Is soundstage DEPTH a myth?

Alex/Wavetouch     I enjoyed reading your take on the subject. Took some time to get my speakers positioned and room treatment optimised.   However there is some truth in your description of modern audiophile recordings and kit.   Often I feel I’m missing out in comparison to my “cheap Hifi” of the seventies. When I hear music if that era played on “vintage” systems I still get the n my magic.  Makes me wonder whether I’ve convinced myself that I could have made a mistake spending a lot on my present kit which sounds awesome in a “ modern audiophile “ way.         

Soundstage depth , far right , far left , rear sound , and height can be achieved with a single pair of stereo speakers . Of course the information has to be in the recording to begin with in the first place ! The equipment including your cables has to be also able to extract that info and play it back to you . In my lifetime Ive only met 3  people that can actually set up a proper stereo playback system ! A retired sound engineer , and two audio dealers . I never realized how much I was missing until I found these golden eared audiophiles .

It did cost me more than I wanted to spend on equipment but I never regretted it .

Conrad Johnson tube pre amp , Krell solid state amp, Krell CD player ,Nordast cables and speaker wire , and a pair of Anthony Gallos Reference 3.1 speakers with dedicated sub amp for the Reference 3.1 woofer , all set up properly give me all the depth , height, far left , far right , and rear sound one could ever want !

Room treatments are great but not necessary to achieve these sounds either .Ive had small rooms,  large dedicated rooms , basements rooms, awkward rooms  . All  speakers have been properly set up by one of the gurus . I don't have the patience to sit for hours to tweak speaker placement or equipment set up but Im sure glad there are people out there that love to do this .

You would be surprised at the amount of information even from old Jimmy Hendrix studio recordings the have what I would call spatial sounds . Its been lots of fun over the years to listen to many CD's that have been recorded purposely that way .

Someday I hope you find one of these gurus that can show you the way .

Terraplane8bob - adds more truth which again so many misinterpret in their listening..

AND, things do get thinner and cooler sounding harmonically the further they are from us or recording perspective.

People should understand the recording process and how "audio" works before trying to be so subjective and discuss the merits of audio components. I’ve read both Mix magazine and The Journal of Audio Engineering for years as a hobbyist in audio before I became an active player and designing rooms.

AND: asctim brings up another issue I’ve had as both a hobbyist and dealer. There’s a lot of equipment that makes the imagery come closer, the Pro designers of audio recording gear call this "magification", I hate it, having owned large speaker systems all my life the last thing I need is imagery to be oversized. The same is true of the opposite effect but more rare. I also dislike "in your face recording", we don’t experience music that way in real life! Many jazz recordings tick me off with the vocalist practically swallowing the microphone, result, voice larger that life and sounding amplified due to proximity effect of the microphone.

Di-poles and Bi-polar speakers ADD to the original signal in an unrealistic way and everything you would listen to will be altered as it adds a bounced echo off the front wall. A passive echo effect tunable by the speaker distance from the front wall.

Oh and again, the less you toe your speaker in, the more you involve your room and create greater reflections. You can do this so much that you can create artificial ghost imaging which I’ve called "Sympathetic Reflections", an effect, not realism.

Dolby Atmos - Great effect and totally enjoyable with movies, electronic music or EDM, but I haven’t heard much natural music recorded realistically on it yet .....

If you get use to this, it’s akin to adding artificial flavor in everything you eat, a slippery slope in audio enjoyment i think ...

AND - Room treatment is absolutely necessary to achieve best audio performance and realism from any system.

Want to learn a little more, look up LiveLab McMaster University .ca

My audio system total $ = ca. $1,500

But, I can enjoy music better than my neighbor who owns B&W and etc.

Why, I do have one more very high end part, my brain's selective filtration function.

What is the function? It selects good part of sound produced from a mediocre audio system, and filters bad parts (noise, 3rd harmony high frequency, etc) out.

As long as I maintain the function in my brain, I do not need high end audios.

Please, try to develop the function instead of wasting your money.

r27y8u92 -- I pursue high-end audio because listening to high fidelity is such a viscerally rewarding experience. It's pure pleasure, something that seems to be an anathema in your world view. Yeah, I could survive on gruel, too, but I don't.