-inventor Daniels, the process is extraordinarily simple: "The basic principle is like M-S [mid-side] miking in reverse." A stereo signal from a guitar preamp or effects loop feeds two speakers: One channel is routed through a sealed enclosure with its cone facing forward, representing the "mid" part of the signal. And like the "side" part of the M-S miking equation, the bottom speaker is mounted on a baffle (perpendicular to the top speaker) within an open-sided enclosure to generate a figure-8 dispersion, where one side is out of phase with the other.

"The SFX electronics process stereo signals into sum and difference signals," explains Daniels. The signals that started out as "left" signals are made into signals that add acoustically in the air around the cabinet, causing the SFX speaker array to steer the combined acoustical output of the two speaker elements toward the left side of the cabinet. Signals originally from the "right" are made into signals that subtract acoustically, causing the SFX speaker array to steer the acoustical output toward the right side of the cabinet.

By simply adjusting the balance between the two speakers and feeding a stereo source (such as the onboard DSP effects built into the new Fender amps), a massive ambient field is formed that can envelope a medium-sized room. "Hearing SFX is like hearing surround TV for the first time," beams co- inventor Pittman. "It makes the amp sound huge and not just left/right, but deeper." Pittman does add a warning about using the system for the amplification of recorded playback material: "Compared to ordinary stereo, SFX is not as accurate. However, its surreal reproduction enhances stereo effect."
 
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