Got home and gave a listen. Interesting to hear, thanks. The Gefell sample has the applause attenuated in post, correct? The applause in that sample doesn't sound obnoxiously loud at the end of the piece, though obviously louder than the rear baffled 4060 sample.
The chair baffles certainly cut the rearward sound significantly, which is the idea of course. Similar to my own experiences with such rearward baffling, personally I find the tonal change for those reduced sounds less desirable. I even notice the same 'dulling of rear sound' effect to a lesser extent in my limited experiments with the 1.5" diameter nerf foam balls APEing the DPA spheres. The balls do give the 4060's more directionality and a bit of midrange focus that can be useful, but as for their reduced rearward sensitivity, I find I'd almost rather have well recorded, exceptionally clear ambient noise than muffled sounding rear noise.
A thought that has crossed my mind in the past is that 'applause', though not the usual focus of our interest, seems difficult to record really well. By that I mean really natural, realistic sounding applause. Maybe it's just that we don't really set-up to capture applause accurately or that the level of applause often does not match especially well with that of the music from the mics perspective and recorder gain settings. Or maybe its the distribution of clappers near the mics and the highly dynamic, frequency rich transient nature of the sound.
![Shrug :shrug:](/Smileys/throwback/shrug.gif)