Soundstaging and Imaging: Not an Illusion

A recent topic Soundstaging and Imaging: The Delusion about The Illusion
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/soundstaging-and-imaging-the-delusion-about-the-illusion asked
"Yet, is a recording’s soundstage and imaging of individual participants, whether musicians or vocalists, things that one can truly perceive or are they merely illusions that we all are imagining as some sort of delusion?"

It is no more an illusion than is playback in general.

An engineer may close mic, adding mix effects to simulate room acoustics. Or may use a microphone technique to capture the correct proportion of direct to reflected sound to accurately delineate the recording space on a capable playback system. Each has its advantages. The first allows control after the event enabling wart removal. The latter requires at least movement perfection. It is almost impossible to edit live performances seamlessly, albeit easier with today’s digital tools than with times past razor blade.

On a capable playback system there is no mistaking Carnegie, Albert, La Scala acoustic for digital wizardry. It is effortless to upscale the 3m x2m inter-speaker dimension to La Scala’s 16.15m d x 20.4m w x 26m h stage. It is similarly effortless for any acoustic space, artificial or otherwise. Badly done material is properly presented as a mish-mash of one-dimensional sources floating in conflicting spaces.

When upon first hearing a system, musicians and live acoustic music listeners are instantly beguiled and comment on the liveness, spaciousness, realism of the presentation, making comments like "It’s just like Joe Pass is sitting there" or "Who needs to go to concerts?" or "I can ’see’ the whole orchestra and every section in it!", it is unlikely they are all deluded.

It is my belief that those familiar with live, acoustic music, when presented with enough clues of the space acoustics have no problem fleshing it out and transporting them. On systems with poor or confused clue presentation, the brain gives up trying.

In a system which presents clues well, a component swap may alter the presentation, but is unlikely to destroy it unless the piece is egregiously awful. In an incapable system, either by design or setup, offhand changes may make a difference, but are not likely to effect a transformation. One has to start from first principles with components and setup < read ROOM > that can be proven to be capable of presenting a realistic soundstage from any source. Dimensionless material MUST be presented so. If it isn’t, there is zero chance of it presenting anything properly!

Too often, store demos present an expansive blur that properly should be presented as a cardboard cutout. The customer falsely equates $K with accuracy and thus the circle begins anew.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynmann, 1974