| Stereo requires two horizontally displaced time-coherent sources. There is no other meaning. If you're bouncing audio off walls you may get ambience, but you're not going to get a clean stereo image. Also, the KEF speakers are hardly world beaters. They have a good reputation as PC speakers, but that's not setting the bar very high. Professional speaker manufacturers like Genelec use a similar adaptive tuning system, and you can buy a microphone and software add-on to flatten the response of any speaker. https://www.sonarworks.com/reference The limitations are well known. The correction curve is level-dependent, because room resonance is a time domain phenomenon created by physical standing waves in a 3D space that includes damping elements, and you can't truly correct it with a frequency domain solution. You can approximate a time-domain correction with convolution and some assumptions about the room geometry and acoustics, but it's never going to be perfect. Bottom line: I'm sure the Homepod sounds very nice, and - as usual - it's innovating with technology that's been available elsewhere for a while, and made much easier to use. But it's not magic, and it's not going to sound hugely better than a much more expensive true stereo system. Of course that'll do just fine for a lot of buyers. |
Apparently there is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereophonic_sound
"Stereophonic sound or, more commonly, stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that creates an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two or more independent audio channels through a configuration of two or more loudspeakers (or stereo headphones) in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing.[1]"
I'm inferring from that there are other methods to create an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective.