Is Imaging Worth Chasing?


Man, am I going to be torn apart for this. But I says what I says and I mean what I says.

Here’s a long term trend I’ve noticed in the audio press. Specs that used to be front and center in equipment reviews have essentially disappeared. Total harmonic distortion, for instance. Twenty years ago, THD was the start and end of the evaluation of any amplifier. Well, maybe power, first. Then THD. Armed with those two numbers, shopping was safe and easy.

The explanation for the disappearance is not hard to figure. Designers got so good in those categories that the numbers became meaningless. Today, most every amp on the shelf has disappearingly low distortion. Comparing .00001 to .000001 is a fool’s errand and both the writers and the readers know it. Power got cheap, even before Class D came along to make it even cheaper. Anyone who tries bragging about his 100 watts will be laughed out of the audio club.

Stereophile still needed to fill it’s pages and audiophiles still needed things to argue about so, into the void, stepped imaging. Reviewers go on and on about imaging. And within the umbrella of imaging, they write separately about the images height, width, and depth. “I closed my eyes and I could see a rock solid picture of the violas behind the violins.” “The soundstage extended far beyond the width of the speakers.” And on and on.

Now, most everyone who will read this knows more about audio equipment than me. But I know music. I know how to listen. And the number of times that I’ve seen imaging, that I’ve seen an imaginary soundstage before me, can be counted on my fingers. Maybe the fingers of one hand.

My speakers are 5-6 feet apart. I don’t have a listening chair qua listening chair but I’m usually 8-9 feet back. (This configuration is driven by many variables but sound quality is probably third on the list.) Not a terrible set-up, is my guess from reading lots of speaker placement articles. And God knows that, within the limited space available to me, I have spent enough time on getting those speakers just right. Plus, my LS50s are supposed to be imaging demons.

I’ve talked to people about this, including some people who work at high-end audio stores. Most of them commiserate. It’s a problem, they said. “It usually only happens with acoustic music,” most of them said. Strike one. My diet of indie rock and contemporary jazz doesn’t have much of that. “You’ve got to have your chair set up just right. And you’ve got to hold your head in just the right place.” Strike two. Who wants to do that?

(Most of the people reading this forum, probably. But I can’t think of any time or purpose for which I’ve held my head in a vise-like grip like that.)

It happens, every now and then. For some reason, I was once right up next to my speakers. Lots of direct sound, less reflections. “The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads” was playing. And I literally gave a start because David Byrne was standing on the coffee table. Cool.

But, generally speaking, imaging is something I only read about. And if that little bit of imaging is the dividend of dropping more money into my system, I’m not sure that I want to deposit into that account.

I think that I still have a few steps to take that will pay benefits other than imaging. But maybe the high-end is not for me.

paul6002

Whether or not you value imaging is purely subjective. If imaging is important to you, you pursue it, and it's there to be pursued if you value it. You shouldn't be swayed by some notion that you're not a true audiophile if you don't care about imaging, and you shouldn't expect others to validate your imaging apathy.

Timbral accuracy for acoustic instruments and voices may be more important, but imaging is right up there as one of the best magic tricks a fine home audio system can beguile us with. In fact, "realism" may not be the point, as bkeske seems to say. He quotes snapsc, who asks (rhetorically) whether or not it's possible to precisely locate instruments by ear at a concert. Fair enough; it rarely is. But the veritable auditory hallucination that a good recording played on a fine pair of speakers in an acoustically excellent room can achieve is nevertheless a thrill. For smaller ensembles up to chamber orchestras, it greatly adds to one's appreciation of complex music to be able to pick out individual instruments; one can follow their musical lines more easily in part because you can “watch” them, “keep your eyes on” the performer you're listening to— and yet, your eyes are, of course, closed. High-fidelity audio at its best does for me something that I think no other experience in life does, not even being present at a live performance: music, which is a temporal art, becomes spatial. I can “watch” an acoustic drama unfold without seeingjust by listening.

An example: the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has a recording of Beethoven's incidental music to the "Creatures of Prometheus" that is full of astonishingly spatially specific passages. Track 7, for instance, begins with a harp on the left, which is joined by the violins playing pizzicato, also on the left, and then a solo flute, just to the right and behind the violins. Then an oboe comes in on the right, then a clarinet just next to the oboe on his or her right...and then a solo cello, on the far right of the stage, to the oboe's left and closer to the listener. I very much doubt those precise locations would have been so palpable had one been at the original performance.

This imaging magic has actually led me to appreciate middle movements of symphonies whose first and last movement crowd pleasers had, for decades, stolen my attention. The middle movements in Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven, even Bruckner and Mahler, tend to be more like chamber music, with solo parts for woodwinds. Such subtleties are much harder to appreciate unless your system can make them really come alive.

You should be getting imaging with any system if it’s set up correctly. This is a very basic fundamental result of stereo. There’s no magic, just a byproduct of stereo. It’s supposed to get better as you move up the line with components, and improvements in your system, but imaging is basic. 

@dinov 

You said it much better than I did...while there are situations where imaging may not be so good, with the right music, set up and listening position most systems should produce at least a decent stereo illusion including imaging with location.

If the idea though is that you are not going to actually have a seated listening position as possibly suggested by the OP...you are just going to be 8-10' back from your speakers and moving around the room...imaging will be hard to come by....which may then argue in favor of the ohm walsh speakers as a possible alternative.