Soundstage - Too much?


Is there such a thing as too much soundstage? Should the width of the stage extend to the side walls in your listening room? How would you compare the soundstage in your system to live music?
jtinn

Showing 2 responses by jayboard

As to Ben's question, how can you get a sonic image outside the speakers, I guess I'm more surprised by soundstage height and depth. There, you also get sounds that are not right on the line segment between the speakers, but your system doesn't even get to use left-right ear differences to perform that magic. If you play your music through Monaural, you'll still hear height and depth, although in comparison with also having the side-to-side information available, it seems kind of dull. If you have an instrumental voice only through, say, the left channel, the instrument will seem like it's positioned at the left speaker. But, paradoxically, if you also have that instrument coming through the right channel, faintly and with the right quality and time relationship to give the proper spatial cues, you can push the instrument's position out past the left speaker. At least, that seems to me to be the way it works. It's easy to see how these subtle spatial cues can get trashed accidentally or deliberately in the recording process and also lost in the playback process. Obviously, I agree with Sedond on this one. Sure, room reflections do all kinds of things to the sound and soundstage, but I think it's accurate reproduction of spatial cues that produces a good soundstage. If surface reflections generated soundstage, why haven't I ever heard instruments or voices coming from the floor?
Can't argue with the quotation from the acoustics book, but it's a giant step to say that those reflections are what create coherent sonic images outside the speakers. Another way to look at or experiment with the issue is to consider if you diminished the importance of reflections by setting your system up for listening in the nearfield (assuming your speakers work well in the nearfield). Would your lateral soundstaging degrade? Or perhaps improve?