How much does one of those run?
BACCH4mac, you really should try it
- Thread starter jimbill
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Sounds like this is a viable option to improve sound in a poorly-designed or non-treated room. I expect it wouldn’t be as big an improvement in a well-designed, acoustically-treated room. Interesting technology, regardless.
jimbill
Well-known member
I paid $800 for a new one. Ebay has plenty of used ones. Just be sure it has 8 GB memory. 16 GB is better if you want to work on it while you listen to music.
ok, thanks. Maybe someday I will give this device a try. The starter version price seems reasonable, but the better one is rather pricy. Tell us what you think of the improvement going from the starter to the pro version. Is the difference in performance worth the cost?
Im guessing that the program works on movies/tv as well as music? its pretty much active as long as you have it turned on?
Just looked on their site, this is only for stereo speakers.
https://www.theoretica.us/bacch4mac/
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Thats what I was thinking. My room isnt treated at all now, and maybe it would help me.
jimbill
Well-known member
"Room removal", as mentioned above, is a good description.
It is a filtering system that takes out the cross talk between speakers. It doesn't claim to do anything with the frequency response. Although, as noted in another comment, it does seem to improve/eliminate comb filtering.
I spoke to Dr. Edgar Choueiri (look him up on Wikipedia) today for more clarification. He recommends pointing your speakers on axis with your ears. With the program, you don't need to toe out to excite the room. The program reproduces the reverberations of the recording. He said with the speakers in line to your ears, you get the best production of the higher frequencies. The soundstage will still be outside of the speakers on good recordings. I'm paraphrasing his words and I'm no rocket scientist (like he is).
And as far as the sweet spot...if you listen from a chair, you will take a reading from your normal sitting position, then a reading leaning over as far as is comfortable to the left and right. The head tracking will keep you in the sweet spot in that entire area. If you sit on a sofa, you can calibrate it to both ends of the sofa. He said you will maintain the sweet spot but you might notice some rolling off of the highs at the far ends of the sofa.
It's really a different animal. $5,000 isn't chicken feed, but neither is treating a room and buying expensive cabling. And there's no way cabling is going to make as big an impact as this.
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A good friend bought the Bacch Adio SP for $18k on the used market. He has owns a +$250k system and he says the Bacch is the his favorite piece of gear! That’s very high praise! I heard the Bacch also at Axpona on the Janzen speakers and I was super impressed. Edgar the Bacch inventor is a rocket scientist very brilliant!
And, this is all for just 2 channel listening, right? It doesnt work with more than just stereo listening?
Whether or not that's the same person I know (online) who picked up the Adio, it's likely at least a similar situation: a very respectable system, likely in a very well treated room, and the BACCH brings tremendous improvement. So @Rich it should have a material effect even in a well-treated room.
I have a few acquisitions on my two-year horizon, one of them being the "Audiophile" level of the system even though I've never personally experienced it. (My system doesn't mesh well with the software-only system.)
Ztatic
Member
FWIW, the particular pair of JansZen Valentina that were being used in the latest AXPONA demo had the SE option, which provides omni dispersion at the press of a button on the remote. SE stands for Stereo Everywhere, and when in SE mode, they sound about the same all over the room and also provide some imaging everywhere.
For BACCH, however, they were not and must not be run not in their SE mode, but in their directive mode -- no added ambient sound. The less wall, floor, and ceiling splash, the better for BACCH. This is because BACCH processing is based on crosstalk cancellation (XTC), namely subtracting much of the sound that would normally reach the left ear from the right speaker, and the right ear from the left speaker. Sound splash adds random crosstalk that is difficult to cancel, so it should be minimized for BACCH.
That said, even in directive mode, the JansZens have ±10° horizontal dispersion at 15kHz, so the dispersion is controlled, not beamy. This has the advantage of limiting how much the BACCH system has to compensate for response differences while head-tracking.
To clarify how BACCH's head tracking works, it uses a webcam aimed at your seating position, or if you want your lights off, an infrared camera. It zeros in on facial features to discover where your head is. Calibrations are run for center, leftmost, and rightmost head positions, after which the entire calibration apparatus can be set aside. After that, BACCH adjusts its processing to work optimally wherever you may move within that range.
For BACCH, however, they were not and must not be run not in their SE mode, but in their directive mode -- no added ambient sound. The less wall, floor, and ceiling splash, the better for BACCH. This is because BACCH processing is based on crosstalk cancellation (XTC), namely subtracting much of the sound that would normally reach the left ear from the right speaker, and the right ear from the left speaker. Sound splash adds random crosstalk that is difficult to cancel, so it should be minimized for BACCH.
That said, even in directive mode, the JansZens have ±10° horizontal dispersion at 15kHz, so the dispersion is controlled, not beamy. This has the advantage of limiting how much the BACCH system has to compensate for response differences while head-tracking.
To clarify how BACCH's head tracking works, it uses a webcam aimed at your seating position, or if you want your lights off, an infrared camera. It zeros in on facial features to discover where your head is. Calibrations are run for center, leftmost, and rightmost head positions, after which the entire calibration apparatus can be set aside. After that, BACCH adjusts its processing to work optimally wherever you may move within that range.
Ztatic
Member
BACCH has a mode that can simulate 5.1, 7.1, etc.. using just two speakers. IMO, this is interesting, but not as good as the pure BACCH mode, because the virtual sound sources are more or less localized to set speaker locations. The pure BACCH mode provides seamless, three dimensional sound all around the listener.
