If you don't have a wide sweet spot, are you really an audiophile?

Mahgister-- OK. Now I’m following this. Your later posts seem (at least to me) to use the ordinary meaning of timbre. What I did not understand was the relation of this to things like "imaging" or "soundstage", which I believe in this context are essentially ’something else’ ’

It is difficult concept of acoustics i work hard to understand them a bit in few hours i cannot make that more simple than the japanese article about Imaging and soundstage....

Nor more simpler than Toole explanation in his book...

I has given the adress of the article and the book is on the net free to read...

I cannot create longer posts here and take 3 or 4 hours to make them clearer ....

I give the gist of the problem....

All that was to argue with someone who was arguing with everybody here.... 😁

i am not a scientist but i learned how to read in my daily 45  years work: counselling students for books and their reading abilities in almost any fields... I know nothing but i can create relations with multiple fields rapidly....It serves me well to create my own audio system at peanuts costs when parsing the essential bits of information percolating audio thread.... I only made a synthesis of these bits and i called that working with the three embeddings controlled dimensions of any audio system... I discovered this triple tuning of a system is more important than the system itself....Simple no?

I hate the word "tweaking" because it miss the point, being interpreted to be SECONDARY additions and not essential installations controls and dogmatic mind call that "snake oil" easily because they are costly, or "placebo" because they are not always very audible in some conditions...For sure true snake oil and placebo effects exist... But thowing the baby with the bath waters is not a solution....

My best to you...

That Japanese science thing is very similar to what I have heard from years ago and what Duke has talked about as well. 

Image focus comes almost entirely from the direct sound. Reflected sound affects this differently depending on the amount of delay. Within a window of about 3-5ms it is too close in time and imaging suffers. Sound travels about 1ft/ms. This is where the advice to place speakers several feet from walls comes from. Beyond about 5ms reflected sounds contribute to a perception of space. This is where the sense of envelopment comes from. 

That is of course far from the whole story. That is just one aspect of it. The initial wave front. Really accurate low bass is associated with large spaces and is another factor in envelopment. Then there is the spectrum of direct sound to the reflected, diffuse sound. And more. They all go together. 

These are all closely related and similar. There is more difference in the language being used to describe them and from what point of view than anything else.

For sure.... Nobody reinvent the wheel.... But the japanese article is very clear...

I dont pretend to anything myself except being the father of this maxim:

Dont upgrade embed everything right before....

😊


By the way i enjoy precise very good bass i hear with my stomach from a 7 inches driver in a square small room 13feet by 13 feet with bad location for one speaker in a corner, thanks to Helmoltz activation method of the room....Passive materials treatment is half of the story to tell....


Just a remark about the direct sound....

Image focus comes almost entirely from the direct sound.

There is no direct sound separated from reflected sound, early and late reflections for the brain...The brain work with the three , direct, early and late at the same times in milliseconds to recreate the image and timbre experience....

Even in near listening reoom treatment and controls work in a huge way because of that... When someone speak of direct sound it is a "physical concept" about the wave coming from the source, but acoustically for the ears there is NO solely direct sound perception in a closede small room, the ears recreated the sound perception in milliseconds with the physical direct sound and the early and late reflections.... Here we must distinguish physical concepts and neurological acoustical one.... The sound we hear IN A SMALL ROOM is never the direct sound....It is a composite of the different multiple waves summed into one interpretation by the brain.... Many people missing these distinction affirm that near listening can spare someone of room treatment because of these confusions... The most astonishing fact in audio for me was meditating about the fact that the sound waves cross my room 80 times per second....Then what i listen to is this composite sums of waves i interpret like music in my room....

For sure for the brain the difference between what is a direct sound, and early or late reflections are linked to timing and distance in the room and the location of the listener.... It is relative....The brain recreate the sound when i move in my room with these 3 psysical concepts but what i listen to is a COMPOSITE always of these three....

 i can for sure glued my ears to some inches of the driver to hear ONLY the direct sound but i am not sure that these noise will be interpretable by the name music....But even in a headphone my brain created the musical  sound with the direct physical waves of the source with the early and reflected waves of the shell room...No headphones sound the same in great part because of the shell room vibrations and reflective properties...

Headphones are like a room, we must adjust the response in frequencies of the driver and the frequencies responses of the shell room... Between the 2 there is a hiatus in this hiatus are where we can inplement  our possible controls and tuning between the 2 ...

The timbre perception in an headphone is the most important characteristic like in a room... We can improve it by modifying the damping of the shell or his geometry...Like in a room...And like in a room the recording sources does not contain all the information necessary for the ears to recreate the timbre or imaging perception, we must complementarily add what is missing for a perfect illusion, we must control the shell like we control our room for the best possible illusion... For sure we can listen to intra headphone and here we have more of a direct experience of the direct sound in a sense of what was the recorded information at the live event it seems but is it right?

No because the recording live original event was incomplete or better said imperfect because of the trade off related to the recording process, locations and types of mic.

It is for this reason that internal headphones are not better than speakers for recreating timbre perception....And probably less efficient to recreate the illusion of a live performance as if the musicians were playing right now in our face....We can improve the room shell of normal headphone, and the room with many controls but it is more difficult with very small internal headphone...

The best experience of music is for the time being always with speakers in a controlled room....

In other for me to get wider sweet spot I use four identical speakers two on right and two on left 
my preamp has XLR and RCA inputs both active at the same time 
two separate amplifiers that’s it sounds so amazing in my room and to my ears 😌😌😌