Soundstaging and Imaging: The Delusion about The Illusion


Soundstaging in a recording—be it a live performance or studio event—and it’s reproduction in the home has been the topic of many a discussion both in the forums and in the audio press. 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?

https://www.stereophile.com/content/clowns-left-me-jokers-right

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Showing 6 responses by whart

Right. I remember walking into The Record Collector in Hollywood about thirty years ago (at its old location) and after talking with the owner about a few records, mentioned that his speaker position- one located in one room, another past an arch in another area- wasn’t so good for imaging. Hey said "bah, stereo-- a gimmick."
This was in the days when mono records sold for almost nothing. I should have bought more.
To stereo-- listen to those old jazz records from the dawn of the stereo era- no center image- hard panning left and right with a hole in the middle.
When I have visitors who have never heard higher fidelity stereo, they usually remark on the sound coming out of the middle--the phantom image. Is it a parlor trick? Sure. Does it contribute to a greater sense of realism? Maybe.
I was very much about imaging in the ’70s- when I started listening to the original Quad- a speaker with vast limitations, but mostly suffering from sins of omission. The image was almost everything! It could be spooky in its sense of realism on the right recording, along with that coherency that comes from electrostatic panels (sans the add-on woofers and tweeters, which I would use to make up for some of the shortcomings of the Quad).
For the past dozen years, I’ve been listening to horns- and image they do well, with SET amps, no crossover on the mid-horn and judicious placement.
But, imaging is only one factor in trying to create the illusion of real music. Tone is very important to me, as is timing in the attack and decay of the fundamental and harmonics. All are cues that trick our brains into believing more.
Is it ultimately an illusion? Of course!
Is there something better? Probably. Weren’t there three channel experiments back in the day?
I used to add a delay line and a small set of nothing special speakers -ala the old Hafler method- it worked better on some records than on others- to add a 3d dimension to the proceedings. (I don’t really bother with discrete multichannel sound, though I guess I could on my home theatre system).
Ralph Glagal also developed a fairly elaborate playback method that, I believe, used conventional recordings but was able to present the information in a way that was supposed to better recreate the live music experience. (He lived not far from me in NY and I should have visited when I still lived there).
I doubt we need more formats at this point- getting consensus among CE, the rights owners of content and ultimately, consumer buy-in makes for big scale investments at high risk. (Look at all the failed formats over the years and the huge controversy over more recent approaches, like MQA).

I’m also not interested in re-buying material, much of which is out of print, and in many cases, has never been reissued, at least legitimately.

I’ve come to the conclusion, after spending many years, a lot of time, and a considerable amount of money and effort ---that not everything will sound great- if some of it does, wha-hoo! I’ve focused more on getting the most out of average recordings, not "special" ones- and accept the fact that it is a poor substitute for the real thing.
I will say that after attending Crimson’s show here almost two years ago, I played some of the sides from the Live in Toronto 2016 set the next morning and was very impressed with how well my system and this recording acquitted themselves. I could not, of course, reproduce the size of a 3,000 seat hall, or the power of the bass (their sound team was amazing-- they never overloaded the room, which is common in most amplified music shows).
I have musicians visit occasionally, and we can get a decent approximation of an acoustic guitar over the system. Piano is much more difficult to reproduce convincingly and much has to do with the recordings in my estimation.
Where things start to get challenging is when the the material gets complex (big orchestral passages with lots going on) and starts to sound cluttered-- I don’t think it is simply an issue of dynamics, but may have to do with the ability of the phono cartridge through the electronics through the speakers to unravel all that is going on and present it in a convincing way.
I also don’t listen at terribly loud volumes- I like to try and get the energy, bass and dimension at less walloping SPLs.
Short answer, to me, is imaging is a factor and perhaps not even a necessary one to create the illusion of live music, recognizing that no reproduction is quite the same as the real thing; this is so, for me, even when the reproducing system, recording, room, set up and all the other factors, including mood or frame of mind, are most conducive.
@kosst_amojan--the terms have an accepted meaning. JGHolt published a glossary many years ago that was long used so that people could speak the same language when describing reproduced sound.
I learned to understand both image and soundstage from using the old Quad ESL beginning in 1973. This was a speaker that excelled in the midrange (with some real world limitations) but remains a reference.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to florid language in audio-speak that became common in reviews, but Holt was known for his no-nonsense approach to subjective reviewing. Here’s a link to his glossary as republished by Stereophile (he started that publication and it was erratically published, no adverts and unlike the slick glossy today).
PS: You'll note that there is a difference between image and soundstage. I can hear that difference in the use of my phono stage, which places instruments in very precise positions in space, top to bottom, front to back and dimensionally, so you can hear the body of the instrument, as well as its position relative to the mic, if it is there on the recording.
Obviously, a multi-tracking pastiche of tracks and overdubs with no natural acoustic space being represented will rob a recording and its reproduction of a natural soundstage, although it can be created as an artifice through slick engineering, something that started to occur in the '70s (if not before) when tracks and lots of outboard processing invited mischief in popular recordings. This also coincided with the rise of the engineer as auteur and the use of the studio as a crutch- no longer was an engineer a 'recordist' but an artist themselves, and the musicians, some of them not as capable of playing through the entire sound and nailing it on a take, could go back and 'fix it' to the point where the recording is a  confabulation- sometimes wonderful sounding, but bearing no resemblance to what might have actually happened in real time in a room. 
@tostadosunidos - but if the performers are positioned front to back,  and the recording captures that, it should be reproduced. I can hear such placement and it is not the result of mixing left or right-
@celander - your last post suggests that you don't believe imaging exists in a reproduction system. I don't need "test" recordings to establish what I hear. It is a "real illusion" to me, that depends on the recording. 
The Bose example is interesting. Did you know that Bose sued Consumer Union for a bad review?
What is your position, now that we've given you our (various) views?
A very large system in a small room could be problematic. Why is that controversial? Celander, I'm not trolling you here, but I'm curious to understand your perspective. Care to share? 
@bdp24 - i heard that system a few times with the original big Tympani panels. When I bought my SP 3 and Dual 75a back in the day, the dealer demo’d the units I bought on just such a system. And I got to meet William Zane J in the early days as well when he was making the rounds- he was a pretty intimidating guy judging by how the dealer wanted to make sure he was happy. I wasn’t old enough, or invested enough in the ’business’ of the stuff (I slung gear as a kid and was an enthusiast) to care what he thought, other than that it was cool to meet him since he had already achieved legendary status, thanks in part to Harry Pearson, but man, that stuff sounded so good compared to most of the other gear around then.
One interesting anecdote on records. I’ve long had copies of "Way Out West," a sort of classic jazz warhorse that gets played periodically because, well, Sonny Rollins. I never found a clean early pressing for reasonable money, so relied on remasters. The original Analogue Productions cut, which I think was cut by Doug Sax, sounded pretty good, but it had a giant hole in the middle- very typical of early stereo hard panning. I eventually got a 45 cut that Hoffman and Gray did and it had an image in the middle. I asked Hoffman what was up with that - he said that the resolution of that cut was so much better (whether source tape, mastering chain or technique, I dunno) that I was hearing a center image because of the sound bouncing off the back wall of the room where it was recorded.
I’ve still got an original stereo cut on my ’list’ for that one.....
Back to our regularly scheduled program....