Speaker positioning and center image depth

@sns Agree, especially when considering a tried and true design like the Cornwalls which are meant to be positioned in the corners. When you say meticulous attention, it sure does vary by speaker. Some speakers have incredibly small sweet spots, but getting them right pays off handsomely, and other speakers may have larger sweet spots, but they compromise overall dimensionality. And then there are the speakers that can have a large sweet spot and image very holographically, and those are very special.

@wolf_garcia

Do people really need this much coaching when it simply should be: Move your speakers around until they sound good to you. The end.

First, respect to you and your experience. I have benefited from many of your comments and you’ve posted helpful advice to questions I’ve asked, as well.

Regarding your comment, here, well, all I can say is that there are others with similar levels of experience as yours who do measure, tinker, adjust, and treat rooms. It would seem they're all wasting their time.

@blisshifi, my impression is that soundstage depth can either be dominated by the room or by the recording, the latter being preferable but generally more difficult to accomplish.

First looking at the room as the constraining factor: As a ballpark first approximation, it seems to me that soundstage depth is related to the distance from the speakers to the wall (or equipment rack, or TV, or whatever) that is behind and/or in between them. My untested observation is that soundstage depth often seems constrained to twice the distance to the reflective surface between and behind the speakers. So if the speakers are out three feet from the wall, it seems to me that soundstage depth tends to extend to about six feet - which is cool because it is perceived as extending beyond the physical room boundaries, but imo there is significant room for improvement.

Diffusing, re-directing, or broadband-absorbing the first reflections off the wall behind the speakers (and avoiding having the equipment rack or TV there) can help to "unmask" the soundstage depth cues which are already on the recording.

Also, well set-up (i.e. far enough out into the room) bi-directional speakers like the Borresens/Raidhos, Quads, and Maggies you mentioned, have reflection characteristics which can be exploited to shift the perceived acoustic space from "playback room" to "recording venue", whether the recording venue cues be real or engineered or both.

Duke

How the speaker images should be entirely up to the recording. This assumes that the equipment is up to the task and set up correctly. If a system images the same way regardless of the program source it is either not up to the task, is not set up correctly or both.

I shall throw another hand grenade while I am at it. Painfully few of us have ever heard a system that images correctly. I think many systems are capable of a satisfactory image but are not optimized to perform at that level do to problems inherent with speakers and room issues.