AITR Terminology

Chuck P

Inspired
OK so maybe some of you guys that are more tenured and smarter about this stuff than I am can help me with a terminology question.

It seems to me that lately folks are using "AITR" (Amp In The Room) to mean two very different things:

  1. There are some current threads using "AITR" to describe various ways to get cool room ambience on a recorded or headphone sound. Today's hot topic is using long IRs to combine cab characteristics and room reflections to get a great natural cab+ambience+mic room sound right out of the cab block.
  2. Traditionally, I understood "AITR" to mean the degree to which you could make an FRFR system sound indistinguishable from an amp, live, if they were in the same physical space as the listener. Like, could a person tell which was [AxeFX-> power amp->FRFR speakers], and which was an amp+cab.

It seems to me that these are almost opposite concepts - the former is about capturing and presenting ambience in a realistic way, and the latter is about a cab sound so dry it removes even the mic and preamp coloring and replicates what physically happens when an amp+cab are blasting away. My impression is that folks are somewhat exhausted about this latter topic and that it isn't getting as much discussion as it did at times in the past.

Are these both common usages of "AITR" (or is #1 a tongue-in-cheek play on #2)? Do you guys just use context to tell who is talking about what? For example, I saw a recent thread that claimed the FM3 really had that "AITR sound", and I'm not totally sure what to make of it.
 
For all practical purposes, #2 is impossible. The only way to make the in-the-room experience identical is to physically project sound into the room in an identical way. No amount of IR filtering is going to change the dispersion characteristics of your speakers. FRFR cabs are not guitar speakers. They typically have much wider and more even dispersion patterns that traditional guitar speakers, especially in the highs. That will cause the sound to bounce around the room differently giving you the different response and feel in the room. You would need a way to physically change how the FRFR cab projects sound waves to exactly copy the feel of a real guitar cab.

So usage of AITR will depend on if you are trying to recreate the actual experience of playing an amp in the room or trying to recreate the recorded sound of an AITR. The former will always be a tall order. The later is what FullRes is able to help with.
 
Amp in the room is a misnomer anyway since we are really talking about cab in the room. Otherwise I agree with @mr_fender that you are never going to have the same sound out of a FRFR setup. The FRFR setup with cab sims replicates the miced cab sound so until cab simulation improves beyond replicating that, we are not getting what listening to a guitar cab and speakers directly in the same space will sound like, we are hearing the interpretation of that picked up by microphones and then piped to speakers for listening.
 
For all practical purposes, #2 is impossible. The only way to make the in-the-room experience identical is to physically project sound into the room in an identical way. No amount of IR filtering is going to change the dispersion characteristics of your speakers. FRFR cabs are not guitar speakers. They typically have much wider and more even dispersion patterns that traditional guitar speakers, especially in the highs. That will cause the sound to bounce around the room differently giving you the different response and feel in the room. You would need a way to physically change how the FRFR cab projects sound waves to exactly copy the feel of a real guitar cab.

So usage of AITR will depend on if you are trying to recreate the actual experience of playing an amp in the room or trying to recreate the recorded sound of an AITR. The former will always be a tall order. The later is what FullRes is able to help with.
Speaking of physically changing the dispersion of sound, I jammed with a guy a few years back that had 3d printed some derivatives of the "speaker donuts" from quite a few years back, but had added some webbing/fingers to them as well. It sounded great and I asked him to make me some, and he agreed, then fell off the face of the earth. I think Big Speaker may have had some dirty dealings with that...
 
OK so maybe some of you guys that are more tenured and smarter about this stuff than I am can help me with a terminology question.

It seems to me that lately folks are using "AITR" (Amp In The Room) to mean two very different things:

  1. There are some current threads using "AITR" to describe various ways to get cool room ambience on a recorded or headphone sound. Today's hot topic is using long IRs to combine cab characteristics and room reflections to get a great natural cab+ambience+mic room sound right out of the cab block.
  2. Traditionally, I understood "AITR" to mean the degree to which you could make an FRFR system sound indistinguishable from an amp, live, if they were in the same physical space as the listener. Like, could a person tell which was [AxeFX-> power amp->FRFR speakers], and which was an amp+cab.

It seems to me that these are almost opposite concepts - the former is about capturing and presenting ambience in a realistic way, and the latter is about a cab sound so dry it removes even the mic and preamp coloring and replicates what physically happens when an amp+cab are blasting away. My impression is that folks are somewhat exhausted about this latter topic and that it isn't getting as much discussion as it did at times in the past.

Are these both common usages of "AITR" (or is #1 a tongue-in-cheek play on #2)? Do you guys just use context to tell who is talking about what? For example, I saw a recent thread that claimed the FM3 really had that "AITR sound", and I'm not totally sure what to make of it.
I agree Chuck P. - I have always regarded threads about amp in the room as a way to replicate (to the best of our ability) the feel/sound of a guitar cab being in the room with you.
The new AITR conversations (in my brain) are more of Amp in 'a' room...and not Amp in 'the' room (that has been sought after in historic threads).
At least that has always been my interpretation.
 
Amp in the room is a misnomer anyway since we are really talking about cab in the room. Otherwise I agree with @mr_fender that you are never going to have the same sound out of a FRFR setup. The FRFR setup with cab sims replicates the miced cab sound so until cab simulation improves beyond replicating that, we are not getting what listening to a guitar cab and speakers directly in the same space will sound like, we are hearing the interpretation of that picked up by microphones and then piped to speakers for listening.
Chuck's post isn't about 'can it be done'....it's more about what people mean when talking about amp in the room.
 
Speaking only for myself, it means taking some traditional cabinets with a big supply of clean watts and turning it up it up.
 
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