Soundstaging and imaging are audiophile fictions.

I fully agree with you. What is missing in sound reproduction in the home is the sense of acoustics found in the venues where music is played live. Most folks here firmly believe that this can be achieved with stereo. I think that multi-channels systems are required. I think that the sound emanating from an ensemble playing is a lot more homogeneous than what audiophiles seek to recreate. The only pinpoint imaging is that of solo voices or instruments. Less pinpoint, but also identifiable as localized somewhere in a given portion of the acoustic space, are sections of a large ensemble playing on their own. Generally, however, you don't hear what the mad press and insane audiophiles praise, which are things like being able to identify the second violinist in the string section as being clearly to the side of the first. Such pronouncements by reviewers and audiophiles can only be attributed to hyperbole. I am certain that all the talk about systems providing a more front of the hall or back of the hall listening experience will be heard. I think that any decent seat in a hall usually yields a more homogeneous sound front than what audiophiles crave. So maybe audiophiles are getting away from the absolute sound and into something more like hyper reality.

A very valid point is that made by Stuartbranson: all the senses work together so that, ultimately, there is nothing like the live experience. Most significant is the visual aspect. Another good point IMHO is that the missing ingredient in home reproduction of music is ambiance. The knee-jerk reaction by a lot of audiophiles to multichannel is just that. So you will always have your proponents of obscure forces at work trying to get it right with vinyl, stereo, analog, magic cables of all kinds, vibration dampening devices and a myriad of other cures to non existent problems. The future lies squarely in multichannel systems, properly implemented, playing well recorded/mixed material. People are free to listen to whatever they want and to opine to their heart's delight, including rambling on about the miseries of digital, the shortcomings of Redbook CD reproduction, the battle between SACD and DVD-A as carrying the seeds of multichannel destruction, of Quadraphonics in the 70s, of the analogy with Betamax, of nature and the little tweety birds, I just hope that enough people will be interested in MC audio to make it work.

I tend to agree with Shubertmaniac and Detlof: the visual cues in the live music experience are the most significant factor is helping to localize instruments and voices. I also agree with Sean that large ensembles will invariably be squished and squashed sound wise because they simply cannot fit in our listening rooms. That was, in fact, the basis of my initial comment and was not explained too well by me. Stereo can only provide a limited sense of space. Dipoles and flat panels with their particular radiation patterns do help in creating the openness that most people want. Multichannel systems appear to me to be the only solution to making our limited home space appear larger. This I have experienced for a decade by using ambiance synthesis courtesy of a JVC XP 1010 unit. It has been sitting idle for a while, but I may put it back in my system at some point. The contribution of additional speakers providing ambiance should not be dismissed. I am still considering buying the extra equipment to have an MC system that conforms to the ITU standard (which I still find to be overkill BTW) for use with MC SACDs. The differences in set-up between these ITU recommendations and what is required with ambiance synthesis like the JVC are difficult to square up. From experience I know that proper ambiance can be recreated with small speakers, well placed, driven by low powered amps and that the delayed signal is totally unlistenable on its own being severely bandwidth limited. It seems that ambiance synthesis is deader than a door-nail in the marketplace and that the new MC media are the only hope of seeing systems with more than just two channels. Let's hope "audiophiles" will get over their MC prejudices. There is some movement at both TAS and Stereophile in proposing MC sound systems. Oops! Maybe that's the kiss of death!

Reread the original post. My first reading of it must have been pretty cursory. Sorry! Strangely enough the original poster would want to go back to mono and I am suggestion that what is needed is multi-channel. Sound staging and imaging are real illusions. I believe that just about every decent system does the trick. You would have to have a pretty poor system, pretty poorly set up and in a pretty poor room these days to lack a proper measure of these qualities. Where I beg to differ is at the point where audiophiles start making extremely finite distinctions between the prowess of one stereo system over another to (a) provide a soundstage that is wider than the room in which the system sits, (b) provide a layering of instruments that is believed to be very deep when, in fact, it is still only in front of the listener (audiophiles love it when the speakers are far from the walls at the front and sides and that the sound appears to come from a point behind the speakers and fully detached from them) and is heard as though one is peering through a window (the worst systems seem to have us peer through a basement window, whereas the better ones give us a ground floor picture window), (c) provide localization of specific instruments or voices in a large ensemble that, to my ears at least, is not present in a concert hall listening to a large enough ensemble when sitting at a normal distance (the latter point does not mean that instruments and voices cannot be localized in the sound field, merely that so much exaggeration exists among audiophiles when describing certain systems ability to do so that they appear to have reached a point beyond the live listening experience, hence my hyper-reality comment). Many audiophiles approach the whole issue of recreating a three dimensional sound field in which instruments and voices can still be heard with a degree of differentiation in a strictly two channel way, concentrating on preamps, amps, cabling and speakers to transcend the limitations of those two channels. Unless one believes in magic, all of those components will not do it. That is where proper multi-channel systems should come in to add the missing dimension.